JW in conversation with Mark Lewis in 1993:
"I think connoisseurship is an extremely theoretical approach to art, in principle, since it aims at making the subtlest distinctions between (and within) works. I feel that this terminology has just become frozen over the years and has lost the sense that critical philosophy and ideological critique are aspects of connoisseurship. A 'serious' work of ideological critique begins from a concept of the 'valid' and the 'serious' work (or its opposite - counterfeit or kitsch). Connoisseurship and a canon of taste are already present in it. The academic radicals and conservatives have allowed themselves to tear apart a discourse which is more expansive than either of their positions can recognize. I'm not interested in connoisseurship in its auction-house sense and the snobbism of reactionary elites, except where fine empirical distinctions are concerned. There, the critical elite would probably have a lot to learn from a connoisseur-like study of the granular or molecular nature of individual, physical art works, or objects - which is what we artists make--"
The Lahaina banyen, 10 August 2023. On the left hand side of the square are three cars. Go in maybe fifteen feet to the right of the car furthest from the water, just under that huge canopy of shade, and that's where you might occasionally find me with my big camera, on an "out of office" day. I also have a few studies made early on from the upper right hand corner of the square, but I never liked the light there & slowly worked around to a more spatially complex southeast-facing view. If this all sounds insanely self-centered in the face of massive loss of human and economic life I suppose all I can offer in my own defense is my legitimate grief at the almost certain death of a living thing I've struggled to depict for over a decade, for the sheer fact of its perserverence in the face of a world inimical to it & its kind.
Lahaina, HI, 9 August 2023. The dark mass behind the burned white government building is a single banyen tree, planted in 1873, the subject of an unfinished composite picture I've been working on since 2012.
Breaking character for a moment to tell a longer story. Visited Lahaina in 2012 & soon learned that a vacation meant for "working on a relationship" was maybe not the best time to start making a 40" x 60" multiple-exposure print with extreme lighting contrasts & 12+ figures (+ birds, etc.), most of whom changed from day to day.
Returned to Vancouver. Relationship changed. Never stopped thinking of that block-size tree; the vendors & tourists & hustling locals & officials out on break from the government office & birds & other living things gathered in its shade. & also of Ursula Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow": "a brooding calm that was half aware of them and half indifferent to them."
I thought, I'm gonna make that picture! & had Duchamp's Philadelphia door, made silently over the years where he pretended to make no art, as a model.
So I bought a new camera, and a computer capable of the complex compositing. & twice, since 2012, flew secretly to Maui on points, never telling anyone where I was going & never staying longer than two or three days at a time, living in my rental car or stealth camping, so I could spend 12+ hours at a stretch with my camera(s) and the tree & its ever changing cast of extras.
That picture will not be finished now. I hope the tree (which I have spent enough time with now to feel it must be dimly aware of me) & the broader society around it, which is of course my picture's real subject, survive the anthropocene, and that I will be able to visit again, when it is safe and respectful for a non-Hawaiian to do so, & that there will at some point be a new, & different picture, of which I'll say no more, until it's finished.
In the meantime: Hawaii can use your money. If you are a reader or friend of this blog, or my work, please consider donating to support indigenous Hawaiians in their struggle(s) against the anthropocene. I have!
"The intriguing rock exposure in front of you is part of a formation that caps the highest hills in this area. The Point Reyes Conglomerate is a formation consisting of a sandy matrix embedded with pebbles, cobblestones, and boulders. Geologists estimate that the formation may be over 50 million years old.
Here you can see layers intersecting at different angles (cross bedding), and rounded cavities caused by the erosion of poorly cemented materials. Notice also that in any one layer the larger sand grains which sank first are at the bottom, while the finer ones lie on top (graded bedding).
Please do not chip or pick at the conglomerate.
Leave it intact for others to enjoy."
"A kiln is a provisory space where objects and their makers are temporarily held, communing, until the firing is over and the heat disperses, and along with it the artifacts of that transitory time, marked forever by their meeting. The makers in this exhibition met and worked together in a perishable place, one that is gone now, and are appreciative of the opportunity to reunite these sibling objects alongside Christopher Brayshaw’s photographs documenting the dispersal.
With love and gratitude to Don Hutchinson."
Five of my recent photographs (2022) are included in a group exhibition opening by month's end in Vancouver. Details soon.
Someone asks about a "statement of aesthetic intent" & I think it's all here, if you really know me.
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