Touching Surfaces: Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging

230 Pages·2008·4.18 MB·English

by  Anca Cristofovici

Touching Surfaces
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General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Cover photo: Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary (1998).
Courtesy of the artist.
Cover design:
Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2513-4
ISSN: 1573-2193
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Printed in the Netherlands
Touching Surfaces
Photographic Aesthetics,
Temporality, Aging
ANCA CRISTOFOVICI
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
In memoriam

Aurora-Stela Anghel
Aurora Anghel
Daniel Cristofovici
Carolina

Acknowledgements

This book had its earliest beginning at the Center for
Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, where I was a fellow in 1996-1997. My gratitude to
Kathleen Woodward, its director at the time, for providing me with
exceptional working conditions and a most inspiring intellectual
dialogue. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to the staff of the
Center, and especially to Carol Tennessen, associate director at the
time, who assisted me in many ways. I also want to acknowledge the
generous support of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation that
made my collaboration with the Center possible.
In the absence of any other institutional support since then, I
would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me, over the
years and in diverse ways, to turn that project into a book. I am
particularly pleased to thank my friends, Doris Kiely, Yolanda Lalu
Levi, and Angela Jianu, who read fragments of the work in progress,
Juliet Bates, who kindly read the entire manuscript in its final phase,
Mark Carlson, Corrado Minervini and La Famiglia da Nizza, for
helping me solve details in the layout of images, and Serge Della
Monica, who, over time, showed me the light in the dark room.
My special thanks to the photographers whose work has
sustained this book, and in particular to those who generously
accepted to grant me the reproduction rights and made useful
comments on their work, to Christine Guibert for her permission to
reproduce the photographs of Hervé Guibert, and to Agathe Gaillard,
from the Gaillard Gallery, in Paris. I am also grateful to those who
provided me with high definition images to be reproduced in the book:
Kay Broker and Alexandra Batsford, from the Pace/MacGill Gallery,
in New York; Dan Cheeck, from the Fraenkel Gallery, in San
Francisco; Adam Harrison, from the Jeff Wall Studio, in Vancouver;
Christina Horeau and Marie-Eve Beaupré, from the René Blouin
Gallery, in Montréal; and Jonas Wettre, from the Steidl Verlag, in
Göttingen.
The library staff of La Maison Européenne de la Photographie
in Paris, my part-time home during the years when this book was
being written, has been of great help. My thankful thoughts to all for
viii Touching Surfaces
their competence, warm reception, humor, and to Henri Coudoux, in
particular, for his genuine interest in my project.

The first chapter of this book is an updated and revised
version of my essay, “Touching Surfaces: Photography, Aging, and an
Aesthetics of Change”, which first appeared in Figuring Age. Women,
Bodies, Generations (Kathleen Woodward ed., Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), reproduced here by
permission. I have presented fragments from the chapters on Jim Dine
and Joyce Tenneson at the Annual International Conference on
“Literature and Psychoanalysis”, in 2004 and 2005, that were
published on-line in the proceedings of the respective conferences.

I wish to thank Dr. Daniel-Meyer Dinkgräfe, the director of
the Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts series at Rodopi, for his
interest in my manuscript, which was to come out with another
publisher in 2003 and then was mysteriously lost.

Paris, March 2008
Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.

Bill Viola, Statement 1989

It is a most recollected small painting. It thinks
that only one thing is necessary & this is
time. But this one thing is by no means
apparent to one who will not take the trouble
to look.

Thomas Merton,
on a painting Ad Reinhardt made for him