Flatness

David Joselit has much to say about the cost of altering the image of the self: he sees that "flatness may serve as a powerful metaphor for the price we pay in transforming ourselves into images--a compulsory self-spectacularization which is the necessary condition of entering the public sphere in the world of late capitalism"(293). As Kristen has already pointed out, flatness works to compress a person into a stereotype. No real depth of character can be allowed in stereotype, simply a "presence and absence" (304)--a presence in the way the stereotype is all a community can engage with (i.e. all they can see) and an absence in the invisibility of the real people forced to wear the image.

I find Joselit's argument somewhat troubling. His rationale lies in the ambiguity of finding the self in images--if the creation of the self in an image is railed against as inauthentic "then where is it that we can lodge the self?" (292)--and his answer is in that same flatness of the picture plane. From the "psychological depth" (294) of Pollock's work, to Johns' (presumed) equation of skin and the picture plane--and thus a reference to Foucalt's posit that "the soul is the prison of the body" (298), to the already mentioned stereotype as seen in the work of Kara Walker and David Hammons, Joselit sees these canvases as authentic and possibly accurate representations of the innermost core of a human, of the soul. But these things cannot BE the self.

You are not what you eat. You are not what you wear. You are not what you paint. There is something so much deeper than that and the "flatness" of a picture plane, no matter how applied or perceived, will not be able to capture it. As he has said with Johns' process, it is the act of making that uncovers his version of self-image. If it is to be believed that the soul is the body's cage, then any functions or expressions of the body would have to be made within the confines of it. The soul--and iterations of it-- exists through the body's expression of it. It cannot exist but through the body. Even if we are each given a soul before our brains can process the world, it is still the process of action that allows the soul to become visible, to become known. It is because of this that I feel Joselit's argument falls flat. Ba-dum psh!

There is something that stirs us in the surface of an artwork. They allow us to connect deeper with the world around us by forcing us to focus on a single image of interest, something that reaches through our cage to move us. Will these works accurately contain a soul, a look into the inner workings of the artist, or will they only contain our own response to the piece, the artist, or both? I vote the latter.


Joselit, David. " Notes on Surface : Towards a Genelogy of Flatness". Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya, Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2005. pp 292-308.