post-aesthetic age – Marco Montalto

Just remember what it is you wish for

Both memory and the act of remembering originate in mindfulness. To be mindful is to have knowledge, but also to take care. A memory is a memory of and to remember is to remember because… Therefore, if memory is equated with knowledge, neigh, if memory is indistinguishable from knowledge, the contents of memory can be…

Speciously Valid

Science defines a photograph. All science does is define a photograph. To dissect, to analyse, to investigate, to examine, to inspect, to study… actions all done in order to check whether reality is real, whether reality persists. What then, we should ask, is the difference between these actions and the act of remembering? Is there…

Everything is in itself

The Other irks perception; perception cannot withstand otherness. The Other is a thorn in the side of perception. The world is first seen. The perturbation, the anomaly, is an Other mindlessly perceived, the Other impinging upon perception. The world is first seen. Everything approaches Dasein from a future; all beings hold a futurity in perception.…

The Crucible

The photographic is the act of recognition. The pictorial is the look that makes us want to (keep on) look(ing). Photographs and paintings can both evince the photographic. A photograph can labour to attain the pictorial. A painting necessarily evinces primarily the pictorial. But is it wholly correct to say that a painting necessarily evinces…

Curating the Archive

The prima materia of perception is not the world. The prima materia of perception is memory. As our eyes linger on the object of their gaze, the memory gives way to what is really being seen. The eyes do not travel; they travel with the body. Charles Sanders Peirce established a trichotomy of signs, which Silverstein explains thus: “the…

On pain and how to photograph it

Let us start by postulating that pain is staged. Such a postulation would make pain somewhat irreal, a game even. But we know that when we feel pain, we feel its pangs genuinely enough. In experiencing pain, we do not sense anything irreal about it, let alone do we consider that it might all be…

The Post-Aesthetic Age: where everything is photographic

Photography is inherently not conceptual. A piece of visual work defined as being conceptual is a piece of work that clearly evinces the introduction of text into its machinations, text or any of its derivatives, in any of their multifarious formats. A piece of visual work defined as being conceptual is a textual image. Such…

Sustainable Prospects – Week 8

In a previous blog post, I wrote that visually we seem to have entered what I then termed the post-aesthetic age (click here to read that post). Really, all that denomination was meant to mean was that with the passing of time images seem to be increasingly becoming more and more aesthetically alike. Terming the…