Drawing in sand

In September 2019 I got to spend a few days visiting Keiron at “The Philadelphia Office,” a hermetic studio of sorts that he maintained in Philadelphia for several years. Having had conversations, played chess, and photographed inside many of Keiron's studio spaces before, I was prepared for an inspiring experience. I did not, however, expect that Keiron's self-described sketches in stone, would leave an indelible impact on the way I make and think about objects. 

Yesterday I went to see Keiron’s work in a show. He had arranged many stones for the occasion, some carved and some uncarved, within the context of a gallery. The public nature of the gallery space allowed me to witness the work in my own way as well as witness the ways other people responded to the work. 

I was overwhelmed by happiness for Keiron, believing that people’s energy and attention would transfer into the work and nourish the stones like water for plants. But beneath my feelings of celebration, I couldn’t stave off a small and shameful feeling of covetousness. Having talked and thought so much about these stones, having photographed and made prints of them, and even having helped Keiron move them on one or two occasions, I found myself projecting a narrative of impudence onto these strangers as they gasped and smiled and showered the work with their love. What did they know about where those stones came from? What did they know about Keiron and the sacrifices he had made so that those stones could exist before them? 

Several hours later, I found myself involved in a conversation about tourism and the collection of cultural artifacts from abroad. I didn't say much in the conversation, not wanting to take up space, but enjoyed listening to one guest’s provocative inquisition and the host’s agreeable defenses. Are these objects being represented as trophies of conquest? Are these objects being used as part of a ritual that expresses reverence for the culture that created them? Are the objects maybe even better off untethered to the intentions of their creator, expanding their identity to encompass new meaning and life under new contexts? 

Keiron's sketches in stone have helped many of the aforementioned questions percolate inside of me for years. One way I think about his work is through the simple fact of their re-contextualization - they have been brought from there to here and placed in such a way for your consideration. In this sense the stones are like R.Mutt’s toilet and Duchamp's gesture of placing an allegedly non-art object on a pedestal in an art gallery. I like to take this sculptural gesture of re-contextualization and stretch it across media into the realm of the photographic; then I like to take it one step further and say that this gesture boils down to the very essence of the photographic impulse. The camera is the tourist, snatching up surface appearances in order to reproduce them at a later date within the context of the tourist’s own language, materials, and space. 

I use a camera to consider something that I love, or something I think I can learn about love from. The photographic process is an attempt to draw out the moment of intimacy between photographer and subject. When I make a photograph I try to clear my mind of preconceptions, I want to see my subject forming questions or answers in a language unique to their body.

Photographing these sketches in stone, which are Keiron’s “artworks” - for lack of a better term, is an especially perplexing experience for me because it complicates notions I hold around authorship. Keiron has not asked me to photograph his work and he has not paid me to do it. Long ago I had the idea to photograph Keiron’s work, Keiron was perfectly happy to facilitate my idea and I continue to do so for reasons that I do not fully understand. I don’t know that I can call these photographs my artwork, I don’t even know that it matters whether they are, or are not, my artwork. If someone wanted to buy my photograph of Keiron’s work, I would split any earnings with him evenly. I know that I am compelled to make these photographs, and my doing so has not gone unrewarded, however opaque those rewards may be.

Over the last several years as I have increased the seriousness with which I consider photography, I have questioned the line between photography and other artistic mediums. I have been proud of photography and embarrassed by it. I have called photography he/him, painting she/her, and sculpture they/them; but what if there is no difference between these media, really? What if one of Keiron’s sketches in stone – a composition of uncarved stones positioned in such and such a way, is actually my photograph drawing in sand – a composition of lines left in sand by the outgoing tide? What if none of us are the author, but merely fingers that point at the moon? 

Into It

            The snow is piled several feet deep outside my window in the Catskill mountains, but my mind is far away in 1970’s Los Angeles. I’m attracted to the snow for the way it covers holes, pinecones, and rocks. Snow flattens the topography just like water creates an even surface over the depth of a pool. I am thinking this way because I recently watched the 1974 film by Jack Hazan about David Hockney : A Bigger Splash.

            There are currently three documents about David Hockney floating around my mind : A Bigger Splash, Secret Knowledge, and David Hockney By David Hockney. The second is a book that has lived on my list of books-to-read for nearly four years, but it was also made as a BBC television special in 1992, which I found and watched proceeding A Bigger Splash. The third document is a book, never a film, and has a long autobiographical text that accompanies Hockney’s visual works dating from his youth up until 1976, when the book was published. The BBC film pleased me to no end, with its obsessive inquiry into photographic techniques, and its dramatic unfolding akin to a detective story. The autobiographical book, however, frustrated me for the urgency of activity it inspired. The line drawings were so perfectly human that I thought to myself, as I sometimes do, ‘I must give up silly pursuits of the camera and put pencil to paper.’ Why is this so often the response I have to great art? Why am I obliged to give up my current pursuits and follow in the footsteps of some other particularly expressive genius?

A - confidence.

B - focus.

            Let me now, for a moment, stall the seemingly necessary examination of a profound pain caused by my lack of A + B, and instead look back on the method of discovery that brought me to such compelling artwork : the golden thread that led me to Hockney. As I mentioned, Secret Knowledge existed for me on a to-do list. David Hockney by David Hockney existed for me as a vintage book, a beautiful stack of pages clothbound in green, which has been living on my bookshelf for as long as I can remember even if I didn’t pay it much attention. These cultural artifacts had traveled with me for years in the various channels of storage that make up my world : the material architecture of a bookshelf and the digital data of megabytes.  My partner has been feeling ill since our roommate tested positive for coronavirus. The realities of a global pandemic shape my social interactions, and they shape my physical circumstances too. Especially now, I have been grateful for my health. I am trying to indulge myself in fruitful indolence, seeking the sweet spot between contradictions. This has meant reading, meditating, taking baths, and going on walks. Also, of course, there is much screen watching. Finding the right movie to watch is of preliminary importance and overwhelming difficulty, it is the decision that determines the balance of my future ‘s fruitfulness and the idleness.

            To digress further down this rabbit hole, I am reminded that foraging for mushrooms is an apt metaphor for the passive discovery of treasure. Don’t they say you can’t go looking for love, it has to find you? My dad keeps this quote in his wallet, “seeking happiness is like trying to get a butterfly to land on your shoulder, if you ignore the pursuit and go about your business then one may just come and rest on you for a moment.” I’ve butchered the quote somehow, surely, but in doing so I am reminded of a young Opal Whitely in the most magical photograph. The one in which nearly a dozen butterflies float about her : landing on her hands, clung to her hair, resting on her shoulders. 

            Enough, okay, I will try to dig myself out of this hole in the snow, back to the other night, quarantining. I was trying to find a movie that could appeal to my dulled senses through drama and action, but also appeal to my intellect by staking its claim within the ongoing research that fuels my artwork. As I made my way through writeups on the various films screening on the platform, I found myself excited about a 1980 film by Bill Gunn, Personal Problems. The trailer was especially effective, it promised a lo-fi authenticity with heart wrenching piano ballad accompaniment; but the piano player’s voice reminded me of works by another genius Arthur Jafa. I decided not to settle there but instead go to see if Arthur Jafa had any film recommendations. Sure enough, it was easy to find him sharing good films he had watched and was thinking about, and that is where I found A Bigger Splash.

            I’m loving this, this winding and mysterious way that art finds me and I find it. Part of me wonders if I wouldn’t be plenty satisfied just seeing, hearing, and reading great works of art. No making required. The art of consumption. The art of maintaining an active mind. But, too much mind? That worries me actually. I think that I must use my hands to create: in the flesh, on the page, etc…

            Well, a good solution to the common dilemma of what to do and how to think is quite often to simply do something, and then find out what you think. 

            I’ve made this drawing just now, in my best ( current best, not always best - mind you ) Ode to Hockney. In A Bigger Splash, Hockney uses the camera to document his model for later reproduction in paint on the picture plane. I was just now drawing what lay before my eyes, and couldn’t help looking out onto that tree in the yard and remembering the silly photograph that I made yesterday. Yesterday’s photograph began as an image in my head - a mental sketch, inspired in me by a book called Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling. Those descriptive words activate the human body and describe a multitude of motivations, but while I drew on a piece of paper they coalesced for me and I thought of nothing more than of diving into it. Out the window, into the cold air, onto the snow; wherever I can favor my body to feel something, wherever I can engage the objective world and what it has to offer. In that moment I was thinking those thoughts and I was actually just sitting down drawing on a piece of paper. I looked out onto the snow and projected an image of myself, immersing myself in the landscape, I willed myself to hang from a tree wearing tighty-whiteys. I ran to it, every stride a new barefooted emergence in snow up past my shins. I actually placed the tripod, set the timer, pushed the button, and climbed up into the tree. The camera took a picture while I hung from my arms, inactive for the duration of exposure.

I don’t’ know where this leaves me. I’m before a piece fo paper thinking about David Hockney, about Portrait of an Artist (pool with two figures) 1972. I’m thinking about the fully clothed figure whose gaze ventures beneath the surface of a pool to another figure. The other figure is swimming, fully submerged in the water, wearing tighty-whiteys. 

Reproduction

One thing I think about when I think about photography is reproduction. “Drawing from life” is another form of reproduction, a strategy of mark making that attempts to reproduce certain 3-dimensional subjects on a 2-dimensional piece of paper. But the kind of reproduction that I think about in relation to photography has less to do with that desire to capture the world on paper than it does with the need to create a multiple: a singular image that can be accessed in a multitude of places and times. To provide a counter example, I consider the individual human as unique, not multiple; an individual human is restrained to a singular body, in a singular space. When I think about photography and reproduction, I think about the way that any number of humans, in any number of spaces, can access the “same” image.

I love conversations about how “digital” reproduction is somehow distinct from “analog” reproduction, but I admit that my current meditation is otherwise. Any photograph means something unique to me on Tuesday and something different when I look at it, or a reproduction of it, on Wednesday.

It would seem that nothing remains the same, regardless of material, place, or time.

Works of painting and sculpture would seem to have straightforward relationship to “uniqueness.” The artist makes the work and hopefully finds a place outside the studio for it to exist, the artist can then perceive a lack of that particular work in their life. I have rarely, if ever, known this experience of “missing” an artwork; as a photographer I always hold onto a negative or digital file and can access the image at any point in time. Considering the notion of a unique work, I decided to load photosensitive paper into my camera, as opposed to the traditional method of loading photosensetive film into the camera. Film is initially sensitive to light, and once developed it remains partially translucent. Film is made this way so that light can shine through it onto light sensitive paper, producing a photographic reproduction print. By loading paper into my camera instead of film, I bypassed the film: the essence of traditional reproduction, making instead a relatively unique image on paper.

Now… for the subject matter of the image in question: I must return to this notion of reproduction and the physical im/possibility of it. I look at a reproduction on Tuesday and it is different still from my viewing of it on Wednesday. And so….. I took some 20 photographic prints of the sky and I made a small pile of them on the ground. On top of the pile I placed two small rocks, and I hoped that that rocks would hold the prints down- keep them in place like a paperweight- keep things from shifting about and changing position in space and in time. But this task in im/possible. I mounted the photographic print, and I designed a frame for good measure, but still… it refuses to keep still, as I understand it.

On Nothingness

There’s a photograph of an empty bookshelf that I took several years ago, and I’ve been wanting to complete it somehow. Today I actually posted it on instagram for a few minutes, writing something sarcastic about Marie Kondo in the caption, but then I deleted it. Photos of nothing are a delicate breed, they can easily fall flat, but if handled well they deliver my favorite kind of photographic experiences. At one end of photography, and I’m thinking mostly images like studio still lives, there is a great formal pleasure in the composition, weight, and texture. At the other end, and now I’m thinking mostly of journalistic or documentary images, the photograph carries centuries of history within it, violence, oppression, and maybe justice. How can I put this succinctly? How can I write it without losing whatever mystery existed in my head?

My favorite kind of photographic experiences happen when a picture seems completely open ended, rudely so at first. I wonder what laziness compelled this artist to produce such a work, and what audacity allowed them to place the burden of interpretation on me, the viewer. But then I read something, or I hear something, or I go out in the world and I see something, and inside of me the image slowly develops a meaningfulness. Thanks to whatever insecurities I hold onto, my first reaction to work that doesn’t look like my own is often critical, but great power lies in one’s ability to control that shift toward criticality or praise. A good teacher has this talent, they can read the room and intentionally exercise empathy with the artist. A good teacher will generously offer up their creative response to the work by following a train of thought that began with something right there in the frame, but through the same process they may offer a criticism to someone whose confidence would otherwise grow unchecked. I’ve heard of Australia’s culture of “Tall Poppy Syndrome,” where those individuals who grow too big are quickly brought down, and I’m not advocating for that per se It’s just that I know there is a balance and it takes a wisdom to maintain.

In relation to my photograph of an empty bookshelf, what I wanted to say about Marie Kondo came from a place of stripping away the unnecessary. In that sense, the bookshelf feels timely and political, it is the hole where a monument to xyz slaveholder used to stand. I wonder just how many books on my shelf perpetuate the perspective of the white male? Shouldn’t I take them all down, examine each book and it’s biases carefully, and put back only those that will help me build a better and more equitable future?

I made the photograph when my brother was moving out of his place in San Francisco. One way I’ve considered completing the picture is by printing it on a lightweight paper that floats easily with any passing motion in the air. When I move into a new place I will make this the very first photograph to go up on the wall, and it would have to be the only one for some time. It would remind me to go carefully into every decision about what to bring into the space and where it might live. But this photograph is better off untethered to architecture, the bookshelf is analogous to the mind in the same way that a computer hard drive is. These are structures that allow for a system of storage and retrieval. I confess I meditate - I care about mindfulness, call me cliche! But I do feel a deep-seated understanding of Nam Jun Paik’s Zen for Film, 1964, an empty 16 mm projection, and in my bones I have experienced the benefits of what nothingness has to teach. To steer back to the bookshelf and “my favorite kind of photographic experiences,” this nothingness is where we start and where we end in a photograph. As the author of this empty bookshelf, I have experienced innumerable meanings from the image, I allow myself to follow a golden thread but in time I let it go. I am left then with a photograph of an empty bookshelf. It is merely a plot of sand, where words have been written but washed away, where every new visitor may enjoy the essential pleasure of thinking responses through language, each in their own unique way.

Running Away

Justine Kurland’s new book “Girl Pictures” is heartbreakingly beautiful, and has given me a kind of organizing principle through which to focus my past artistic motivations. Above all, the book is about the urge to run away.

My first memory of running away was some time around 3rd grade. My friend Steven Woods was sleeping over, and after the sun finally set on our long afternoon of playing catch and looking at baseball cards we settled into my bedroom and dressed down for sleeping. I remember the exact pair of red plaid boxer underwear I had on, I was excited about them because I had only recently upgraded from tighty-whitey’s and enjoyed the abundant space, but this particular pair was just the wrong texture so that it didn’t do a good job of absorbing whatever remains of pee came out after I pulled up my pants up. It was late enough to be retired in my room, but we weren’t saying goodnight yet. Steven had moved from New York the year before, he always wore a Yankees hat and acted tough, and we got to daring eachother we couldn’t sneak out of the house without anyone noticing. This was an easy task actually, my room was in the very front of the house and we had only to slip out of my bedroom door and then 5 feet to our right was the front door. So we did, out the door, down the three brick steps, across 15 feet of mowed grass lawn, a sidewalk, and then hallelujah the street. The cement felt good on our bare feet, and once we were there our instincts kicked in, “Run! let’s go to Pardee Park! They’ll never find us there!!!” so we sprinted and giggled and yelled at eachother, our words falling behind the speed of our feet. Now I noticed the second failing of my new boxer underwear: there was no button for the pee-hole, and I achieved a whole new level of freedom as my penis got perfectly bounced out of the opening in the red plaid, and stayed there taking in the breeze as I ran away from home as if for my life.

We got to the end of the block and turned left, then kept our speed for another short block until we crossed the street into Pardee Park. There we jogged across the huge field, to the climbing tree on the far side of the park. We climbed in our baggy shirts and underwear up into the trees where we were hidden by the canopy, and there we perched for some time, catching our breath and whispering. After a while, we saw a man rumaging through the trash in the distance. We pointed to the plastic bags covering his feet and laughed and snorted and tried to keep quiet. I think we were scared of the homeless man, we didn’t know what to do and so we made fun of him, but there we were all run away from home and confronted with a real deal homeless person.

It didn’t take long for my brother, three years my senior, to come and find us in the tree. He relished the responsibility of his chore and treated us with a mixture of reprimand and pity for our predictability. As promised, I havn’t ended up where I intended in this little writing, but what I am trying to say is that running away is a topic that has gotten alot of mileage in art making. It’s a pursuit of freedom that is fleeting and ephemeral, because if you run away for too long, there’s no home to go back to.

Rocks & Minerals

It seems like the obvious place to start so it’s where I’ll start for now, even if it’s not where I started before. I was looking through a used bookstore in rural Michigan for wonderfully weathered paper that I might print on, when I came upon the second edition of “A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals” by Frederick H. Pough, from The Peterson Field Guide Series, printed in May of 1956. I thought I would probably cut out some pages with interesting text or graphics and print over them, it was a general approach I was taking to printing at the time but a significant part of me felt like I was being insensitive and ignorant towards the actual content of these books. How can I make an artwork with some geological information as the substrate, but not have explored my curiosity much further than the words that appear on that single page? So I kept the book and find myself almost a year later reading into it in hopes of discovering what kind of rocks I had been looking at when I made a particular picture.

I took the picture on a camping trip with my brother along the northern California coastal range. I had just seen a Vija Celmins retrospective, and I couldn’t think about anything else but views of the ground before me and the all-over compositions she reproduced so wonderfully in graphite.

The word “Shale” was floating around my head somehow as I stumbled on the picture in my harddrive today. I hadn’t been inclined to identify any of the rocks I’ve made pictures of before, but I’ve been really excited by the rock photographs of Bronwen Wickstrom, and I spoke with her briefly in the park yesterday, so I decided to give the whole identification thing a try. Pough’s Field Guide says this about Shale on p. 316: “The thin layers and the fine clayey material that compose shale are very characteristic, but its color may vary from black to white, with grays, dark reds and greens very common. Fossils, often of leaves and plant remains, are frequent.” I can’t quite remember what color this particular shale was, if it was shale, but I really do believe it was pretty much the grey you see here. Imagine running down a hill of this stuff, every foot sinking into it and rebounding your weight from foot to foot in strides of increasing distance until the slope settles down; that’s a wonderful way to expend the potential energy of elevation.