200words: metamorphosis

“...He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles' feathers, and his nails were like birds' claws.” Daniel 4:3

Metamorphosis:Titian2012 hangs together as a thorough exploration of a lusty theme, even the compression of perspective in the ballet vignettes calculates a voyeurism, matched by the hungry crawl of the quivering hand held frame drawing its narrow crop across dancing figures, grazing aloof, pouring over disconnected details, prying into the privacy of a rehearsal. And they are ravishing to behold.

But there is a maxim that Titian and his derivatives would like to question sceptically by visiting ironically or by viewing through a frame of nostalgia: that voyeurism changes you: that voyeurism is no mere action but the adoption of a worldview, an act preceded by an attitude, preceded by a view of the human. And as you believe about the human, so you become, animal, machine, inert, despirited, disanimated, and hollowed out.

In this way, there is nuclear power in the glory of the naked Other, you have to contain it or abstract it, in order to come out alive. For Titian this is exercised in an animalised abstraction, but we, engaging robotic intercourse and industrialised pornography in an age of fetishised technology and mechanical reproduction, with our eye to the peep hole, we become mere data-recievers, gutted of any intersubjective potential.

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/