Still thinking about photographs
My experience, however, is that you can’t manage to think about things simply by deciding to, and that the mind’s deeper currents often need to be surprised by indirection, sometimes, indeed, by treachery and ruse, as when you steer away from a goal in order to reach it more directly or look away from an object to register it more exactly.
—Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, pg. 71
I don’t think you can not say that applies pretty generally. Or something.
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It seems to me that the object must exist before one can think about it…or maybe the idea of the object. And so it is in Art…I’m going to butcher this quote by william carlos williams, but he basically said, “there are no ideas exept in things.” It’s a very modernist statement but fitting for this conversation. Ideas and thinking are both reactionary. They are not born out of a vacuum. Say I am standing on a street corner watching a woman with a sheer dress on stray into a shaft of light created by two buildings and I lift up my camera and click the sutter. The entire act is reactionary, the thinking involves what I previously know about photographs and a curiosity about what THIS frame will look like as a photo. It seems fairly esoteric but it is true of any art. Painting is a reaction to paint on a canvas, even if its an Italian Renaissance painter…it is reaction to previous thoughts of light and paint and what I see. Art (maybe I should qualify good art or Art with a capital A) is a reaction not a thought and I think that there is a difference between reacting and thinking. So.. if there are no ideas exept in things (and that is a BIG if), then there are never any new ideas…only new reactions to ideas…ummm…I’m not sure if I belive in anything I just wrote but it’s worth thinking about.
Isn’t all experience reactionary, not just in art? Can you think of a single experience you have had that hasn’t involved a reaction to something? Can you think of an example of a reaction that doesn’t involve thought? I don’t think there is much seperation between the two. I do however think there is a difference between thought and analysis/reflection.
Does art always have to be a reaction to itself or is there potentiel for a reaction to something outside of itself or to put it another way, can’t reactions to something else be transformed into art?
P.S. Austin I am glad you are joing the conversation…..Jerk