Issue 10.3 | Summer 2012
Guest edited by Jonathan Beller
Manuel contributed a selection of images
You can view the issue here : http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-media-theory/
And here’s a little write up on Manuel Vason from this issue’s introduction by Jonathan Beller:
“Manuel Vason has worked with almost 200 performance artists around the world (many of them world-famous) to create some of the edgiest images extant. He is, without a doubt, among the most talented and challenging photographers of his generation. While everyone may draw their own conclusions regarding the meaning and significance of this work, my own sense of what his images pursue is singular desires and unique aspirations that emerge in the collaborative process between performance artist and photographer. These constellations recorded and extended in the photograph push us to exceed our own often comparatively mundane desires manufactured by markets; social fragmentation and isolation; and reified notions of race, gender, sex, etc. Encountering the performative articulation and transmission—literally, the forms of desire that studiously or spontaneously go beyond the inertial modes of wanting, which in many respects limit and capture so many of us in their aesthetical and political regimes—invites viewers to exceed the tired modes and norms of lack that result, in part, from the capitalist mass media’s stripping and homogenization of our libidos. In certain respects we could say that Manuel’s collaborative photographs are an invitation—a communicative act or form of sharing that calls on us to pursue an intersubjective relation with alterity. Thus viewers are invited to move beyond themselves towards various singular formations, but these singularities nonetheless posit and indeed perform community.”