“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, April 29, 2011

Object-Oriented Art: You Are Already Dead 3


Isn't that one of the best album covers ever made? And it's a photo—of the Raspail tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris. Juxtaposed with that slab of black.

That covered, veiled, grieving figure—living or dead or undead? Art or life? Man or woman? Dead or alive? Grieving or relieved? Uncannily it reminds me of a newborn baby, holding on to its mother's body, only just alive, exhausted.

The disturbing ambiguity of this OBJECT is profound. That's the trouble with pretense—you don't know whether it's pretense or not.

So apropos of a previous post, this would be a wonderful example of the object-oriented, rather than the constructivist, approach. Somehow this image is more ecological for me than the most detailed network of relations.

And the album is called Within the Realm of a Dying Sun for Pete's sake! How can any speculative realist not love that?

1 comment:

Henry Warwick said...

brilliant album that. one of my faves.