Article: STORY 14 — CONTEMPLATING DESIRE (Curatorial Inclinations)
STORY 14 — CONTEMPLATING DESIRE (Curatorial Inclinations)
I keep returning to the question of what desire
actually wants from an image.
Not satisfaction. That much I know. The image that fully delivers extinguishes itself the moment it's seen. What desire seems to want is something more like permission to keep going. An opening that stays open.
I have been sitting with three Polaroids on fabric. Scattered, not arranged. The informality of the way they haven't been composed into an argument is doing something to me. There's a man whose head is bowed. Another who looks directly at whatever holds the camera. A third somewhere between, as if the question of where to put his attention is still unresolved. Three different answers to the same problem of being looked at.
COUTUREBOY began, I think, in the unresolved. The boy who watched men wasn't trying to arrive anywhere. He was learning desire as a form of attention sustained and precise, without a demand for return. That practice is still the center of this work. What I'm contemplating now is whether the image can hold that quality. Whether it can remain in the act of wanting without collapsing into the object wanted.
Glissant would say opacity is what makes the other desirable, that full transparency kills the relation. These photographs understand that. The deep blacks, the grain, the shadow that swallows more than it reveals, they are formally committed to not giving everything. And in that withholding, the wanting has somewhere to live.
I don't know that I've resolved anything. I'm not sure resolution is the right ambition. What I'm after is desire that stays metabolically alive in the image, not spent, not denied. Just dwelling.
Maybe that's what the archive is. Not a record of desire fulfilled. A record of desire that learned how to be patient with itself.
COUTUREBOYs are very much down to earth. Just not this earth.
