Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 126
Self-portrait with “Blue Misterioso”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. There is no subject the photographer might attempt that could not be touched with pathos. All photogrpahs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Photography by Susan Sontag in Anthology: Selected Essays from Thirty Years of The New York Review of Books, edited by Robert S. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 52
Boat hull
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The modern way of seeing is to see in fragments. It is felt that reality is essentially unlimited, and knowledge is open-ended. It follows that all boundaries, all unifying ideas have to be misleading, demagogic; at best, provisional; almost always, in the long run, untrue. To see reality in the light of certain unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our experience. But it also – so the modern way of seeing instructs us – denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real. Thereby it represses our energy, indeed our right, to remake what we wish to remake – our society, ourselves. What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.
Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, editors, Susan Sontag At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 49
Untitled, 24″ x 24″ chromogenic print, edition of 5
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The beauty of art is better, “higher,” according to Hegel, than the beauty of nature because it is made by human beings and is the work of the spirit. But the discerning of beauty in nature is also the result of traditions of consciousness, and of culture – in Hegel’s language, of spirit.
The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent. As Wilde pointed out, art does more than school us on how and what to appreciate in nature. (He was thinking of poetry and painting. Today the standards of beauty in nature are largely set by photography.) What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.
A happy by-product of this insight, if insight it is: beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous.
Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”
Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, editors, Susan Sontag At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 34
On the High Line
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.
In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the king’s army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of monuments, department stores, mammals, wonders of nature, methods of transport, works of art, and other classified treasures from around the globe.
Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.
Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag in On Photography
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 