On List's 'Goldfish Bowl'

Can you by any chance recall the picture Herbert List did about freedom?

Or was it about the human condition and its limits? Or maybe about our subjective realities and how we experience them? In any case, I am referring to the picture where a fishbowl containing a goldfish has been placed with great irony overlooking the Aegean Sea.

What poetics!

What aesthetics!

What a statement!

The picture was taken on an island, famous for the beautiful, breathtaking and idyllic view it has to offer to its inhabitants and visitors. And List did not go against this fact, but rather conformed accordingly; he embraced and played by the rules that nature had set up for him. It seems however, that he wanted something different, something ‘other’ of what was merely apparent and ‘simply there’ in front of his lens.

He wanted to set up his own little theatre of the absurd and to quickly direct his piece, an untold story, an idea whose meaning would burden the viewer.

Both the goldfish and the fishbowl entail a rather mundane and simplistic cultural nature, but as they are used here they manage to destabilize and disturb my ‘normality’ and the way I am used to read, consume and digest images. That’s probably because my mind is driven far beyond the very image that I see.

Time stops and it feels as if I am looking at myself in the mirror for the very first time. Soon after, a senseless procedure of self-reflection, exploration and thinking begins, through a rapid unwrapping of connotations that extend from philosophy and ethics, to politics and power. However, this interplay between the literal scene and the metaphors hidden in the multiple layers of the image bring me to an even greater confusion, making it hard to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’; where does the one stop and the other begin? And although the image disseminates a calmness and tenderness, at the same time it exposes a cruelty and madness, where the oxymoron has lost its character and has become the norm.

What drama takes place in front of the lens! Like an ancient Greek tragedy, but with no peripeteia, without a sudden twist of plot, where the Earth has become the mourner and humanity as the spectator simply realizes its nothingness and voidness. I really wonder where Poseidon and Nietzsche are hidden…

(From Objective Eggs photo-zine).