Ms. Mann had made a landscape I simply could not decipher. I had a picture like that. Charcoal and paint and wax on a large canvas made by a woman I assuredly knew but no matter how, I never knew well. Modotti’s stairwell, but this was doors, steps leading upwards or down, thresholds to or away. The openings were thick in their darkness, but whether that black was within or without, I could not say. A kind of vertigo. An incapacity to gain my bearings. An experience that art and women have always supplied me with in large measure.
I approached a room at the St. Louis Art Museum that completely gave credence to its acronym. On one giant wall hung three enormous panels by Gerhard Richter, the three months most Winter. Opposite to it across the spacious room – a gargantuan assemblage by Anselm Kiefer was hanging. Between the two I foundered, awestruck and thoroughly a-mazed (assuming that means “to be jettisoned into an unsolvable maze or labyrinth”). Lost. Immersed. Afloat. A parallel to loving my wife.
Like cattle in a feedlot among females, I graze, stare dumbly and bellow, then stunned, flayed and strung up all of a sudden. Before I know what’s happened. Art is like that. You wander in, something strikes you in your senses, you move in – kazowy! – you’re rearranged, undone, overloaded.
I must say I don’t really mind the dystopia, aporia, conundrum’d state of being this implies, but to sense a ground for being in it (to secure one’s being at all!) is tricky. Usually it emerges after the stupor – you become cognizant of pain. Your throat is slit, your blood is gone, you’re an artifact, a meal.
Humans are not that helpless.
This was intended to be a consideration (astute, reasonable, hopefully enjoyable) of ambiguity and liminality – their presence in our apprehension of the world – of art and persons and things. Persons, places and things, how about, the designations “art” and “spouse,” “painter,” “friend,” “S.L.A.M” or “self” are afterbirths of our relations.
So the stairs, the leaky lake-y landscape, the architectures of doorways, the ladies and the painted times…
where I enter, where I leave, seems entirely up for grabs. Depends on the day, my mood or company, my body’s presence with my mind (and vice-versa), the music or chatter or silence in my head, and so on.
There’s a thrill to it, an ecstasis – as if sometimes I become phantom, fleeing and spreading into the surface of things; at others a long contemplation, as if merging with jelly at the bottom of the sea. Usually, amid much stammering, I end up stuttering: “I don’t know. I can’t describe it,” whether to partner or journal,
and begin again.
And sometimes I just breathe (think about breathing) and gaze. Something like a ubiquity of assimilation occurs, a vanishing and presence – to dis-appear. Not to cease, but, apparently, to occur “in,” diffuse, non-identically and undifferentiatedly.
Where am I?
Or might I be aptly participant? As if the similarities of cells and atoms (the family resemblance of objects) and the woven unity of wind have been accepted, acknowledged, awared in the confusion (“fusion-with”).
I don’t know. I can’t describe it.
But I like it and fear it at once – secure and unsettling – like “home,” as it were, or my “self.”
A sort of cognition of the ever-unknown lexeme “I” in its ever-unknowing surround…of people, places and things…that primal chaos and truth. Ambiguous, liminal, present.
If you pressed me, now. If I were honest, a photographic career is, basically, just like any other, with different tools and products. It fluctuates, you know? You move from the zeal of the capture, the feeling that your point of view (POV) might be “special” or “unique” – and it is – it’s one-of-a-kind even when one is copying someone else, still a translation or a version, not a “same.” You get over the miraculous. It wears off with time. Inattention, a zillion images from a million Kodaks, Polaroids and Nikons, and the clicker just feels overwrought, or miniscule, inundated and insignificant.
So you join a cause or a team, a kind of “group POV.” You figure there’s strength in numbers, you can at least make a digit’s difference, someone else cares or shares or might be helped by what you do, who you notice, how you work. But that film plays out as well, being as how everyone in the “group POV’ can’t ever actually escape their individual POVs, it ain’t long before you each understand a “place” or a “role,” an “effect” you come to feel is replaceable, or that you could as well perform that function on your own. Cut and splice. Disappear.
Now sometimes a kind of “back-to-square-one” occurs here – or a sensation of discovery that’s nearly always re-discovering, which is just fine. You pay a little more attention to your tools, try old ones, new ones, mix up the chemicals, collage the exposures, experiment surfaces and pages. You plunge the medium, see if something ain’t been missed or never combined, used just so, at this or that time, this or that way. When you look hard enough (if you care, that is) – you’ll find it. Someone’s been there, thought it, shot it, used it, what-not.
Then you might try plumbing your individuality – family roots or land, self-portraits, things you figure only you have access to; or you try some wild novelty – work for no other reason than to try what you haven’t seen tried, usually the results are ridiculous, maybe some cool accidents, but very rarely anything world-shaking or earth-shattering comes of it, more like play. Banality and/or play. Too finite or too abstract. Solipsistic or anonymous.
At this point, usually 20 years in or so, give or take decades, many sell out. Either by doing “well enough,” using their skills developed for someone else’s purposes, or literally unloading the shebang on Craigslist or gifting it to a young idealist upstart or relative; or you teach.
Others of us simply scale down. By which I mean you return to the basics, by which I mean you figure out through all the efforts, jobs, mechanisms and situations, what actually pleased you. What gave you the willies the highs the joys the thuds about being and doing…and you figure out, at whatever level of notoriety or negligence, how you can keep on doing these things.
You look, and you feel. What you like feeling looking you make pictures of. Could be people’s faces, secret subway shots; could be getting yourself off to remote places – mountains, trees; could be naked women or men; innocent children; dangerous wars. Could be proximity to the rich and famous; or microscopic lives of plants or insects; could be the chemicals and lights themselves, the materials – blurs, slurs, Rorschach-like concoctions. Only you know, ‘cause you’re the one that feels it when you look.
Hell I’ve been a grocery bagger, an insurance peddler, kindergarten teacher and garbage man, just to see the chaos of shapes and light, just to rove the streets to or from with my “magic box.” You’ll know if you gotta. You’ll even know what you’ve gotta.
I’m an old man now. I know about time. I know how I am not I. No longer. This mottling, freckling, wrinkling and mole-ridden flesh each new hour I am forced to call mine. The pain in the shoulders and the neck and the knees, my excruciatingly stooped back, my trembles and twitches…I fight back.
I capture the young. Flesh nubile and soft, pliable and pure, elastic. I carry my posture of strength, contracted muscles of athletic days on this little 3×5 glossy scrap, you see? Here’s uncle Mort – alive, swimming – BEFORE 1918 and he was no more. Pah! Right here friend! Right here is uncle Mort. And the Native Americans did live here first, and did wear strange clothing, ride horses, build tee-pees and clod huts – you see?
What might have been erased by vile death, by erosion, what we may have never truly “witnessed” or “seen” – right here through this powerful small cannon!
Matthew Brady
If we speak simply of existing, in whatever form (given what becomes of our actual bodies and minds) Atget has defeated death – you may challenge me to find his flesh, his bones, his musty breath – perhaps not! But here, right here! His aspect, his presence, his form. See? None of us, none of us, even those of us who greet it at our own hands, like death. We try to circumscribe it, undo and short-circuit its authority, vitiate its inevitability – well, here is how I do it!
Eugene Atget
Death and anonymity destroyed by the ambiguity of the lens! You may have no inkling WHO this subject is/was, but you will not doubt that they were, and therefore are in your ingestion of their image.
Beauty vs. decay. Beauty of decay. Youth versus age, the vitality of age. Life against death, or the life of death. I can capture it, exercise my will to power, stay the tide if only this moment, you see?
The action makes the difference in the arts. That I can take action against, on, within my world and produce a stoppage, an ongoing, an object that without me would not remain, be.
A salesman’s pitch, a preacher’s sermon, a whistling in the dark, you say – I say sure! I say it’s a banter and a babbling whistle, but it is my friend, it is. This is the significant battle, the valorous war. To take a stand against void while accepting its encroachment, to face up to destruction taking names and numbers, to perpetually freeze its moments, stop-gap, isolate and preserve. Seek and destroy.
I think of each shutter-click like a whittling, another shiver off death’s enormous trunk, a cut, a shape and scrape, a form emerges in its waste.
Where it all begins, I suspect, is the “snapshot.” Whether family photo album, yourself messy-faced in diapers and high-chair, exotic postcards or history books – that strange “a-ha!” instigated by the similitude of the unknown or misremembered. The “whap” of what you imagine you’ve seen, fantasized, dreamt or been, suddenly presented to you as an instant, an image.
“Stealing a glimpse” kind of thing. A centuries-past wedding, the Rockies in sepia, a Hindu temple, your sister as a baby – the mystery of it, the magic! That first plastic camera, disposable and durable, that I used like a weapon as a boy. Bam! Bam! Blam! – my toe, my dog, the playground sand. Blast! Wham! Crack! – got you candy wrapper! Beetle! Back of daddy’s head!
What wonder, no? The outlaw Jesse James – preserved! The Eiffel Tower! Existed then, exists now, because of this contraption, this mad science. Africa, India, colors and clothing, languages, beliefs and cultures – perhaps! perhaps! – someone must have really been there – and something! – the camera may be able to lie, but it cannot create matter, substance! It records moments, minutes, on battlefields, of cheetahs, camels and pyramids!
I had a grandpa! Or I didn’t, but here’s a possible one – detached from his family of origin – available image – who really occurred – could be mine – you see?
For all the skewing of this miniscule eye…the fragile lens…the limiting range and frame, the delicate settings and the passage of time – in only a couple of centuries (as testament to its early stimulus and fascination) – our world has been literally flooded with these fragments. Images. Perhaps rivaling the entire history of visual arts, save writing, no?
So to start, it is enthrallment. Magic, mystery, forbidden, anonymous, it appeals to everything in human youth: the impossible! To experience – perhaps to capture! To seek – to startle – to freeze – to kill.
To take the photo. To grasp the image. To snap the shot. To keep the memory, its stimulus. In the blink of an eye.
I proceed to enact a daguerreotype, a portrait, of a nude human body. I desire the body, the nude, for its pliable form. Shapable still-life, form requiring will. I will need to place my hands on you, move you, to sculpt your body into lights and shadows. I choose you because you are beautiful to me, interesting, unique. You consent, or choose, “for art,” you say, “for art I will remove all my clothing and exist only in my skin and bones,” “for art I will be naked.”
And I agree. Regardless of artifice or style, mechanisms or techniques, art reveals us naked, as we are in our skins, our fragile, porous borders. I must touch you. Art cannot occur in solitude. Always there must be “other.” Always there must be “form,” a here and a there, an inside / outside, a marking and memory.
I do not know how it feels for you to have my hands upon your body. You lie still. You are naked, are beautiful. I place my palm underneath of your knees and pull them up toward your chest. Your calves I press firmly along your thighs to the point where your heels cleave buttock. Sharp angles, slow curves, deep shadow. My fingers trace around your bottom and up the small of your back, learning your spine, your lines. I whisper.
Firmly, quietly, I shove your shoulder up over your knee and push your blade firmly, flattening a slope with a vertebrate edge, cupping the folds of your legs and creating shades of muscle and rib along the contortion of your back. Turning your face to the floor, I stress the creases of the tendons securing your neck. I use your hair like a pencil. Sketching and tracing the shape of your skull like thick charcoal, then drawing out strands for fine points, contour every which way of scapula and horizon, blade-rib-spine for highlight, sweet water of flesh as it pours your body and bends.
This takes time and concentration, you must hold still while your figure trembles. The arms? The hands? I flatten one out between my own, straining the fingers as widely as I’m able, squashing it against the surface where your face ought to be, now hidden beneath the likeness of your hair, pivoted on your nose and your crown. The other I stretch along your back to your bottom as a mirror, a reflected wave providing border and frame to the curling fetus of your twisting torso.
Hold there. Adjusting your digits to the swerve of your buttock, I tap them to the turn of your thigh. You are beautiful, pliable, soft. I stare. I close my eyes and gently feel my way over every shape of you in the dark. A blind man finding my way along the rocks of a beach, underwater. I imagine work onto paper, in wet clay or cool marble, correcting some angles of compromised gradients, pools of stasis, until you exist only as flow and obstruction. Yes there, yes there. How do you feel? Do not answer, you cannot afford to breathe, you are art, an object, an artifact.
Stay as I fix my devices, reform your surround, and manipulate tools. Stay.
We begin. I shape you, you will. I twist you, you choose. We wait, we wait, attendant to the sky.
Indeed there are days I’m uncertain. Unsure if I’m able to see. Since youth I’ve been blind, very nearly, “legally”? – yes, in my left, but spectacles account for that, I mean “vision.” Shapes, soft and blotted, everything variations of strangely spotted, fuzzy ovals. My natural eyesight is that I see what you see examining blood cells through a microscope. It’s a hell of a guess to proclaim something “tree,” or “car,” “human,” “house.”
My glasses restore what is known as “normal vision,” in other words, I’m enabled to distinguish walls and streets, eyes from mouths, blades of grass, shadows, pebbles, feathers even.
What I’m attempting to signify here is not accuracy, but that dread of poor vision, its undoing – where my eyes open out and register lines and fields, patches and frames, sketches and grounds, and I feel certain, uneasily assured, that what my brain is recording is itself. That these forms I “see” and “recognize” – sharp angles of a roof, scribbles on sky-canvas of a great bare cottonwood, spillages and squee-gee’s smears of walking figures – that these forms feel, in fact, to be formed. Forms formed by me. That rather than seek and capture I en-vision and create.
That the world is all dim-grey and full of shadows, and I mark it using light. Light is all – a motion, a shudder and click – and somehow I’ve reordered what might be there. My point of view, my stance. Decrepit old man with still the use of his fingers, albeit shaking, shooting willy-nilly, random violence, chopping up what is and nailing it in fragments.
At first I sought, I really sought. I ached a way to know what’s real. I hungered, craved, and wanted – to get out there, in there, attach – somehow seal myself to my surround – to objects. I thought: I’ll see something – something really there – and then I’ll, I’ll, well, I’ll prove it to myself – make a little monument, a document, an artifact that might bless me, secure me – I WAS HERE I SAW THIS – see? I indeed exist and was present – at least at that moment. That I might hold it, a thing, an object, something with matter, that matters.
But doesn’t repeat – you see? What I did with the light and the shapes, the forms and the shutter – my “settings” – that is what I look at again and again – it’s “developed” on me. What I saw develops as I see, and then again with each viewing, but is not, I repeat, is NOT what I took the picture of. Which was a moment. My prints, my negatives, are next moments, and next. New situations, new contexts – new sights: with the requisite distortion of my vision.
In the museum, the gallery, the box in my closet, laid out on my desk, with a friend on my couch – new forms, new shapes, new visions surround. Points of view.
Poor vision, you see? Inaccurate. Not the world or the subject, but me. Not my eyes (“corrected” by lenses), but what directs them to look, what selects their focus, blurs the contexts – my settings – what chooses. Responds.
We all have it somewhere, a figure ill-informed and compositely made.
Mine begins like this: part-womb and part-breast, and hair of dark stars. There are wrinkles, faces mostly turned away or altogether absent, save on the specialist of days. It is not rounded. Mostly I study the back. I remain.
Fine-featured then, since I’m left to my own, hips holding rooms and breasts short by half. A particular’d elegance and a voice that soothes, all things I add to what’s missing.
I can smell her or him, scented of pollen and silt. I remain on the lookout, shaping the notes as lines on a canvas, rain over sky.
I believe it appears, here and there, a savior, a teacher, an object to adore. When faced with a mountain or storm I learn more. A natural wonder. There’s awe in the outline.
And passion. Words on a page, notes on a scale, a scintillant stirring.
It comes to light and it sings. In its movements, its promise, its sounds. I embrace and the figure is blurred. My dark shadow. It walks away, or I retreat and recoil.
It looks like this: fluid and sturdy, lithe and filled with quiet fuel. Eternal source (a womb, a breast) and distant constellation (object of desire) otherwise function of the Muse, symbol and seed woven together.
To follow after, and derive. Layered with impossible nourishment, what infinity breeds.
“and any art, after all the other things if may be about, is fundamentally about its medium”
-Ronald Sukenick-
In conclusion?
Perhaps this entire exercise, this simplistic simplification of what I think I might know about the medium of languaging (a mystery to me) has been undertaken and written for myself alone. Perhaps it is comprised of the sounds of sobbing in a dark little attic, me searching to find a “speech fellowship” in this world, in my life experience. I can guarantee to you that it is an experiment in assaulting frontiers, unknowns, and deep abiding fears of mine: that I don’t know what I’m doing, that my languagings aren’t effective, that I don’t relate/co-relate to others well, that my writings are woefully inadequate to experience and the world, that my life doesn’t mean anything, that I and my words don’t matter.
I have hopes beyond these things though.
My hopes, I believe, in part have been to raise or renew an awareness of the mysterious tangle of being languaging engages us in – our realities. And in part to encourage creativity in our usage of language(s), and an openness to its using us, in order for the medium itself to become, and for us to be aware of our languaging as an experiencing, itself. Not necessarily “about” experiences (though it often accomplishes this as well), nor inherently “about” anything “else” – but languaging as activity of being human.
That a compulsion to use language as art, is a movement toward relation and intimacy…to utilize what language(s) open to us, get funky with it (exercise agency), constructing new common places, possible fields, toward more completeness of overlapping or shared experiencing. That our use and experience of languaging is our shared experience – where we meet – without a necessity of sharing referrals or signifieds behind or beyond the words themselves. Meetings in/at/through the artifacts of languaging.
It is my opinion that this is what works of art have always done, regardless of medium, content or imagery: taken available matter, identifiable to us all and humanly acted in and with it, composing it in a manner that becomes its own unique place of experiencing and being.
This often requires undoing habitual ways of using the mediums of living in order that we perceive the human and the medium again, afresh, and are thereby enabled to engage all matters/persons participant directly as experiencing. This may help explain why art is often confounding or unsettling at first…becoming new and unique experiences…as we always fear the unknown swarm of reality until we risk our personalities against/toward/with it.
I want to encourage you, in both expression and encounter, to take more into account, to open against your fears, to begin to engage the materials of experience, the ubiquity of our borderlands, frames and “frontiers” with courage, existing at the thresholds that you always necessarily are, but not only craving the safety that comes from seeking what you know, are accustomed to, have familiarity or agreement with, nor for what it might “mean” or what might lie “behind” it or that it might be “about,” but learning and challenging yourself to meet it directly – to look at it, to relate openly and expectantly.
Moving you to construct in your own surrounds places unique to yourself and available to your world – welcoming or offering others opportunities and possibilities to join. To become.
And how was it I acquired this alphabet among so many others? Broken and crossed-out from the start, I adapted myself, twisted and stretched, contorted and shaped to become something more, something other than my single digit of a mark. Stumbling about all through the letters I reached, bowing this way and that, even circling round on myself exposing the emptiness inside, the only thing noteworthy surrounding me or attached to me from outside, where reality lies. Pleading and spreading my arms, split apart, right up to my crucified and zig-zagged zero-I-ng end.
All my Words are Silent 