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Notes on Surface: toward a genealogy of flatness 1 David Joselit I. When I think about surface I think of an advertisement I have seen in several of the gay publications which are distributed free in my Los Angeles neighbourhood. It shows a man with gelled hair, dramatic eyes and high cheek bones, whose face is framed by the following text: `Beautiful? Sure./ Real? Who cares!' The ad is one of many promotions for elective plastic surgery published in the popular press ± gay and straight alike ± of southern California. What fascinates me about this particular exhortation to remake the body pivots on the word real. Clearly, for the ad writer (as well as for the man represented and for the presumed readers), the real does not carry the Lacanian perfume it may emanate for readers of this text. Rather, it is intended to signify `authentic', and authenticity is dismissed with a campy shrug: `Who cares!' But if this exclamation is accurate ± if no one cares ± then why does the ad take pains to preempt the anxieties it appears to disavow? For indeed, the question the advertisement asks in spite of itself ± its repressed returning ± is the following: `If your face isn't real, what is?' This is a question whose significance I believe goes far beyond the precincts of the pulp press. If our bodies are as malleable as the surgeons wish us to believe and if genetic science has proven that the texture of our organic envelope is in fact a code, then where is it that we can lodge the self? Is it, as popular psychology has it, some interior essence ± some inner child ± or does it inhere in the changeable surfaces of the body? The radical possibility encoded in the `Who cares!' of our advertisement, is the collapse of this dichotomy. Forget about the real, it does not exist, or it is everything that exists: Who cares! This, I think, is the ethical riddle which haunts a complex and contradictory field of discourses on flatness and depth within art history. It is well known but little acknowledged that flatness, which is traditionally associated with a teleological progress toward self-referentiality within modern painting, has also served as the reigning metaphor of its supposed negation, postmodernism. Listen to Fredric Jameson: A new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense [is] perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return. ...' 2 Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 23 No. 1 March 2000 pp. 19±34 19 ß Association of Art Historians 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

David Joselit, Notes on Surface-Toward a Genealogy of Flatness

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Page 1: David Joselit, Notes on Surface-Toward a Genealogy of Flatness

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