Chris Ware, Cameras, and the Psyche

Just a quick link to the Obscene Machine Blog, where Chris Ware shows what happens when cameras start messing with the psyche! The Tex[t]-Mex project is nothing more and nothing less than a sustained (some might say obsessed) interrogation of what happens when words and images are simultaneously deployed in the interest of telling a story--in the case of this book, the "seductive hallucinations" and ethnic mannequins that pass for "Mexicans" in America. What one gets is a semantic, semiotic, ontological ménage-à-trois that tests the wits of all--as if the various and sundry superpowers of a literary critic, art historian, visual theory maven, and existentialist philosopher had to be brought to bear in an instant (someone call a psychoanalyst quick!). Ware's work calls our attention as it is an example of an art that forces our aforementioned mix of simultaneously deployed critical methodologies and it advances said quad-cluster of skills at the same time--imagine a cocktail of Remedios Varos [2] and Jacques Derrida, some odd cloned fusion or Man Ray and Roland Barthes and you begin to, wait for it.... , get the picture. These issues are at the heart of, or, to hone the metaphor, infect the retina of Eyegiene--my follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex.