Gus Blaisdell Collected

Afterworld: The Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin

∙ 31 ∙ afterworld the Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin ■ These from Michael Herr’s Dispatches: . . . Brilliant white smoke of phosphorous (“Willy Peter / Make you a buh liever”), deep black smoke from ’palm, they said if you stood at the base of a column of napalm smoke it would suck the air right out of your lungs. (p. 10) I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it before. I went there under the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. (p. 20) The first of these quotes amused me during the early stages of this writing: its easy pun on Joel-Peter’s name; that it could be inflected through the puerile and the penile and the penal surfaces that fantasize some of these pictures. I also heard echoes of Coyote, wily trickster and hapless creator of the Southwest. The white phosphorous brought to mind that flash-in-thepan genre of exhibiting dead gunfighters on upraised planks and in coffins or hanging from telegraph poles and gallows, one popular image of the Old West.Then there were times when I imagined the white phosphorous bomb itself, the earth exploding like some lasered cyst, and looking into the hole beneath I would find the cast of characters that people these photographs Joel-Peter Witkin, Sanitarium, 1983. Courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago. afterworld ∙ 33 struggling frantically toward the surface of our world. That image misled me for the longest time about the original place from which these photographs arrive. (Cryptically at this point, they do not come from either an underground or an underworld.) Yet it was during such moments, even misled by my own imaginings, that I felt I was standing perilously close to that mythical column of napalm smoke. Only then did I begin to sense a narrow path through the whole body of Joel-Peter’s work. Yes, as Duane Michals has said,“Joel-Peter’s work gets to you.” If it doesn’t, then there is no way for you to get to it. A perverse, morbid, and dynamic eroticism (I use these terms descriptively ) underlies all this imagery of desecration, contact with the agonized and the dead and the excremental. Joel-Peter has said he is a portraitist and that his portraits are conditions of being. Of being what is the critical question. The corpulent, voluptuary, concupiscent subject matter arouses as it repulses. I am uninterested in the artistic and religious trappings that cover much of this material. What fascinates me is the narrow defile of feeling between pleasure and pain, where prurience is a useful figure: the attempt to relieve by pleasurable scratching an itch that becomes a painful wound. The site studied is one where pain and pleasure confuse without amalgamating and yet, in the one who looks, they must begin to coalesce—a mottled, piebald range of feeling. I call this seemingly narrow range a defile to distinguish it from an abyss, especially from an abyss that deepens as it narrows. Am I saying that these pictures are superficial, only skin deep? Flesh is where it all starts and skin is hardly protective enough. How deep, how shallow is incarnation? Human embodiment is where I begin to essay this narrow, elusive, continuous, uneasy and sometimes defiled range of feeling. Phaedo, in the Platonic dialogue named for him, provides a telling anecdote . Socrates has been freed from his shackles: Socrates, sitting up on the couch, began to bend and rub his leg, saying, as he rubbed: How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought the opposite of it; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other.They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem; and I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had...