The Mark of Theory by Andrea Bachner

Author:Andrea Bachner [Bachner, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, Social Science, Media Studies, Philosophy, Movements, Post-Structuralism
ISBN: 9780823277490
Google: Y5WUDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2017-11-28T05:50:53+00:00

Counterpoint 2: Surface Promiscuity

No horizon opens up the frame; all is surface. No depth there; just lines in movement. Superimposition of the flat, two scenes crossing each other. A horizontal sway, like an open book, black planes crisscrossed by whitish traces, mottled by red imprints in vertical flight. Surface differences, as the smooth black shapes fuse with rugose reds. Not interruption but detour. Tracks converge and diverge, overlap or share directions for a time, without erasing each other or creating a seamless concordance. Ascending serpentines through mountainous terrain, rivers cascading toward the edge, spurious traces chiseled in rock? What catches the eye here? What lets itself be captivated by vision? Nothing makes sense in the uncertainty of scale—extreme distance brought too close; oscillating between the bird’s eye of an aerial panorama and the close-up of a rubbing, as if of dermal folds. Unsettled eye without attachment point; invitation to digital touch immediately spurned by grainy visuality: trompe l’oeil, trompe le doigt.

This photo-etching forms part of Quebrada: Las cordilleras en andas (2006) by Chilean writer and artist Guadalupe Santa Cruz. Quebrada, with its polysemic title that can be tentatively rendered as “Ravine/broken: Shouldering the Andes,” is a book turned art object, a composition of photo-etchings and text that mixes the genres of travelogue, interview, and theoretical essay, thus eschewing any single literary genre. Sometimes on one and the same page the text juxtaposes the cited voices of the inhabitants encountered on the protagonist’s journey through Chile’s north, the traveler’s reflection on the experience of traveling, descriptions of the landscape, and detailed renditions of the process of photography and the subsequent creative steps in the artist’s atelier that led to the engravings included in the work.

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