‘CATARACTS’

‘The Lazarus Heart’ “He looked beneath his shirt today There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide From the wound a lovely flower grew From somewhere deep inside” - Sting What the fuck is visual literacy? When it comes to dominant photographic theory, I see before me a shallow ocean. I pity another year of bachelor’s students flipping a semiotic coin and trying to make out, in the blur of heads or tails, a signifier. Perhaps after reading Sontag, they would be more inclined to blow their brains out with a loaned DSLR rather than use it for a portrait of their housemate. Or even, in the confusion of icon, index and symbol, mistake their dog (correctly) for an index of fleas and throw poor old Shep into the washing machine with the rest of those dirty indexes. Why must photography be bound to language so categorically? Why does it lean on its journalistic linage? What strange boundaries do these photographic taxonomies demarcate? Are they the relics of the adolescent mediums history of self justification, now existing only as an obscure glass panel separating us from those clumsy hobbyists who wouldn’t know a Ruff from a Wall? Why does this semiotic tradition continue in academic pedagogy even in the wake of photographies rapid digital liquidification? Do I have some personal hang up with Roland Barthes? I ask these questions not seeking an answer, nor are they really questions, the correlative question mark here does not denote a question at all, it’s a mark of castigation. Deny me with your studium’s if you wish but my punctum is superior? Guy Grabowsky’s works are the miracle, repeated. They are the body of Lazarus dragged through the cave, again and again, up and down, for every retelling of the resurrection. Over and over and over, the ‘myth’ of photography is brought up against its own speculated surface for another semiotic reframing. Saussure and Peirce are strung up as Punch and Judy, as Mary and Martha, all for the necro-puppet show. Each utterance like a thud on the sand. Thunk! ‘Brick wall.’ Thump! ‘Tape.’ KATHUNK! ‘The Image.’ Grabowsky’s large scale photographs have left the adornments of a proper burial behind, no longer do the “Sapphires lay in Broken Emeralds” or the “Flowers Bloom from Opals.” We know the myth, we know the resurrection. To repeat, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all, I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all, I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” This is the resilience of Grabowsky’s work. If a new wave of “minimalism” is to be believed, you will not find it here. No this is not the work of some Pre-Raphaelite revisionist brotherhood, this is not a tribute, this is the cave in all it’s glory. These scratches you see at the entrance here today are sincere, an index of the endless cycle of photographic myth. But how can you form a correlative system of logic when the events within it are positively supernatural? I exclaim, “someone came back to life in this cave! Don’t you see! The resurrection is the intervention of the digital!” No one bats an eye, they’ve seen it all before. The rock rolls from the entrance and, unexpectedly, a smell emerges. The decayed body lies in the tomb, covered in tape, the cycle has accelerated to ruin. Lazarus is John’s seventh “sign,” the last piece of cumulative evidence that makes up the “week” of Jesus’s miracles. I’m unsure of how to classify this “sign” within a semiotic taxonomy, Reverend Frank Lynn Crouch’s Doctoral thesis “Everyone who sees the Son: Sign, faith, Peirce’s semiotics, and the Gospel of John,” costs $46 on Proquest and he hasn’t replied to my emails, perhaps he’s dead too. Let’s just imagine that he answers that question for us but what happens to the myth when its end deviates, its core sign is corrupted? What happens to a sign when it’s misused, beaten, flogged, killed, made obvious, spent? Is the signs ‘worth’ as a moral or spiritual instrument lessened? Grabowsky's work “Epiphany Leads to Transparency” references an event that we are not privy to. A moment of spiritual enlightenment, we might assume being described autobiographically, in which the artist makes a material discovery. An epiphany in which an image of a flower is placed behind see-through tape, this is the sign of transparency. This is also a transparency of the artist’s process. We can see through the title and look at Grabowsky in the studio, placing tape over an image of a flower and thinking, “eureka! Something has changed. Something has been resurrected.” Barthes once called the refusal of a ‘fixed’ or ‘ultimate’ or ‘secret’ meaning of a particular text, “an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law.” I would say the opposite, it is myths complete re-workability that makes it's theological. On the other-hand, a fixed, ultimate, secret meaning like those in a painting by an artist forced to hide messages in theological events by an overzealous patron, that might just be anti-theological. Allow me to briefly reflect on one previous castigation here: Would it not be presumptuous of me to say that the digital environments (now so diligently adhered to the ‘photographic’) are to blame for this sentimental Saussurian order of signs? The structure of the web acts on a cradle of semiotic vectors, that is to say: hyperlinks on the internet reinforce an allegorical linkage system in which a text can be entered into and reveal a historic text - click B to get to A. Hyperlinks have their logical foundations within structuralism’s ‘hypotext,’ that being: any text which refers to a previously written text. So like the good little post-structuralists that we are, we can conclude that this definition includes just about every single text ever written. The ‘thumbnail’ on the ‘hand’ of your ‘cursor’ can be ‘opened up’ and ‘read’ as a chain of symbols, therefore all digital images hyperlink to the revelation of an internal textuality which ‘informs’ the image. No longer does an explanation sit under it’s eaves or hang from the rafters, this image is materially distended by language. Here is the level that Grabowsky intercepts the image, frantically embalming the word «petal» as it rots in reproduction. A phenomenon of decomposition known as ‘link rot’ refers to the increasing prevalence of dead links on the internet; the sheer volume of digitized text strains its capacity to remain functionally connected. This affliction can also be observed on the rotting wooden caskets of journals, papers and articles, propped up by the procession of ever reshuffling pallbearers, on their way to the resurrection machine. Look - undulating on the horizon! Here comes: “The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography,” followed by, “Photography after the Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Non-Symbolic,” and bringing up the rear, “Peirce’s Index.” These are discorrelated dead ends; so dependent on a string of rotten semiotic links that they cease being generative outside of empty reorderings. Link rot aestheticises the promise of a connection yet hollows out the logic of it’s fulfilment - as too does Grabowsky; his works are merely aesthetics of an end. They are the portrait of a print crumpled in the printer, of a chemical spill in the dark room. Formalised grubby hands, accidents and imperfections, nothing is wrong, nothing can die, the process is never finished. Keeping in mind his temporal obsession with Tarkovsky, if one were to read Grabowsky»s oeuvre as one single processed image, covered over and over again with new semiotic representations, while keeping the same Grabowskian taxonomy, this very process of continual conceptual resurrection becomes the image of a photographic infinite. Any kind of formulation is just another scratch on the surface, the resurrection has occurred so many times that it is meaningless. From blue to green, from flower to window, from analogue to digital, from mark to mark, all are flattened by an arduous photographic process, and so, Grabowsky brings us into his world, into meaning as photography, looking as photography, living as photography. Here allow me to parade Lazarus, not as a figure of resurrection but as a dead body, a fixed meaning, or in somewhat contemporary parlance, a hyper-Lazarus. This is the stubbornness of the played out infinite, this is the second death of the eternal resurrection. Grabowsky»s work operates within this perpetual blur, the flipped coined, Lazarus between a horizontal and vertical position, an arc in the cave. “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.” - Corinthians 10:2