ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 – ‘Milk: liquid contingency and the grid’ – consists of a close reading of Wall’s Milk (1984). It begins with an examination of his essay ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’ (1989). In this essay one of Wall’s key objectives is to reflect on the dialectical relationship between (what he terms) the ‘dry intelligence’ of photography and the ‘liquid intelligence’ of nature. Wall refers to the explosive liquid in the artwork Milk to introduce and allude to a number of debates about the capacities of camera vision and the impact of new technologies on notions of time. The complexities at play here require multiple perspectives to make sense of it. This chapter draws upon a range of conceptual frameworks to unpack Wall’s interrogation of photographic temporality, including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the ‘decisive moment’, Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘optical unconscious’, Roland Barthes’ concept of the photographic punctum, the traditions of late nineteenth-century and early to mid-twentieth-century high-speed photography (in particular, the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Harold E. Edgerton), Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies of time, and the significance of the grid as a means of mapping time and space. A close analysis of Wall’s Milk and his essay ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’ against this historical backdrop reveals resonances between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in terms of how the development of new kinds of technological pictures impacted on notions of ‘thinking’ and ‘seeing’ time.
