WHAT DO ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMAGES WANT?
Inspired in J. Lacan, Slavoj Zizek wrote (“Looking Awry”, The MIT Press, 1992): “When I look at an object, the object is always already gazing at me, and from a point at which I can not see it.”
And he adds that, if this antinomy - of my view and of the gaze that the object devolves to me - disappears, I am caught in a kind of "pornographic" environment: “reality” approaches too close and in all its details.
I need a distance between that “reality” and fantasy in order to articulate my desire (in this case, my desire of understanding what we have conventionally accepted to be the “archaeological reality”).
Knowledge implies not a frontal, straightforward view, but an “awry look” at things. That look does not seek some kind of “hidden meaning” in the objects, from which to extract a product called “past”.
But in a way, helped by lots of tools, including images, what we want is to establish a narrative that, being ultimately "fictional" (truth is a divine monopoly), increases some sense to our lives as temporal beings.
Photography, then cinema or video, and many other image technologies have been, and increasingly are, intimately connected to our desire of “looking at the past.”
Or is it that, alternatively, the past is already looking at us, gazing at us? The question remains open.
This subject is, I think, a good topic for discussing these ideas from fresh standpoints, in order to play with the concepts of desire, past, and image.
This is probably a fruitful way, among many others, to overcome some current ready made notions about the “archaeological process”.
In order not to keep tied to domestic visions of the past, too simplistic to comfort our imagination, and incapable of freeing us from the fetishism of the so-called “material record”.
And he adds that, if this antinomy - of my view and of the gaze that the object devolves to me - disappears, I am caught in a kind of "pornographic" environment: “reality” approaches too close and in all its details.
I need a distance between that “reality” and fantasy in order to articulate my desire (in this case, my desire of understanding what we have conventionally accepted to be the “archaeological reality”).
Knowledge implies not a frontal, straightforward view, but an “awry look” at things. That look does not seek some kind of “hidden meaning” in the objects, from which to extract a product called “past”.
But in a way, helped by lots of tools, including images, what we want is to establish a narrative that, being ultimately "fictional" (truth is a divine monopoly), increases some sense to our lives as temporal beings.
Photography, then cinema or video, and many other image technologies have been, and increasingly are, intimately connected to our desire of “looking at the past.”
Or is it that, alternatively, the past is already looking at us, gazing at us? The question remains open.
This subject is, I think, a good topic for discussing these ideas from fresh standpoints, in order to play with the concepts of desire, past, and image.
This is probably a fruitful way, among many others, to overcome some current ready made notions about the “archaeological process”.
In order not to keep tied to domestic visions of the past, too simplistic to comfort our imagination, and incapable of freeing us from the fetishism of the so-called “material record”.
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