VISUAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Alicia Chester
Every Acconci in the Video Data Bank
A project to remake every Vito Acconci performance video in the Video Data Bank
Current Positions
Collections Research Fellow, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 2011-2012
Adjunct Faculty in Photography, Graphic Design Department, Oakton Community College, Fall 2009 - Present
Fields of Interest
Critical theory, continental philosophy, feminist theory, visual studies, photography history and theory, art history and theory
Thesis: Beholding Bodies and Embodied Beholders in Annette Messager's Mes voeux
This thesis brings together discourses concerning indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language to bear upon the photographic image in an attempt to open the parameters of current photographic discourse and carve a place for nontraditional photographic practices. Each of these facets – indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language – links photography to the body and solicits an embodied response from the viewer by placing the viewer’s body at the center of the experience of beholding images. Mes vœux (My Wishes/My Vows, 1988-1991) is a photographic installation by multimedia French artist Annette Messager comprised of layers of black and white photographs depicting intimate close-ups of body parts, each framed under glass and hung from the wall by twine in a circular formation. Scraps of paper framed in the same manner overlay the photographs and contain handwritten, repeated words. The photographs and text exist as both images and elements of sculpture.
Mes vœux rejects the metaphor of photography as an illusionistic window giving view to another place and time, and thereby draws attention to the material surface of its photographs, and by way of analogy, the surface of the bodies it depicts. Accumulated layers of metaphoric skin and indexed bodies together construct hybrid photographic bodies the beholder may imaginatively touch, and which, in turn, may affectively touch the beholder to engage a visceral and embodied response. The emotionally suggestive text employs double entendres, puns, and homonyms to condense meaning in an oscillating wordplay that simultaneously causes a collapse and excess of signification.
Mes vœux’s nontraditional format provides contrast to the trend of the “tableau form” of photography discussed at length by Michael Fried in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), in which Fried applies his theory of theatricality, first articulated in his controversial essay challenging minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), to contemporary art photography. Photographic practices such as Messager’s that may be considered theatrical and that do not conform to the “tableau form” are notably absent in contemporary art photography theory as exemplified by Fried, narrowing the discourse and the field of possibility for the medium in art practice. Mes vœux links concepts of touch in visual art with concepts of embodied viewership and theatricality as traced through art history – including the advent of minimalism and the “tableau form” of photography – since the 1960s and binds them together through the medium of photography and the representation of bodies.