The Art of Urban Walking: Ghosts, Images & Text
A little “essay in progress” about the series.
Your comments and input kindly appreciated.
What follows - if you choose to descend down the series here of photographs conjoined with texts - is a way of looking at the City, at least looking and listening to the City while walking. (The “City” here is San Francisco - in case you have wandered in from afar.) Pieces, many of which I have come call “Ghosts.” But the why of that, more will be said later.
Consciously or not, I suspect one is always constructing his or her own particular experience of a space. The objects of what one’s eye goes to, what the ear makes significant to over hear, the nature of one’s conversations with others, are to some degree determined by what is going on within one’s particular intellectual and emotional “mindset” of a particular day. As a friend once pointed out, if you are looking for a place to rent, impulsively the eye will be looking for “Rent” signs. If one’s friend or wife is pregnant, the eye will gravitate to pregnant women. It the condition in either case is not true, one’s looking will be more determinded by something else.
Yet, that said, I believe a space, particularly in the case here, an urban space is different, more complex. The eye, ear and other senses are in a combination of argument and collaboration with whatever details present themselves. One, I assume, is naturally drawn to focus on things that will freshen the psyche and, simultaneosly, block out gray, or gratuitious intrusions. At the same time, one is not the inventor of ones immediate landscape. Other forces are at work here. The advertisers - makers of signage and billboards - are, for example, trying to take psychic icons - fire, ice, intimacy, romance, whatever - and convert one’s psychic flow to embrace a commodity - a certain brand of liquor, for example, to induce desire, romance. An additional, often invisible, underlay are one’s individual and collective memories and stories of a space, as in “What happened or what was here before this present time experience.”
The walker (biker, or car driver), however, can seize the agression inherent in the environment and convert those images and histories into purposes personal, social, religious or political. A shop window - particularly a creative one, say, featuring a Day of the Dead assemblage of skeletons, bicycles and a family snapshot of a late patriarch - becomes a catalyist into ones consciousness of a familiar death in an entirely different personal tradition. Similarly one can select a bird out of a liquor billboard and turn the creature into an oracular source. A remembered, personal history - an event, an accident, or a character who or or store which inhabited the space, may further complicate the tableaux, the collision of past and present. Alternatively, the lumpy character, image, color and texture, say, of homeless blankets left curiously unrolled on the park grass will provide entrance into the ghosted lives of others.
Indeed, one can say, the objects, persons and sounds in any space will provide a series of patinas - let’s say “ghosts” from which any number of histories can be deciphered, while their envelopes opened - provide fresh resources for the re-creation of stories, poems.
Indeed, from the point of view of making an art that speaks to a larger condition than shop or gallery sales, or billboards and other kinds of signage, let alone the objects of everyday living - the urban landscape provides the fodder to build a collage of juxtapose elements, or, to radically cut and simplify the complexity of, say, an advertisment into an abrupt ephinany - personal, social, political or otherwise. On one level everything - present and past - becomes ‘fair game’.
Yet, that said, the argument here is not a proposal for the manipulation of materials in some predetermined, thought out manner. The magic of the process is letting the eye and/or ear be drawn to particular elements - letting things come to one as, perhaps, in the magic of a a courtship in which the initiating couple are, and, on some level, remain a surprise to one another. Indeed, at best, a series of astonishments, revelations.
So what happens: an image is taken through the instrument of the camera, or an overheard phrase enters as text. Then, there begins another argument. On some level any image refuses to disclose itself into a text without an argument. One must, once again, listen to the image, that is listen to see what the image dictates, transmutes as language. Listened to closely, the shape or form of an image will insist that a certain language is accurate, while other “attempts” are gratuitous, false, or, in bad faith.
On the creative level, one proceeds, almost as an act of faith, as if there will definitely be a language, a text that will mount itself as accurate to the occasion of the image. After all - in taking the photograph - someting inside ones consciousness has made a connection with its particular content. There is a “why” about it. The task is to find it.
That said, the image and the text may always be at war with each other, or, minimally in a peripheral relationship - as in, for example, the image of the parabola of the course of one moon barely crossing the parabola course of another. That’s OK. It makes the entire construct richer, and something besides using the image as a self-serving, self-determined object: Something that becomes called “art” because of its inherrent friction, one that hits at a core, the “verity of difference”.
