Anodyne
Saturday, February 18, 2006
 

4:15pm-ish, Main and Broadway: the first day in calendar 2006 that the sleepy February sun grazed the side of the Lee Building and dropped in to say hello. Full seven minute standstill, eyes closed. Winter 0, cjb 1!

More handwritten notes on the (Untitleds), yellow lined legal pad and red pen just out of sight in the foreground:

Anti-expressionism. Expressionism projects human feelings, etc. onto inanimate objects. The (Untitleds) uncover aspects of a thing (expressed as a noun; a single, specific object) latent in the thing but not typically observed because of force of habit, which compels us to see a thing as representative of a mental category (eg., the title) and not for the "dense specificity" of the thing itself.

Nouns, bolted together with grammar's glue, yield sentences. A good Friedlander or a Shore photograph is a compound sentence, worthy of Faulkner, Joyce, or Proust. Your little exercises are provisional definitions, "examples of use" like the ones in the dictionary. Infinitely expandable, a list that keeps on keepin' on.

Don't post a picture the same day you make it.

(Duchamp's delay)

Ask yourself, do you really want to claim an image? Or are you just me-toing? Do your pictures possess an abstract, "open," aporetic quality? Or are they just "good compositions?"

Gillian Rose, aporetic reading: "according to the difficulty which the conceptuality represents by leaving gaps and silences in the mode of representation." (Mourning Becomes The Law, Cambridge UP, 1996, p.8).
- posted by cjb @ 9:54 PM


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