Re: <documenta X><blast> Visual

Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sat, 26 Jul 1997 17:39:58 -0400

At 01:51 PM 7/25/97 -0700, you wrote:
>> us.' This landscape is prior to our seeing; it is the field upon which
>> seeing occurs. Rather than looking, we are looked at. And so seeing,
>> and volition, is reversed, redirected. But then what does it mean that
>> the gaze belongs to 'things'? How is it routed through a thing that
>> looks at me? The gaze we encounter is not 'seen,' but only
>> interpolated, and so is this act of situating the gaze in 'things' our
>> own? And how does the viewer 'lay down the gaze'?
>
>...you may want to read the essay at the end of the catalog 'gerhard
>richter, 100 paintings'...
>
>dk
this is reminiscent of an assignment Tom Wolfe had: he was to interview
Marshall McLuhan in a striptease establishment in San Francisco. Wolfe,
McLuhan, and some others congregated there, and Wolfe, thinking that he'd
catch the outwardly conservative McLuhan off balance, asked him what he
thought of the topless waitpersons who were threading their way around the
evening's crowd. McLuhan opined "well, you see, they're wearing us".