The Explanation for Everything by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

iii. There Is Too Much Sexual Relation

Unlike novel reading, museum going does not presuppose a private space that is free from surveillance, in which the viewing subject sees without himself or herself being seen. True, the closed-circuit cameras that regularly monitor the interior of museums, or even the uniformed men and women who stand in low-tech guard, tend to pass unnoticed, so thoroughly have we grown accustomed to our visual accessibility. (Or at least unnoticed by me. I had to phone the Wadsworth Athenaeum, where I first saw The Perfect Moment, to confirm that closed-circuit cameras had in fact monitored the exhibit. They had.) We have grown accustomed to our accessibility, however, in a manner different in kind from Ridley, who actively solicits—in the etymological as well as the familiar sense of the word: sollus, whole, and ciere, to move, stir, agitate—the visual surveillance to which we are routinely subjected, to which we routinely subject ourselves. Even fully manacled, Ridley stages the conditions of his own objectification, an objectification to which the museum-going spectator does not, indeed cannot, contribute. The very nature of the museum presupposes the relation of a thoroughly autonomous viewing subject to thoroughly accessible and exposed objects. In holding up a mirror to the viewing subject, however, Bill, New York, 1976–77 effaces the distance between subject and object positions. The ontological privilege that the viewing subject enjoys vis-à-vis the aesthetic object, which is always the right to see without oneself being seen, to consume in representation without oneself being represented, is itself violated.24 And in staging the conditions of his own objectification, in proleptically assuming the object position, Ridley beats the museum-going art consumer at his or her own game.

Liberal critiques of visual representation tend to rehearse some form of the opposition between the “naked” and the “nude,” the better to preserve the body natural from the body cultural. I am naked when I experience my body in all its mammalian warmth and innocence; I am nude when my body is given over to (or appropriated by) the culturally determined space of representation. Nakedness is natural and thus heterosexual, although today the paraphernalia of safer sex apparently threaten to translate the condition of heterosexual nakedness into a perverse nudity:

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