March 22, 2008
March 21, 2008
Failure as Destination
I was listening to The Microphones and Neutral Milk Hotel today. I was thinking about the lo-fi sound; the fuzzes and pops, the slightly off-key singing, the less than perfect musicianship, etc., and I realized that this is what makes it beautiful. Their failure is beautiful. The implied impossibility of expressing themselves to the full extent of their vision is endearing. It is like when a kindergartener writes you a letter and some of the letters are backwards, and the text slopes down to the right and gets squeezed on the edge of the page. But through trying so hard you can see, and in some way better than looking directly at it, the true beauty of what they are trying to do. It is like looking at a bunch of clouds passing over the sun. All the cracks and different opacities and god rays are what are impressive. Looking directly at the sun is just blinding. In fact it’s impossible unless you are looking through some sort of filter, be it the clouds, sunglasses, or the atmosphere itself during sunset. So if the source of art is pure beauty, or pure emotion, or pure something, then art is simply a filter put in place so that we can look directly at it. Instead of art as a producer of beauty, it is a reducer, which breaks things down to a manageable size and intensity.
Four and Rit Memories.
March 16, 2008
March 14, 2008
Birth days
Tuesday was my birthday, and it was also the day my Uncle died. It was definitely a shock, but not totally unexpected. My Uncle never was in the best of health. My family didn’t tell me until Wednesday though. They didn’t want to taint my celebration of life with the darkness of death. I wish they would have though. I’m not one for getting trashed and celebrating my birthday like it is New Years; it’s more of a personal New Year. Viewing my Uncle’s death through the lens of my birthday isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s made me take a more serious look at what another year means.
It is strange because on Monday I began to think about death in a new way. As a young person death has been something relegated to otherness. It has always been far away from me, both in a sense of time and physical and emotional distance. Not many of my relatives have died and I’ve never had any close calls myself. I am not saying that I haven’t thought about it. I have thought about death a great deal, but always in an abstract sense, like thinking about a science experiment. The other day I started thinking about my death. I stopped thinking about death as an abstract distant event and thought of it instead as something that is going to happen to me. It is something that I will encounter; something that I will have to deal with in some way. I know this seems obvious, and it is a thought that I just assumed was already in place. Of course I am going to die, eventually, but I always kept that thought at a distance so as not to permeate me. On Monday I let it in. It is genuinely horrifying, and anyone who says death doesn’t scare them is a liar or delusional. Death is the opposite of everything we know, it is the ultimate unknown. It is odd how I thought about death so seriously the day before (possibly the day of, they don’t know the exact time of death) my Uncle passed away. It makes me wonder if it is more than coincidence. Maybe there is such thing as emotional gravity, and when something you had a connection with disappears you feel it. Like when twins know when the other one is hurt or in trouble. I also found this poem by Cid Corman on Wednesday night:
Hey – it
aint just
any
one who
dies: it’s
you. That’s
what makes
today
so clear.
March 9, 2008
March 5, 2008
I Heart Photograph
I was very excited to learn that I am going to be included in the IHeartPhotograph show “Is it possible to make a photograph of New Jersey no matter where you are in the world?” Then I was significantly less excited when I realized that everyone who entered got in. Buzzkill. I still think the thematic premise of the show is great though. Plus I get a pdf with all of the other work from the show too, which I will be happy to send anyone once I get it. So if you are in South Orange, New Jersey from April 6 – May 25, stop by the Pierro Gallery, to see my prints at the glorious size of 5×7 inches.
Although I am still in full support of this show, it does remind me of something I read about the Maysles brothers who made the cult classic documentary Grey Gardens. It said something to the effect that good documentary filmmakers realize that their subjects are far more interesting than anything they themselves could say about them. It poses an interesting parallel for the IHeartPhotograph show. Will the conceptual framework overshadow the work contained therein? Is the work being used to illustrate a point it was not initially intended for, and therefore being subverted and overpowered by this imposed structure? Is Google itself more interesting than the results you can get on it?
