Portal 10, graphite, micadust

this brilliant image was drawn by the San Francisco based artist, Sheila Ghidini. it’s place in the discontinuity of the sequence of this blog, is very important. Shiela’s image suggests a number of other switchboard operator tactics, as is visually apparent, so i won’t commit the theorist’s error and overlay a bunch of words on top of what is so demonstrably ‘there’ in her work.  i’ll only add :

1. ‘drawing’ of this ‘master’ quality, as with mamarella’s ‘herself’, plays a particularly important role in resisting the spectacle. it resists the dominance of a bankrupt ‘photographic realism’, bankrupt because there is nothing more illusionistic and politically manipulable than a ‘realist’ photograph. ‘realistic photography’ reduced knowledge to one of the most impoverished and the most co-opted of the human senses – sight. so if sheila’s portal 10 is an image of an eclipse, then, it carries knowledge no photograph could capture.
2. and, therefore, it cannot be reduced to the critique of rationalist discourse this blog began with, to the conditions of non-possibility recounted in Cartesian Meditations I and II (below).

Armstrong.

Galileo’s drawing of the moon through his new and improved telescope. The ‘knowledge’ contained in this drawing has not been overcome by NASA; merely extended.