Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida : Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson

Abstract

And in the years following, we find her extending her critical innovations back in time to key, often neglected, works of the pre-war avant-garde -Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926), the films of Joseph Cornell and Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein's unrealized projects -as well as René Clair's science fiction comedy Paris qui dort (1923).Although the particular crisis of criticism generated by Minimalism has passed, and the critique of the 'idealist' orthodoxy has itself become orthodox, Michelson has continued to play a major role in developing new techniques and conceptual frameworks to meet the demands on criticism of advanced art, both indirectly in the work she has encouraged and promoted as an editor (first of Artforum and then October), a teacher (professor of cinema studies at New York University), a translator (of thinkers such as Bataille, Lacan, Deleuze), an author of prefaces and introductions (Noël Burch's Theory of Film Practice); and more directly as a writer of essays.Her recognition of the limitations of criticism in the 1960s, and her turn to other intellectual traditions to find alternatives, have proved, I think, to be exemplary for critics over the last three decades.Second, the alternative techniques and conceptual frameworks Michelson herself pioneered in her effort to overcome the critical limitations exposed by Minimalism together constituted, as David Bordwell has rightly pointed out, a new way of understanding art, a new paradigm of interpretation.6 Although Michelson initially developed this paradigm in relation to Minimalism in the late 1960s, its richness and power has meant that it has been extended well be-The paradigmatic notion propelling this paradigmatic analysis -that an art work can occasion reflection on philosophical topics such as 'What is seeing?'; that art 'as exploration of the conditions and terms of perception ... converges with philosophy and science upon the problem of reality as known and knowable' (CK 58) -has proved to be a singularly fertile one for criticism of the last thirty years, having been extended well beyond the understanding of Minimalism and the avant-garde to include mass and popular art.Certainly it has for Michelson's work.In the same year as her text on Morris, she applies it in her analysis of 2001, arguing that while watching this film, 'Viewing becomes, as always but as never before, the discovery, through the acknowledge-'Examine the mutations of things,' says St. Augustine, 'and thou wilt everywhere find "has been" and "will be."Think on God and thou wilt find "is" where "has been" and "will be" cannot be.' Absolute presentness being the attribute of Divinity, to experience 'the work in all its depth and fullness' as within 'a single, infinitely brief instance' is to dwell in Presence, in 'conviction' as in Revelation.(RM 19) 20 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida 'sublime inane' (KI 38).Even though Michelson's mature work begins with a consideration of how Minimalists, such as Morris and Rainer, overturn the idealist tradition exemplified by Abstract Expressionism through a secular analysis of everyday reality and our ordinary knowledge of it, it is as if she nevertheless retains, unlike the postmodernist critics who follow her, a profound reverence for at least one feature of idealist art: the desire for transcendence, for escape from the limits of the merely human, the earthly, the corporeal, the ordinary, the 'here and now,' in search of forms of certainty and knowledge unavailable in quotidian human existence.Hence her focus on those filmmakers who conceive of cinema as a powerful visual technology that, by escaping the limitations of everyday human seeing and knowing, reveals reality in a manner impossible for normal human vision.In her work, it seems to me, the secular and idealist traditions are in permanent conversation, if not dialectical interaction, even though at certain times she displays the discomfort with the idealist trend typical of postmodernism.It is as if she has much less confidence than postmodernist critics in the possibility, or even desirability, of expunging idealist transcendence from advanced art, as if the desire to escape the constraints of the ordinary in search of something better through art is somehow natural to the human condition, and the critic of modernism must therefore think it together with the secular project of analyzing the ordinary.If I am right about this -and I am not sure that I am -then it accounts for at least two other features of Michelson's work.First, it explains, at least in part, her attraction to Eisenstein and Vertov, the two filmmakers she has spent the most time thinking and writing about.For the different projects of these two 30Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida *In this introduction, I have tried to convey a sense of Annette Michelson's considerable impact -both actual and potential -on Anglo-American criticism of advanced art.All of the essays in this volume honor this legacy by attempting to build on one or more aspects of it that I have mentioned.The editors and contributors hope she will enjoy them.

Cite this

Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey (2003). Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida : Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson. Amsterdam University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789053564943

@book{richard2003camera,
  title  = {Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida : Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson},
  author = {Allen, Richard and Turvey, Malcolm},
  year   = {2003},
  publisher = {Amsterdam University Press eBooks},
  doi    = {10.5117/9789053564943}
}

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