As a person who often explores an expression of gender and violence in their own works, I have found an enlightening (and additionally somewhat depressing) perspective in the writings of Susan Sontag. The following sentence and reflections are ones which I have found correlates well with certain themes which I try to discuss with the production of my art.
that war is a man’s game—that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male – Page 3
This as a reference to the writings of Virginia Woolf which Sontag explores in greater detail elaborates on an identity mechanic explored in our global dynamic, the bellocose nature of masculinity. The mention is to an abstraction, a literal “Killing Machine” which does not actually, physically exist but is perpetuated by the likes of those who embody such a notion descriptively. The times in Woolf’s late life when mechanized warfare began to take over the battlefield, the pace of people forever augmented by motorization bled into the visual dialogue of male shapes and angular motives in modern art, which Sontag may additionally be alluding to.
The first justification for the brutally legible pictures of dead soldiers, which clearly violated a taboo, was the simple duty to record. “The camera is the eye of history,” Brady is supposed to have said. – Page 42
An exploration of the photographer’s agency is important, and while I may work with models whom differ drastically in emotion and expression I often find that I am only a voyer, a witness to the scene which they are creating. Brady’s devastating photos of the many slain during the civil war imply an obligation to spread this horror beyond the place it was originally confined to; much like I feel the need to capture and preserve the specific ways in which Androgens immutably effect the body – each statement an augury to others that can be interpreted as artistic statements when the truth is actually quite utilitarian.
THE ARGUMENT THAT modern life consists of a diet of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated is a founding idea of the critique of modernity—the critique being almost as old as modernity itself. – Page 82
I would describe my primary preoccupation as a purveyor of mediation, and earlier in the text Sontag explores the tiring effect of photography as a popular media, in the years since her death it has become an auspice of social media. Desensitization is an important aspect to study as an artist, examining the point at which my works dissolve into easily ignored – scrolled past objects better helps me understand the scope of human creation. The aspect of horror has a place when wrapped in subtlety because human beings can always be shocked, placed into a more primal state no matter how advanced they become – you have to get your viewers to look closely and empathetically position themselves in order to truly deliver this experience, in my case to think of how their bodies have changed and reflect on this.