Browsing by Author "Kaisto, Heta"

According to Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon is an artist who has been enormously resourceful of stripping down narratological and representational elements from his paintings. It is the aim of the painting is to bring to pass invisible forces and convert them to visible, namely to embody a body without organs. A being is in a perpetual production under the multitude of both external and internal forces in a constant shift; even a being of sensation, namely an artwork, is in a constant shift while trying to embody a block of sensation, namely affects and percepts. In this lies also the problem of sensation: not all art can accomplish this embodiment. The Deleuzian logic of sensation boils down to freeing the Figure from all representation; becoming a fact, an Icon, which resembles only itself. In this thesis, the aim is to review if this liberation possible in a photograph by examining the photographic series Shadow Chamber by Roger Ballen. According to Deleuze, a photograph is doomed to its representative nature as well as in some ways an inferior artform to a painting, and as such is unable to attain the body without organs, the virtual body made purely by intensities. In order to harnest the forces, such a body needs to be produced where a sensation is able to occur. This is succeeded in the process of becoming-animal, where the affect turns a human into a non-human thus creating a body which can disappear to give a way for the pure sensation. This becoming-animal happens through infection and transference, not through resemblance; the aim is that neither, the human nor the animal can be recognised. Such a body can be called an Icon, in which pure intensities can pass and give forth a plane of consistency, a body without organs and ultimately a plane of immanence, namely the sameness, the pure difference . In Shadow Chamber, glimpses of these bodies without organs can be found, with the hope that a photograph might be considered as equivalently expressive artform as a painting.