I create images. The first thing most people will ask me about my images is what are they photographs of? This is natural in the sense that the viewer wants to bring up his preconceived notions about what the subject is to judge what he or she sees—I intend to deny them this pleasure, at least when their first impression is forming. At the end of the process, not the beginning, I want you to know what it is an image of. The reason is simple, these are not abstract images in the proper sense of the word, but I want the viewer not to impose their reality on my image; I want them to see the thing for the first time, unencumbered by their preconceptions of what the subject is.
Also, I use this the word “image” because I’m trying to make the point that artistically that there is no difference whatsoever between a painting and a photograph; in both cases the artist has something in his mind that he is trying to bring to life as an image. There is no reason not to consider my images as one might consider a painting of the same subject. What confuses people is the technical process is so different that they think the end product must be different. Also, the term “photography” covers a lot of ground, and it is hard not to think of all photography as the same thing more or less—this is false.
Technology is technology, tube paint was as much of a revolution in painting as digital processing was for photography, yet I don’t see nearly every magazine on the subject of painting dedicated to the technology of painting as I do in photography. This is a problem that we photographers have brought on ourselves. Photography is not solely or even mainly about its technology, and this is especially true of photographic Art.
Many folks seem to think that because the technology behind a painting is different that the technology behind a photograph the images they create are different in purpose. Speaking strictly about photographic Art, the differences are more between artists than between images. Of course technology has an impact, and sometimes a large one; “realistic” painting lessened in artistic import with the advent of the camera, but the artistic purpose of creating photographic Art and painted Art is not so different.
No. 20: Death, Art and Truth
My dog died the other day. She was a fifteen-year-old English Cocker Spaniel. She was loved and a full member of the family. This was a real event; real tears were shed by the entire family; she will be missed.
I also had the opportunity recently to see the magical soprano, Anna Netrebko, sing the great cavatina “Casta Diva/ Ah! bello a me riturna” from Bellini’s opera, Norma, an aria contrasting divine and profane love. She was her great self; a voice from heaven, she was the music incarnate. I am not ashamed to say that I was very moved by deep feelings of the tragic nature of the human condition. These feelings were genuine from my point of view, but were created by her artifice. She was giving her all to convince me that she was the personification of sacred and profane love itself; she succeeded miraculously, but still it was artifice: Anna Netrebko was not really conflicted and her character was not real.
Which experience was true? The fact that Art is created by someone always makes it, and the feelings it may arouse false in a certain sense, but things are more complicated than they seem at first blush. Ms. Netrebko’s aria was false in the sense that she was not Norma, but it was true in that it conveyed feeling of human tragedy honestly and aroused in me feelings of empathy that were real in the sense that I actually felt them. They also served the useful function of encouraging me to think about human short-comings and the possible true dimensions of divine love.
One of the great issues all artists face who are trying to accomplish more than a fashionable piece of kitsch, is the criticism leveled by many that art is mere mimesis, an imitation of nature, which makes art dependent on nature and therefore inferior to it. In other words, Art stimulates false feelings because Art itself is false. Max Weber believed that this wasn’t a problem in an ethical sense because the philosophy of Art, aesthetics, was not even concerned with the issue as he pointed out in “Science as Vocation”:
Consider a discipline such as aesthetics. The fact that there are works of art is a given for aesthetics. It seeks to find out under what conditions this fact exists, but it does not raise the question of whether or not the realm of art is perhaps a realm of diabolical grandeur, a realm of this world, and therefore, in its core, hostile to God and in its innermost and aristocratic spirit, hostile to the brotherhood of man. Hence aesthetics does not ask whether there should be works or art.
Soren Kierkegaard took the bull by the horns when he said in Fear and Trembling: “A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.” This is closer to the truth; admit that the craft of Art is artifice that can be used for good or evil. It is not by its nature evil, however, any more than rhetoric is; the issue is whether the speaker is a good lover or a bad lover to use Plato’s example. At Art’s best it is a life-force that can defeat the devil by giving man a reason to hope, the devil’s poison.
Furthermore, Soren Kierkegaard again put his finger on a great truth when trying to explain how one becomes a “knight of infinite resignation:” “This [movement] requires passion. Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion, and no reflection can produce a movement.” We know and make judgments about the world using our reason and our emotions because, as I’ve written previously, reason without emotion cannot judge. In part this is because we only reason about things that matter to us, i.e., cause an emotional reaction. Art brings an emotional charge to truth, and this charge can lead to action; Art is more than true facts. To quote Rabindrath Tagore, a Nineteenth Century Indian poet:
Clothed in facts
Truth feels oppressed;
In the garb of poetry
It moves easy and free.
So, Art uses the devil’s tool of illusion to deliver beauty and truth more effectively than logic alone. I enjoy listening to Ms. Netrebko because I experience truth in her Art that I can appreciate all the better because of the distance from reality that Art provides. After all, the actual experience of truth can only be tolerated in very small doses.
No. 19: Color
To return to earth, color in photography has generally been concerned with fidelity. This was logical for technical reasons: it was very difficult to accomplish. As late as 1957, people as expert as Arnold Newman, Ansel Adams and Paul Strand complained about the lack of control with color. Eliot Porter’s use of dye transfer around this time was probably the first instance of controllable, accurate, and potentially natural colors.
Artistically, color has been problematic because of this focus on fidelity. Of course every artist creates what he or she sees, and as I’ve noted previously that will be a highly individualized reaction. But the interplay between two good friends, Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams is instructive. To this day Eliot Porter’s work is appreciated by many more for its political impact than its artistry. The problem of course begins with his intent, which was to take man out of nature so that he could thereby defend the wilderness using its beauty as a shield. As Eliot Porter’s brother noted, the ecological aesthetic shows that everything is connected, that “[T]here is no subject and background, every corner is alive.” Thus, absent the human imprint or a dominant subject, the emotional temperature of an image by Eliot Porter is cooled dramatically. Ansel Adams’ intent, however, was to create black and white images that reflected his very personal experience of nature as an artist and are therefore full of a man, the artist whose perspective it is. He never accepted color as capable of being as powerful an expressive force as black and white, with its lovely luminosity and almost architectural presence. Ansel Adams thought that the reproduction of natural color was not of much artistic value, despite its beauty, because the artist’s lack of precise control made it capable of only a documentary approach rather than an artistic reaction to the natural. For Eliot Porter, the point was nature; for Ansel Adams, the point was man.
I admire the Art of Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams very much, and when color was new their differences were appropriate. Now, however, color is easily duplicated in the digital environment, even if the original capture was poor. Thus, to the extent the difficulty level of the craft has diminished, the artistic value of fidelity has been reduced. The dispute, however, remains legitimate. Is the faithful reproduction of the subject sufficient to be Art, even if the result is beautiful? I think that Art demands more than science; it demands the experience and sensitivity of the artist. The tree of the poet and the tree of the beggar is the same to science, but not to the poet and beggar; one sees shade from the heat or cover from the rain, and the other sees an icon of the life force in the world.
My approach is to see the subject as it is if properly understood: a thing of many possibilities. Recall, that I’ve previously said that a person’s conscious view of the world is like a JPEG in that it has been processed by the subconscious brain to “correct” it and reduce the space required to handle all the data. The data the camera’s sensor collects is the RAW image, literally and figuratively, and therefore it has far more data than a person would be conscious of. By adjusting the saturation data in conjunction with other adjustments, one can bring to the fore or send into the background colors in the image that might not be noticed at first. This is not being photographically dishonest, because these colors were actually present when the sensor was exposed. All I am doing is shifting emphasis for artistic purposes, just as black and white photographers have always done. This approach requires the artist to be more knowledgeable about color theory because color theory will help the artist understand how enhancing yellow, for example, might affect the viewer’s perception of the image. Additionally, the resultant image is intentionally not a faithful reproduction of what the average person would see if standing in the shoes of the photographer. In fact, a given image might even appear “unreal,” but a proper understanding of what “real” means in an epistemological sense should free the viewer of any such prejudice.
Thus, Eliot Porter and his fellow artists conquered color and used it for their own purposes, artistically and politically. Now we have an opportunity to go beyond the normal perception of reality to a broader and therefore more artistic view of things. Photography has for too long been perceived to be a merely documentary medium. While documentary photography will always be important, the artistic photographer should feel free to take wing and see the world from a different perspective.
No. 18: The Art Spirit (Continued)
To continue my last thoughts on beauty just a bit, Robert Henri generally agrees with Robert Adams that beauty is orderly, but I submit that there is a danger here of going too far because beauty does not equate to order; William Blake was a klaxon in this regard. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is his unique vision of the seminal importance of the human body in any consideration of beauty and art. It may seem odd the think that the theme of this great poem is similar to Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body, but it is. It is error to ignore man’s passions in pursuit of pure reason. William Blake argued from the rooftops that the order of reason can imprison, and at the center of things is a mystery beyond reason that is nonetheless available to us.
A better word than “order” for beauty would be “harmony,” because it suggests the willing seduction of the soul to the proper order of things. Our soul is pleased to be courted by the infinite, and perhaps to return home for just that instant when beauty is perceived and felt. The artist’s work is a byproduct of this experience, a record of a state of being to borrow an idea from Mr. Henri. That’s why in the end there is a danger in thinking Art to death; it must be felt
As Robert Henri said: “Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at the sight of them. This is beauty.” This is a bit clinical, and I would prefer replacing “mind” with “soul,” but he is essentially correct that as a man is, so he sees.
So how in the world does this relate to taking photographs, or making art more generally? Become a more enlightened, more sensitive, more appreciative, more loving person and it will be reflected in your work.
No. 17: The Art Spirit
I’ve been reading a wonderful book entitled: The Art Spirit, a collection of comments by American painter and teacher at the turn of the 20th Century, Robert Henri. He notes that: “There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day when we seem to see beyond the usual’. At such times there is a song going on within us, a song to which we listen. It fills us with surprise’. The value of a picture rests in its constructive beauty. ‘Its story is merely incidental’. The real motive, the real thing attained is the revelation of what you can perceive beyond the fact.” Sadly, but truthfully he also comments that the: “art student of these days is a pioneer. He lives in a decidedly colorless, materialistic age’. We have yet as a body to come up to the art of living. The art student of today must pioneer beyond the mere matters of fact.” Of course this is the Romantic viewpoint of a painter presented nearly a century ago, but I couldn’t agree more.
Science, the hallmark of our age, is colorless, soundless, material, and therefore lifeless. It is no wonder then that the modern world is full of cynicism, irony and despair because both the scientific culture and artistic culture only address the material concerns of man, leaving his spirituality undernourished and abandoned. However, as far as we know, it is only we humans that experience color and sound, pleasure and pain, hope and despair. It is the artist’s role to flesh out the concrete, measurable world and put it in a human context. To recapture its proper role in life, artists must again believe in objective truth because beauty in art is a reflection of an objective truth, the concrete as experienced by the artist. It is a fusion of the spiritual and the objective that permits man to celebrate the great gift of life.
No. 16: Photography as Symbolic Art
True Art is concerned with beauty. As Pope Benedict XVI recently addressed a group of artists:
Indeed, an essential function of genuine beauty, as emphasized by Plato, is that it gives man a healthy “shock”, it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum ‘ it even makes him suffer, piercing him like a dart, but in so doing it “reawakens” him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft. Dostoevsky’s words that I am about to quote are bold and paradoxical, but they invite reflection. He says this: “Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty he could no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here.”
Visual Art can conveniently be divided into two approaches to the broad concern with beauty, the natural/material and the symbolic/ideal. Music, by its nature as always been symbolic, program music aside, but the visual arts are another matter. In the visual arts the symbolic form reigned until the naturalistic revolution of the Renaissance, which in turn reigned until the 19th Century. For example, Greek statuary expresses the ideal, whereas Renaissance sculpture expresses the natural, even when dealing with mythical subjects. Again, cave paintings, Egyptian and Etruscan Art are obviously symbolic, while Impressionist paintings reached the apex of natural art’the description of the surface of the subject only, without concern for the underlying substance of the subject.
Somewhat ironically, photography can be a great symbolic art form because it is normally so closely tied to its natural subject. This is because the natural world is nearly always the starting point, even if in abstraction, by the very nature of the photographic process; we gather reflected photons of light and record them digitally or chemically. This means that any extraction of the symbolic form from the subject is exaggerated by its intense contrast with the natural object that is the ostensible subject of the photograph. Oil painting, formerly considered the art form most capable of rendering reality in all its texture and color, pales in comparison; no matter what the skill of the painter, it will always be a painting of something, not the outcome of an actual scientific record of the photons that struck the photographic medium.
Additionally, contrast is at the heart of most visual art. Artists have always used contrast to make their visual point, be it a contrast of hue, tone, saturation, luminosity, texture, space or substance. It would be hard to imagine greater contrast that between the expectation of photographic capture of something real with the manipulated image, the real and the ethereal. This feat is performed by extracting the real image from the material image; something like Plato’s ideal form from the natural one as it were. As Wassily Kandinsky points out in his delightful little book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art: “‘Selection’ aims not so much at beautification as at emphasizing the character of the object, by omission of the non-essentials’.The organic form no longer serves as direct object, but as human words in which a divine message must be written, in order for it to be comprehensible to human minds.” Just so, the photographer extracts their image by selecting the frame of the subject, adjusting tonal contrast, and if color, manipulating the saturation of the colors to expose the reality of the subject; the symbolic and the natural in one image.
No. 15: “Trailing clouds of glory do we come”
Wordsworth wrote in “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Art is one of our touchstones with our native place; a peephole from our prison-house to the place from whence we came. Romantic gibberish? No, at least not according to my Muse.
I am not going to define “Art” here, although I’ve listed definitions of art terms previously. First, I’m not smart enough to define “Art.” Second, I don’t think anyone is smart enough to precisely define Art because Art provides a connection to the infinite and as such is not precisely definable by man. Art does have characteristics, however, that allow criteria to be developed, however loosely describing what characteristics a thing needs to have to be considered “Art.”
The merits of this approach is reflected in our experience with this sort of endeavor in other areas. Our experience is that the broader the view, the more stable and easily defined a thing is, but that the more narrow or precise we attempt to be, the more elusive the target becomes. For example, a chair is easy to find and easy to describe physically and chemically; we can locate it in space, describe in great detail what it is composed of and when it exists in time because the concept “chair” is relatively broad. However, as we try to get ever more precise, as to what we mean by “wood”, the molecule making up the wood, then the atom, then the particle, our terms become less and less definite and “existence” or “material” ever a more philosophical term as noted in the Heisenberg quote I used in the second part of “What it’s like to be a bat.”
Just so our discussion of Art. As long as we use vague terms like beauty or truth, all goes well, but the more closely we try to define what we mean by beauty or truth, the less meaning the concept seems to have. This bothers many, and the debate about what we mean when we say we “know” something as been going on in philosophical circles ever since there have been philosophic circles. For my purposes I’ll say that just because I don’t know something in all its detail does not mean I am unfamiliar with it at all; even a vague term has some utility. Thus, it is more productive to think about the characteristics one should expect in describing something that is considered Art and leave it at that so that we don’t lose the big picture trying for ever greater precision.
What characteristics does Art have? To be “Art” a given work should have some or all the following characteristics as it can be: instructive; delightful; beautiful; noble; intelligent; socially relevant; harmonious; discordant; angelic; satanic; sublime; truthful; humorous; tragic; designed. Notice that I don’t hold that a work of Art must have all these qualities. I only intend that to the extent the work has the above listed characteristics it is Art, and it follows that the greater the quantity and quality of these characteristics a work has, the greater is the work of Art.
These qualities are not an exclusive list of course, but they do point to something more than mere politics or social commentary, which are simply a reflection of the “light of common day.” They do point to our childhood, when the world was new and magical, and our memories of where we came from were still fresh.
No. 14: Technology and Perception
In an earlier piece I said:
Technology is not irrelevant, but is not critically important for me either because it is the esthetic purpose of the artist that matters. It really doesn’t matter whether one uses film or digital media, high-end or low-end equipment. What matters is whether one understand what the equipment can do, can take advantage of its virtues and limitations, and create a great image, the key is the aesthetic purpose of the artist, not the equipment used.
I don’t do equipment reviews here, and I’m not about to start now, but I want to make something explicit that was only implicit in the above quote.
I recently began using a Canon 5D Mark II camera, Canon “L-series” lenses and DXO image processing software. You can obtain the details about these innovative products elsewhere. In summary the Canon has a state-of-the-art sensor that captures a lot more information, the lenses are state-of-the-art optics, and the DXO software corrects any remaining imperfections in the lens and sensor.
I confess that I was surprised at how much this new technology changed the kind of photographs I was taking. Most of the pictures I have on my website were taken within a few hundred yards of my home and thus I have been able to re-take some of them with the Canon. For example, those who are sharp-eyed may have noticed that the 1st Movement of the 7th Sonata has changed a bit. It’s still a photograph of some shear curtains hanging in my bedroom, but it’s a new image. This one was taken with the Canon system, whereas the old one was taken with a Nikon system. I compared the two images and I have to say that the Canon image was not significantly better at expressing the intent of the image; it was more that the intent of the image had changed. The Canon image emphasized the texture of the curtains much more, the effect of improved technology, and thereby had de-emphasized a bit the relative importance of the quality of light coming through the window. I decided to use the Canon picture because after some thought I realized that it hadn’t reduced or impaired the amount of information dealing with the lighting, it had added textural information and thus had permitted a more informative image.
I made other photographs and had similar results. The Nikon’s images were fine technically and they had realized the intent of the image at the time, but the improved technology was adding information and thus was effecting the intent of the image, and therefore my aesthetic purpose. I must now consider a more complex result when I conceive the image and this in turn has enhanced my perception of the subject. Thus, despite the fact that I hadn’t expected the new technology to change me and thereby my art, it has.
No. 13: Art City Austin 2009 and Carpentry
I just returned from Austin’s major juried art show and sale. Art City Austin is growing into a quality event, with artists from all over the country participating. I met lots of interesting folks and saw lots of interesting art.
One of the discussions among the photographers was the perception that many art shows and perhaps art collectors, were prejudiced against digital photography because it was “so easy that anyone could it,” and the inkjet printing process made digital images common. They apparently conclude from this that digital photography was not Art.
First, the argument that digitally produced photographs are somehow not Art because they can be mass produced is silly because it essentially argues that Cezanne is not as great an artist as Giotto simply because his paintings are more common. Additionally, it would exclude lithographs, wood-cuts and the like, which would not make Toulouse-Lautrec or Albrecht Durer very happy. This is just the modern version of the old saw used against photography since the photographic process was invented. Alfred Stieglitz had to battle painters who argued that photography was not Art because anyone could simply produce a photograph. He argued correctly that of course anyone could print a photograph, but it was the process of seeing the potential photograph, painting,sculpture, poetry in the first that was the difficult and artistic part.
Second, the central point of discussion should not be about how something is produced, although craft is always an important part of the evaluation of any work of Art; it should be about the end result. As is often the case among photographers, the argument is focused on the tools of the craft, not the result. Carpenters are highly skilled craftsman, but they are not artists, architects are. Thus, Frank Loyd Wright is a great artist not because he could build a good house, although knowledge of how to build one is critical to how he thought about the end result, but rather he is considered a great artist because he designed great Art. Just so the digital photographer; she is not a great artist because she knows how to buy and use expensive software; she is a great artist if and only if the images she created are great Art.
No. 12: Concepts
I am not an academic; I am an artist. However, just to be sure we’re all the same page, I’ll define some terms using definitions from Wikipedia; not because they’re the best, but because they are readily available:
“Art” is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the sense or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature and the visual arts. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as Aesthetics. Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period (19th Century), when art came to be seen as “a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science”. Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
“Abstraction” is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behavior.
“Formalism” is the concept that a work’s artistic value is entirely determined by its form–the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content. In visual art, formalism is the concept that everything necessary in a work of art is contained within it. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance. Formalism dominated modern art from the late 1800s through the 1960s.
“Modernism”: is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the “traditional” forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. This is not to say that all Modernists or Modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that Modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the axioms of the previous age. A salient characteristic of Modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).
“Postmodernism”: means ‘after the modernist movement’. While “modern” itself refers to something “related to the present”, the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema and design, as well as in marketing and business and the interpretation of history, law and culture in the late 20th century. It is also described as “of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)”, or finally “of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language”. The American Heritage Dictionary describes the meaning of the same term as “Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: “It [a roadhouse] is so architecturally interesting ‘ with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock”.
These definitions makes more sense when applied to a real world example. Ansel Adams is a hero of many photographers, myself included, because we grew up learning photography with the help of his Zone System, and because he created many exquisite photographs in a modernist vein. However, most casual viewers think he was simply creating beautiful photographs of the majestic landscape around him; he was not. He was a formalist, revealing his personal understanding of the underlying structure of nature creatively using the very best photographic craft at his disposal. He wrote this:
Most photographers realize that in their art, above all other graphic arts, subject can both dominate and restrict if the essential elements of creative expression are not clearly applied. The function of abstract art is to free the qualities of form, line, value, and color from the usually imperative domination of subject. A photograph can never be as free of the entanglements of subject as can a painting, but the medium does permit a wide range of points-of-view and nonrealistic values.
“Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs” by Ansel Adams.
Thus, he saw himself as interacting with his subject using the “essential elements of creative expression” to produce Art from a particular point of view. He was not simply trying to produce a technically perfect, “realistic” photograph of a grand vista, still life or person. He was a modernist because he emphasized and reveled in his medium in a manner that has been called the “New Objectivity.” He was not postmodernist, because he was not reacting to modernists, and because he was deadly serious about his Art in a way that a postmodernist would not be (unless in the sense of being seriously absurd). Finally, he was not an abstract artist because he meant for the viewer to be more fully aware of the specific subject itself through his poetic vision of it.
No. 11: “What it is like to be a bat” (Continued)
Once one realizes that we are limiting our “objective” viewpoint to ourselves, it becomes obvious that the “objective” viewpoint is merely the averaging of the subjective human viewpoints. This approach is viewed as more valid because it accesses the subjective experiences of many humans, and therefore nulls out the errors of any one individual person.
This is fine as far as it goes, but materialists seem to think that this is the only way of knowing who we are and what the nature of the world is. Consciously or unconsciously, materialists confuse that which we can know empirically from that which might be knowable in some truly objective sense, i.e., the God’s eye view of things. They think that the limits of empirical knowledge are the limits of reality, whereas idealists do not.
I’ve been reading what may be the best book on this subject ever published, “Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science” by Werner Heisenberg. This Nobel Prize winning giant of modern physics points out that the modern interpretation of atomic events has turned science away from the materialistic trend of the nineteenth century. He posits that classical physics is founded on philosophies of the past, mainly that of Rene Descartes, and that the fact that we are human limits our ability to understand the world because of the limits of our brains and our language, which are formed by common human experience. He concludes that the materialist-idealist dichotomy is false because quantum mechanics has shown that at the level of the very small material is much closer to Plato’s elementary particles because they are not eternal, indestructible units, but are “energy” that can be described mathematically. In fact he highlights the subjective nature of quantum mechanics:
This again emphasizes a subjective element in the description of atomic events, since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means are at our disposal.
“Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science”, page 32.
He later continues on page 160:
In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.
In other words since we are not bats we cannot know the world as bats and are limited to knowledge obtainable to humans. More importantly, the world we humans know, at bottom, begins with potentials, not things. Thus, the prudent posture is to admit and accept our limitations; have faith that whoever created us and this world intended more than our misery; act on our duty to experience whatever portion of reality we can to the fullest and to share it with others for their benefit. We can’t know the world of the bat, but we can enhance the experience of being human and thereby strengthen our imaginative powers to see more deeply into the nature of our species’ reality by experiencing Art and thereby going beyond objectivity.
No. 10: “What it is like to be a bat”
This is a wonderful article you can find on the web and you should make a point of reading the entire article, which deals with the limits of humanity’s ability to understand the world. It also fits nicely into my ongoing ruminations on art and perception, and the limitations of materialism as a way of looking at the world.
It points out that subjectivity is a viewpoint, the observer experiencing sensations with no effort made to find an answer agreeable to all observers. A subjective description of sound might be to one person that it is lyric and to another that it is merely loud. In this case, one viewpoint is not “more accurate” or “better” than the other because it describes only one individual’s response to something.
However, objectivity is also only a viewpoint; it is not all-encompassing. It requires empirical verification to correct for individual variations in perception, in other words it assumes that subjective responses can be “wrong,” individually, but not in aggregate. Thus, an objective description of sound is that it is a wave moving through some sort of media. This viewpoint usually asks questions that we want answered for some practical reason, and after observing, hypothesizing and testing we develop an objective answer that answers the question asked in a manner that will be consistent among all similarly situated observers.
This means the answer to which viewpoint is a “better” description of “reality” is the one that serves whatever purpose one is trying to serve by answering the question posed. For example, one might ask whether the sound was too loud for a baby’s nursery, but wouldn’t ask whether it was too lyric. Additionally, one might ask how loud the sound was to someone with a device for measuring the loudness of the sound, but one wouldn’t ask them whether the sound was lyric. In other words, we get to choose the question that we believe needs answering and determine which viewpoint provides the most responsive answer. By choosing, we generate answers to questions we care about and create our personal (aka subjective) picture of the world and who we are.
We often make the mistake of acting as if the “objective” viewpoint is something akin to the God’s eye view of things or at least is the “best” way of claiming to “know” the world. Unfortunately, this is not the case because the objective viewpoint is inherently reductionist; the thing under study must be broken into its constituent parts to understand how it works; the presumption being that the thing under study equals the sum of its parts. (Niels Bohr pointed out that life itself could never be studied scientifically because one would have to kill the subject to study it.) When honest, the objective viewpoint does not pretend to describe all of “reality;” it does not even pretend to describe all physical reality or even observable reality. It limits itself to a description of that part of the human experience of reality that can be measured and for which a question has been asked that can be answered by careful observation and creative thought. Why did the apple fall from the tree? Newton answered that it was because it is in some deep way like the moon. At heart then, the objective viewpoint is utilitarian; it answers questions about “reality” that we’ve decided needed answering so we can do something with that knowledge. (At least that is how it is supposed to work. Two excellent books on the actual subjectivity of the scientific method are Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method.)
What does this have to do with bats!? As the article points out, bats may be reasonably assumed to have an experience of the world since they are advanced mammals. Most bat species perceive the world acoustically, using biological system of echolocation. Their brains “see” the world by subtly modulating high-frequency shrieks and their brains are hardwired to correlate outgoing and incoming sound waves to “see” where they and their prey are in three dimensions. This system is not similar to anything we humans experience because our senses and brains are not designed to “see” the world this way. Trying to imagine what it would be like to be a bat only results in imagining what a human being would be like if he had webbing on his arms, etc.
“What is it like to be a bat” conducts this thought experiment and concludes that all experience is subjective and irreducible in sentient creatures. The bat’s entire framework of experience is unbridgeably different than our own. The article points out, therefore, that any shift to greater “objectivity” makes us less attached to a specific viewpoint by definition and therefore takes us further away from actual phenomenon as experienced by the species in question (usually human). The key limitation to remember is that objectivity limits its findings to those applicable to those with similar viewpoints. This is the whole point of relativity theory: humans live in a subjective universe that, with the exception of physical “law,” is only “objective” for human observers within a given framework. This is a crucial fact and surely a significant limitation to our ability to know the TRUTH that is all too often forgotten.
Thus, the prudent posture is to admit and accept our limitations; have faith that whoever created us and this world intended more than our misery; act on our duty to experience whatever portion of reality we can to the fullest and to share it with others for their benefit. We can’t know the world of the bat, but we can enhance the experience of being human and thereby strengthen our imaginative powers to see more deeply into the nature of our species’ “reality” by creating and experiencing Art. Art is magic in this sense; it short-circuits paradigms and expands our horizons by going beyond objectivity.
No. 9: Out My Back Door
William Blake once wrote that: ” As a man is So he Sees.” I’ve made this point as well in earlier comments, but let me give a simple example that will show that one doesn’t have to live in Carmel or Yosemite to take good photographs; you can do it close to your own home.
One of my favorite images is the Third Movement of my First Camera Sonata. How I came to take that photograph is typical, albeit more humorous than usual. I had just finished mowing the lawn and putting away the mower. I keep it under an enclosed cedar deck, covered with a plastic tarp. As I was putting on the tarp it became stuck under the door so I pulled the tarp without thinking and of course it closed the door. The problem was that there was no way to open the door from the inside. I didn’t want to break out, so I was stuck sitting under the deck with the dirt and spiders while I waited for my bride to come looking for me. I spent the first half-hour trying to rig various tools to make my escape from my Azkaban, then I gave up and sat awaiting my fate–death by laughter. After some time spent sweating, I happened to look up and saw light streaming through the cracks in the flooring of the deck above me; it was as if I had been transported to a Gothic cathedral. I was discovered about another half-hour later, caught and released, whereupon I grabbed my camera and took the picture.
The point is not that I am the village idiot. The point is that even the village idiot can see the magic of life if he just looks for it. You don’t need Half Dome to have a great subject, all you need is to be the kind of person who sees what is right in front of you, a house of God dressed in dirt and spider webs. Roughly half the images in my Camera Sonatas have been taken within three hundred yards of my back door and I live in Central Texas, not the Grand Tetons. So be the kind of person who sees with the greatness that is within them, not just someone who sleep-walks through paradise.
No. 8: Art as Conversation (Continued)
A good conversation is about ideas, but while necessary, ideas are insufficient to participate in the artistic conversation of the West, which has been at its best a communion between artist and audience. I’ve been reading an interesting book entitled That Divine Order by Peter Vergo. He provides a wonderfully poetic quote from an ancient Chinese artist, Tsung Ping, that expresses perfectly the idea that Art is really a communion between artist and audience:
Thus I live at leisure, brandishing my wine cup and sounding my lute. I unroll paintings and face them in solitude; seated, I plumb the four ends of the earth, simply responding to the uninhabited wilderness, where grottoed peaks tower on high and cloudy forests mass in depth. The sages and virtuous men shed reflected light from the distant past and myriad delights are fused with their spirits and their thoughts. What should I do then? Freely expand my spirit, that is all. What should be placed higher than that which expands the spirit?
Amen to that.
Thus, more than an exchange of ideas, Art must be experienced and allowed to commune with the spirit of the individual audience member for it to have its full effect. I hope this site encourages whatever audience it has to not settle for mere experimentation, but to demand serious Art, to engage that Art fully and to freely expand the spirit.
No. 7: Art as Conversation
Art must be a conversation or else it becomes merely self-love. A conversation demands engagement with another. It requires a common language of some kind and courtesy towards the other. In a conversation the conversationalists all benefit from the conversation because it probes; it reveals; it concerts. Since at least the Greek civilization the West had been engaged in a conversation with itself about things that really mattered over time; this conversation could of course turn humorous, but its purpose had always been serious.
Then the industrial revolution came, the world wars came, and the Western conversation began its slouch into soliloquy, and eventually the whole project was stopped dead by irony. This devolution was worsened by the artistic community in two ways: (1) the cultured classes in general had done nothing to stop the march of socialism and in fact had done much to birth the two forms of socialism that had spread like cancer across Europe and into Asia; (2) many had sided against democracy and with socialism during the inter-war years and were guilty about their politics after the horrors of WWII. This conduct eroded the authority of culture in general and accelerated art’s slide into mediocrity.
Of course, this process was only partially the fault of the very talented and knowledgeable artists of the Twentieth Century, and it would be unfair not to point out that it is a testament to many of them that when the center failed to hold they continued to make art. However, making art from a Western culture bombed with industrial efficiency into fragments was very difficult; as Dietrich Bonhoeffer opined, man had asked God to leave, so he had. The technical and social revolutions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries had seemingly severed man’s ties to the natural. Without the attachment to nature, art became overly rational, virtually medieval in its approach to art except that rather than being grounded in God, it was grounded in nothing at all.
Obviously, I can’t change history, but I can say that enough time has passed and enough lessons have been learned that we can once again at least admit that our conversation had been worthwhile and that we should try to start it up again. A good place to start would be to discuss what happened to our culture and how we might reclaim the center. Art can help restart this conversation. As a proposal, I would suggest that we begin the conversation by looking to the Baroque aesthetic because we are much in need of its balance.
No. 6: “Sailing to Byzantium”
William Butler Yeats speaks of my artistic journey better than I possibly could, so let me provide you with his great poem in its entirety:
“Sailing To Byzantium”
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
‘Those dying generations’ at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Online text, 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved. From The Tower | 1928
No. 5: Truth
Let me try to address my broader theme from a slightly different angle. I’ve mentioned truth in prior articles, but only hinted at it, so let me expand on this concept. I am a realist in the philosophical sense of the word’I believe that there actually is an objective reality, TRUTH, whether it can be completely captured empirically or not (Einstein’s disagreement with the idea that quantum theory is a complete theory is instructive here if you’re interested).
God dazzles us by an excess of Truth. The problem with the idea of truth is not that there is no objective truth, the problem is that there is too much objective truth for the limited human brain to handle; think of it has having too little RAM. The complete truth, THE TRUTH, could only be known to God because only God could conceive of the whole TRUTH at one time. Human beings have to parse THE TRUTH and thus cannot consider the whole; hence the problem of the apparent multiplicity of truths. Think of truth as a sphere with an infinite number of points/facts/truths. Each of us assembles slices of facts to create and support our paradigm of reality, then we live in that paradigm, not reality. This is because we do not directly apprehend reality, and thus are forced to live in a world of ideas/concepts of what reality is based on what our senses tell us, as noted here elsewhere.
Understanding this led to empiricism; an approach that seeks to quantify and rely upon sense data only. All science is reductionist, however. It disassembles to find the constituent parts of whatever truth it seeks, but it loses something in the disassembly because the sum is greater than the parts. An electron behaves one way in isolation, another if part of an atom. The atom behaves one way in isolation and another as part of a molecule. I am a merely bag of water containing a few trace elements, yet my sum is hopefully greater than that. In short, something is missed by using the fine tool of science exclusively.
As I have been explaining in these articles, our brain uses models of reality to live in reality, e.g., words, icons, and paradigms, in order to save valuable RAM. It does this because it simply doesn’t have the capacity to absorb all the data. Models can be more or less accurate, but they cannot by definition be 100% accurate because they necessarily simplify or reduce THE TRUTH so that our small brain can function, survive, reproduce and create. A word is a model. We have a very difficult time thinking about something unless we name it first because the thing itself, which represents a huge amount of data, must be reduced to a manageable size. Think of it as similar to converting the RAW data image into a JPEG image by the processor in a digital camera; data is lost, but the image is still recognizable.
Given this limitation of the human brain, it isn’t surprising that we disagree as much as we do because in a certain sense we are each living in different universes of our own making. The key to remember is that every thought both posits something and limits it at the same time. Thus every great thought, expression, paradigm both frees and imprisons because it establishes artificial boundaries needed to have sufficient RAM to think about anything at all.
However, the unconscious mind has more RAM if you will because it does not have to support consciousness, and this permits it to use the RAW negative as it were, rather than the JPEG negative. Just as in processing a digital negative, the result using the RAW negative is better than the result using the JPEG negative because it has more data to work with and therefore less extrapolating to do. Everyone is aware that we are smarter than we are conscious of; we “trust our gut” in almost all matters of import no matter how much information we gather.
Art unites the conscious and the unconscious and thus comprehends a greater portion of the truth. It can take a thing and enrich its meaning by connecting it with other meanings at the conscious and unconscious level. A poet can arrange words in such a way so as to add meaning to words not otherwise available, unlike science, Art is expansionist. Just so, an artistic photograph can also add richness to the perception of the world and increase the space of truth. Thus, an artist can’t enlarge the amount of RAM an audience member has, but he can use tricks to concert other meanings, enrich the experience and enlarge the audience’s understanding of truth. More poetically, Art should aspire to remind us that we are souls who have drunk from the river of forgetfulness and need to rediscover who really we are. To quote William Blake from “There is No Natural Religion”:
Application
He who sees the in-
finite in all things,
sees God. He who
sees the Ratio only
sees himself only
No. 4: Philosophy Before Technology
Technology is certainly not irrelevant, but is not critically important for me either because it is the esthetic purpose of the artist that matters. It really doesn’t matter whether one uses film or digital media, high-end or low-end equipment. What matters is whether one understands what the equipment can do, can take advantage of its virtues and limitations, and create a great image, the key is the aesthetic purpose of the artist, not the equipment used. (Of course I did not say “simply create a great image.” I covered-up nearly all of the technical problems in producing something worthwhile to make my point about taking the proper perspective regarding the relative lack of importance of technology in the artistic project).
An artist first needs to consider the nature of his existence: the cosmology problem. The presumptions he makes about whether this material world is all there is or not will determine the subject matter of his work. If there is a god or absolute Platonic form of some kind then art of one type is likely, whereas if there is no such claim made, another sort of art is produced; the fact that the twentieth century Ulysses is your average white middle-class Englishman is testament to this distinction. Next he needs to consider how he knows what he knows: the epistemological problem. The presumptions made here will determine how he does his art. One only need consider impressionism or cubism to appreciate how the consideration of perception can be the key to any work of art.
Generally, the Twentieth Century was a century of genius and a monument to materialism. I intend my little works to drive a stake into the heart of materialist art. This is because a materialist cannot create great Art because he does not believe in great Art; great art is not created by things, it is created by an inspired spirit– neomodernism, surrealism, postmodernism, Dada, pop art, etc., any art reduced to mediocrity as an aesthetic will serve as an example. In short, I disagree with Marcel Duchamp because Art is not a joke to me.
No. 3: The Function of Art, Part 2: The Camera Sonata
To summarize, I want the viewer to see the world anew. I use a camera because it is commonly relied upon to show what “really” is; photographs are authentic and my images therefore show what really is. However, I want the viewer to come away from my images with a new perception of what is possible, of what is really and more fully before him in his everyday life; to see the world anew as a result of the experience of interacting with my work. I am not the author of these images, I am an explorer who photographs what is revealed to me. I want there to be an interaction between my image and the viewer that stimulates thought and feeling; Art ought to be a conversation.
To enhance this process, I create Camera Sonatas where each “movement” is an image; the assembly better defining the individual images and forming a more stimulating experience than the random mounting of individual images. Coming to this point was a two-step process. I had seen an tremendous Ansel Adams showing of over one-hundred of his photographs here in Austin, but came away exhausted because of the work it took to stay focused on such a large number of individual, all black and white photographs. Shortly thereafter I was listening to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” when I realized that the sonata form was the perfect solution to my concern about the proper display of my images. Composers juxtaposed movements in a sonata to maintain interest, and in the case of Beethoven create an overarching impression by telling a unified musical/emotional story as it were. Thus, the “Moonlight Sonata” I was listening to had a somber first movement, a bright little flower of a second movement, and a terrible and defiant final third movement. Taken together Beethoven’s Sonata provided a complete emotional and intellectual experience that was enhanced by the positioning of the movements. I now try to do the same thing with my photographic images by assembling them into a Sonata form when I display them.
No. 2: The Function of Art, Part 1
To paraphrase Victor Hugo’s comment about music, photographic images express that which cannot be said, but upon which it is impossible to be silent. Art enriches the experience of life, providing a more completely truthful picture of reality and permitting us to consider important non-verbal concepts.
The difficulty of the seemingly simple idea of a “concept” was brought home to me recently when I was waiting for my wife outside the lady’s room with my granddaughter. She is just learning to speak, so while waiting she would point to things and try to ask “what’s that?” I would respond with “door,” “lady” or whatever. She then pointed to the bathroom, so I said “bathroom,” and it suddenly struck me how difficult it was to simply learn words. She needed to understand much more than the sounds of “bathroom,” she needed the concept of “bathroom;” after all she was just pointing to the “door.” But, absent the word “bathroom” I couldn’t think of the concept of a bathroom, the chicken and egg problem.
Art helps to get around this difficulty because it is a tool to help think about and communicate a complex concept not amenable to a word, at least not fully and accurately. Sex in art will get your attention, so let’s use it as an example. To understand sex, one could go to a biology book and read about sex. When done, however, would the reader have a truthful idea of what sex really is? Before going on, read D.H. Lawrence’s “Love on the Farm,” then follow that up with his “The Snake.” If you’re more ambitious, continue with William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” then return.
Now you see that poetry has gone well beyond words and provided you with a mystical, and more completely truthful understanding of a subject that requires an appreciation of mystery to more fully understand what is meant by the word “sex.”
Image-making is also like music in that I can talk about the idea of the image, but I really can’t convey the idea itself because it is the image. We do this all the time, but perhaps don’t think of it that way, for example, the smell of fresh bread or a loved one, or strong feelings of almost any kind.
Poetry is another kind of music that informs my approach. In A Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye explains the artistic aesthetic of William Blake, a poet I enjoy very much. Blake correctly pointed out that we do not perceive sense data directly, rather it is mediated through our brains as perception. (See Decarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio R. Damsio, Quill Press, for a very interesting discussion of the relationship between reason and emotion.) Far ahead of his time, we now know that the brain organizes the incoming data from the senses and that the mind only deals with abstract concepts at the conscious level. In other words, people see what they are allowed to see by the software of their brain, filtering out what is “irrelevant” and permitting awareness of what is “required” to be conscious of. This perceptive process is enriched through experience and education, thus the fool and the artist observe the same tree, but perceive the tree differently. This perception, a concept, can even rise to the level of symbol, reflecting the fusion of sense data, the organizing programs of the brain, data from other sources and the personality of the observer. Somewhere in the process the soul is engaged and reflected in the perception. Carl Jung noted: “A symbol really lives only when it is the best and highest possible expression of something divined but not yet known even to the observer. For under these circumstances it provokes participation. It advances and creates life. ” (Jung, Psychological Types, p. 605).
Cultures that are technologically primitive understand that the image of the thing and the thing itself are magically connected. We do too, but as with many other native ideas, we believe that we have advanced beyond such primal thoughts, however, try an experiment: find a photograph of someone you love, and drive an ice pick through it. If you are like I am, you will hesitate, you will not like the idea, because deep in your dinosaur brain you know a truth, in your mind the image of the thing and thing itself are magically connected. (I owe this example, and much else to The Story of Art, by E.H. Gombrich) Many artists in the past have not cared about portraying a thing “realistically.” The ancient Egyptians, for example, painted ideas, perfect forms to insure that the important data were transmitted into the after life. They could realistically portray the human form as a technical matter, witness Egyptian sculpture, but they choose not to do so. Medieval artists and Byzantine artists similarly were not concerned will “reality,” in the sense of material reality, rather they were concerned with an immaterial realty that is somehow connected to a material reality.
Thus, the truth shimmers for people because we are limited; we understand only shards of it, and with a great deal of work can hold on to a few shards at once, but they come into and out of our consciousness, and thus shimmer. Because we have this limitation, in every day life we use a model of some aspect of the truth, the concept, to deal with the portion of the infinitely complex that we are capable of consciously thinking about. One of art’s goals should be to help provide that magical recognition of a more complete truth, a truth beyond the mere dictionary meaning of the terms we use, even beyond the craft of the art itself.
No. 1: Image not Photograph
I distinguish the concepts of “photograph” and “image” meaning that I create images from photographs. The point is that I am not directly concerned with the question of whether I have created a technically perfect photograph because I am aiming at a great image. In sum, I don’t wish to be hamstrung without purpose; a great image might not be a technically perfect photograph; syntax should aid communication, not strangle it.
This image (the subject, shapes, point of focus and colors of the image, and paper quality) is both something old and something new The first thing I do when considering the capture of an image is to remove it from its context by shifting the perception of scale, depth of field, contrast, normal point of view, etc. Stripping the thing of its context also strips the audience of its prejudices about what the thing in question is “supposed” to look like, i.e., its concept of the thing photographed. Once freed, I can present my perception of the thing anew; it is still an image of thing; it is still “realistic,” but hopefully a new way of looking at it is born and the original concept of it has been transcended.
No. 21: The Image
I create images. The first thing most people will ask me about my images is what are they photographs of? This is natural in the sense that the viewer wants to bring up his preconceived notions about what the subject is to judge what he or she sees—I intend to deny them this pleasure, at least when their first impression is forming. At the end of the process, not the beginning, I want you to know what it is an image of. The reason is simple, these are not abstract images in the proper sense of the word, but I want the viewer not to impose their reality on my image; I want them to see the thing for the first time, unencumbered by their preconceptions of what the subject is.
Also, I use this the word “image” because I’m trying to make the point that artistically that there is no difference whatsoever between a painting and a photograph; in both cases the artist has something in his mind that he is trying to bring to life as an image. There is no reason not to consider my images as one might consider a painting of the same subject. What confuses people is the technical process is so different that they think the end product must be different. Also, the term “photography” covers a lot of ground, and it is hard not to think of all photography as the same thing more or less—this is false.
Technology is technology, tube paint was as much of a revolution in painting as digital processing was for photography, yet I don’t see nearly every magazine on the subject of painting dedicated to the technology of painting as I do in photography. This is a problem that we photographers have brought on ourselves. Photography is not solely or even mainly about its technology, and this is especially true of photographic Art.
Many folks seem to think that because the technology behind a painting is different that the technology behind a photograph the images they create are different in purpose. Speaking strictly about photographic Art, the differences are more between artists than between images. Of course technology has an impact, and sometimes a large one; “realistic” painting lessened in artistic import with the advent of the camera, but the artistic purpose of creating photographic Art and painted Art is not so different.
No. 20: Death, Art and Truth
My dog died the other day. She was a fifteen-year-old English Cocker Spaniel. She was loved and a full member of the family. This was a real event; real tears were shed by the entire family; she will be missed.
I also had the opportunity recently to see the magical soprano, Anna Netrebko, sing the great cavatina “Casta Diva/ Ah! bello a me riturna” from Bellini’s opera, Norma, an aria contrasting divine and profane love. She was her great self; a voice from heaven, she was the music incarnate. I am not ashamed to say that I was very moved by deep feelings of the tragic nature of the human condition. These feelings were genuine from my point of view, but were created by her artifice. She was giving her all to convince me that she was the personification of sacred and profane love itself; she succeeded miraculously, but still it was artifice: Anna Netrebko was not really conflicted and her character was not real.
Which experience was true? The fact that Art is created by someone always makes it, and the feelings it may arouse false in a certain sense, but things are more complicated than they seem at first blush. Ms. Netrebko’s aria was false in the sense that she was not Norma, but it was true in that it conveyed feeling of human tragedy honestly and aroused in me feelings of empathy that were real in the sense that I actually felt them. They also served the useful function of encouraging me to think about human short-comings and the possible true dimensions of divine love.
One of the great issues all artists face who are trying to accomplish more than a fashionable piece of kitsch, is the criticism leveled by many that art is mere mimesis, an imitation of nature, which makes art dependent on nature and therefore inferior to it. In other words, Art stimulates false feelings because Art itself is false. Max Weber believed that this wasn’t a problem in an ethical sense because the philosophy of Art, aesthetics, was not even concerned with the issue as he pointed out in “Science as Vocation”:
Consider a discipline such as aesthetics. The fact that there are works of art is a given for aesthetics. It seeks to find out under what conditions this fact exists, but it does not raise the question of whether or not the realm of art is perhaps a realm of diabolical grandeur, a realm of this world, and therefore, in its core, hostile to God and in its innermost and aristocratic spirit, hostile to the brotherhood of man. Hence aesthetics does not ask whether there should be works or art.
Soren Kierkegaard took the bull by the horns when he said in Fear and Trembling: “A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.” This is closer to the truth; admit that the craft of Art is artifice that can be used for good or evil. It is not by its nature evil, however, any more than rhetoric is; the issue is whether the speaker is a good lover or a bad lover to use Plato’s example. At Art’s best it is a life-force that can defeat the devil by giving man a reason to hope, the devil’s poison.
Furthermore, Soren Kierkegaard again put his finger on a great truth when trying to explain how one becomes a “knight of infinite resignation:” “This [movement] requires passion. Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion, and no reflection can produce a movement.” We know and make judgments about the world using our reason and our emotions because, as I’ve written previously, reason without emotion cannot judge. In part this is because we only reason about things that matter to us, i.e., cause an emotional reaction. Art brings an emotional charge to truth, and this charge can lead to action; Art is more than true facts. To quote Rabindrath Tagore, a Nineteenth Century Indian poet:
Clothed in facts
Truth feels oppressed;
In the garb of poetry
It moves easy and free.
So, Art uses the devil’s tool of illusion to deliver beauty and truth more effectively than logic alone. I enjoy listening to Ms. Netrebko because I experience truth in her Art that I can appreciate all the better because of the distance from reality that Art provides. After all, the actual experience of truth can only be tolerated in very small doses.
No. 19: Color
To return to earth, color in photography has generally been concerned with fidelity. This was logical for technical reasons: it was very difficult to accomplish. As late as 1957, people as expert as Arnold Newman, Ansel Adams and Paul Strand complained about the lack of control with color. Eliot Porter’s use of dye transfer around this time was probably the first instance of controllable, accurate, and potentially natural colors.
Artistically, color has been problematic because of this focus on fidelity. Of course every artist creates what he or she sees, and as I’ve noted previously that will be a highly individualized reaction. But the interplay between two good friends, Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams is instructive. To this day Eliot Porter’s work is appreciated by many more for its political impact than its artistry. The problem of course begins with his intent, which was to take man out of nature so that he could thereby defend the wilderness using its beauty as a shield. As Eliot Porter’s brother noted, the ecological aesthetic shows that everything is connected, that “[T]here is no subject and background, every corner is alive.” Thus, absent the human imprint or a dominant subject, the emotional temperature of an image by Eliot Porter is cooled dramatically. Ansel Adams’ intent, however, was to create black and white images that reflected his very personal experience of nature as an artist and are therefore full of a man, the artist whose perspective it is. He never accepted color as capable of being as powerful an expressive force as black and white, with its lovely luminosity and almost architectural presence. Ansel Adams thought that the reproduction of natural color was not of much artistic value, despite its beauty, because the artist’s lack of precise control made it capable of only a documentary approach rather than an artistic reaction to the natural. For Eliot Porter, the point was nature; for Ansel Adams, the point was man.
I admire the Art of Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams very much, and when color was new their differences were appropriate. Now, however, color is easily duplicated in the digital environment, even if the original capture was poor. Thus, to the extent the difficulty level of the craft has diminished, the artistic value of fidelity has been reduced. The dispute, however, remains legitimate. Is the faithful reproduction of the subject sufficient to be Art, even if the result is beautiful? I think that Art demands more than science; it demands the experience and sensitivity of the artist. The tree of the poet and the tree of the beggar is the same to science, but not to the poet and beggar; one sees shade from the heat or cover from the rain, and the other sees an icon of the life force in the world.
My approach is to see the subject as it is if properly understood: a thing of many possibilities. Recall, that I’ve previously said that a person’s conscious view of the world is like a JPEG in that it has been processed by the subconscious brain to “correct” it and reduce the space required to handle all the data. The data the camera’s sensor collects is the RAW image, literally and figuratively, and therefore it has far more data than a person would be conscious of. By adjusting the saturation data in conjunction with other adjustments, one can bring to the fore or send into the background colors in the image that might not be noticed at first. This is not being photographically dishonest, because these colors were actually present when the sensor was exposed. All I am doing is shifting emphasis for artistic purposes, just as black and white photographers have always done. This approach requires the artist to be more knowledgeable about color theory because color theory will help the artist understand how enhancing yellow, for example, might affect the viewer’s perception of the image. Additionally, the resultant image is intentionally not a faithful reproduction of what the average person would see if standing in the shoes of the photographer. In fact, a given image might even appear “unreal,” but a proper understanding of what “real” means in an epistemological sense should free the viewer of any such prejudice.
Thus, Eliot Porter and his fellow artists conquered color and used it for their own purposes, artistically and politically. Now we have an opportunity to go beyond the normal perception of reality to a broader and therefore more artistic view of things. Photography has for too long been perceived to be a merely documentary medium. While documentary photography will always be important, the artistic photographer should feel free to take wing and see the world from a different perspective.
No. 18: The Art Spirit (Continued)
To continue my last thoughts on beauty just a bit, Robert Henri generally agrees with Robert Adams that beauty is orderly, but I submit that there is a danger here of going too far because beauty does not equate to order; William Blake was a klaxon in this regard. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is his unique vision of the seminal importance of the human body in any consideration of beauty and art. It may seem odd the think that the theme of this great poem is similar to Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body, but it is. It is error to ignore man’s passions in pursuit of pure reason. William Blake argued from the rooftops that the order of reason can imprison, and at the center of things is a mystery beyond reason that is nonetheless available to us.
A better word than “order” for beauty would be “harmony,” because it suggests the willing seduction of the soul to the proper order of things. Our soul is pleased to be courted by the infinite, and perhaps to return home for just that instant when beauty is perceived and felt. The artist’s work is a byproduct of this experience, a record of a state of being to borrow an idea from Mr. Henri. That’s why in the end there is a danger in thinking Art to death; it must be felt
As Robert Henri said: “Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at the sight of them. This is beauty.” This is a bit clinical, and I would prefer replacing “mind” with “soul,” but he is essentially correct that as a man is, so he sees.
So how in the world does this relate to taking photographs, or making art more generally? Become a more enlightened, more sensitive, more appreciative, more loving person and it will be reflected in your work.
No. 17: The Art Spirit
I’ve been reading a wonderful book entitled: The Art Spirit, a collection of comments by American painter and teacher at the turn of the 20th Century, Robert Henri. He notes that: “There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day when we seem to see beyond the usual’. At such times there is a song going on within us, a song to which we listen. It fills us with surprise’. The value of a picture rests in its constructive beauty. ‘Its story is merely incidental’. The real motive, the real thing attained is the revelation of what you can perceive beyond the fact.” Sadly, but truthfully he also comments that the: “art student of these days is a pioneer. He lives in a decidedly colorless, materialistic age’. We have yet as a body to come up to the art of living. The art student of today must pioneer beyond the mere matters of fact.” Of course this is the Romantic viewpoint of a painter presented nearly a century ago, but I couldn’t agree more.
Science, the hallmark of our age, is colorless, soundless, material, and therefore lifeless. It is no wonder then that the modern world is full of cynicism, irony and despair because both the scientific culture and artistic culture only address the material concerns of man, leaving his spirituality undernourished and abandoned. However, as far as we know, it is only we humans that experience color and sound, pleasure and pain, hope and despair. It is the artist’s role to flesh out the concrete, measurable world and put it in a human context. To recapture its proper role in life, artists must again believe in objective truth because beauty in art is a reflection of an objective truth, the concrete as experienced by the artist. It is a fusion of the spiritual and the objective that permits man to celebrate the great gift of life.
No. 16: Photography as Symbolic Art
True Art is concerned with beauty. As Pope Benedict XVI recently addressed a group of artists:
Indeed, an essential function of genuine beauty, as emphasized by Plato, is that it gives man a healthy “shock”, it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum ‘ it even makes him suffer, piercing him like a dart, but in so doing it “reawakens” him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft. Dostoevsky’s words that I am about to quote are bold and paradoxical, but they invite reflection. He says this: “Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty he could no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here.”
Visual Art can conveniently be divided into two approaches to the broad concern with beauty, the natural/material and the symbolic/ideal. Music, by its nature as always been symbolic, program music aside, but the visual arts are another matter. In the visual arts the symbolic form reigned until the naturalistic revolution of the Renaissance, which in turn reigned until the 19th Century. For example, Greek statuary expresses the ideal, whereas Renaissance sculpture expresses the natural, even when dealing with mythical subjects. Again, cave paintings, Egyptian and Etruscan Art are obviously symbolic, while Impressionist paintings reached the apex of natural art’the description of the surface of the subject only, without concern for the underlying substance of the subject.
Somewhat ironically, photography can be a great symbolic art form because it is normally so closely tied to its natural subject. This is because the natural world is nearly always the starting point, even if in abstraction, by the very nature of the photographic process; we gather reflected photons of light and record them digitally or chemically. This means that any extraction of the symbolic form from the subject is exaggerated by its intense contrast with the natural object that is the ostensible subject of the photograph. Oil painting, formerly considered the art form most capable of rendering reality in all its texture and color, pales in comparison; no matter what the skill of the painter, it will always be a painting of something, not the outcome of an actual scientific record of the photons that struck the photographic medium.
Additionally, contrast is at the heart of most visual art. Artists have always used contrast to make their visual point, be it a contrast of hue, tone, saturation, luminosity, texture, space or substance. It would be hard to imagine greater contrast that between the expectation of photographic capture of something real with the manipulated image, the real and the ethereal. This feat is performed by extracting the real image from the material image; something like Plato’s ideal form from the natural one as it were. As Wassily Kandinsky points out in his delightful little book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art: “‘Selection’ aims not so much at beautification as at emphasizing the character of the object, by omission of the non-essentials’.The organic form no longer serves as direct object, but as human words in which a divine message must be written, in order for it to be comprehensible to human minds.” Just so, the photographer extracts their image by selecting the frame of the subject, adjusting tonal contrast, and if color, manipulating the saturation of the colors to expose the reality of the subject; the symbolic and the natural in one image.
No. 15: “Trailing clouds of glory do we come”
Wordsworth wrote in “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Art is one of our touchstones with our native place; a peephole from our prison-house to the place from whence we came. Romantic gibberish? No, at least not according to my Muse.
I am not going to define “Art” here, although I’ve listed definitions of art terms previously. First, I’m not smart enough to define “Art.” Second, I don’t think anyone is smart enough to precisely define Art because Art provides a connection to the infinite and as such is not precisely definable by man. Art does have characteristics, however, that allow criteria to be developed, however loosely describing what characteristics a thing needs to have to be considered “Art.”
The merits of this approach is reflected in our experience with this sort of endeavor in other areas. Our experience is that the broader the view, the more stable and easily defined a thing is, but that the more narrow or precise we attempt to be, the more elusive the target becomes. For example, a chair is easy to find and easy to describe physically and chemically; we can locate it in space, describe in great detail what it is composed of and when it exists in time because the concept “chair” is relatively broad. However, as we try to get ever more precise, as to what we mean by “wood”, the molecule making up the wood, then the atom, then the particle, our terms become less and less definite and “existence” or “material” ever a more philosophical term as noted in the Heisenberg quote I used in the second part of “What it’s like to be a bat.”
Just so our discussion of Art. As long as we use vague terms like beauty or truth, all goes well, but the more closely we try to define what we mean by beauty or truth, the less meaning the concept seems to have. This bothers many, and the debate about what we mean when we say we “know” something as been going on in philosophical circles ever since there have been philosophic circles. For my purposes I’ll say that just because I don’t know something in all its detail does not mean I am unfamiliar with it at all; even a vague term has some utility. Thus, it is more productive to think about the characteristics one should expect in describing something that is considered Art and leave it at that so that we don’t lose the big picture trying for ever greater precision.
What characteristics does Art have? To be “Art” a given work should have some or all the following characteristics as it can be: instructive; delightful; beautiful; noble; intelligent; socially relevant; harmonious; discordant; angelic; satanic; sublime; truthful; humorous; tragic; designed. Notice that I don’t hold that a work of Art must have all these qualities. I only intend that to the extent the work has the above listed characteristics it is Art, and it follows that the greater the quantity and quality of these characteristics a work has, the greater is the work of Art.
These qualities are not an exclusive list of course, but they do point to something more than mere politics or social commentary, which are simply a reflection of the “light of common day.” They do point to our childhood, when the world was new and magical, and our memories of where we came from were still fresh.
No. 14: Technology and Perception
In an earlier piece I said:
Technology is not irrelevant, but is not critically important for me either because it is the esthetic purpose of the artist that matters. It really doesn’t matter whether one uses film or digital media, high-end or low-end equipment. What matters is whether one understand what the equipment can do, can take advantage of its virtues and limitations, and create a great image, the key is the aesthetic purpose of the artist, not the equipment used.
I don’t do equipment reviews here, and I’m not about to start now, but I want to make something explicit that was only implicit in the above quote.
I recently began using a Canon 5D Mark II camera, Canon “L-series” lenses and DXO image processing software. You can obtain the details about these innovative products elsewhere. In summary the Canon has a state-of-the-art sensor that captures a lot more information, the lenses are state-of-the-art optics, and the DXO software corrects any remaining imperfections in the lens and sensor.
I confess that I was surprised at how much this new technology changed the kind of photographs I was taking. Most of the pictures I have on my website were taken within a few hundred yards of my home and thus I have been able to re-take some of them with the Canon. For example, those who are sharp-eyed may have noticed that the 1st Movement of the 7th Sonata has changed a bit. It’s still a photograph of some shear curtains hanging in my bedroom, but it’s a new image. This one was taken with the Canon system, whereas the old one was taken with a Nikon system. I compared the two images and I have to say that the Canon image was not significantly better at expressing the intent of the image; it was more that the intent of the image had changed. The Canon image emphasized the texture of the curtains much more, the effect of improved technology, and thereby had de-emphasized a bit the relative importance of the quality of light coming through the window. I decided to use the Canon picture because after some thought I realized that it hadn’t reduced or impaired the amount of information dealing with the lighting, it had added textural information and thus had permitted a more informative image.
I made other photographs and had similar results. The Nikon’s images were fine technically and they had realized the intent of the image at the time, but the improved technology was adding information and thus was effecting the intent of the image, and therefore my aesthetic purpose. I must now consider a more complex result when I conceive the image and this in turn has enhanced my perception of the subject. Thus, despite the fact that I hadn’t expected the new technology to change me and thereby my art, it has.
No. 13: Art City Austin 2009 and Carpentry
I just returned from Austin’s major juried art show and sale. Art City Austin is growing into a quality event, with artists from all over the country participating. I met lots of interesting folks and saw lots of interesting art.
One of the discussions among the photographers was the perception that many art shows and perhaps art collectors, were prejudiced against digital photography because it was “so easy that anyone could it,” and the inkjet printing process made digital images common. They apparently conclude from this that digital photography was not Art.
First, the argument that digitally produced photographs are somehow not Art because they can be mass produced is silly because it essentially argues that Cezanne is not as great an artist as Giotto simply because his paintings are more common. Additionally, it would exclude lithographs, wood-cuts and the like, which would not make Toulouse-Lautrec or Albrecht Durer very happy. This is just the modern version of the old saw used against photography since the photographic process was invented. Alfred Stieglitz had to battle painters who argued that photography was not Art because anyone could simply produce a photograph. He argued correctly that of course anyone could print a photograph, but it was the process of seeing the potential photograph, painting,sculpture, poetry in the first that was the difficult and artistic part.
Second, the central point of discussion should not be about how something is produced, although craft is always an important part of the evaluation of any work of Art; it should be about the end result. As is often the case among photographers, the argument is focused on the tools of the craft, not the result. Carpenters are highly skilled craftsman, but they are not artists, architects are. Thus, Frank Loyd Wright is a great artist not because he could build a good house, although knowledge of how to build one is critical to how he thought about the end result, but rather he is considered a great artist because he designed great Art. Just so the digital photographer; she is not a great artist because she knows how to buy and use expensive software; she is a great artist if and only if the images she created are great Art.
No. 12: Concepts
I am not an academic; I am an artist. However, just to be sure we’re all the same page, I’ll define some terms using definitions from Wikipedia; not because they’re the best, but because they are readily available:
“Art” is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the sense or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature and the visual arts. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as Aesthetics. Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period (19th Century), when art came to be seen as “a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science”. Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
“Abstraction” is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behavior.
“Formalism” is the concept that a work’s artistic value is entirely determined by its form–the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content. In visual art, formalism is the concept that everything necessary in a work of art is contained within it. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance. Formalism dominated modern art from the late 1800s through the 1960s.
“Modernism”: is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the “traditional” forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. This is not to say that all Modernists or Modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that Modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the axioms of the previous age. A salient characteristic of Modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).
“Postmodernism”: means ‘after the modernist movement’. While “modern” itself refers to something “related to the present”, the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema and design, as well as in marketing and business and the interpretation of history, law and culture in the late 20th century. It is also described as “of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)”, or finally “of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language”. The American Heritage Dictionary describes the meaning of the same term as “Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: “It [a roadhouse] is so architecturally interesting ‘ with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock”.
These definitions makes more sense when applied to a real world example. Ansel Adams is a hero of many photographers, myself included, because we grew up learning photography with the help of his Zone System, and because he created many exquisite photographs in a modernist vein. However, most casual viewers think he was simply creating beautiful photographs of the majestic landscape around him; he was not. He was a formalist, revealing his personal understanding of the underlying structure of nature creatively using the very best photographic craft at his disposal. He wrote this:
Most photographers realize that in their art, above all other graphic arts, subject can both dominate and restrict if the essential elements of creative expression are not clearly applied. The function of abstract art is to free the qualities of form, line, value, and color from the usually imperative domination of subject. A photograph can never be as free of the entanglements of subject as can a painting, but the medium does permit a wide range of points-of-view and nonrealistic values.
“Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs” by Ansel Adams.
Thus, he saw himself as interacting with his subject using the “essential elements of creative expression” to produce Art from a particular point of view. He was not simply trying to produce a technically perfect, “realistic” photograph of a grand vista, still life or person. He was a modernist because he emphasized and reveled in his medium in a manner that has been called the “New Objectivity.” He was not postmodernist, because he was not reacting to modernists, and because he was deadly serious about his Art in a way that a postmodernist would not be (unless in the sense of being seriously absurd). Finally, he was not an abstract artist because he meant for the viewer to be more fully aware of the specific subject itself through his poetic vision of it.
No. 11: “What it is like to be a bat” (Continued)
Once one realizes that we are limiting our “objective” viewpoint to ourselves, it becomes obvious that the “objective” viewpoint is merely the averaging of the subjective human viewpoints. This approach is viewed as more valid because it accesses the subjective experiences of many humans, and therefore nulls out the errors of any one individual person.
This is fine as far as it goes, but materialists seem to think that this is the only way of knowing who we are and what the nature of the world is. Consciously or unconsciously, materialists confuse that which we can know empirically from that which might be knowable in some truly objective sense, i.e., the God’s eye view of things. They think that the limits of empirical knowledge are the limits of reality, whereas idealists do not.
I’ve been reading what may be the best book on this subject ever published, “Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science” by Werner Heisenberg. This Nobel Prize winning giant of modern physics points out that the modern interpretation of atomic events has turned science away from the materialistic trend of the nineteenth century. He posits that classical physics is founded on philosophies of the past, mainly that of Rene Descartes, and that the fact that we are human limits our ability to understand the world because of the limits of our brains and our language, which are formed by common human experience. He concludes that the materialist-idealist dichotomy is false because quantum mechanics has shown that at the level of the very small material is much closer to Plato’s elementary particles because they are not eternal, indestructible units, but are “energy” that can be described mathematically. In fact he highlights the subjective nature of quantum mechanics:
This again emphasizes a subjective element in the description of atomic events, since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means are at our disposal.
“Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science”, page 32.
He later continues on page 160:
In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.
In other words since we are not bats we cannot know the world as bats and are limited to knowledge obtainable to humans. More importantly, the world we humans know, at bottom, begins with potentials, not things. Thus, the prudent posture is to admit and accept our limitations; have faith that whoever created us and this world intended more than our misery; act on our duty to experience whatever portion of reality we can to the fullest and to share it with others for their benefit. We can’t know the world of the bat, but we can enhance the experience of being human and thereby strengthen our imaginative powers to see more deeply into the nature of our species’ reality by experiencing Art and thereby going beyond objectivity.
No. 10: “What it is like to be a bat”
This is a wonderful article you can find on the web and you should make a point of reading the entire article, which deals with the limits of humanity’s ability to understand the world. It also fits nicely into my ongoing ruminations on art and perception, and the limitations of materialism as a way of looking at the world.
It points out that subjectivity is a viewpoint, the observer experiencing sensations with no effort made to find an answer agreeable to all observers. A subjective description of sound might be to one person that it is lyric and to another that it is merely loud. In this case, one viewpoint is not “more accurate” or “better” than the other because it describes only one individual’s response to something.
However, objectivity is also only a viewpoint; it is not all-encompassing. It requires empirical verification to correct for individual variations in perception, in other words it assumes that subjective responses can be “wrong,” individually, but not in aggregate. Thus, an objective description of sound is that it is a wave moving through some sort of media. This viewpoint usually asks questions that we want answered for some practical reason, and after observing, hypothesizing and testing we develop an objective answer that answers the question asked in a manner that will be consistent among all similarly situated observers.
This means the answer to which viewpoint is a “better” description of “reality” is the one that serves whatever purpose one is trying to serve by answering the question posed. For example, one might ask whether the sound was too loud for a baby’s nursery, but wouldn’t ask whether it was too lyric. Additionally, one might ask how loud the sound was to someone with a device for measuring the loudness of the sound, but one wouldn’t ask them whether the sound was lyric. In other words, we get to choose the question that we believe needs answering and determine which viewpoint provides the most responsive answer. By choosing, we generate answers to questions we care about and create our personal (aka subjective) picture of the world and who we are.
We often make the mistake of acting as if the “objective” viewpoint is something akin to the God’s eye view of things or at least is the “best” way of claiming to “know” the world. Unfortunately, this is not the case because the objective viewpoint is inherently reductionist; the thing under study must be broken into its constituent parts to understand how it works; the presumption being that the thing under study equals the sum of its parts. (Niels Bohr pointed out that life itself could never be studied scientifically because one would have to kill the subject to study it.) When honest, the objective viewpoint does not pretend to describe all of “reality;” it does not even pretend to describe all physical reality or even observable reality. It limits itself to a description of that part of the human experience of reality that can be measured and for which a question has been asked that can be answered by careful observation and creative thought. Why did the apple fall from the tree? Newton answered that it was because it is in some deep way like the moon. At heart then, the objective viewpoint is utilitarian; it answers questions about “reality” that we’ve decided needed answering so we can do something with that knowledge. (At least that is how it is supposed to work. Two excellent books on the actual subjectivity of the scientific method are Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method.)
What does this have to do with bats!? As the article points out, bats may be reasonably assumed to have an experience of the world since they are advanced mammals. Most bat species perceive the world acoustically, using biological system of echolocation. Their brains “see” the world by subtly modulating high-frequency shrieks and their brains are hardwired to correlate outgoing and incoming sound waves to “see” where they and their prey are in three dimensions. This system is not similar to anything we humans experience because our senses and brains are not designed to “see” the world this way. Trying to imagine what it would be like to be a bat only results in imagining what a human being would be like if he had webbing on his arms, etc.
“What is it like to be a bat” conducts this thought experiment and concludes that all experience is subjective and irreducible in sentient creatures. The bat’s entire framework of experience is unbridgeably different than our own. The article points out, therefore, that any shift to greater “objectivity” makes us less attached to a specific viewpoint by definition and therefore takes us further away from actual phenomenon as experienced by the species in question (usually human). The key limitation to remember is that objectivity limits its findings to those applicable to those with similar viewpoints. This is the whole point of relativity theory: humans live in a subjective universe that, with the exception of physical “law,” is only “objective” for human observers within a given framework. This is a crucial fact and surely a significant limitation to our ability to know the TRUTH that is all too often forgotten.
Thus, the prudent posture is to admit and accept our limitations; have faith that whoever created us and this world intended more than our misery; act on our duty to experience whatever portion of reality we can to the fullest and to share it with others for their benefit. We can’t know the world of the bat, but we can enhance the experience of being human and thereby strengthen our imaginative powers to see more deeply into the nature of our species’ “reality” by creating and experiencing Art. Art is magic in this sense; it short-circuits paradigms and expands our horizons by going beyond objectivity.
No. 9: Out My Back Door
William Blake once wrote that: ” As a man is So he Sees.” I’ve made this point as well in earlier comments, but let me give a simple example that will show that one doesn’t have to live in Carmel or Yosemite to take good photographs; you can do it close to your own home.
One of my favorite images is the Third Movement of my First Camera Sonata. How I came to take that photograph is typical, albeit more humorous than usual. I had just finished mowing the lawn and putting away the mower. I keep it under an enclosed cedar deck, covered with a plastic tarp. As I was putting on the tarp it became stuck under the door so I pulled the tarp without thinking and of course it closed the door. The problem was that there was no way to open the door from the inside. I didn’t want to break out, so I was stuck sitting under the deck with the dirt and spiders while I waited for my bride to come looking for me. I spent the first half-hour trying to rig various tools to make my escape from my Azkaban, then I gave up and sat awaiting my fate–death by laughter. After some time spent sweating, I happened to look up and saw light streaming through the cracks in the flooring of the deck above me; it was as if I had been transported to a Gothic cathedral. I was discovered about another half-hour later, caught and released, whereupon I grabbed my camera and took the picture.
The point is not that I am the village idiot. The point is that even the village idiot can see the magic of life if he just looks for it. You don’t need Half Dome to have a great subject, all you need is to be the kind of person who sees what is right in front of you, a house of God dressed in dirt and spider webs. Roughly half the images in my Camera Sonatas have been taken within three hundred yards of my back door and I live in Central Texas, not the Grand Tetons. So be the kind of person who sees with the greatness that is within them, not just someone who sleep-walks through paradise.
No. 8: Art as Conversation (Continued)
A good conversation is about ideas, but while necessary, ideas are insufficient to participate in the artistic conversation of the West, which has been at its best a communion between artist and audience. I’ve been reading an interesting book entitled That Divine Order by Peter Vergo. He provides a wonderfully poetic quote from an ancient Chinese artist, Tsung Ping, that expresses perfectly the idea that Art is really a communion between artist and audience:
Thus I live at leisure, brandishing my wine cup and sounding my lute. I unroll paintings and face them in solitude; seated, I plumb the four ends of the earth, simply responding to the uninhabited wilderness, where grottoed peaks tower on high and cloudy forests mass in depth. The sages and virtuous men shed reflected light from the distant past and myriad delights are fused with their spirits and their thoughts. What should I do then? Freely expand my spirit, that is all. What should be placed higher than that which expands the spirit?
Amen to that.
Thus, more than an exchange of ideas, Art must be experienced and allowed to commune with the spirit of the individual audience member for it to have its full effect. I hope this site encourages whatever audience it has to not settle for mere experimentation, but to demand serious Art, to engage that Art fully and to freely expand the spirit.
No. 7: Art as Conversation
Art must be a conversation or else it becomes merely self-love. A conversation demands engagement with another. It requires a common language of some kind and courtesy towards the other. In a conversation the conversationalists all benefit from the conversation because it probes; it reveals; it concerts. Since at least the Greek civilization the West had been engaged in a conversation with itself about things that really mattered over time; this conversation could of course turn humorous, but its purpose had always been serious.
Then the industrial revolution came, the world wars came, and the Western conversation began its slouch into soliloquy, and eventually the whole project was stopped dead by irony. This devolution was worsened by the artistic community in two ways: (1) the cultured classes in general had done nothing to stop the march of socialism and in fact had done much to birth the two forms of socialism that had spread like cancer across Europe and into Asia; (2) many had sided against democracy and with socialism during the inter-war years and were guilty about their politics after the horrors of WWII. This conduct eroded the authority of culture in general and accelerated art’s slide into mediocrity.
Of course, this process was only partially the fault of the very talented and knowledgeable artists of the Twentieth Century, and it would be unfair not to point out that it is a testament to many of them that when the center failed to hold they continued to make art. However, making art from a Western culture bombed with industrial efficiency into fragments was very difficult; as Dietrich Bonhoeffer opined, man had asked God to leave, so he had. The technical and social revolutions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries had seemingly severed man’s ties to the natural. Without the attachment to nature, art became overly rational, virtually medieval in its approach to art except that rather than being grounded in God, it was grounded in nothing at all.
Obviously, I can’t change history, but I can say that enough time has passed and enough lessons have been learned that we can once again at least admit that our conversation had been worthwhile and that we should try to start it up again. A good place to start would be to discuss what happened to our culture and how we might reclaim the center. Art can help restart this conversation. As a proposal, I would suggest that we begin the conversation by looking to the Baroque aesthetic because we are much in need of its balance.
No. 6: “Sailing to Byzantium”
William Butler Yeats speaks of my artistic journey better than I possibly could, so let me provide you with his great poem in its entirety:
“Sailing To Byzantium”
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
‘Those dying generations’ at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Online text, 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved. From The Tower | 1928
No. 5: Truth
Let me try to address my broader theme from a slightly different angle. I’ve mentioned truth in prior articles, but only hinted at it, so let me expand on this concept. I am a realist in the philosophical sense of the word’I believe that there actually is an objective reality, TRUTH, whether it can be completely captured empirically or not (Einstein’s disagreement with the idea that quantum theory is a complete theory is instructive here if you’re interested).
God dazzles us by an excess of Truth. The problem with the idea of truth is not that there is no objective truth, the problem is that there is too much objective truth for the limited human brain to handle; think of it has having too little RAM. The complete truth, THE TRUTH, could only be known to God because only God could conceive of the whole TRUTH at one time. Human beings have to parse THE TRUTH and thus cannot consider the whole; hence the problem of the apparent multiplicity of truths. Think of truth as a sphere with an infinite number of points/facts/truths. Each of us assembles slices of facts to create and support our paradigm of reality, then we live in that paradigm, not reality. This is because we do not directly apprehend reality, and thus are forced to live in a world of ideas/concepts of what reality is based on what our senses tell us, as noted here elsewhere.
Understanding this led to empiricism; an approach that seeks to quantify and rely upon sense data only. All science is reductionist, however. It disassembles to find the constituent parts of whatever truth it seeks, but it loses something in the disassembly because the sum is greater than the parts. An electron behaves one way in isolation, another if part of an atom. The atom behaves one way in isolation and another as part of a molecule. I am a merely bag of water containing a few trace elements, yet my sum is hopefully greater than that. In short, something is missed by using the fine tool of science exclusively.
As I have been explaining in these articles, our brain uses models of reality to live in reality, e.g., words, icons, and paradigms, in order to save valuable RAM. It does this because it simply doesn’t have the capacity to absorb all the data. Models can be more or less accurate, but they cannot by definition be 100% accurate because they necessarily simplify or reduce THE TRUTH so that our small brain can function, survive, reproduce and create. A word is a model. We have a very difficult time thinking about something unless we name it first because the thing itself, which represents a huge amount of data, must be reduced to a manageable size. Think of it as similar to converting the RAW data image into a JPEG image by the processor in a digital camera; data is lost, but the image is still recognizable.
Given this limitation of the human brain, it isn’t surprising that we disagree as much as we do because in a certain sense we are each living in different universes of our own making. The key to remember is that every thought both posits something and limits it at the same time. Thus every great thought, expression, paradigm both frees and imprisons because it establishes artificial boundaries needed to have sufficient RAM to think about anything at all.
However, the unconscious mind has more RAM if you will because it does not have to support consciousness, and this permits it to use the RAW negative as it were, rather than the JPEG negative. Just as in processing a digital negative, the result using the RAW negative is better than the result using the JPEG negative because it has more data to work with and therefore less extrapolating to do. Everyone is aware that we are smarter than we are conscious of; we “trust our gut” in almost all matters of import no matter how much information we gather.
Art unites the conscious and the unconscious and thus comprehends a greater portion of the truth. It can take a thing and enrich its meaning by connecting it with other meanings at the conscious and unconscious level. A poet can arrange words in such a way so as to add meaning to words not otherwise available, unlike science, Art is expansionist. Just so, an artistic photograph can also add richness to the perception of the world and increase the space of truth. Thus, an artist can’t enlarge the amount of RAM an audience member has, but he can use tricks to concert other meanings, enrich the experience and enlarge the audience’s understanding of truth. More poetically, Art should aspire to remind us that we are souls who have drunk from the river of forgetfulness and need to rediscover who really we are. To quote William Blake from “There is No Natural Religion”:
Application
He who sees the in-
finite in all things,
sees God. He who
sees the Ratio only
sees himself only
No. 4: Philosophy Before Technology
Technology is certainly not irrelevant, but is not critically important for me either because it is the esthetic purpose of the artist that matters. It really doesn’t matter whether one uses film or digital media, high-end or low-end equipment. What matters is whether one understands what the equipment can do, can take advantage of its virtues and limitations, and create a great image, the key is the aesthetic purpose of the artist, not the equipment used. (Of course I did not say “simply create a great image.” I covered-up nearly all of the technical problems in producing something worthwhile to make my point about taking the proper perspective regarding the relative lack of importance of technology in the artistic project).
An artist first needs to consider the nature of his existence: the cosmology problem. The presumptions he makes about whether this material world is all there is or not will determine the subject matter of his work. If there is a god or absolute Platonic form of some kind then art of one type is likely, whereas if there is no such claim made, another sort of art is produced; the fact that the twentieth century Ulysses is your average white middle-class Englishman is testament to this distinction. Next he needs to consider how he knows what he knows: the epistemological problem. The presumptions made here will determine how he does his art. One only need consider impressionism or cubism to appreciate how the consideration of perception can be the key to any work of art.
Generally, the Twentieth Century was a century of genius and a monument to materialism. I intend my little works to drive a stake into the heart of materialist art. This is because a materialist cannot create great Art because he does not believe in great Art; great art is not created by things, it is created by an inspired spirit– neomodernism, surrealism, postmodernism, Dada, pop art, etc., any art reduced to mediocrity as an aesthetic will serve as an example. In short, I disagree with Marcel Duchamp because Art is not a joke to me.
No. 3: The Function of Art, Part 2: The Camera Sonata
To summarize, I want the viewer to see the world anew. I use a camera because it is commonly relied upon to show what “really” is; photographs are authentic and my images therefore show what really is. However, I want the viewer to come away from my images with a new perception of what is possible, of what is really and more fully before him in his everyday life; to see the world anew as a result of the experience of interacting with my work. I am not the author of these images, I am an explorer who photographs what is revealed to me. I want there to be an interaction between my image and the viewer that stimulates thought and feeling; Art ought to be a conversation.
To enhance this process, I create Camera Sonatas where each “movement” is an image; the assembly better defining the individual images and forming a more stimulating experience than the random mounting of individual images. Coming to this point was a two-step process. I had seen an tremendous Ansel Adams showing of over one-hundred of his photographs here in Austin, but came away exhausted because of the work it took to stay focused on such a large number of individual, all black and white photographs. Shortly thereafter I was listening to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” when I realized that the sonata form was the perfect solution to my concern about the proper display of my images. Composers juxtaposed movements in a sonata to maintain interest, and in the case of Beethoven create an overarching impression by telling a unified musical/emotional story as it were. Thus, the “Moonlight Sonata” I was listening to had a somber first movement, a bright little flower of a second movement, and a terrible and defiant final third movement. Taken together Beethoven’s Sonata provided a complete emotional and intellectual experience that was enhanced by the positioning of the movements. I now try to do the same thing with my photographic images by assembling them into a Sonata form when I display them.
No. 2: The Function of Art, Part 1
To paraphrase Victor Hugo’s comment about music, photographic images express that which cannot be said, but upon which it is impossible to be silent. Art enriches the experience of life, providing a more completely truthful picture of reality and permitting us to consider important non-verbal concepts.
The difficulty of the seemingly simple idea of a “concept” was brought home to me recently when I was waiting for my wife outside the lady’s room with my granddaughter. She is just learning to speak, so while waiting she would point to things and try to ask “what’s that?” I would respond with “door,” “lady” or whatever. She then pointed to the bathroom, so I said “bathroom,” and it suddenly struck me how difficult it was to simply learn words. She needed to understand much more than the sounds of “bathroom,” she needed the concept of “bathroom;” after all she was just pointing to the “door.” But, absent the word “bathroom” I couldn’t think of the concept of a bathroom, the chicken and egg problem.
Art helps to get around this difficulty because it is a tool to help think about and communicate a complex concept not amenable to a word, at least not fully and accurately. Sex in art will get your attention, so let’s use it as an example. To understand sex, one could go to a biology book and read about sex. When done, however, would the reader have a truthful idea of what sex really is? Before going on, read D.H. Lawrence’s “Love on the Farm,” then follow that up with his “The Snake.” If you’re more ambitious, continue with William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” then return.
Now you see that poetry has gone well beyond words and provided you with a mystical, and more completely truthful understanding of a subject that requires an appreciation of mystery to more fully understand what is meant by the word “sex.”
Image-making is also like music in that I can talk about the idea of the image, but I really can’t convey the idea itself because it is the image. We do this all the time, but perhaps don’t think of it that way, for example, the smell of fresh bread or a loved one, or strong feelings of almost any kind.
Poetry is another kind of music that informs my approach. In A Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye explains the artistic aesthetic of William Blake, a poet I enjoy very much. Blake correctly pointed out that we do not perceive sense data directly, rather it is mediated through our brains as perception. (See Decarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio R. Damsio, Quill Press, for a very interesting discussion of the relationship between reason and emotion.) Far ahead of his time, we now know that the brain organizes the incoming data from the senses and that the mind only deals with abstract concepts at the conscious level. In other words, people see what they are allowed to see by the software of their brain, filtering out what is “irrelevant” and permitting awareness of what is “required” to be conscious of. This perceptive process is enriched through experience and education, thus the fool and the artist observe the same tree, but perceive the tree differently. This perception, a concept, can even rise to the level of symbol, reflecting the fusion of sense data, the organizing programs of the brain, data from other sources and the personality of the observer. Somewhere in the process the soul is engaged and reflected in the perception. Carl Jung noted: “A symbol really lives only when it is the best and highest possible expression of something divined but not yet known even to the observer. For under these circumstances it provokes participation. It advances and creates life. ” (Jung, Psychological Types, p. 605).
Cultures that are technologically primitive understand that the image of the thing and the thing itself are magically connected. We do too, but as with many other native ideas, we believe that we have advanced beyond such primal thoughts, however, try an experiment: find a photograph of someone you love, and drive an ice pick through it. If you are like I am, you will hesitate, you will not like the idea, because deep in your dinosaur brain you know a truth, in your mind the image of the thing and thing itself are magically connected. (I owe this example, and much else to The Story of Art, by E.H. Gombrich) Many artists in the past have not cared about portraying a thing “realistically.” The ancient Egyptians, for example, painted ideas, perfect forms to insure that the important data were transmitted into the after life. They could realistically portray the human form as a technical matter, witness Egyptian sculpture, but they choose not to do so. Medieval artists and Byzantine artists similarly were not concerned will “reality,” in the sense of material reality, rather they were concerned with an immaterial realty that is somehow connected to a material reality.
Thus, the truth shimmers for people because we are limited; we understand only shards of it, and with a great deal of work can hold on to a few shards at once, but they come into and out of our consciousness, and thus shimmer. Because we have this limitation, in every day life we use a model of some aspect of the truth, the concept, to deal with the portion of the infinitely complex that we are capable of consciously thinking about. One of art’s goals should be to help provide that magical recognition of a more complete truth, a truth beyond the mere dictionary meaning of the terms we use, even beyond the craft of the art itself.
No. 1: Image not Photograph
I distinguish the concepts of “photograph” and “image” meaning that I create images from photographs. The point is that I am not directly concerned with the question of whether I have created a technically perfect photograph because I am aiming at a great image. In sum, I don’t wish to be hamstrung without purpose; a great image might not be a technically perfect photograph; syntax should aid communication, not strangle it.
This image (the subject, shapes, point of focus and colors of the image, and paper quality) is both something old and something new The first thing I do when considering the capture of an image is to remove it from its context by shifting the perception of scale, depth of field, contrast, normal point of view, etc. Stripping the thing of its context also strips the audience of its prejudices about what the thing in question is “supposed” to look like, i.e., its concept of the thing photographed. Once freed, I can present my perception of the thing anew; it is still an image of thing; it is still “realistic,” but hopefully a new way of looking at it is born and the original concept of it has been transcended.