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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, May 15, 2006
An interesting manifesto from this website:"Non-photography day is an effort on my part to revive the moment by putting down the camera. It is a day to think about how life exists, in essence and not appearance and to understand the inadequacy of the photograph in describing this essence, to bring awareness of the perils of living through the view finder or the display screen…
This day was made after trekking through the Jungle on the Thailand/Burma Border with a group of travellers. As you would expect we came across many wonderful views, villages and creatures on our way; however I noticed that the people around me were living in these moments through their camera, and as soon as we stopped and were still, all reached for their camera... I felt my fellow travellers rarely really appreciated the essence of the moment they were in or engaged in any relationship between themselves and the places we stopped. They were more concerned with gaining the pattern the camera made. I felt sad for them, as it seemed they were missing out on so much reality through their obsession, an act of possession- of wanting to own the appearance of the place, as if this was all it had to give and photographs were their way of taking it."
What interested me about this was that this was the view I originally held but have since completely changed my mind. Originally, I felt that photography was a mechanical way of viewing the world, which only served to dim the immediacy of experience. Since then, I've come to see it as a way of slowing experience and regaining observation of intricacy and detail (as Susan Sontag put it, "All photographs are memento mori"). I'm thinking of how neuroscience has come to describe consciousness as a series of individual moments, which like a flickbook are asembled to create the illusion of a continuous stream; photography or painting return us to the moment that lies underneath the illusion:"Consciousness also does funny things with time. A good example is the “cutaneous rabbit”. If a person’s arm is tapped rapidly, say five times at the wrist, then twice near the elbow and finally three times on the upper arm, they report not a series of separate taps coming in groups, but a continuous series moving upwards?as though a little creature were running up their arm. We might ask how taps two to four came to be experienced some way up the forearm when the next tap in the series had not happened yet. How did the brain know where the next tap was going to fall?"
Nonetheless, I still feel to some extent that any form of art, photography included since it is every bit as contrived a representation of reality as impressionist or cubist painting (certainly in my own photography I have gradually become increasingly conscious of different techniques and styles I was repeatedly using without having thought that at first that it was anything other than a transparent reflection of my subject), is an objectification of experience, something that necessarily involves standing outside life and at a remove from it. In that sense, I think of a line from Derek Jarman's film of Caravaggio; "all art against life."
posted by Richard 5:23 pm
