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| ALICE OH 2 |
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"Just Looking" from Thinking Through, The Work of Alice Oh
Just looking is deceptively simple. It is a familiar expression. By now, however, I hope the viewer is realizing that thinking through the work of Alice Oh is a matter of thinking through the familiar in order to experience the unfamiliar. This passage from the familiar to the unfamiliar is one of the steps necessary to thinking through the work, and, while there is no set time for this passage to take place, in order for thinking to have a place to take we must slow down. Therefore, let us take a few moments to decelerate and think through what is meant by 'just looking.'
Upon first reading, the phrase 'just looking' seems to demand nothing more of the viewer than what it says. One simply looks. This is an everyday activity befitting an everyday expression, the type of expression that one uses when one is doing something as mundane as shopping. A salesperson will ask if we need help and often we reply, 'No, I'm just looking.' This is an activity, if not an expression, that each viewer has probably carried out on more than one occasion. Indeed, much of our existence is a matter of just looking.
Just looking, however, is an activity that is intimately connected to a certain passivity, whether we are browsing in a department store or on the Internet. We are not actively looking for some particular thing. Our looking has no pre-established goal, something that determines what we are looking for. We are in the act of looking, but no thing when found will end our activity. We are just looking, a passive activity.
Yet, just as passivity lurks within the activity of just looking, there is another way of reading this phrase, lurking within this phrase, as we begin to read more slowly, as we de-familiarize the familiar. This is an otherness that may even reside in our enunciation of the phrase 'just looking,' even when this phrase is not prompted, when we think to ourselves 'I'm just looking.' What is this other, unfamiliar sense of just looking, a sense that requires us to slow down and read more carefully?
It is a matter of just looking, of justifying our acts of looking. Whether to ourselves or to a salesperson, to some other, even the self as other, we defend our passive activity, saying that we are just looking. At once, we say that we are simply looking and that such a passive activity is just. This is something that is allowed, permitted. Why? For it is just looking. It is a looking that is adequate to the passive activity that just looking is. It is both just looking and just looking. If our looking had some determining end, we would not say that we are just looking. Or, if we had some determining end in our looking and claim to be just looking, we would lie to the other. We would not be just, even if we claim, precisely because we claim, to be just looking. We hide from the other, even from the self as other, that our looking is determined from the beginning, that we know what we are looking for and are only looking for what we know, the familiar. We conceal the familiar from the unfamiliar and conceal ourselves to the unfamiliar. However, if we are just looking, we have suspended our activity of determined looking, slipping into a passive activity that allows a passage from the familiar to the unfamiliar.
Again, such a passage from the familiar to the unfamiliar opens a lot to think about, as well as think through. Just looking could open up a discussion of ethics within the realm of the visual. Such a thinking about ethics, however, could merely become a means of looking just and there are already enough semblances of justness in our world of political correctness. No, just looking has nothing do with looking just, even if just looking has everything to do with becoming just.
There also could be a thinking about just looking that one could historically ground within the emergence of the modern world, a world that is about spectacle and the spectacular, a world that we have inherited. Within the academic world, the centrality of the visual within the modern era has given rise to the study of 'visual culture' and the discipline of 'visual anthropology.' Within and beyond the academic world, we see questions being raised about the shift from verbal literacy to visual literacy. One could enumerate a range of material phenomena indicating that, today, just looking is never a simple activity even if it is one that takes place countless times a day. While there is not enough space here to do justice to all the issues raised by just looking, it will, for the moment, have to suffice that the peculiar interest in just looking involves the ethical, theoretical, and material demands of visual existence, of an existence where the visual contours much of our being.
How then does 'just looking' apply to the work of Alice Oh? First, just looking would continue the way of thinking opened up by thinking through the work. That is to say, to look at the work of Alice Oh, one only needs to just look. No expertise is needed to just look at the work. Indeed, expertise risks looking about the work for the familiar and, in finding the familiar, not discovering the unfamiliar. In remaining on familiar ground, in looking for the familiar, one is not just looking. A looking for the familiar would be a looking for familiar discoveries, leading to familiar discoveries, leading to a thinking about the work. All of this would be done without leaving familiar ground, without thinking through the work. It would be a looking that is determined by the familiar, searching for the familiar, never stepping beyond the familiar. This would, from the start, prevent us from thinking through the work. To think through the work, we only need to just look.
In just looking, however, the viewer again encounters the dilemma of having to question the unquestioned assumptions that go into the passive activity of just looking. This questioning is done in order to avoid, for the moment, a thinking about the work that fails to think through the work, a failure that is always a risk. For just looking to happen, we must suspend for the moment a looking that remains within and about the familiar. This is also a matter of ceasing to think about what one should look for and paying more attention to how one is looking, to the activity of just looking, a passive activity. Just looking happens. It is not an activity we engage in by simply acting. Just looking is an activity that is passive, allowing a passivity through which the work acts upon us, passes through us. In suspending looking for the familiar, the unfamiliar approaches us through the work. Moreover, we do not look for the unfamiliar. This too would not be just looking. We do not discover the unfamiliar. The unfamiliar discovers us, a discovery that happens through just looking.
This leads me to the second aspect of just looking to which I wish to briefly draw the viewer's attention. This involves an ethical commitment to the act of looking that the work modestly asks of the viewer. This is a peculiar ethics, an ethics that is not called for by the artist, but by the work. It is neither a matter of appearing just, nor a matter of having to justify our acts of looking to some authority figure. It is also not a matter of there being a singular, authoritative way of just looking at art, or even worse, a self-righteous way of looking. No, there are many ways of just looking, each in there own way just, but none of them requiring the familiar justifications that are provided by the authority of historians or critics. How then do we justify the act of looking? By just looking. In just looking, the responsibility for looking resides in the individual and we each can find and found our own acts of looking, be they just or unjust in the eyes of the other or the self as other. But if it is not the other to whom we justify our acts of looking, then to whom? To the work that alone bears witness to our act of just looking.
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