the space in between

the personal aesthetic

what do you mean when you think of the word "aesthetics?"

is it a detached, dry, intellectual word, something too often and too wearily encountered on yet another artist's statement written by some anonymous gallery assistant?  is it a rare and personalized form of sight that only "master" artists seem to posses?  is it a convenient pivot-term that critics can hover upon when creating confining boxes to fit their arguments about an artist, their output and their psychology into?

does one learn aesthetics or does aesthetics learn you?  meaning: is aesthetics a panoply of ideas and concerns one encounters in a ripe and meaningful fashion, something to add to an artistic arsenal that will further give shape and weight to work made--or is it a different kind of encounter, a shocking familiarity, when you realize that a fully articulated way of thinking about something is one that you have always had and always carried with you, unawares.  until that moment of encounter.

are aesthetics something given to you from the outside, or is it latent potentiality, waiting there for you to recognize it as some part of your self?

what informs you? who cares about beauty and making and thinking in ways that seem important to you, that resonate?  is it a process of thinking or making/doing, or, as new age and cliché as it sounds, a mode of being?  and: who and what has embodied this notion for me?

the first photographer that turned my head was bill brandt.

soho bedroom, 1938

i was but a babe to photography, its history, practice--any and all of it.  but when i looked at the work of brandt, something beckoned.  whispered to me, compadre. 

new as i was to the medium, certain rules were known "rules" and these would concern focus, shadows (and the ability to see deeply into them), varied tonal range, how-to-shoot-a-nude, how-to-shoot-a-documentary-photograph.  the whisper inside me was gleeful and grateful because she recognized brandt as bucking all of those rules and the images, despite the break with what is known as successful image making, still managing to be strong, stand-alone, Moments With Which To Be Reckoned.

i think i saw his nudes first, before anything.

camden hill,  1947

these were not the cool, controlling, perfected bodies of edward weston.  or the shamelessly direct and wondefully amateur turn-of-the-century erotic nudes i had also become aware of.  these were...if they were like anything, they were more like nudes i'd see in paintings than in anything i'd ever seen in a photograph.  elongated, mannerist limbs.  skin tones so contrasty as to lack any perceptive familiarity i had of the notion "skin."  perspective shifted, skewed, on its side.  was the photographer laying on the ground sideways to get this view?  maybe.  and the mood of them...sad like the nudes of edward hopper.  enigmatic and a little dangerous like the collages of max ernst.  or even better yet, like the representations of the feminine by his lesser-known and muchly talented wife, dorothea tanning.

you could not "see into" his blacks.  he did not want you to.  or did not care if you cared.  sometimes the perspective was such that it looked like the photo was made through the fat end of a coca-cola bottle.

east sussex, 1953

what i was responding to but didn't yet know was brandt's capacity to show a range of emotion and form simultaneously.  emotions both protracted and projected as if on a blank, white movie screen.  his accounting for, or dismissal of, the added layer of projected meaning by a potential viewer.  a practiced eye that liked to double the association of forms, to play with that psychology in his photos.  a photographer who, for me, would give me a little (the image), but was more than content to leave much in the way of meaning or interpretation a blank. 

i learned recently that brandt's work was not only unappreciated in his working days, but openly ridiculed and reviled.  in the great big book on brandt that i feel lucky to own, bill jay writes about the experience of having championed brandt's work as a junior editor for Popular Photography.  the editor, les barry instead found it, "...impossible to accept the concept that this collection of poorly printed, ineptly cropped photographs of badly posed, unattractive women is his idea of serious work."  talk about being misunderstood.  jay asserts in his foreward that despite decades of being told that he was a bad printer, an inept portratist, a sentimental documentarian, a horrid seer of the nude form, that he went right on working and working.  making images and printing them exactly as he saw fit.  it seems impossible to imagine a working artist today not withering against such steady, constant negative critique.  when i think how often an artist quickly finds a comfort zone in their aesthetic vision once it has been vetted by curators and commerce (are the two even distinguishable anymore?), and how oftener and oftener it seems that one does not toy with the ingredients of success once you've begun to grope towards it, bill brandt's plodding example seems nearly heroic to me. 

years after i first encountered brandt i found another artist-as-touchstone.  by this time i had become more personally invested in photography; i had been studying it for a number of years, i had rented studio space and built a darkroom that i learned to fail and fail better in.  my travel plans on a student budget consisted of trips to traveling gallery and museum shows in whatever blocks of time i could afford to pay to stay out of town for.  i had met and become friends with some other photographers, and now an intersecting dialogue of ideas, approaches and aesthetics had come to inform and play off of my own. 

at the jackson fine art gallery in atlanta, i first encountered the work of japanese photographer masao yamamoto.  i wasn't quite prepared for what i saw there, or the reaction i would have to his work.  again: the niggling sense of familiarity, of shared sympathies or concerns.  the greeks had a word for it: anagnorisis, meaning literally a recognition of someone, not only of their person but of what they stand for and represent. 

#960

the images, for those of you who have not seen them, are extraordinarily small.  and variegated in size.  some are 2x3, some 3x3, more often than not odd sizes.  they are torn and worn and tea-stained.  they are printed too dark to see distinctly and too light to see for certain.  they are not treated or exhibited as precious objects, and the revelatory experience of seeing contemporary photography speak loudly through smallness and intimacy reinvigorated my sense of the range and possibility of the genre of photography.

installation view at the jackson fine art gallery, 2003

craig krull gallery, santa monica, 2003

i don't know this for certain, but i think that yamamoto allows the gallery to decide how his work is to be shown, with perhaps a few sentences about his working philosophy and thinking.  when i spoke to an assistant at j.f.a., she told me that the photographs arrived at the gallery minus any of the usual fuss and precocious preciousness surrounding the transport of contemporary art.  they were stuffed unceremoniously into a box, all sitting on top and intersecting with one another.  i imagined a cigar box stuffed to the brim with someone's old and aging personal history, closed with a thick rubber band on the outside.

wabi-sabi aesthetics has always deeply resonated with me, and its precepts can be readily seen in yamamoto's works.  the tenets of wabi-sabi, if such a thing exists, would include some or all of the following:

• a purposeful lack of hierarchy; de-emphasis on class or caste (with origins in the traditional japanese tea house, in which the entry to the tearoom is purposefully set very low, so that everyone, regardless of rank, would need to lower themselves to enter)
• preoccupation with a watchful observance
• an emphasis on economy, but without drifting into a kind of miserly-ness
• an appreciation of evanescence, emphemerality, of fleetingness
• leonard koren writes that things wabi-sabi are, "...unstudied and inevitable looking...[but] not without a quiet authority."

to my thinking, wabi-sabi is an aesthetics of removed/impersonal vulnerability.  what do i mean by that?  that it is vulnerable and yielding to nature, events and circumstances beyond its control.  that it shows its wear and tear on its sleeve but does not do so loudly.  it is quiet and proud while being constituted from humble origins.  is it an aesthetic of a new kind of puritanism?  i don't believe so.  within wabi-sabi is a lack of fear or an expectation of any kind of reward.

after all of this disorganized meditation on the constitution of my personal aesthetic, i am no nearer to deciding whether or not aesthetics are something one does, or has done to one.  i certainly experience a "simpatico" moment when encountering something that has managed to articulate something i know to be a deep personal truth, but then, doesn't everyone?  or are those answers and assumptions too pat? do the majority of art-makers and see-ers even give aesethetics a second-glance anymore, or have we all decided that it is the undisputed domain of a bunch of dead french continental philosophers?  are aesthetics confined to the domain of form, art and making?  is it something one lives (here i think of agnes martin, of richard foreman, even of anthony bourdain)?  the one idea i keep returning to, the thing that i want to express here that matters to me, is that a certain self-awareness of one's borders, boundaries, what one gives and what one keeps close to the chest, are all elements of art making that make the making Real to me, that i want to internalize like a mantra, that i wish were more present in the world around me and in those who happen to be in the business of making.

the limits of photographic character: images you thought never existed

A photograph is a secret about a secret.  The more it tells you, the less you know.   
                    --diane arbus

so i lied earlier, when i said that photography hadn't done anything for me lately.

i have seen quite a bit of art in the last year, and in several genres that are not my focus, especially:  dance, performance, theater and new media.  like my experiences with photography, some of it has been morbidly bad.  some of it sublime (heiner goebbel's eraritjaritjaka springs immediately to mind for the latter category).  photography though, for all its hits and misses, is the mistress i return to, and will continue to write of.

there are images that once seen, you know will follow you; that certain ideas you maintain will be punctuated now by this new collective visual unconscious.  that the word which sprung into your mind when you saw this image will be recalled by you whenever the image appears suddenly and unbidden.  that such images are what form each of our highly personal and subjective inner galleries.

i would imagine that the images which fill my private gallery space contain a single continuous thread: those images which i'd like to imagine some other version of myself might have taken.  which is not to say: images i wish i had taken or images that i wish i had the capacity to take.  no, i mean the images which, given a different set of priorities or choices made, are those that i (perhaps delusionally) know are things i could have seen myself seeing.  as if these images, when i encounter them, are an aha! moment of negated destiny.

alack and alas, we all choose (and keep choosing) who it is to be and who it is we want to become.  and in the choosing, so many paths-not-taken fall to the side.  this notion of self-identity and awareness of that self has got me thinking about a schematic construct i once encountered, thought was incredibly important, and over the succeeding years had nearly forgotten all about.  considering my abiding interest in art, art-making and art-makers, it was alarming to me that it had nearly slipped through the cracks.  i'll get on more about it later, but as an initial tease-of-thought the idea i'm speaking about is that of photographic character. 

it goes something like this:

 Projects  +  Ideology  +  Temperament  +  Social Group  +  Psycho-biography
                                                            =
                                         photographic character

to understand photographic character is to (1) enter a similar frame of mind [as the photographer's];   (2) experience their photographic experience, and (3) understand it [them] in a total way.  once you understand what a photographer would never do (e.g. walker evans would never make a nude), you can begin to understand the parameters of a given artist's photographic character.

                                                          
                                  

                                             

                                diane arbus.  self-portrait, pregnant, nyc, 1945.

it seems like that at a certain age it is very fashionable to like the work of diane arbus.  and that age would be a young, coming-of-age age, when her raw inquiry and love of a gritty new york--which arguably doesn't exist anymore--finds in your impressionable youth a receptive and captivated audience member.  if, as you age, you further develop an interest/practice in photography, the bell curve will complete itself and it will become equally fashionable to dislike the work of diane arbus.  to claim her output as that of an exploitive, voyeuristic depressive, and to attribute her status among the art-elite as having something to do with how still, to this day, culture is intoxicated with the myth of the mad genius, the maker-of things.  your attitude of her may fall within this framework, outside of it, or be of the persuasion to have simply never given the matter much thought.

my conception of arbus changed when i encountered the above photograph.  i'd like to imagine that what i find in it goes beyond my own photograph-as-confession voyeurism, and that it isn't simply the peak into the obvious personal that gives me pause.  beyond my first flush of shock and thinking that this is a photograph i'd never imagined she'd make, i have come instead to see that this image is really a prelude to all the other photographs that i have come to know as arbus's--touching, vulnerable, a little skewed--as if she made this one imprint of herself before she went out seeking the same in the world over the next twenty-odd years.

arbus is 22.  pregnant with her first child, doon.  her husband is in military service in india.  it is 1945, and she is living with her parents.  this will be one of a series of images that she will make and send to her absent spouse, and one of the only self-portraits of diane arbus that i've ever known.

the words that come to mind in looking at this image:  tender.  vulnerable.  uncertain.  firsts.  spare.  and that head of hers, cocked over to one side, as if in appraisal of herself, the fact of her first pregnancy, the oddity of taking a photograph of oneself naked in front of a mirror.  as if in that look she gives herself she's trying to get at some essential core, some thingness that differentiates her, or this moment, or herself in this moment, apart from all others and all other moments.  this going within to extract and reveal something that will remain occluded, fantastic and a quiet secret.  and i realized in looking at this that it's the same feeling i get as her intention in any photograph that i had ever seen that she had taken of someone else.

Our baby is a girl...curious and even a little funny.  I simply stare at her.  I expected to feel a deep recognition but I don't.  She isn't like either of us but lovely: very alive with very beautiful shoulders.  I love our lack of connection: that she doesn't feel anything towards me and i feel such an odd, separate way about her. 

I expected great changes (first, I expected it from pregnancy, then when it didn't come, I expected it from birth), but I'm glad I didn't change or at least feel changed.  I trust myself better as I am.  It was very simple--I have forgotten most of the bad part because of the anesthetic--but I still know it was simple.  I guess events are always simpler than people--which is good. 
--letter from Arbus to Alfred Stieglitz

the retrospective show where I saw this image has been hailed as everything from landmark to overtly worshipful ("why are we in her panty drawer?" critic David Spiher wrote of the MOMA show).  While I can appreciate the sentiment driving the latter criticism--that of turning the spectacle of photography into the spectacle of personality (or, more precisely, maximizing the dollar potential of the former by elevating the latter)--I believe that it is too easy to dismiss the value of the inclusion of the personal in a show such as this.  Whatever the intentions of the curators--displaying cameras, collage-walls, notebooks and even a recreation of her studio--the inclusion does end up lending some insight to a particularly hard-to-get-at aspect of both the photographer and the critical process.  having the ability to peruse this at leisure lends us fodder to contemplate arbus's psychological biography, which in turn could further inform us about her work, processes, artistic project via her artistic boundary conditions.  one could argue that the gallery or museum is no place for such inner critique, but i think that would be a mistake.  for all that we have projected onto the work of diane arbus and what we think from that we can assume about her, having a sustained moment with her letters, diaries, jotted-down-dreams et al. lets her speak her psychology back at our projections.

it seems there has always been the argument of "appreciate the art and keep the artist out of it," but is that really viable?  to consider the character of any given photographer seems hopelessly outmoded, anachronistic, but i would argue for this practice in any genre where we would exercise a critical model or mode of thinking.  even of (perhaps especially of) critics themselves. 

douglas nickel's notion of photography and photo-history as being a discursive, social practice based on an entire set of discourses and commentaries  in our lifetimes can serve as a basis for understanding how to approach the notion of photographic character.  photographic projects should be viewed with these questions in the back of our pockets:  what were they trying to do with photography here?  what of their character is evinced in their photography--what have they put of their person in here?  what was their attitude?  what was their disposition? 

where one points the camera is where your psyche pointed it.  if a photographer does not deal with that thing the psyche is putting forth, the psyche will in turn relentlessly keep pointing them there.  an artist that is aware of what they are doing and what motivates their actions are serving the rest of us with tasks and life-lessons to follow:  Know Thyself.  ideally: be able to speak cogently about what it is you do and why, without having critics and curators proffer meaning in your stead.  often when an artist fails at this, it is motivated by two cross-purpose actions: deferral and denial: defer the meaning and realization of what it is being sought in the work, and deny the reasons why it is being done through photography.  noble projects versus neurotic ones.

a noble project can simply mean one in which the photographer is self aware to the degree that she knows what her tastes and predilections are and why, makes no apologies for them, and makes images based on what conceptual visions interest her.  sometimes this can involve an agenda, sometimes not.  either way, the approach will be open-ended in terms of strategy, with no pre-conceived notion as to what the final product will be.  ideally, the work will not be viewed as a "product" at all, but in terms of a means by which to better understand something.

the image above of arbus pregnant is not such an image.  it is instead a photograph taken by someone so known to my image-repertoire that the existence of this image stretched my understanding of what i thought i knew about her work.  it actually ended up expanding it.  the pregnant artist is not the culminating work of an open-ended teleology or practice, but this particular image is, i would argue, the beginning of her starting to think like one who could posses such a thing. 

 

that which moves and shakes

while trained as a photographer, and while i largely use this space as place to meditate on Things Photographic, truth be told i do partake of other genres, other modes of representation and visual thinking.  in fact, there are many times when the spate of photography i take in, grouse and ruminate over will be like so much inelegant sputtering, a hacking cough of hackneyed notions and cobbled or predictable presentation, when compared to the quality of making, question-having and solution-seeking that i am blessed enough to stumble upon from time to time, often in genres that i have less of a frame of reference.  is it ridiculous to feel like i'm cheating on photography when i find myself swooning over something that is decidedly not?  does photography care that i'm ignoring it for a time, because it hasn't done anything for me lately, and meanwhile  i'm having drinks and long, meaningful looks in a corner with this something else over here?

one of the most influential mentors i have ever had was a drawing instructor .   well, to be precise, he taught and knew how to do all manner of media and things--so much so that it scared the shit out of his peer faculty members during the faculty biennials, when he would exhibit finished, accomplished works in no fewer than five media while the rest struggled to pull something together in a month or so because they had failed to make much over the previous two years (that in itself was a kind of important lesson).  but what he really excelled at in teaching was getting to mold minds at the "fundamentals" stage.  help you unlearn preconceptions that you brought with you into the classroom haughtily, in ways that only eighteen and nineteen year old aspiring art students can.  i remember that he had a universal ban on pencils of any kind, and taught us to use the magnificently messy vine charcoal and pastels instead; that we were never allowed to turn anything in that was drawn on less than 16x20" size sheets (and that he encouraged us to buy big rolls of drawing paper); that he was a master at teaching our eye how to see and prioritize; that in drawing it became important to realize that the center is not everything and consequently everything outside of it of less importance--that instead intention and deliberate consideration should be given to every mark, to the weight of each line.  through hours and hours of my drawing badly,  i learned that drawing is done with the entire body, standing up:  that you draw with yourself in a sometimes-dance, sometimes stand-off to your canvas, or torn off sheet of oversized paper.  that there is relation and negotiated space between body, arm, instrument and media.   

i am reminded of this formative, humbling experience, and its twin memory of being in proxy to a charismatic maker-of-things who cannot stop making, stop drawing, as i have been trying (for months now) to find the words to best describe the astounding work of artist william kentridge.

i wish that i could show you, in a cupped hand, the single most moving piece of art i saw in the last year.  in a dark, hushed room in a cramped banking space; i wish i could take you to the slack-jawed wonder that is kentridge's black box .

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

and:

The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion.

--william kentridge, quotations from william kentridge by carolyn christov-bakargiev (1998), societé des expositions du palais de beaux-arts de bruxelles (with thanks to art throb) .

and one more:

I once did take some advice. I was told by many intelligent people who only had my best interests at heart: "Do one thing only. If you do everything you will always be a dilettante, unable to master any field. Either be a filmmaker, or an actor or an artist, and you will do it better." For many years I tried to keep to this good advice. I sold my etching press when I went to acting school. I stopped doing theatre when I started working in film. It was through hard work and good fortune that I escaped that advice.

kentridge is an artist who has found work-around solutions for many things that defy the logic of how things progress.  what i mean by that is this notion that there is some prefabricated map or plan of way of getting to somewhere or something, of getting to become something, and that kentridge's m.o. in life has been to do ten or ten million other things than those prescribed tasks, and arrive at That Place, whatever and wherever it is, with more authority and finality than most.  his primary working media is drawing, specifically charcoal drawing, considered a "minor art" of the traditional variety. these drawings, while sometimes fodder for other things, do not exist solely as preparatory work for something Else, often they are the finished product.  His drawings are huge, messy things with histories.  his mark-making describes his subjects as having made choices, as things which move within the white space of the paper, and settle back down again.  i don't know that i have ever seen a drawing of his that did not show a characteristic pentimenti, traces of movement or suggestions of a previous movement  that has been overlaid with another choice, another more final line.  

drawing from Felix in Exile, 1994.

the son of lawyers, a student of politics and african history, and an artist who does not believe in sole, dedicated practice to one media or medium only (he has training in puppetry, theatre and film), kentridge is the living embodiment of getting to one's destiny despite the good intentions and advice of everyone around you.  kentridge actually gave some words of advice on the act of getting and giving advice.  he said:  

We do not hear advice.  We do not want advice.  We particularly do not want advice we haven't asked for.  The only advice we register is when something is said that we already know but need someone else to confirm...I am wary of advice.  But more than that I am wary of the certainty that lies behind most advice.  I am mistrustful of certainty. 

which is not to say that kentridge puts stock into uncertainty either.  his process, both in his writing and his visual work, is one that resists binarization.  he prefers open-endedness, and his position, as has been ventured forth by some, is rather a non-position, a "negative critique of a lived and unresolved contradiction."  (ashraf jamal, co-author of art in south africa: the future present) 

black box/chambre noire is a work commissioned by the deutsche-guggenheim and exhibited in 2005.  the space in berlin is a smallish-gallery room housed in a larger building which is a bank.   i was chagrined by my own expectations being subverted, realizing that i had come with a preconception of what a "guggenheim" space was supposed to be like.   on the walls hung drawings that were used in the production of the finished piece, which was set in the center of  the room, with a few small rows of chairs in front of it.  the "black box" was a mini-theatre, like a puppet show box except that it had several (six, to be exact) receding tracks.  and each layer was heavily worked, with drawings and media affixed and waiting for you to begin to unpack and absorb.  when the lights dimmed and the "show" started, a projection began to play onto the theatre, and hand-made "puppets" began to move across the tracks through a rigging in the black box.  music that at turns were 19th century recordings of mozart's the magic flute were interspersed and overlaid with traditional namibian songs, and the "play" itself was at turns part history lesson, part cultural critique, part freudian psychoanalysis.  

kentridge at work on black box/chambre noire in his studio in johannesburg

there are characters in kentridge's piece, and their manifestation turns the viewer, no matter what the age, into a child learning how to make associations and meaning from the abstractions they see in front of them.  kentridge has said of his cast :

The six characters are a Megaphone man who’s the narrator; a transparent Herero woman defined by the head-dress: she’s actually a spring with a piece of transparent gauze on her head. A mechanical running man: a cut-out piece of paper that runs; a pair of dividers, that’s the measuring arm, measuring skulls and geography; an exploding skull that makes a brief appearance; and a second Herero woman based on a German postal scale from 1905, a scale for weighing letters.

and what of the content?

that is a little more of an involved answer, and one i will have to rely heavily on the artist to explicate.  put simply, kentridge was commissioned by the deutsche guggenheim to produce a work of art which dealt with germany's colonial history in africa.  kentridge was given this commission as he was entrenched in a project about mozart's the magic flute.  part of the work he was doing involved a 1:10 scale of the stage setting for the opera, which he transformed and incorporated for the purposes of black box.  the specific history that kentridge chose to deal with was the german massacre of the herero tribe in southwest africa, which is now namibia.  the massacre, conducted by general lothar van trotha, was a retaliation for the tribe's uprising against the increasing encroachment on their land, seizing of cattle and livestock, and the continual breaking of treaties.  the herero had carried out a directed attack on the ruling germans, killing about 150 farmers and reclaiming their cattle.  the german solution was to enact what some historians conclude was the first genocide of the twentieth century, nearly annihilating the tribe by killing over 75% of its population. 

of the intersection of his magic flute project (which was recently on view at the marian goodman gallery) and black box/chambre noire,  kentridge writes:

Transforming shadows, the early cinema, the vaudeville of the time, which was practiced throughout Europe and even in the United States--these are some of the forms I'm going to examine in Black Box.  But I will consider these early forms with hindsight, looking back on them as if they were an Enlightenment project.  I will ask: What knowledge do we have today, and what lessons have we learned--now that it is no longer 1791, when Mozart wrote his opera, but 2005?  (from Kentridge's forward to the exhibition text)

and of his specific sets of references and associations for the commissioned piece in berlin:

...I'm playing with three sets of associations in Black Box.  The first is the black box of the theatre.  The installation consists of a model of a theatre, which houses projections and characters.  The characters are small automatons--mechanized (and not necessarily anthropomorphic) objects that perform, together with the projections, within the theatre space.  So the first reference is to the "black box" of the performance realm. 

The second association of the black box is the chambre noire--the central chamber of a camera between the lens and the eyepiece, into which light enters and where a kind of meaning is created.  Here, the infinite possibilities of the outside world come in, but a single image is chosen, fixed upon the plane.

The third reference is the flight-data recorder that is used to trace the last moments before an airline disaster.  And the disaster I will be referring to--although I will not necessarily describe it nor didactically enumerate its stages--is the German massacre of the Herero people in Southwest Africa.

...If The Magic Flute suggests the utopian moment of the Enlightenment, Black Box represents the other end of the spectrum.

the entire production was 20 minutes long.  in one visit, i sat through it twice before the museum closed.  and when i returned to berlin a week later, i attempted to see it again, banging on the closed bank doors like a... well, like someone who knew that the most extraordinary thing she'd ever seen was on the other side of that door and she was going to be fleeing 7,000 miles away from it without getting to see it again.  that's what it was like.   

what was so extraordinary about black box was that it managed so many things that art usually so stupendously fails at dealing with: things that have to do with politics both past and present; cultural guilt and grief; memory and forgetting; the evocation of universal themes and then the subsequent questioning of what those themes are, what their validity is in the face of changed contexts, agency or audience; and it did all of these things while still managing to be startlingly, breath-gasping-and-all beautiful.   it doesn't try to do or invoke any of the above tropes or themes, but it fully realizes them all.  seeing this piece set me about a mad rush to find, see and ingest as much of kentridge's words and works as i could find. 

what i found was a dearth of production that continually builds on its questions; a rare clarity of purpose and intent which belies an artist who is fully aware of his artistic project (and i don't mean that in the same way that m.f.a. programs plague students with the assignation of a "project" that is to be their life-long noose) and his own existential boundary conditions.  kentridge is wildly smart: well-read and with a wide berth of interests across the field of the humanities.

in a rather fabulous interview with bell hooks kentridge and she discuss race, history and particularity, with hooks asking poignant questions which elicit thoughtful responses from kentridge.  an excerpt:

bh:  I grew up in a small Southern town where there were certain places black folks couldn't go.  in fact, one of the lingering memories of my childhood is of this place that made wonderful hamburgers, but we knew black people would not be served there.  and when we walked by as children, those burgers smelled so delicious, and the smell awakened longing, but as a black person you could not satisfy this desire.  what's interesting about the u.s. is, people have so quickly forgotten the intensity of that legislated apartheid here.

wk:  that forgetting is already happening in South Africa, too.  the system in South Africa is only four or five years old, and memory is gone.  In many cases, it's already difficult to hang on to what we were.  there is sort of a willful amnesia, a refusal to accept accountability, that comes from the naturalization of outrageous systems in the world.  but i'm more interested in the question of historical memory--of what happens when people forget so quickly. 

bh:  an intriguing aspect of your work is its immediacy: you use popular forms--cartoons or poster graphics--and defamiliarize them.  at the same time the pain is more accessible.  it becomes an intimate trauma.  in the installation ubu tells the truth, a narrative of daily life unfolds that is ordinary and mundane, and then suddenly traumatic events happen, transforming the experience.

wk:  a question i eventually ask is, how does one relate a private experience of a public trauma?  for example, when we see images on television now, of people killed or starving, it's not that they aren't shocking, but that they fit into a sort of bank of images and are dulled.  the hard part is to try to get back to the first sense of shock one had...the hard part is to try to hold onto that sense of outrage because that is the truest response.  all the other ways of living with it dilute and normalize.

bh:  a willingness to receive the truth of images has to be there as well.  when i read about your childhood it was evident that actually witnessing cruel acts gave you a heightened sense of awareness.  lots of other little white boys saw these things.  what enables one person to resist while many other people collude?

wk:  a whole constellation of facts.  for me it actually has to do with the house i grew up in.  i was raised to be aware of the nature of the society we were living in.  kids i went to school with grew up in a world where hatred and terror were normalized.  what are the things with which people blinded themselves to find all that acceptable?

bh:  they have to construct a wall inside.  your work exposes the layers of these walls.  for example, there is a recurring image of someone turning their back.  whether you are white or black, the demand of white supremacy and apartheid is always that one split oneself--to normalize.  a white person like you, who resisted normalization, stands out.

wk:  i always assumed that splitting was just the way one exists in the world.

something bell hooks says about kentridge in the preface to her interview sticks.  she says that kentridge is always "...acknowledging that we are always more than our pain." a major--and moving--theme of black box  has to do with what one does with such pain.  the narrator megaphone man rolls out into the stage area, with a torn-sheet placard affixed to it reading trauerarbeit.  

the word refers to freud's conception of grief work, conceived of as a necessary labor, a mourning one undergoes which has a finite endpoint (mourning and melancholia, 1917).  with the introduction of this word and, indirectly, this historical peer working on these themes at the time of the massacre, kentridge opens up a dialog about what it is to be guilty, to be complicit, to be the inheritors of psychic pain.  maria-christina villaseñor, the curator of black box, wrote that among kentridge's questions are:

...does trauma ever really recede?  can it be contained?...the history that looms largest in kentridge's work is the complex, deeply intertwined relationship of between Europe and Africa, the rhino in the room, so to speak, a presence that can never be ignored...there is no standing outside in kentridge's work.  black box implicates us in our belief and disbelief, in our wonder and cool knowingness, in darkness and in light.

notably, after wwi, freud radically revised his work about grief in ego and the id, asserting that grief is continual and ongoing, a sisyphean labor without end. 

with all the issues kentridge skillfully touches upon in his work black box/chambre noire, with his address and redress of western white history at the bequest of the penitent authors of such histories, kentridge has given us a work that is implication, absolution and everything in between.  black box is full of pointed, unanswered questions; the practical realization that nothing can be done to recover or correct the excessiveness of a punishing past; that we are always more than our pain but never without it; and that, like the multi-part media chosen to depict it, history and its retelling is messy, overlapping, conflicted and consisting of multiple voices. 

though his animated films are rare and hard to come by (shown mostly at festivals and rare museum screenings), a short 6-minute excerpt of the documentary art from the ashes can be seen here.  black box/chambre noire is currently being shown at the johannesburg art gallery through july 9th.  hopefully then it will tour to at least one of the guggenheims in the  u.s.  a production of kentridge's full-length stage opera of the magic flute will run at the brooklyn academy of music in the spring of 2007. 

 

influences and confluences

to have the knowledge that you seek a particular vein of something is to be aware of not only your tastes, but what influences you, creates bias and division, separates one set of concerns from another.  connoisseurship, perhaps, but also a little bit of greek wisdom: to know why you are drawn to specific things, people, situations or a kind of aesthetics is a form of knowing thyself. 

i have been swayed by a particular kind of representation of birds.  for years i've been made aware of this imagistic longing which i posses.  it is very specific.  when i say to someone, "i'm interested in making photographs of birds," to the addressee that immediately creates some presumptions that become harder to correct if the conversation goes much deeper than this.  "oh, so you're into landscape photography then?"  no, not exactly.  not the way you perceive what that genre is, nor, probably, the way that i do. 

when i search for ways to describe this, even to myself, the vocabulary comes up lacking.  the best way i can find to describe what i mean and to describe it absolutely is to pull a photograph or a book from somewhere and physically give it and then in turn my meaning to someone.  to you.  my clumsy visual lexicon:

a certain awareness of grace:

camille solygua

starkness:

michael ackerman

a love of form and play with space:

katsushika hokusai

masao yamamoto

smallness.  delicacy:

ibid 

 

  superstitious:

jim dine : birds
 

from multiple sensibilities i become aware and attuned to my own.  i define what bird is to my own eye, and i redefine each adjective i found to describe each form; meaning becomes expanded and at the same time compressed.  i also define by negation what the image i seek is not.  a healthy respect for both these image makers and what they pulled from within them begins to emerge within me.  awe is balanced by fright which is balanced by play which is balanced by tea-stained memories that never were.  the influences become confluences when i take my camera into a scene with a mind full of birds. 

these were taken a much warmer season ago, in a much warmer clime than i inhabit now.  before i left the south:

 

 

these are sketches of thoughts, really.  the diet of one who intends to make more images which will evoke the lexicon she's using to go by for the moment, and then expand the meanings she had previously described.   more work in the works.  both the written and the seen.

 

the thing of the thing

a blog is a funny thing. 

in the beginning, it is a tabula rasa, a place where you can project onto all that has needed a very particularized and niched space to simply be.  because of its newness, you are able to create and alter at will the tone, the subject matter, the seriousness and the obsessiveness of your own little piece of the self-publishing cyberspace pie. 

given time and diligence, some of the reasons you carved out your little niche begins to come manifest: you receive responses to posts, emails and find through your statistical log that other people, other blogs, are discussing your posts.  sending people your way.  creating community, audience and critics in a seemingly fast amount of time.

it is when this above mentioned occurs that something about how you think about writing takes a subtle shift.  before response, we'll say, you wrote thinking that maybe somewhere someone might be reading, but it wasn't a given.  after response, you know empirically that people are, and you might even know, in that indirect way of the internet, who some of them are.  it's like heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the observation of the experiment begins to change the quality of the actual experiment such that you cannot know if, or to what degree, the observation taints the experiment being observed.

i bring this up not because i have become stymied and inconsistent in my writing due to the fact that i know someone is looking, but because i find it worth mentioning that when one hesitates in the face of their experiment, and then when something outside of that niched out, projected-place she created fundamentally shifts--say, a job, a relationship, a move or all three--the blog is the first thing to go. 

at least, that's what introverts like me do.  i become exhausted at the thought of producing the very sorts of things that it gave me great satisfaction to produce not for you (solely), dear reader, but for me.  and like the garden in my yard which is slowly being prepared to weather the brutal winter that will undoubtedly be coming soon to my new locale, i have had to take a long meditative breath away from this space and communicating these things which i ponder on a greedy, constant basis.  my neighbor is laying cardboard on the ground, and then hay on top of the cardboard, so that the ground underneath stays warm, moist and fertile through the frosty, biting winter.  i feel i have been preparing myself much the same. 

so, with renewed purpose and a clearer mind, i return to this too too neglected space.  perhaps some redecorating is in order.  since i would like to be more frequent in my musings here, it may be appropriate to open up the floor to writing that is not only the full-length artist psycho-biography--though i do adore that and will keep writing them--but some more fractured and fleeting writing.  sometimes i forget about the gems that can be found in fragments; truer thoughts which rise so quickly to the surface because you imagine you care about them less. 

speaking of fragments, i offer you this one.  it swept all the art pretense from underneath my feet and knocked me sideways:

at the met this month i was rushing back and forth between galleries trying to get my one-day-in-the-city special exhibitions fix.  i had gone to look at the the spirit photography exhibit that was showcased, and was excited as i'd never laid eyes on these types of photographs in the flesh.  the show was packed with people, and i seemed to be eternally in line behind these two loud women that kept pointing and saying things like, how could anybody ever think these things were real, anyway?" over and over again.  anxious to leave and visit another part of the museum, i rushed between the hallways which connected their photography wing to their painting wing.  the hallway that has the oft-changed permanent collection of photographs, and, as you near the exit, a gallery of drawings.  i almost missed it, and then i stopped.

it was a drawing of hokusai's the great wave at kanagawa, copied by van gogh.  his familiar ink stroke, those wobbly lines on yellowed paper.  next to the drawing was an excerpt printed from a letter by van gogh, discussing it.  the image of this wave, which has been co-opted by every new age purpose known to man, has been commodified to symbolize an experience of serene zen calm.  it used to be the advertising symbol for a holistic health care place i worked for in grad school.  to van gogh, however, it did not embody any of those fuzzy warm things.  look at the foam, he wrote, you can see that they're really claws, they're clutches.  and that they're coming for the fisherman in the boat.  i'm paraphrasing from memory, but that's the gist of it.  and it was astonishing to me.  this ubiquitous image, this famous woodblock print that i've only ever glanced at, apparently.  how could i have missed the danger inherent here?  the vulnerability and tinniness of those wooden boats caught underneath the crest of that great--as in inspiring fear and awe--wave?  those clutches?

i wasn't even looking to catch a moment like that, and out of all of the ones i was seking in my art hiatus weekend, this was the most stunningly felt and realized. 

what little girls want: the art of miwa yanagi

                    A woman
                    who loves a woman
                    is forever young.
                    The mentor    
                    and the student
                    feed off each other.
                    Many a girl
                    had an old aunt
                    who locked her in the study
                   to keep the boys away.
                    They would play rummy
                    or lie on the couch
                    and touch and touch
                    old breast against young breast.

                              --Anne Sexton, "Rapunzel," Transformations

miwa yanagi, rapunzel, 2005.

miwa yanagi creeps me out--in all the good kinds of ways.  her images carry the capacity to go from surface to psychological in lightning-quick speed, and what lay in the subconscious afterwards folds into complex unease with a lingering, distinct aftertaste.  cursory on-line research into her newest body of work provides three titles describing the same set of images, all apt in one or more ways:  fairytales; the darkness of girlhood and the lightness of aging; and the incredible tale of the innocent old lady and the heartless girl."  whichever phrasing you choose, this third body of her photographs follows seamlessly where the last left off, and her visual problem-solving mingled with her confidence in her questions and critque makes her among the most interesting and provactive image makers today.

the japanese have a phrase for women art photographers, and it is not one that they should be entirely grateful for: onnanoko shashinka, translated literally as "girlie photographers."  as the first wave of established japanese photographers begins to make way for the new second wave, women have been struggling to make work that is both personal and collective, meaningful without being minute.  and while work by female photographers is being produced, there is irritatingly little infomation or exposure of it.  the lack of interest, press or support of contemporary female photographers in japan has been in part because of the concerns choosen to be explored in their art gets snidely referred to as "women's work" and is subsequently dismissed.  miyako ishiuchi's photographs catalog her mother's articles of clothing and ephemera, as a daughter tries to understand her relationship to her and to herself through personal (nearly sacristral) objects she wore or carried on her person.  michiko kon deals in still lifes constructed entirely of foodstuffs.  gloriously decadent, humorous and grotesque, they are still made of items that a woman bought at a market, which are ingredients in a meal, that to a  japanese mentality is to be served and prepared for a husband and family. 

i have never liked the notion of women vs. male artists of any sort.  women-only shows, while they serve a purpose, feel like a half-hearted attempt at artistic affirmative action.  equality has never come about through polarity.  the fact is, the playing field has never been level, and all that's ever mattered--male or female--is the work.  photography, because of its relatively late entrance into the art scene, has been perhaps the greatest democracy of all the arts (whether or not you read about it speaks to something else).  ishiuchi's photos are delicate, eerie and truly personalized, intimate documents.  kon's are among the first photographic images by a japanese photographer that i ever became infactuated with (and whatever happened to her anyway?  has she made anything since the mid-1990's?).  that said, miwa yanagi makes altogether different kinds of images.  different from women.  different from men.  different from anything i have ever seen.  miwa yanagi is an artist whose questions give way to more questions. 

yanagi first found herself championed by a transvestite japanese photographer,yasumasa morimura, who had been making a splash re-enacting art historical scenes and inserting himself as an obvious asian-male-made-to-be-westernized-ideal-of-female.  he introduced her work to a curator of a major deutsche bank exhibition, held at the kunsthalle in frankfurt.  her work was shown along the same walls as cindy sherman, nobuyoshi araki, jeff wall, miyako ishiuchi and morimura. 

her first series, elevator girls, is startling to look at and is seductive in its deliberately sleek and polished sensibility.  but when i first saw them i did not understand what i was looking at, and faced with the cultural roadblock, stopped at the surface. 

elevator girls, 1996-1999

i did not know what an "elevator girl" was, and wasn't aware of any overreaching cultural critique going on in the images.  there are times when i assume that if i need to be given too much information about the context for a work, or why it exists, then the work becomes about the information and not about the work itself.  i tend to think that these pieces fail when the explanation is more interesting than the visual.  but happily in yanagi's case, her visuals are always thought through, well executed and the context is necessary, and necessarily engaging.

noriko fuku describes elevator girls as those who:

...wear beautiful uniforms called "royal fashion," often created by famous designers, and they receive special training where they learn to bow and speak with an exaggeratedly feminine tone of voice:  "welcome to our department store.  we appreciate your visit here today.  this elevator is going up now and stops at all the floors upon your request.  the second floor is for designer brand dresses for ladies.  are there any customers who would like to stop here?"  when the door opens, she says, "please mind your step."  another elevator girl is usually standing outside the door, also wearing royal fashion.  the elevator girl inside the elevator smiles and bows to the girl outside, as if saying, "i am handing over my customers to you, please take care of them."  elevator girls stay in their tiny cells repeating the same speech and gestures hour after hour.  only beautiful young girls are hired for these positions.  for the previous generation, this was a highly desirable job.

without this information all i saw were sleek, surreal examples of consumer culture, and was completely oblivious to the specific critique on that culture the images were made to provoke.  as i read in interviews and articles, i began to glean that this first work was possibly not meant for a wider cultural audience than the japanese (though her successive work would contend mightily with more collective themes), and that what it would become was yanagi's first stab at puncturing this feminine bubble that exists in japan, the one that sets out all the acceptable options for a woman's course in life and what her expectations can and should be for the duration. 

white casket, 1998

i trust yanagi's images in part because her line of questioning is evident and continually surprising:  what can young, educated japanese women expect for their ambitious lives lived in large cities, post-education but pre-marriage?  what does it mean to define oneself through sheer consumerism?  is one doll different at all from another?  is life as an elevator girl like living in some terranium, existing as a perfect moving object in a kind of fishbowl?  how does one escape?  does one escape?  is collective identity a kind of murder, a form of sought-after suicide?  in interviews, yanagi comments on the varities of female experience in japan, chief among those she questions are a group deemed "parasites."  parasites are women who choose to stay living at home with their parents while spending all of their considerable salaries on fashion.  the relationship's dynamic perpetuates itself because both parties think they are doing good deeds by living under the same roof:  children think they are being good by watching over their parents and just generally being there, and parents feel a reason to live in continuing to take care of them.  yanagi has said, "they stay home and spend all their money buying what they want.  prada or hermes, japanese women consume all brand-name products.  the industry does best in japan thanks to these women." with no real cultural comparison in the west, the finer points of her criticism of this aspect of daily life was completely lost on me.  once i had read the context which to a japanese would be self-evident, the photographs pulsed with their intended meaning. 

in this interview, yanagi describes how her experience with her models from the series elevator girls began to generate fodder for her next work, grandmothers. 

yanagi:  in the process of making the series, i had the opportunity to talk with models who were in their twenties.  it was interesting.  they want something for their future.  but they have a hard time expressing what they want as if their desires were subdued or locked inside...japanese women think they have to be lovable and liked by everyone around them...they think that they don't deserve to live if they are not like that.  as a result, they don't talk openly about their wishes or strange desires even though they had some ideas about who they wanted to be when they were children.  in order for them to recall their childhood dreams, they need to be liberated from their youthfulness.

wasaka:  young women cannot express who they want to be at present because they are young?

yanagi:  right.  but, they can often express what they want to accomplish 50 years later.  i think that occurs after they feel liberated from the age issue.

wasaka:  does that mean that they don't care anymore about what others think of them when they become senior?

yanagi:  yes.  so the more restricted she is today, the more free and gorgeous she may become fifty years later in her imagination.

misako, 2002

in your arms i used to listen to
that song which i will play again tonight
oh hazy moon
how many more nights are yet to pass
for this desolation to cease.

it is with her grandmothers series where yanagi began to fully come into her own.  she had begun elevator girls as a performance piece, switching to photography when she became frustrated by the lack in the piece's capacity to give her full authorial control.  as if hitting a wall from such strictures, she turned around here, and gave up some of that rulership and found that it took her places it could not have with her absolute direction.  using some of the models from elevator girls, and procuring others through an on-line advertisement she placed, she found stories within stories of what young women dreamed about becoming when they were older, once freed from their perceived obligations to family and society.  artist and girl went hand-in-hand, teasing out the dreamed-of-life and what it might look like.  using a combination of aging software, latex and makeup, yanagi brought the young into lively agehood.  the women were asked to compose something that the reflective, experienced older woman would say or think. 

ai, 2004

i know people in this neighborhood talk behind my back and say that my fortune-telling is fake.
i don't do this to get a bit of money from these kids, i'm not that desperate or bored
i'm just here waiting for one special customer: my successor.
since she's not attracted to the past or anxious about the future,
i leave it to chance that someday, she'll enter through this shattered doorway.
after she takes my place, i'll live quietly, discharged from both my hopes and regrets.

how many more dull fortunes do i have to tell
i can't help feeling pity for these innocent girls.
their lives will be just like their mothers,
chronic boredom interrupted by disappointment and disillusionment.
can't believe that they come here to confirm that.
i'm fed up with their girlsih secrets,
made rosy only by their shallow expectations and cheap dreams.
i'll only take five more customers today.
oh, this girl is about to cry.
there's no use for tears, sweetheart.

the result is a compelling battery of images, myriads of self-directed destinies and specifically wished-for futures;  a truly realized and collaborative work.  perhaps because the piece wouldn't be complete without it, perhaps because it was too good a self-portrait opportunity to resist, yanagi included herself in the retinue of old ladies:

miwa, 2001

for ten years

i have looked after many children
every time
i embrace a new child
we all embark upon our journey together

at eighty
the long journeys across many mountains and rivers have become difficult.
still, i keep going
with the thought
that my children will exist
in the farthest reaches of this earth.

yanagi could be speaking about all the women she encounters while researching and producing her many images.  or she could mean the women she hopes are touched or changed by the ideas of possible futures they could embody, if only they could see themselves within those possibile potential selves.  or further still, the children may be the actual works themselves, taken out of japan, department stores, and foreign art museums, and held in the mind's eyes of millions who come in contact with them, and by extension, with her wish for herself and a changed world. 

her grandmothers series was well-received, shown in europe, japan and america, and included in a book of her work and interviews.  it was reviewed as a series that viewed aging and feminity in a positive light, and the context for the reviews rarely delved anywhere near yanagi's larger critique of banal and repetitive existences most japanese women live in today. 

her newest body of work, the darkness of girlhood and the lightness of aging, begun in 2004, picks up some of the more sinister strands that her previous works had flirted with, but had not fully given voice to.  to my eye, it is her most darkly compelling and aesthetically full-rounded work to date.  in all her previous images, the final product is presented in lush, large, and luminous display, some photographs reaching 70x280" in size.  heavily digitally manipulated, extroidinarily detailed, we are engulfed as viewers into her mise-en-scéne.  these new images are smaller (but not small, exactly, measuring about 40x40"), classically printed black-and-whites, and still deal with a female-to-female dynamic, but in the well-known terrain of the fairy-tale. 

gretel, 2004

i cannot find much information about this series, and am frustrated, as i often am, about the lack of information concerning newer work by pioneering japanese photographers.  what i do know about the series i found in a recent issue of asia art pacific magazine.  the  review tells that yanagi reconstructs fairytale scenes from western tales as well as from gabriel garcia marquez's erendira.  she casts girls between the ages of five to eleven, and records them as both a girl and an old woman.  the end result, in the handful of images i've seen (and want desperately to see in person), is chilling, unsettling, and utterly engrossing. 

snow white, 2004

i quoted from anne sexton's book of poems transformations at the beginning of this post.  that particular tome was sexton's dabbling into tales-told-slant, and yanagi's rendering of girl-into-old-hag, innocence thwarted, and the cycle of youthful curiosity giving way to trials, self-discovery and redemption has much in sympathy with sexton's treatment.  in both the little girls aren't all as innocent as they seem; evil witches are misfortunate shrews who wear their life's regrets on their sleeves; both wield a certain power and horror; both are one in the same. 

erendira, 2004

yanagi's new series of work is being show from august through october at the hara museum of art  in tokyo.  i do not know whether it will come to the states or not, but if you have the means and opportunity to see it, i highly suggest you do so.

perfect images, written photographs and the absolute

this picture has been lost and i will never again feel that same emotion...i suspect that [a] recomposed image will no longer please me in the same way, or with as much force, since it  will have had time to make its way to my head, there to crystallize into a perfect image, and the photographic abstraction will happen by itself on the sensitized surface of memory, to be developed and fixed by writing, which i resorted only to free myself of my photographic regret.

---hervé guibert, ghost image

i may know better a photograph i remember than a photograph i am looking at...ultimately--or at the limit--in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.  "the necessary condition for an image is sight," janouch told kafka; and kafka smiled and replied: "we photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds.  my stories are a way of shutting my eyes."   

---roland barthes, camera lucida 

i often think of the image only i can see now, and of which i've never spoken.  it's always there, in the same silence, amazing.  it's the only image of myself i like, the only one in which i recognize myself, delight...

...so i'm fifteen and a half.
it's on a ferry crossing the mekong river.
the image lasts all the way across.

---marguerite duras, the lover

there are photographers who are manic beings and photograph constantly, using the camera to mediate life and the experiences that cross the path of their lens.  there are writers who do the same thing with words; as they are in the midst of an event--either mundane or profound--there is always something in them thinking of the most perfect way to describe the thing they're experiencing that very moment, which word or phrase is not too heavy or too frivolous, in short, the sentence that goldilocks ate.  for these writers and photographers alike, experiences somehow only become valid and real once described, and whether in words or in a cropped field of vision, experience and event are complete when treated and translated through their respective media.  and for these types, there are always two experiences being had: the actual event that is happening that very moment, and the description/transcription of that event.  to live with this duality is nearly an unconscious thing, it becomes second-nature, a non-event, and indeed is a more difficult thing to unlearn to do than to pick up and begin doing.

(in fact, when photographers and writers are "taught", they are told to photograph constantly, record everything, write everyday, even if it's nothing.  that to practice this is a way to inscribe it into your life, to make it a natural extension of yourself and your artistic expression.  i am reminded of the story "a pilgrim's progress," in which an earnest religious acolyte is bade to find a method to "pray without ceasing" and when he has done so, he will have attained enlightenment and peace.)

i happen to practice a very different method of both of these things.  and the manic version (of which i have an internalized voice of one that lives within me) scolds me and calls it laziness, but i only think that this is partially true.  the other method of experience and description views the manic's method as anathema.  the rapid fire of the shutter being able to capture moments at 1/3200th of a second, or in eight frames a second, becomes a vulgarity to both time, memory and experience itself.  when one is already thinking of how something will look or sound or read before one has even looked or tasted or felt is to have a record and not a memory, a version without meaning.  i read, listen and look widely.  i believe instead that to experience anything, it must be felt and wrung through body and mind utterly before thinking about thinking on it.  only when the moment has passed will i allow myself another new moment, the one that shuts me in a room alone and quiet to write about it. 

of course, not carrying pen or camera around everywhere does leave you without the tools to sometimes finish seeing the thing you were open to and only you could see, or to remember all the details of something after the moment has passed.  every writer or photographer, whatever their persuasion (and an infinite variety exist between the two points i have described above), know and have felt this.  the lost moment.  the perfect image gone forever, the beginnings of the great story lost to the overcrowded mind.  i have been meditating lately on these lost moments, and wondering how they affect both memory and experience.  are we nostalgic for these images lost to us, forever shifting details in our memory?  are they made more perfect as we recount or remember them precisely for their not becoming document, and thus, concrete thing?  are these imperfect moments more precise because of their changeable ambiguity?  what is that ache we feel for what we did not encapsulate, this different memory we have, different from the kinds with contour and light and shade, made somehow unchangeable because of their definiteness, their recorded existence? 

i have come and come again to hervé guibert, roland barthes and marguerite duras, who all have much to say about memory, regret, experience and selfhood.  i have visited them each differently for different reasons, but as i write here now i imagine a situation where they are all three in the same room together.  i don't imagine they all get along.  but they are all sympathetic to one another.  all of them go to great effort to articulate a particular lost moment, and what losing that moment does to their memory of it, and of themselves.

hervé guibert, self-portrait:

   

guibert wrote a tome  (which i am forever indebted to james  for introducing me to) of amazing essays on photography, ghost image.  the book is a series of informal essays, conversational and diaristic, which treats fragments concerning photography, what it is to photograph, what it means to look.  it has become one of my favorite meditations on the subject, and guibert's voice is clear, lyrical and embarrassingly honest.  in it, he describes his ultimate "lost" photograph, a moment he missed camera-less while vacationing on the island of elba.  the image, that of, "four young boys stood in a row beneath the great foaming mass, a small distance from one another, facing the water, braving the waves that washed over them, allowing themselves to be rolled around by them," was glimpsed for a few moments, enough to have had captured had he the proper equipment.  instead, he looked out on it, noting its ordered perfection, ephemerality and particularity.  he seethed in anger because as he watched this perfect image, unable to record it, he knew he would also watch its passing, the moment in which it, "decomposed and crumbled into pieces before suddenly transforming itself into a regret."  he has the passing flirtation with the possibility of coming upon the scene again the next day--the light will be the same, the boys may return to the water, but he soon abandons this for the only course that may do the scene justice: he locks himself in a room and writes about it.  but with a difference.  the writing for him does not do what was missed in the act of photography, it instead reminds him of the limits of the image and of memory:

if i had photographed it at once, and if the picture had turned out "well" (that is, faithful to the memory of my emotion), it would have become mine.  but the act of photographing it would have obliterated all memory of the emotion, for photography envelops things and causes forgetfulness, whereas writing, which it can only hinder, is a melancholy act, and the image would have been "returned" to me as a photograph, as an estranged object that would bear my name and that i could take credit for, but that would always remain foreign to me (like a once familiar object to an amnesiac).

guibert asserts that if he had been able to capture the moment on film, he would have "owned" it, and it would have "become" his.  added to the catalog of images, it would have been a pleasing visual arrangement, "the perfect image," but, he admits, he would have not had the memory of the event had he not conjured it through writing, through trying to relive the image in his mind once deprived the relic of the photograph. 

if photography provides the  visual "proof" that we were there, and we saw what is depicted, does writing give us back our memory of the event lived, or at least a version that cannot be alluded to in images?  if the photograph is evidential, is writing the emotional? 

roland barthes and his mother:

 

roland barthes was not a photographer, nor even a maker-of-things, but he accomplished in his writing what every good philosopher aspires to in their thinking: he began to understand something of the thing itself, and for barthes that thing would be how images and the visual function, and how this intersects and necessarily affects the personal.  in camera lucida, he spends a good portion of time parsing out both general assumptions concerning photography as well as his own very individual response to a highly charged and personal photograph which he will describe in great detail but in the end, refuse to show his reader.  the photograph is one of his mother, referred to simply as "the winter garden photograph," and she has just recently died and barthes is in mourning.  he is scouring the image reservoir for an image, the image, that will give back some essential quality of this much-loved person to him, that will show him something that will signify as "real" visually for something that is felt "real" emotionally. 

but it is a frustrating task.  because photography is slippery.  because memory second-guesses and doubts the veracity given in images.  because what we see does not always correlate to what we remember, and barthes is wary of images becoming memory.  he wants to reclaim his memory from the visual repertoire, not have it given him from it. while looking for the image that will inform memory, he writes, "...a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see."  what he is searching for, instead, is something which causes a disturbance, something that will prick memory, wound it and him in some way.  it is in this essay that he names the idea that became the namesake for this site, where he calls "punctum" that detail in a photograph which renders an image subjective and particular, that which pierces through what we already think we know. 

he is in his mother's apartment looking for a photograph.  he does not know the photograph he is looking for, this is not a searching for something he has once seen and needs to recover.  he will know what he is looking for once he has found it. 

there i was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother...looking for the truth of the face i had loved.  and i found it...

lost in the depths of the winter garden photograph, my mother's face is vague, faded.  in a first impulse, i exclaimed: "there she is!  she's really there!  at last, there she is!" now i claim to know--why, in what she consists.  i want to outline the face loved by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation, i want to enlarge the is face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.  i believe that by enlarging the detail, i will finally reach my mother's very being.

satisfied that he has found it, and perhaps drained by what he has come to understand because of the searching for it, he makes another confession: why what pierces him in this photo must, in order to continue to pierce him, remain private.  he will not show us the winter garden photograph; he declines to make spectacle of his memory, or of contributing another "indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ordinary...it exists only for me...in it, for you, no wound."

marguerite duras and her mother:

guibert, barthes and duras were all contemporaries of one another.  guibert and barthes were social with one another (and guibert inhabited the same building in paris as another french luminary, michel foucault); barthes and duras sparred about one another in print; duras was arguably the most famous.  her most famous novel, the lover, tells the semi-autobiographical story about the writer's first love affair as as a fifteen-year-old girl, with an older chinese aristocrat, while growing up in french indochina.  the book is sparse, selfish and spectacle all at once, and written in a signature second-person past conditional tense for which duras had become known.   duras was also a film director, and her visual sense in that media spills over in descriptions in her novels; scenes are succinctly detailed but richly so, and images are described as complete visual realizations.

i found out some time ago that the working title for this novel was originally la photograph absolu.  in interviews she has said that the origins of the novel began as a commission, when she was asked to comment on a family photo album.  inspired by the images, she began writing the novel.  but one image she returned to, as if in refrain.  significant because it is the only image that does not exist, the image of herself before she would become the self familiar to her for the rest of her life.  it is an image of herself on the mekong ferry, the day she would meet the man who would become her first lover.

i think it was during this journey that the image became detached, removed from all the rest.  it might have existed, a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances.  but it wasn't.  the subject was too slight.  who would have thought of such a thing?  the photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event, the crossing of the river.  but while it was happening, no one knew of its existence.  except god.  and that's why--it couldn't have been otherwise--the image doesn't exist.  it was omitted.  forgotten.  it never was detached or removed from all the rest.  and it's to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute.

i remain struck by her insistence that this image is important because it never became "detached," which i take to mean singled out and remembered as a photograph, a representation of an event instead of something which alludes to a specific memory.  psychic event versus actual one.  that the image of the image becomes more important than the fact of the image itself. 

the above passage shows that duras is in agreement with barthes that photographs act as a block against memory, an aide in forgetting.  perhaps if a photograph of this moment, of duras crossing the mekong existed, the fact in the photograph would speak against her memory of the event, and banalizing it, would diminish what without its existence, becomes seminal in the life of her personhood and as a writer: the moment she sees herself seeing herself--something which could not happen if she were actually able to do so in the act of viewing herself in a photograph.   barthes had written:

not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes counter-memory...the photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.

my thoughts on these three conceptions of absolute, or perfect images, are anything but precise.  i think that more than the example of three articulate and well-spoken writers all reflecting upon their subjective, personal moments-as-image, i am concerned with the recurrent theme of memory-trumping-image, of the notion of taking back memory from images themselves.  is photography the regret we have against experience?  is it like the uncertainty principle, and an event photographed is an event interrupted, tainted, somehow, by its observation instead of its pure participation?  does the act of "taking" the moment in a photograph "take" something from the moment, and the you having the moment, as well?  is it nostalgia or regret that keeps us purveyors of images?  are the two the same?  i've been steeping in these thoughts for a couple of months now, re-reading texts that i've read under different circumstances, different versions of myself.  i only arrive at more questions.  there is no practical application to knowing the whether or why to any of what i've posed here.  i suppose i am striving instead for an awareness: in what barthes has referred to as the "three intentions" of photography: to do, to undergo and to look."