It's been a while...

language is annoying me. instead, ambivalence and complexity.... de-connecting the standard meanings of things...

these are from september

Small Interventions

We are having a very wet summer.

I am thinking about nature again, and about small things, and about Richard Long's work, and about attention to that which is at hand and the non-exceptional. I am also learning about light levels with my macro lens.

Oracle/Soap Dish*

*Perhaps each one of these should have a title that refers to something 'culturally produced', like, Oracle, or, Soap Dish. I'm thinking about the language of titles and what that makes of an image, or brings to the image. The relationship of nouns to phenomena. What comes first, the noun or the thing?

Nebulae/Paperback

Closet/Electrical Device

Participant/Car Seat

Rushes/Flight Attendant

Howler/Sweeties

Wharf/Beach Ball

Mammal/Safety Cover

Island/Petal

Vestibule/Coat

Packet/Surface

In the garden.

Tunisia (2)

Tunisia (1)

No thoughts yet, just some photos. Wish I'd taken more.

Another two from Paris

My thinking on images is continually buffeted around by new ideas. I'm reading Cassirer's Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms (vol 1, Language) and am enjoying it. So far it affirms my own epistemological beliefs, that knowledge of the world is mediated, meaning is not fixed,  and that we deal mostly (entirely?) with fictions. I'm not sure yet if Cassirer is as sceptical as me, I hope to find out. It's interesting though how Cassirer posits language as one of several independent modes of symbolic formation - language, art, myth, science/reason and religion each function through their own cultural forms and the meanings attributed to them, unlike the Saussurians who would place language as the most basic means by which all the different cultural forms function. As I am reading Cassirer it is easy to imagine that photography possesses the dignity of a fully qualified category of epistemology, because the aesthetic imagination is treated as essential to our basic experiencing of the world. Although Cassirer was against Heidegger ('being' as the basic ground of philosophy is constantly rejected), I am reminded of when I read 'The Origin of the Work of Art' because of the same sense of the fundamental importance of representation, of an image inserting itself between us and the world. However, Cassirer rejects the concept of representation too, because for him there is no guaranteed already-existing external world for us to make copies of. It is us that forms the criteria, categories, of perception in an ever constant process of relations between that which we have already formed as symbols and the world that comes to us through them.

Paris

My four favourite images (so far):

Thought Jan 2012

Just going to quickly jot some thoughts down.
Thinking about the role of symbols in our thought. How images that we carry in our minds mold our subsequent cognition, how it is as if the form of the images/representations that we take of the world come to delimit what we are then able to see/think, or at least, to influence it, maybe to facilitate it. Our representations as symbols, because they facilitate a transition somehow, the transition of the thought process itself. The transition of inner mental experience mediated/mediating our experience of the outer world.
Saw this today:
http://www.ravenrow.org/current/asier_mendizabal/
And there was talk of collective symbolisation in objects and in political representation.
I am thinking too about constructing house like structures within our imagination in order to 'house' our thought - that place that makes the ingestion of our experiences possible. What would your house be made from?
The faculties, as in Kant's, need a certain imagination space in order to fantasize. The fantasy, our visions, are secreted by the experience of living life, both physically and cognitively. Those visions are related to the thinking and experiencing, and are necessary for true comprehension to occur.
In which case we need space to be imaginative.

Classification is fascinating

A while ago, Mr. shaj mohan said that my work was always about taking something away. I wasn't sure what he meant, but just this week I think I might be getting an idea. My work is always a focus or close up on something, with an interest in transforming what that thing is a little, making it look a bit like it's not the thing that it is. I can see now, that the taking away, could be about removing the means of identification that would give it its normal identity. 


I've been thinking a lot about being a relativist, that I don't think things are essentially themselves. They always require a relationship or context in order for us to define them. 


I like the contrast in the lower picture here - the purple sky and dark branches, with the gold branches below.

Life is a series of adjustments to the present

mewet

mute (adj.)

late 14c., mewet "silent," from O.Fr. muet, dim. of mut, mo, from L. mutus "silent, dumb," probably from imitative base *mu- (cf. Skt. mukah "dumb," Gk. myein "to be shut," of the mouth). Assimilated in form in 16c. to L. mutus. The verb is first attested 1861. Related: Muted; muting. Musical noun sense first recorded 1811, of stringed instruments, 1841, of horns.

Muted

Getting Into Natural History

I've been away, and pondering on this notion of natural history (since I'm writing a thesis on Adorno's take on it). A new found fascination for animal classification and the natural world as object of study is burgeoning, though these pictures don't really reflect that as they are still very romantic and I'm not sure they pull off any convincing scientific objectivity. Wow, without even trying the dualism/opposition is set up! It's not a dualism that I'm interested in - the affirmation of an opposition between subjective and scientific ways of seeing the natural world. It's the entwinement of the two that is interesting, triggering thoughts on culture/nature as one and semiotics. 

I'm thinking to keep and collect the references to NH and animals... see what they grow into. Reading Afterall today, I was enjoying this article by Francis McKee on Minerva Cuevas: Anarchy in the Hive, with its introductory discussion of a cultural tradition of anthropomorphism being replaced by science, which does of course mean that science has retained something of the function of the old anthropomorphism to society, whatever that was.
 

Things In Themselves

Just giving myself a moment of distraction while reading Adorno's Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems. He has it that all concepts initially arise as abstractions from matter, and therefor, concepts refer to the residual material world - the two are tied, and when we conceptualise, conceptualising does not occur at the cost of the material it supersedes (idealism) but is in fact a result of the material. Things, materiality, the natural, particularities and that which changes, are accordingly elevated by this schema, without our schema merely replacing those things' materiality with another set of concepts. The material is left to exist as material, whilst not being relegated to an inferior status in relation to the immutability of concepts.

These images come from a recent trip to HMS Belfast on the river Thames in London. I managed to utterly fail at learning anything about the ship and its life at war, nor much about the lives of the men who lived and worked in it. I did get very excited about the fixtures though and took a lot of photos that I'm excited to work on. In this philosophical dualism of form and content, I wonder at the role of photography. Does the camera impose a form upon the matter? And where is the matter - in the material of objects' physical makeup, or in their relationships to human activity? I like this thought that the concept refers to its material content - it is as if the form of these objects bring with them the memory of the industry and functionality of the warship.

Tribute/Tributary

In a discussion this evening I was reminded of an image I took in Greece, 2008, and how I had been thinking of Eva Hesse when I had composed it.

It's nice to see it again.