Insidious Lassitude

In 1994 the noted Dutch photographer Hans Aarsman gave up photography. For many years he’d produced exhibitions and books of photographs of some renown. But at the beginning of 90s he began to struggle with the increasing ‘artification’ of the medium, and the proliferation of art images in commercial applications. He felt the very qualities that made a photograph unique were in fact antithetical to its use as art. This was exacerbated and made profoundly evident to him by the critically-disengaged discourse surrounding the use of photography in art. He began to see art as a recision of the qualities which constitute the particularity of photography. He argued that the reproducibility of images, as well as the ease in which they can be created without any specialist knowledge or skills, were not only difficult to assimilate with art, but the utilitarianism of the camera and photography was also threatened or obscured by the increasing encroachment of art into photography. The photographic image had become conflated with the material art object, but the photograph wasn’t a unique object.

Aarsman also worked as a photojournalist, but found himself restricted and frustrated by the use of his photographs. ‘Newspaper photos insist on presenting a simplistic dichotomy’, he said, ‘that perpetual thinking in terms of pros and cons, in good and evil, the oppressed and the oppressor, left and right . . . I was searching for a way to capture the ambiguity of life’. After he quit photojournalism, he travelled Holland searching not just for a new photographic aesthetic, but for a new way to use the camera. He felt that the camera somehow always came between himself and his experience of the visible world. ‘Not for a single instant was my gaze disinterested, [it was] always accompanied by questioning oneself . . . you’re a colonist of the visual world’ he said. He began to think that the camera and the resultant image were untenable with the unfettered and truthful experience of self and visual reality that he was pursuing; they militated against his apprehension of the visual world and his experience of his self within it. The images were almost narcissistic; he was only repeatedly looking at the world as he had been conditioned to see it by his photographic eye. And that eye was only a small part of him and his visual experience.

He gave up all forms of photography when he couldn’t find a way to resolve this dissatisfaction. He felt he had no use for the medium after the co-opting of the photographic image by art, by journalistic expedience, and by commerce and advertising. He sold his cameras and focused his attention on writing visual-critiques and plays about photography.

Early this century Aarsman began using a digital camera to document the capricious and transient desires consumerism aroused in him. His mother died in 2000, and not long after Aarsman moved house. As he was attempting to reduce his possessions in preparation for the move, he came across some figurines his mother had made and given him when he was younger. His new house was small and he would have no room to accommodate trinkets and things of no use. He thought it silly to have a sentimental value for clay gnomes and teddy bears, but still he felt throwing them out was a betrayal of his mother’s memory and had to retrieve them from the bin. Once he’d made a photographic record of them though, he was surprised at the emotional ease with which he was able to throw the objects away. He wondered if the objects of his consumerist desire could be similarly divested of their emotional lure if he photographed them. Consumerist lust is propagated by images, so perhaps he’d be sated by making an image of the object of his desire. He looked around his house at all the things he’d excitedly bought and never used; objects that he’d been desperate to own but had immediately been superseded by a new allure in a shop window somewhere. The moment was gone and all that remained were monuments - or perhaps souvenirs: useless bits of ornery tush - to his caprice and ephemeral desires. He thought that maybe the act of photographing could be commensurate with the consumerist’s consummation of purchasing. Could it be a sort of Freudean relief valve for desire? It’d certainly save him a lot of money and space if it could.

Aarsman went about his day-to-day business as before, but every time his consumer desire was piqued by an object in a shop window - or on a car forecourt, or by a ‘for sale’ sign on a property - he took out the digital camera he carried on trips through town and photographed the object which had aroused his consumer lust. By doing this he hoped he could head off the desire before it turned into an obsession and a purchase.

He did this for the first few years of the century - and may even still be doing it. At some point he collected the photographs and made an exhibition: ‘Photography as Antidote to Consumerism’. Though he hadn’t intended it, Aarsman was suddenly an artist and a photographer again. In an accompanying essay he fleshed out his ideology and made a call to arms:

 Let us provide some resistance. Let art stop acting as a vehicle for commercial interests. And if art is incapable of doing so, because its interests are too closely tied to those of commerce, then we’ll do it ourselves. After all, everybody has a camera in their phone these days.

 *****

In America there are now companies offering to stalk people going about their day-to-day business and photograph them like they’re famous. People pay the company, tell them what they’ll be wearing and where they’ll be, and then the photographer will diligently paparazzo them for an afternoon of shopping. The resultant portfolio of photographs will capture the faux-famous browsing organic pretzels in the delicatessen, emerging from Barneys laden with boutique paper carrier bags, or whatever other commercial diversions they make of an afternoon. The photos will depict the act of shopping; the act of consumerist consummation will be recorded and the images will attest to the visual performance of the act. The burgeoning popularity of this charade has itself created a lucrative market.

Whether the boutique paper bags contain anything is probably a moot point now. The image stands in place of the object that was once the monument (in this case it’s probably a monument rather than a souvenir, since they’re shopping at Barneys) to the fiasco. Those monuments - in Aarsman’s world they’re leather swivel chairs, chromed espresso machines - were only expensive stage dressings - follies, or props - to the act, and likewise the exact content of the paper bags is almost incidental to the narrative being played out. Who knows what’s inside the paper bags draped over Insidious Lassitude’s regular English actress muse Sienna Miller as she promenades down Madison Avenue, or as she ambulates in Primrose Hill? And who cares? It wouldn’t add to the meaning of the images. The locations may change; the contents of the bags may change and never be disclosed, but the image is the same: Sienna is shopping; she is on a trip to buy. And equally importantly: she looks bloody fabulous as she does it too.

Paying to be papped is apparently proving almost as addictive as shopping to Americans. This isn’t surprising because, like shopping, it is an act that must be repeated and repeated: because it is an act - a process, a Sisyphean endeavour - once it is completed it must be commenced again. The self that is given identity by it must be reiterated; the image must be reproduced. It’s a bit like those scenes in ‘Back to the Future’ where Michael J. Fox holds a photo of himself and watches his image disappear when his identity is threatened by not acting out his role properly. In the image of shopping the lines that depict and delineate the self must be constantly gone over lest they fade away. In that way it is maybe a bit analogous to fame itself. Or even fashion, to both of which it is inexplicably linked - once an image of Sienna has been made of her garbing around New York in Boho-chic, then she must create another image to bring to the idiot Americans so they can name it something reductionist and commercially workable like ‘Factory Metallic’, and then sell it in Barneys. They’ll copy it, act it out, appropriate it, reproduce it, and make an image ‘in the style of’ the fashion.

The throwaway nature of today’s culture requires that meaning is in need of constant re-inferrment so that the self is always reinstated before Michael J. Fox’s photograph turns blank. Like shopping; like fashion; like fame; once the moment’s gone all that’s left is the paper bag and an image of a moment that was gone is the click of an exposure. The move to digital processes has only sped this process up. The gulf between object and image is even wider now than when Aarsman turned his back on photography. The image has less physical substance than ever, yet it has assumed more importance as an object. Now the image is the thing, as Jean Baudrillard once noted and Insidious Lassitude is wont to often re-quote and muse upon.

The internet is part of that substance-less materiality too, and the popularity of ‘social-networking’ sites like Facebook has added impetus to the pseudo-pap business. Apparently people use these photos on their Facebook pages. It’s hard to imagine anything more depressing, but the faux-fame photos are at least entirely congruent with the often desperate and false projections of self-image that are prevalent in such ‘places’. According to Izaz Rony, who runs a pseudo-pap business (though I don’t suppose that’s what he calls it), ‘[people are] concerned about the image they project of themselves. [By using pseudo-pap photos] they have something that is real - it’s the window they open for others to look through. They want to create the lives they want to live’. Or, as they aren’t living them, create them by appropriating the look of them, because, really, it’s the same.

Rony explains that by being pseudo-papped people ‘aren’t self-conscious anymore’, so they have this ‘real’ image to paste all over their personal Facebook billboards. Alongside the images of the individual themselves, these billboards also advertise an identity by showing images of the individual’s ‘friends’. The friends are displayed like the souvenirs of shopping are, and the number of friends is totted up for each person and displayed. Of course, almost all these friends are people the individual hasn’t spoken to in years, or are people they spoke to once in a bar to ask them where they bought their fabulous Andy Warhol metallic sweater. Most of the time only a tiny percentage of this list are actually friends (in the old-fashioned pre-consumerist sense of the word), the others are a bit like the unknown contents of the paper bag - only an incidental collection of unused objects. Or in fact images of objects, since they’re often more-or-less unknown and only garnered for image-based identity-constitution. Of course, these images - of unknown friends, plastered over a digital billboard - could in fact be images made by pseudo-paps. So, there are images of people being friends with images of other unknown people; and all the images were made by people who nobody knows because they spend their time hiding behind bins outside Barneys. It’s a vaguely nightmarish scenario.

And in a further dysfunctional twist, people pay to have themselves tyrannised and defined by consumerism and its imagery. The irony is that while people are desperately trying to appropriate the image of ‘the life they want to lead’, the image of Sienna Miller’s life is one she spends all her time trying to escape. Despairing of her deplorable paparazzi shadow and images of herself, she has court orders against photographers and is so damaged that she regularly launches berserk quasi-psychotic physical attacks on them. Which, of course, are photographed and somehow packaged up not as a woman in desperate anguish, but as aspirational imagery. I suppose it is only a matter of time before the pseudo-paps start offering faux-fights as part of their service to their faux-famous clients.      

*****

Human relationships are now subject to the same image-based accumulation vector as consumerist shopping. The appearance of personal growth and progress is mediated socially through the image. The only value which is valid is economic, and all things on this scale are inferred by the visual. Social status, identity, self-validation, and personal value are inflected by the same set of visual signifiers and acts. The realms of human relationships and commerce have merged and are co-dependent, and mutually dependent on the image to hold the whole thing together. But the image is now less dependable than ever with its unfixed and contested meanings, its immateriality, erasability and throwaway nature. Hans Aarsman initially turned his back on photography because he felt it was an unsatisfactory representation of his visual reality; that it represented his self too overtly and in a way that was too simplistic. Today the photograph has become more utilitarian just as he hoped it would. But as a corollary of that it has also - in some of the ways he feared it would - meshed with consumerism and colonised or tyrannised our visual world and commodified the ways in which we understand ourselves.

The photograph at the top of this post of Miller besieged and embattled by photographers speaks eloquently of the depressing, dysfunctional and unsustainable plight that consumerism and its attendant imagery has led Western society and relationships into. Of course, although it depicts from the outside the hellish reality of a life being stalked by paparazzi, it was itself taken by a pap who contributed to the ruckus.

I rather like too the photograph underneath of Miller attacking a photographer with her handbag. The handbag, it must be said, is doubtless by Chloé or some similarly high-ranking fashion house, so - official Insidious Lassitude muse or not - it’s worth pointing out that Sienna perhaps isn’t exactly an oppositional figure to consumerism. The photograph was apparently taken the other day when she arrived at Los Angeles airport. It may possibly have been taken by a paparazzo, but it looks more like it was taken by a passer-by on the digital camera that Hans Aarsman pointed out that everyone now has with them at all times. Though by selling the picture to newspapers, the photographer has rather undermined Aarsman’s call to arms to use that camera to reclaim imagery from commerce and redeem the camera’s utilitarianism. Still, it didn’t look half as good before I cropped and Photoshopped it and plonked it underneath some high-falutin’ text about visual signifiers, so perhaps with my ‘artification’ interventions I’ve reclaimed it as a photograph. Maybe if I expressed that some that the reasons I like it are genuinely artistic then it’ll be redeemed from the clutches of The Daily Mail and the sundry other internet-world ‘places’ it was probably reproduced in.

I think I like it most because Miller is attacking the photographer not with her fists, or with a knife or a gun, but she is instead swinging her handbag manically. It’s like she has just stepped off a plane from the past, a time of greater certainty where disputes are simple, and meanings uncontested. The swinging of a handbag signifies disgust and antipathy, but it is also strangely charming and endearing. Nobody ever died from being clouted with a handbag. Like she’s a quaint English Rose from a distant land of rolling green hills and scone bakers, Sienna’s loopy handbag assault represents a polite and restrained, and ever-so-slightly eccentric English expression of displeasure. In a world of multi-national corporations, global communications, homogenised or Americanised culture, and instantly-transmitted images, the delightful swing of a handbag seems to connote a comforting residue of Englishness. Thus the photograph itself - captured on a lump of consumerist plastic, sold as a digital file, and transmitted around the world instantly - seems to say something terse but articulate about the tensions of multi-national consumerism and the threat to identity mediated by imagery.