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Queenie II
Author: Duane Hanson
Year: 1988 Edit Add
Book: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Queenie II
Author: Duane HansonYear: 1988 Edit Add
Book: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
The ultimate contemporary fetishization of the human body, however, takes a very different direction in the statues of Duane Hanson: what I have already called the simulacrum, whose peculiar function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealization of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality. Your moment of doubt and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures, in other words, tends to return upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum and to transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and fleshcolored simulacra in their own right. The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?
The ultimate contemporary fetishization of the human body, however, takes a very different direction in the statues of Duane Hanson: what I have already called the simulacrum, whose peculiar function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealization of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality. Your moment of doubt and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures, in other words, tends to return upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum and to transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and fleshcolored simulacra in their own right. The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?
Source type: pictureNotes on "Camp"
Author: Susan Sontag
Year: 1964 Edit Add
Book: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Notes on "Camp"
Author: Susan SontagYear: 1964 Edit Add
Book: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
It has proved fruitful to think of such experiences in terms of what Susan Sontag, in an
influential statement, isolated as "camp." I propose a somewhat different cross-light on it,
drawing on the equally fashionable current theme of the "sublime," as it has been rediscovered in the works of Edmund Burke and Kant; or perhaps one might want to yoke the two notions
together in the form of something like a camp or "hysterical" sublime. The sublime was for
Burke an experience bordering on terror, the fitful glimpse, in astonishment, stupor, and awe, of
what was so enormous as to crush human life altogether: a description then refined by Kant to
include the question of representation itself, so that the object of the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power and of the physical incommensurability of the human organism with
Nature but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give
representation to such enormous forces.
It has proved fruitful to think of such experiences in terms of what Susan Sontag, in an
influential statement, isolated as "camp." I propose a somewhat different cross-light on it,
drawing on the equally fashionable current theme of the "sublime," as it has been rediscovered in the works of Edmund Burke and Kant; or perhaps one might want to yoke the two notions
together in the form of something like a camp or "hysterical" sublime. The sublime was for
Burke an experience bordering on terror, the fitful glimpse, in astonishment, stupor, and awe, of
what was so enormous as to crush human life altogether: a description then refined by Kant to
include the question of representation itself, so that the object of the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power and of the physical incommensurability of the human organism with
Nature but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give
representation to such enormous forces.
Original Url: http://core.roehampton.ac.uk/repository2/content2/subs/d.steedman/d.steedman1608/Sontag%20(2009)%20Notes%20on%20Camp.pdf Edit