I wrestle with what I am actually doing when I create an image. Am I displaying an aspect of the thing photographed or am I creating an entirely new, two-dimensional image that does not represent anything outside of my own imagination? Romantic Era avant-garde Realistic painters and writers of the Nineteenth Century were expressly not adding anything to their subject; the subject was aesthetically unimportant (as Flaubert said, his desire was: “to write the mediocre beautifully…”). In that era, “[p]ictures and novels lay a double claim, first to absolute truth undistracted by aesthetic preconceptions, and then to abstract beauty, uninfluenced by the world that is represented.”(quoted from wonderful book on the subject: Romanticism and Realism by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner).
Thus, for these artists any beauty of the subject itself was being left behind and the beauty of the painting or novel as art were rising to the fore, perhaps with the intellectual justification of Kant. This evolved into Impressionism, which dramatically removed the “art” from the subject and theoretically at least showed artfully what a viewer would actually see, as distinct from the thing itself; art and science as one; paint brushed onto canvas. So back to my question. Am I kidding myself when I talk about extracting the subject from the surrounding clutter to show it as I perceived it or am I creating beautiful patterns of ink on paper based on the data a sensor collected? What is the subject? The thing photographed or the image itself?
This brings up a related question: Where is the image? It might be easier to think about if in a musical context: Where is the music? Is it in the score? Is it in the sound waves ? In the mind of the composer? The mind of the listener? Sound waves can easily be dismissed as the location because only people experience music. The score is just an artifact or symbols designed to permit the music to be recreated somewhere else. Thus, it would seem that the only place music could be is in a human mind, either the composer’s or the listener’s. Similarly with the image, which can only be experienced in the mind, mine or yours. Thus, the question that began this riff is misdirected toward the artifact that is the ink on paper. Like the musical score it permits the image to be transferred from my mind to the viewer’s mind through the artifact of ink and paper. I want to print the mediocre (everyday) beautifully out of love for thing itself, stripped naked as it were. So, the answer is: no, I am not kidding myself; I am as serious as a lover. To quote Robert Bringhurst from “THESE POEMS, SHE SAID”: “Self-love is an ending, she said, and not a beginning. Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.”
No. 46: Where is the Image?
I wrestle with what I am actually doing when I create an image. Am I displaying an aspect of the thing photographed or am I creating an entirely new, two-dimensional image that does not represent anything outside of my own imagination? Romantic Era avant-garde Realistic painters and writers of the Nineteenth Century were expressly not adding anything to their subject; the subject was aesthetically unimportant (as Flaubert said, his desire was: “to write the mediocre beautifully…”). In that era, “[p]ictures and novels lay a double claim, first to absolute truth undistracted by aesthetic preconceptions, and then to abstract beauty, uninfluenced by the world that is represented.”(quoted from wonderful book on the subject: Romanticism and Realism by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner).
Thus, for these artists any beauty of the subject itself was being left behind and the beauty of the painting or novel as art were rising to the fore, perhaps with the intellectual justification of Kant. This evolved into Impressionism, which dramatically removed the “art” from the subject and theoretically at least showed artfully what a viewer would actually see, as distinct from the thing itself; art and science as one; paint brushed onto canvas. So back to my question. Am I kidding myself when I talk about extracting the subject from the surrounding clutter to show it as I perceived it or am I creating beautiful patterns of ink on paper based on the data a sensor collected? What is the subject? The thing photographed or the image itself?
This brings up a related question: Where is the image? It might be easier to think about if in a musical context: Where is the music? Is it in the score? Is it in the sound waves ? In the mind of the composer? The mind of the listener? Sound waves can easily be dismissed as the location because only people experience music. The score is just an artifact or symbols designed to permit the music to be recreated somewhere else. Thus, it would seem that the only place music could be is in a human mind, either the composer’s or the listener’s. Similarly with the image, which can only be experienced in the mind, mine or yours. Thus, the question that began this riff is misdirected toward the artifact that is the ink on paper. Like the musical score it permits the image to be transferred from my mind to the viewer’s mind through the artifact of ink and paper. I want to print the mediocre (everyday) beautifully out of love for thing itself, stripped naked as it were. So, the answer is: no, I am not kidding myself; I am as serious as a lover. To quote Robert Bringhurst from “THESE POEMS, SHE SAID”: “Self-love is an ending, she said, and not a beginning. Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.”