Because, first of all, they are a compendium of desires contrasting, contradictory, impacted, immobilizing. The desire to become fully visible, to be seen (at last) as one is, to be honest, to be unmasked. The desire to hide, to be camouflaged. To be elsewhere. Other. The desire to impersonate someone else, but that is not other enough. The desire to escape from a merely human appearance: to be an animal, not a person, an object (stone? wood? metal? cloth?), not a person, to be done with personhood.
The desire to be emblematic. Impervious to age and the distress of flesh. The desire to accede to the ruins of time, to be reconciled with the depredations of time, to become a ruin. The desire to punish the self. The desire to place no aim before that of gratifying it. The desire to dissolve the self into the world, the desire to reduce the world to matter, something one can inscribe oneself on, sink into, be saturated with. The desire to compete with ones own image, to become image, artifact; art; form.
The desire to be stripped down, to be naked, to be concealed, to disappear, to be only ones skin, to mortify the skin, to petrify the body, to become fixed, to become dematerialized, a ghost, to become matter only, inorganic matter, to stop, to die.
The desire to be stripped down, to be naked, to be concealed, to disappear, to be only ones skin, to mortify the skin, to petrify the body, to become fixed, to become dematerialized, a ghost, to become matter only, inorganic matter, to stop, to die.
From Veruschka Trans-figurations (Thames & Hudson, 1986) contains text from Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholy by Susan Sontag
