From 12:00 I continued to print various images for the commission project. I spent about four and a half hours printing and printed everything I wanted except for one image (which had a small mark and some dust I couldn't remove), this was very frustrating and I ended up wasting paper and time on trying to remedy the issue. It was especially frustrating as Steffi has selected it as one of four images she wanted me to print. Due to the time spent on this last print i was unable to get the negatives scanned by John so i'll get the scanning done tomorrow.
(Research below from the following source) http://culturalpolitics.dukejournals.org/content/7/1/79.full
While the bunker promises security and control in the form of refuge it is also a sign of the deadly power that requires reinforced shelter; a bunker is both womb- and tomb-like, generating precisely the kind of attraction/repulsion ambivalence Freud discusses in Totem and Taboo as the characteristic polarity of modern affective life (Freud 1919). Zygmunt Bauman explains that ambivalence refers to “the possibility of assigning an object or an event to more than one category” (1991: 1). As a failure of language's naming function, ambivalence generates, according to Bauman, “acute discomfort” (1) when situations, objects, or actions cannot be accurately or adequately assigned an unambiguous meaning. Modernity's pursuit of order has therefore been a protracted war on ambivalence, yet the classification systems that have sought to reduce chaos by fragmenting and regulating the world have in fact only served to generate more ambivalence. For Bauman, “ambivalence is the waste of modernity” and modernity's “most genuine worry and concern, since unlike other enemies, defeated or enslaved, it grows in strength with every success of modern powers. It is its own failure that the tidying-up activity construes as ambivalence” (15; italics in original).
As a sign of modern industrial warfare, the bunker embodies violence either achieved or promised. But, as we have seen, a visible bunker is to a large extent disarmed, though its military function is overwritten by its uncanny affective power as something hidden that has come to light. The control of the environment the bunker's presence was supposed to ensure – the war machine's capacity to secure and hold territory; to produce order from chaos and thereby reduce ambivalence – is, postwar, apparently no longer relevant. And yet as Macfarlane suggests, the bunker maintains a hold on its environment that cannot properly return to a state of peace but must forever be informed by its militarized condition. The bunker's capacity to generate discomfort of the kind registered by Sebald and Macfarlane is complicated and troublesome; indeed, as Bauman suggests, any attempt to grasp or secure the bunker's significance is likely to produce more ambivalence and contradiction. The bunker as such is disruptively anomalous and defies categorization and stability of function and significance. Oscillating somewhere between the visible and the invisible, architecture and engineering, ruins and rubble, violence and inertia, the spectacularly symbolic and the blankly dumb, the bunker is the waste of modernity that cannot be tidied away.
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| This print still needs some attention |
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