Consolidation thoughts
what is beauty what is art what is photography what is meaning what is being
There have been some recurrent themes in the media I’ve been consuming.
I was sick over thanksgiving weekend and so I finished two books I’ve been reading for months (finally- such a relief and feeling of accomplishment).
I also made it through a 14 consecutive day period of an experimental concept I’ve been playing with: Photo Sobriety. Meaning: no taking any photos or screenshots in any capacity. I did a stretch of one week back in September, leading up to Matt and Marissa’s wedding, with the idea that I would work up to longer stretches and see how it felt. I’ve been recording when the need or urge to photograph comes up in a notebook. The 14 consecutive days took me around 24 to accomplish, meaning I broke several times in the first ten days.
I’ve been reading Sontag’s On Photography as a conceptual support to this project.
One of the books I finished this weekend, Tim Carpenter’s To Photograph is To Learn How to Die feels like the spiritual balance to Sontag, in that it is a text that deeply believes in the possibilities of photography.
A few excerpts from the end that really brought things together for me. These specific bits are about freedom.
In engaging in the question “what should I do?” we are also engaging the question “who should I be?” and there is no final answer to that question. This is our spiritual freedom.
My point is not to provide criteria for the difficult decisions regarding life and death, but to elucidate why their difficulty is an essential feature of leading a free, spiritual life. Existential anxiety is at work in every form of spiritual life, since it opens us to the question of what we ought to do with our time. Moreover, the anxious relation to finitude is not even ideally to be overcome.
I’ll take that as permission to give in to my existenial anxiety.
It all comes down to this: you can give in to the cosmic dread, or you can make something useful that affirms being while still recognizing every bit of pain and difficulty. (The photograph must, since it necessarily embraces the actual, also manifest its poverty: the inability of the maker to ever bridge the gap between what is and what is not. Its not about ‘truth,’ but about what can be confirmed as sufficient.
The camera is singular (superior) in getting at the ineffable: it exposes (and, in the photograph, tentatively resolves) the inherent lack that defines the self; it does this by honoring the world in its thusness. In other words, our machine is decreative in its nature while simultaneously allowing the photographer to manifest the ache of his incompleteness and formal will - the freedom- to choose amound relationships and possibilities, and thus to effect human meaning.
FORM = POSSIBILITY = FREEDOM = SELF
When I read this to Lucy, their immediate reaction was something to the effect of: Why is he trying to write about everything.
I need to learn more about decreation. There’s a whole section in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace on Decreation that I have sort of avoided.
The other book I finished as on loan from Lucy, Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, my first Cusk. She writes about her family’s travels in Italy, their explorations of Italian culture, food and art. In particular, her fixation on beauty and what the purpose of art holds for her and for the world, really caught me.
Without beauty, the human sensibility becomes discouraged. One could look at a flower, of course, or a child; but to look at a painting is to feel looked at, comprehended, yourself. It is to experience empathy, for what is art bu tthe struggle to acknowledge the fact that we ourselves were created? Over time the morality of art has become clear and distinct: we don’t ask it to be correct, or selfless, or didactic, or judgemental. We don’t blame it for the uses to which it is put. We don’t expect it to intervene, to determine, to make peace or war, to end poverty or greed, to abate suffering. We ask only that it be beautiful and true. We turn to it to dignify our experience of the world; to find a reply to the question of consciousness.
We jump into the water.
It is salty, and dark in its depths. We break its membrane: we send furrows and folds traveling across its surface. The ligth has nearly gone. The children swim away into the distance. They leave a wake behind them, a path of ripples that is a kind of membory of themselves, a record etched in the water. Their small heads make two round, black, dense shapes in the distances of the pool. Behind them the path erases itself: this is how they will live, advancing themselves through the yielding, unremembering world, holding their heads upright above the surface. It is half terrible, that they should have to support the mystery of their own selves, just as a work of art must support its own mystery and bear its own fate, however beautiful and beloved it is. For it seems so relentless to me there in the water, the erasing, the dissolving, the rubbing out of each minute by the next. Almost, it is unbearable. It strikes me tht the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worth-less toys in the children’s bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesnt erase.
A record of an instant? Sounds like a photograph to me.
What do Italians have? I remember the traffic policeman who stood at the mouth of the tunnel with his elaborate braided uniform, his long leather boots, his snowy gloves, his manner that was both theatrial and sincere. He courteously waved us out of his land like an actor at the final curtain. The Italians have splendor. What would a decision be like that had splendor at its basis. To what strange, beautiful expectations would it give rise?
I finished the weekend by watching the Agnes Martin documentary With My Back To The World back to back on Sunday. Once alone and once with Lucy, because I wasn’t paying close attention the first time but what I caught seemed worth sharing. Its not so much a film as a way to listen to Agnes's arrant wisdom. She describes over and over again that her work is about beauty and happiness.
That’s what I paint about. The subtle emotions that we feel without cause in this world. I’m hoping when people respond to them they will realize, they make responses to things that are completely abstract. And that their lives are broader than they think.
And that you need to have a clear head to let in inspiration.
I’m very careful not to have ideas, because they’re inaccurate.
Intellect is the servant of ego.
And lastly, this, which I really needed to hear after a long holiday weekend of sitting with my sick self:
You really can’t be an artist if you can’t be alone.
Other encounters worth mentioning:
Two part Piplotti Rist show at Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine
Kanopy subscription via my library card !! (not Brooklyn but hometown MA library) I love the library!!!
This absolutely bonkers Youtube video on Agnes Martin as a follow up to the film (we were trying to find more images or footage or interviews of her from when she was young)