Flowers as subjects in photography can convey sensuality, sentimentality and the body
in a way that can be free of all the hang-ups with the fleshly human form.
I love that we have this preciousness and even formality with what are botanical genitals.
June 13, 2021
When I say this, I do not mean in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe.
Though she never intended that people see the body in her work, this reading of O’Keeffe’s flowers always speaks to me of class and respectability somehow, in the way of early feminism- behold the iris as vagina, large and regal as a grand piano.
Black Iris (1926), Georgia O’Keeffe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
What is interesting to me is not that people think of genitals when considering an iris- actually, I don’t think that we really do, that’s just what they truly are.
A flower is a botanical sex organ, and so it is no real stretch of association.
No, what is interesting to me is when how we can look at what are essentially genitals- and see a face.
A delicate, beautiful, precious face.
That.
What would that be like- what kind of world could that be? To have that association become natural?
To think of the body this way?
For the whole web of dark and complicated and messy mental associations we have around the word and concept genital to be replaced with the same care and respect we have for the flower, and for a precious face.
It would be a world beyond sexual violence,
and beyond gender. The iris is not binary.
Flowers invite the whole natural world to join
in their self-celebration and self-consummation.
They represent a wholeness in multiplicity
and a sense of belonging
in that multiple wholeness.
Deleuze writes about the embrace of the multiple over unity as a means to liberate art from conceptual conventions, to encompass “‘problems which point beyond the propositional mode’ and involve ‘encounters which escape all recognition’. It is not an art of statements or doctrines, but an art of maintaining a momentum of multiple directions.” Embodying seeming contradiction. Transformation. A capture (though not in a static way) of movement in thought
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
Columbia University Press, 1994.
To be a multiplicity
and a wholeness
and belonging
simultaneously
and within oneself
touches on such longings and little quiet pains that anyone who struggles with feeling illegible can relate to.
Gilles Deleuze, tell me more about multiplicity and for art to resist assimilation it must live in a nonplace made of motion. A concept that feels very liberatory and like a light upon spaces of silence. Could it point, I wonder, to other ways of viewing or thinking, to otherworlds in extended metaphor.
I want always to be in wordless conversation with these otherworlds and how the whisper of them exists already within themes of identity, interconnectedness, belonging in transformation, suspended space within time and where the body and the subject comes in and out of focus in all that.
