Wrappers: Fritos Flavor Twists

Friday Photo (9)

Untitled, 2007

Photography and Contingency

I recently bought a camera with impressive features and capabilities. To master it, I’ll first need to absorb the camera’s thick manual. Then, shoot lots of photographs. Because failure is a daily part of creating art, I’ll have many failures ahead of me, if I set myself the goal of using the camera to create art.

Camera technology today makes picture taking nearly foolproof. Point and shoot. No need to have a complicated camera; today’s disposables do a fine job. It’s easy to take a good photograph. Taking an interesting photograph is another matter. Just as the best cookware is a pleasure to use, but unfortunately wholly ancillary to creating a great meal, using a professional camera is satisfying though it in no way ensures an interesting photograph. It’s not the tool. Amateurs using cheap cameras sometimes take interesting, even great, photographs. Thomas Walther’s Other Pictures is a fascinating collection of such photographs. However, snapshooters usually create work of interest by chance.

Most photographers like to minimize chance. They want to achieve a predetermined look—the look of advertising or fashion or the family photo album or a tableau . Unexpected results are unwelcome. The art director expects to get what she ordered. The family wants to relive the birthday or vacation. Both the commercial photographer and the snapshooter know a style—the conventions of photography—and adhere to them. When conventions are broken, surprising things may happen, but they are still failures

I welcome chance—the chance encounter and the unpredictable registration of something on film or the digital sensor. Part of my attraction to chance is psychological. By submitting to chance, I feel I relinquish control, and so am not responsible for failure. This is not true, of course; I control most of what I create. And only I decide whether or not my creations are of interest to me (or possibly you).

But what about the more important, deeper implications of chance? What is the relationship between the philosophy of chance and the aesthetics of chance? These questions came to mind as I thumbed through my copy of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. No philosopher, I enjoy reading philosophy occasionally. Its extended arguments give me pleasure, and nearly always raise interesting questions. Some are worth unpacking, even by armchair readers of philosophy.

Cans: Diet Pepsi

The Mower Against Gardens

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,

  Did after him the world seduce,

And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,

  Where nature was most plain and pure.

He first enclosed within the gardens square

  A dead and standing pool of air,

And a more luscious earth for them did knead,

  Which stupified them while it fed.

The pink grew then as double as his mind;

  The nutriment did change the kind.

With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,

  And flowers themselves were taught to paint.

The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,

  And learned to interline its cheek:

Its onion root they then so high did hold,

  That one was for a meadow sold.

Another world was searched, through oceans new,

  To find the Marvel of Peru.

And yet these rarities might be allowed

  To man, that sovereign thing and proud,

Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,

  Forbidden mixtures there to see.

No plant now knew the stock from which it came;

  He grafts upon the wild the tame:

That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit

  Might put the palate in dispute.

His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,

  Lest any tyrant him outdo.

And in the cherry he does nature vex,

  To procreate without a sex.

’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,

  While the sweet fields do lie forgot:

Where willing nature does to all dispense

  A wild and fragrant innocence:

And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,

  More by their presence than their skill.

Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,

  May to adorn the gardens stand:

But howsoe’er the figures do excel,

  The gods themselves with us do dwell.

Friday Photo (8)

Red Lips (Mall Series), 2006

Marie Watt's Blankets

Visiting Boston several years ago, my wife and I happened upon a Newbury Street gallery exhibiting contemporary works constructed with fabric. Among them were Marie Watt’s small blanket pieces, the first of her blanket constructions that I had seen. I hungered for more.

The announcement of Marie Watt’s new show at PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon, arrived in my mail this week. I wish I could travel to Portland for the show. Instead, I’ll pour over images of Watt’s work on the gallery website.

Watt, a Portland-based Seneca artist, draws on Native American traditions and materials. “I am interested in human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects,” she has written. “I find myself attracted to the blanket’s two- and three-dimensional qualities. On a wall, a blanket functions as a tapestry, but on a body it functions as a robe and living art object.” Her interest in everyday objects and the varied dimensionality of the medium bring to mind Jasper Johns, especially his groundbreaking flag and target paintings of the 1950s. Like Johns, Watt’s blankets play off oppositions: formal/informal and public/private. And like Johns, the blankets carry with them communal meanings associated with Native American traditions. Unlike Johns’ use of communal, depersonalized symbols (the American flag, the bull’s eye), Watt’s blankets also evoke associations with our most intimate and vulnerable activities. Tension created between these evocations and the rigorous formalism of Watt's constructions give her work extraordinary power.