viz.

For your Thanksgiving pleasure—Pavement's cover of the Schoolhouse Rock classic, "No More Kings."

Happy Birthday, Percy Wyndham Lewis (November 18, 1882 - March 7, 1957).

William Eggleston pioneered the use of color photography as a valid visual art form. His 1976 MoMA exhibit was the first one-man show to feature color images. Like his friend Ed Ruscha, Eggleston’s a now legendary figure in contemporary art, and many articles and interviews with him are available in print and online, like this one by Jim Lewis. Unlike most photographers, however, Eggleston rarely takes more than one shot, and only occasionally makes use of the viewfinder. He points and clicks. His saturated color photos often reveal a world that borders on terror and hilarity—and the democratic range of his gaze provides dazzling and impersonal perspectives on U. S. cultural life. The opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet pays tribute to Eggleston’s saturated colors—and the tone of that film captures Eggleston’s sense of the macabre and decayed peripheries that surround us.

Although I admire the color and composition of his photographs, I appreciate more the perspective he brings to mundane things. One photograph form the 1970s reveals a number of shoes under a bed. In another, a child’s tricycle rises ominously over the driveway. There are pictures of gas stations and lonely fields of the Mississippi Delta. Human form does not receive special attention. Instead, it is absorbed into a body of work that values popular objects and landscapes equally. Eggleston’s perspectives make claims about what we see in a democracy and how we see it. That democracy is slightly warped intensifies the all too real values imposed by it. We’re fortunate to have Eggleston’s lens show us what is often not so readily available to our senses.

Work like his, however, confronts our understanding of rhetoric and visual communication. One photo, for instance, reveals only the inside of an oven. Such a mundane vision could be easily dismissed. But on further reflection, we might recall that ovens provide warmth and sustenance. Holiday birds and breads are baked in them. Here, the rectangular pit is striated with two metal racks, revealing an order and symmetry inherent in the design of daily objects we take for granted. Such symmetry reveals a preference for simplicity and utility: core values of democracy. The bare bulb in the back allows users to observe food as it cooks. The rust-stained bottom edge of the outer portion at the hinges suggests that this oven has been used for quite some time too, and the tile floor and doorframe to the right registers a situation wherein a middle class (or lower) sense of decorum is at stake. The oven is clean and symmetrical, and yet the signs of ware and use appeal to our sense of place and values. As viewers, we wonder about the domestic experience of this household. More significantly, the photo seems to ask us to reflect on what is shared and what is not. Certain properties in a democracy are held in common, while others separate us by class, race, gender. The photo argues that we share in certain ancient requirements of hearth to relieve the pangs of hunger. It claims too that the value of appliance and symmetry motivate our assumptions about home design, cooking, social exchange, and class. But perhaps this oven is clean not because of a tidy attention to domestic hygiene, but because it simply isn’t used that often. Perhaps it is rented along with the apartment, and the inhabitants require other domestic pleasures than home baked bread. Of course, a microwave could be on the countertop, making the oven almost obsolete. What does this tell us about a culture wherein obsolescence can so readily present itself as an option in our conception of domestic appliance?

Eggleston’s arguments about form and function in his photographs make him a peculiar and accurate witness to democratic spaces. The intimacy of his perspective is balanced with enough indifference to reveal the shared surfaces of our experience. Just enough incongruence, in Kenneth Burke’s sense, keeps his images alert to the experience of life in late 20th/early 21st century America.

A compelling essay on the current money mess by Charles Eisenstein at the eclectic and ambitious web magazine, Reality Sandwich, offers the following perspective on the larger meaning of “meltdown”:

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.

Carolee Schneeman’s controversial sixties-era films remain to my mind some of the most visually provocative reflections on the “deep and meaningless” facets of life during that turbulent period. Meat Joy (1964), made during an era of U. S. Cold War propaganda, Vietnam War escalation, and multiple political assassinations, celebrates flesh in a context that, at first, may seem anachronistic. And yet, American military and economic claims on the world provided artists of the period a safe space to reflect on the body and cultural taboos associated with libidinal experience.

Today, Meat Joy is a delight to view. The French voices and Dylan-esque harmonica background provide a feeling of joie de vivre that correlates with the playful embraces of scantily clad women and men. When processed fish, chicken, and sausage enter this orgy, I thought, okay, Schneeman is going to drive the metaphor down our throats (maybe not literally, but close enough). But visually, the performance remains so compact, visually kinetic and complex, and surprisingly light-hearted, that the gesture of, say, a fish, squeezed up tight between a young woman’s thighs, is, well, marvelous to behold in this context.

Schneeman’s argument, however, materializes the body—bringing it out of our minds, where too often it exists in submission to social and cultural ideals. By recontextualizing bodies on a stage in orgiastic abandon to the performative moment, the arms, legs, and torsos we see give definition to the space around them, and ask viewers to see bodies at play as they explore tabooed social boundaries.

Fuses (1967), by contrast, presents bodies in a much more intimate, domestic setting. With only ambient beach sounds to supplement the 22-minute, 16 mm film, the intimacy between Schneeman and her lover, James Tenney, is mediated through frequent narrative cuts, image-layers, and post-production manipulation of the celluloid itself. Despite the occasional glistening, post-coital cock, Fuses distances the audience from an experience of literal fucking. Instead, viewers witness an argument for how sexuality can be internalized and reflected on as an experience of the mind as well as of the body. If anything, the film is grounded in a mimesis that recalls the mental state during sex, with rapid image juxtapositions, visual submission to the body, ambient sources of light through a window, intrusions from a pet cat, and glimpses of the face of the other.

While the argument is made in a specifically hetero-context, the intrusion of ecstatic otherness often experienced in sexual intimacy is revealed here, making this a unique, and valuable, film about an area of life that typically remains hidden from popular view. Unlike pornography, which is about manipulating the image-as-product, aiming stylized sexual acts at a particular audience’s desire for physical gratification, Fuses, with its gorgeous shifts of light over the room and textured visual tableau, invites speculation from viewers on attitudes about sexuality, bodies, and expressive, if unconscious, forms.

I find films such as these compelling because they challenge our notions of suasion in the epideictic mode. Without explicit narratives—or even spoken arguments—we are left with the performative gestures of the visual frames of the films themselves.