Chelsea the Cinéaste

  In search of what he called an “astral America” in the early 1980s, Jean Baudrillard came upon its ultimate symbol - the desert: “ Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.” This initial ecstasy soon gave way to sobering contemplation - of technology, the ravages of modernity, the vacuity of the American dream, the mindless luxury of civilisation…”All societies end up wearing masks,” Baudrillard pronounces, tying his observation in with the premise of his seminal work,  Simulacra and Simulation , published just a few years back, that “artifice is at the very heart of reality.”   Baudrillard’s Delphic prose, which comprises the book  America , is echoed in the strange, banal imagery of  3 Women  (1977). The locales were Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs - arid plains where spirit decayed and hopes foundered. As is frequently the case, the drab physical landscape triggers an inverse response from the psycho...

  The comparison of human eye to a camera is a well-worn trope in photography and cinema. In a photograph or film, the camera quite naturally stands for the artist’s gaze. As passive consumers, we do not normally question the validity of such equation: the camera’s mechanised functionality is presumed and taken for granted - it is only a tool. Another line of thought undertaken by, most prominently, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, hints at the complex roles the act of taking a photograph automatically assumes: “…the Photograph,” writes Barthes in  Camera Lucida , “is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” Every subject is an object in a photograph, and the lived moment captured and, accordingly, preserved. Time is especially a knotty matter here: it is ever-present but frozen at a particular juncture, at the past; anticipating an unestablished future, a sure course to death.   To see myself as “other”, as a stranger in a ph...