The Destroyed Object
Newspapers are filled with words and images of punctum (Roland Barthes) that lacerate and leave marks. Yet, the recognition of cruelty does not halt the circulation of suffering located in “exotic” lands or the fate of the “other.” The shock effect—the constant overstimulation of pathos—does not necessarily elicit a wholehearted response. What happens when this source of information, or the supposed narrative authority of truth, is destroyed? When the “safe” newspaper, read during breakfast or in neat offices, is no longer safe, it becomes a metaphor for a reversed relationship between subject and object, observer and sufferer.
A deliberate choice in this drawing is to replace part of the newspaper content with poems by Sylvia Plath and passages from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. The poem selected is Two Sisters of Persephone.
Cambridge MA, Fall 2023