Someone writes to ask if the plant photographs are art. Short answer: no, they're representations of things I've seen, which I'm trying to learn about by photographing and IDing back at home. I hope they are good likenesses of the plants in question, but they definitely lack art's conceptual, self-reflexive dimension, and are largely engendered by simple curiosity. A walk in the woods, or above treeline, or through a warm West Coast spring afternoon is a good reminder of the limits of one's knowledge. That brown bird on the powerline, the one going too-whit, too-wee? Not a clue. Those huge green leaves in the drainage ditch, the ones that look like a cross between rhubarb and a triffid? Dunno. Why are there four...wait, six...eight...twelve rabbits on that farmhouse lawn on Hammond Bay Road? Je ne sais pas. Are those really oysters just below tideline all along Departure Bay's western edge? And why are they scattered loose in among the rocks, instead of being attached to them? "I don't know, but I should try to find out" is a powerful phrase in the mouth of anyone willing to risk briefly looking like a dumbass. And in my experience, people typically ask fewer questions than they should. I see this all the time behind the desk at the bookstore, folks who expect that I'll just magically know what they're talking about.

CUSTOMER: Do you have anything by Oscar Eckenstein?

CJB: Never heard of him, sorry. What can you tell me about him?

CUSTOMER [theatrical sigh]: You don't know.

CJB: Nope! What can you tell me about him?

CUSTOMER: He climbed K2 with Crowley. . . .

CJB: Really! What else can you tell me about him?

Which, if applied consistantly, and in good faith, and with a certain wide-eyed Platonic sincerity, produces one of two responses:

CUSTOMER: He was a railway engineer for most of his life - well educated, and insufferably arrogant (some said). He was not one to mince words, and a long feud with the Alpine Club caused many of its members to denigrate him. Nevertheless, he was a brilliant technical innovator and laid the foundation, with his love of bouldering, of modern British crag climbing. He is credited with designing the modern crampon and developing a short ice axe, as well as analyzing both knots and nail patterns for climbing boots.

Or, rather more often:

CUSTOMER: I dunno. My friend just said I should check him out.

The psychologically interesting response is the long theatrical sigh from the mouth of the guy who, two or three sentences later, turns out to not be fully dialled-in, either. I think this has to do with socially distinguishing one's self, and probably with insecurity, too. I used to encounter this response all the time in the Vancouver art world, most memorably at a Dan Graham lecture at SFU Harbourside:

DAN GRAHAM: Any questions?

MUCH YOUNGER CJB: Yes. That slide of the stack of red plastic chairs that you showed...looked like a "found" Judd or Lewitt sculpture. In making that slidework, did you mean to establish a critical relationship between mass-produced commodity objects and American minimal sculpture?

I remember the words "mimimal sculpture" dropping off into a huge silent void. I had just fucked up, though it was not immediately apparent how. The audience's silence was a collective version of my customer's contemptous "You don't know." Dan Graham, on the other hand, took my ignorance completely seriously, and delivered an arresting and uninterrupted six minute monologue on minimalism, amateur photography, his friend Sol Lewitt, the John Daniels Gallery, & etc.

Charles T. Munger: "Rationality is not just something you do so that you can make more money, it is a binding principle. Rationality is a really good idea. You must avoid the nonsense that is conventional in one's own time. It requires developing systems of thought that improve your batting average over time. . . ."

Amen, oh yeah, says CJB, looking up vascular plants with multi-leaved purple flowers on E-Flora BC, and learning, among other things, that camas bulbs taste like pears when slowly roasted over a charcoal fire.
- posted by cjb @ 6:58 PM