‘Secondhand images’, she has said, here
and this… without connection to… Joe Kelleher’s Studies on the Suffering of Images… in which he directs us to read ‘to suffer’ as to put up with, bear and bear with, to bear one’s own pain, to put up with another’s: the secondhand images… for which we either do or do not take responsibility, in simply regarding. And do we attend to our responsibility? if the image is secondhand? if the pain is not ours? if it is not a pain, but… a life? So, the life of images, as well, the life evoked on the cave walls at Niaux, which I thought was more life than representation or representation as a means to bring to life, to multiply beasts, herds, flocks… which would, counter to the reading of both Alan Read and Joe Kelleher of Marie-José Mondzain of the first self-image of a human–the hand outlined by spat dye also on the cave wall–as at once creating homo spectator, the self-depicting, because absent from its depiction, spectatorial regard, rather bear the import of bringing to life and multiplying humanity, as the work, precisely, of hands…
‘Secondhand images’, Marlene Dumas has said, ‘can generate first-hand emotions.’
…emotions… as intensities to be borne, suffered, first, second, third and fourth hand, and to be dramatised–in the strong sense of Gilles Deleuze, where dramatisation is understood two different ways: epistemologically and ontologically. (This duplicity, while recalling the ambiguity of our suffering images, is taken up by Quentin Meillassoux in Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, when Karl Popper misreads David Hume’s ‘problem’.)
– Nuclear Family, Marlene Dumas, 2013
– The Trophy, Marlene Dumas, 2013
– The Artist and his Model, Marlene Dumas, 2013
– How Low Can You Go, Marlene Dumas, 2000
