Not Alike As People

“The way I understand it, a photographer’s relationship to his medium is responsible for his relationship to the world is responsible for his relationship to his medium.”
— Garry Winogrand

This is from an essay The Hair of the Dog by Lee Friedlander that’s in Arrivals & Departures: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand eds Alex Harris and Lee Friedlander (2004):

… He and I cut our photographic teeth together at the same time and on the same fodder — the United States of the 1950s and 60s. We were not alike as people. We lived and traveled to different places. Our personal and photographic styles were different. I always think of Garry’s working energy as a kind of touchstone that made the work work. I have good work energy, but mine is more that of a plodder, one foot in front of the other, whereas Garry was a dynamo. I still like to think of him out there working and I still derive sustenance from these memories and from, of course, the work, the splendid work. Garry Winogrand was a big man with curly hair the color of a lion’s mane and a bawdy good cheer often matched by an equal cantankerousness. He was a bull of a man and the world his china shop. Garry’s appetites were huge. The photographic one was consummated and fed by a self with such an itching curiosity as to what life looked like in photographs, his photographs. The curiosity was matched by a never-ending engine of high energy, a facile and clear mind, and the ability to summon a will to deal photographically with whatever he saw in front of him.

He wanted to photograph it all, everyday. And most days he was at it or on the way there, rarely tired or out of steam, never bored. [ … ] It was wild to watch him. For three or four hours he photographed everyone [they were in New York City] who passed him. I said: Garry, you’re doing a census. He looked at me quickly and made a grunting noise and went back to his hunt. He wasn’t going to discuss something so sacred — in doing so, he would belittle it.

… Photography seemed for Garry a kind of emotional equalizer. He once told me: If it wasn’t for photography, I’d probably be in jail.

Garry Winogrand: photo by Judy Winogrand; late 1960s

If you’re not familiar with Garry Winogrand’s work, here are the Google Image search results for his name. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Newborn at Seventy

I have recently bumped into several references to the photography of John Coplans, most recently in essays about Lee Friedlander. I know Coplans’s best known images from magazines and books not specifically about him, but I decided to see if I could get one of his monographs. His book, A Body (2002) was not available from Amazon, but they listed several for sale through their affiliates. Under their New listings, there was one that was described as “… and it’s signed by the author with a dedication!!” This made me laugh (obviously it wasn’t “new” if it was signed and dedicated) but I liked the idea of a signed copy (a first edition, though I don’t think there are any other editions …) — and the price was right ($20.00 plus $3.99 shipping).　

Upon receipt, I find that while the book is not new it is in excellent condition and a steal at that price. Of special interest, is the dedication:

I wonder if the doctor didn’t like Coplans (or his pictures) as much as Coplans liked the doctor. Or maybe the doctor has died and the book sold by his estate. Or maybe the dedication and signature are fake (one wonders why Coplans wouldn’t call the doctor by name in a dedication).

It’s an excellent book. I very much like the photographs — he’s sort of a cheerful 200-pound hairy ballerina; or he’s a seventy year old examining and enjoying his body in the same way that new babies do.

Fingers, Downward, 1999, 26 x 34

Back Torso from Below, 1985, 16 x 20

I picked those two pictures (above) because I think they are very good. And because they don’t show his willy (his is definitely a willy and not a dick or a penis). I’ve been looking at nude photography for so long, I can’t remember whether or not frontal male nudity is a good idea on a blog. To see a wider sampling of his work, try these results from a Google Image search on his name. [ link ]

In addition to his photographs, in the book, Coplans has a (not too long) sketch of his life (seventeen large pages) that is good. It has engaging descriptions of his life in London and South Africa as well as active duty in India/Africa during World War II before a lengthy description of his life in the art business. Here is one snip that I like:

… In India, our units are greeted by the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Mountbattan, and given a pep talk on how we are going to “hit the Japanese for six” (a home run to you). Mountbattan is obviously heavily made up, and speaks in a somewhat high falsetto voice. The Askaris [in Coplans’s East African unit] think he is a woman disguised as a man, or some kind of transsexual, or a person dressed in drag. They begin to titter at his performance; we have to shush them up.

Coplans description of how he made his nude photos is as follows:

… I use Polaroid Positive/Negative film that develops both an image and a negative in half a minute, thus I can see the resultant image that my assistant has taken almost immediately. Over time, I refine the process, with the use of a video camera connected to a television set. The video camera is placed in such a way that I am able to look through the back of the 4 x 5 camera I use. I see the image upside down on the television set. My eyes see myself, and I can frame the photo according to will. Sometimes, I discover I don’t have to see myself in advance. The image is in my head and I know how to pose for it.

One last bit. Out of curiosity, I did a search of Photo.net for references to John Coplans in discussion. I turned up an old (1997) article by Philip Greenspun (founder of Photo.net) titled Nudes that makes this mention of Coplans pictures:

… the repulsively hairy body of John Coplans, whose self-portraits definitely constitute one of the nastiest things one can do with a 4×5 view camera (actually his assistant takes the pictures; he just sells them for $5000 a whack).

All I can say to that is that I’m flabbergasted. I’d take any of Coplans pictures over the completely uninteresting (and that’s the nicest thing I can say about them) photos used to illustrate Greenspun’s piece.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Green Peas Cooked in Butter

… when I say that a word is beautiful, when I use it because I like it, it is never by virtue of its sonorous charm or of the originality of its meaning, or of a “poetic” combination of the two. The word transports me because of the notion that I am going to do something with it: it is the thrill of a future praxis, something like an appetite.

All of these bits are taken from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977). Note that in this book, Barthes refers to himself in the third person [“he”]:

… Each word turns, either like milk, spoiled in the disintegrated space of phraseology, or else like a tendril, down to the neurotic root of the subject. And other words, finally, are cruisers: they follow what they meet up with …

… When I read, I accommodate: not only the crystalline humor of my eyes, but also that of my intellect, in order to reach the right level of signification (the one which suits me). A responsible linguistics must no longer be concerned with “messages” (to hell with “messages”!) but with these accommodations, which doubtless proceed by levels and thresholds: each of us curbs his mind, or curves it, like an eye, in order to grasp in the mass of the text that certain intelligibility he needs in order to know, to take pleasure, etc. In this, reading is a kind of work, a labor: there is a muscle which curves it.

… It is a good thing, he thought, that out of consideration for the reader, there should pass through the essay’s discourse, from time to time, a sensual object (as in Werther, where suddenly there appear a dish of green peas cooked in butter and a peeled orange separated into sections). A double advantage: sumptuous appearance of a materiality and a distortion, a sudden gap wedged into the intellectual murmur.

… Is there not a kind of voluptuous pleasure in inserting, like a perfumed dream, into a sociological analysis, “wild cherries, cinnamon, vanilla, and sherry, Canadian tea, lavender, bananas”? to relieve the burden of a semantic demonstration by the vision of “wings, tails, crests, plumes, tufts of hair, scarves, smoke, balloons, belts, and veils” out of which Erté forms the letters of his alphabet — or again, to introduce into a sociological journal “brocade trousers, capes, and the long white nightshirts” worn by hippies? Once you let a “bluish circle of smoke” into a critical discourse, you can find the courage, quite simply . . . to copy it over.

(Thus, sometimes, in Japanese haiku, the line of written words suddenly opens and there is a drawing of Mount Fuji or of a sardine which delicately appears in place of the abandoned word.)

… Writing is that play by which I turn around as well as I can in a narrow place: I am wedged in, I struggle between the hysteria necessary to write and the image-repertoire, which oversees, controls, purifies, banalizes, codifies, corrects, imposes the focus (and the vision) of a social communication.

… all culture is only language …

… One might call “poetic” (without value judgment) any discourse in which the word leads the idea: if you like words to the point of succumbing to them, you exclude yourself from the law of the signified, from écrivance. This is an oneiric discourse to the letter (our dreams seize the words which pass under their nose and make them into a story). My body itself (and not only my ideas) can make up to words, can be in some sense created by them …

Green peas are perfect. When I was little, we (I and my multitude of siblings) used to eat so many of them raw in the garden (they’re yummy like that) that there weren’t many that made it to the “cooked in butter” stage  (where they are equally yummy).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Cursive

This is from an essay Charm by Richard Shiff in the book Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons (2008):

… Acted out in a drawing, words also suffer fits and starts, spasms and jerks, the material effects of an animated body. Who can say why a living body moves as it does, feels as it does? Twombly’s handwriting veers uniquely, as if buffeted by luck. The inaugural Green Painting renders its final word ‘Fishes’ large and with a downward slant to the right. It puts more graphic stress on ‘sinks’ than on ‘sky’ or ‘standing.’ Perhaps these features are only logical in relation to reading and sounding Rilke’s poem, but the eccentricity of Twombly’s cursive generates its own sensation. Trace the words. The play of your hand inscribing will differ from the charm of your voice intoning. Your hand, too, may be charmed.

Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts)
Untitled, Part I 1988
[aka the Green Paintings]

The next bit is from of Chuck Close: Work by Christopher Finch (2010):

… No one looks at a painting with the intensity of the artist who made it. Chuck Close’s paintings, however, are made in such a way — and this again is a function of process, and especially its incremental aspect — that they challenge anyone who encounters them to at least attempt that kind of intensity. (I am reminded of James Joyce’s statement that his ideal reader would be one who devoted a lifetime to studying his books.) This is what gives them such a hold on the viewer. They do not readily yield up their secrets, and yet one hungers to uncover those secrets. It is possible to visit these portraits again and again and discover something new each time (or rather it’s impossible not to find something new). Looking at them, in short, demands active involvement in the way they were made, as well as enjoyment of the finished product.

[I enjoy juxtaposing commentary on Close and Twombly because they seem such polar opposites.]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Immediately

View of Notre Dame, 1914. Oil on canvas

… On February 17, 1914, Marcel Sembat wrote in his journal of two paintings by Matisse of pont Notre Dame: one “very beautiful; everyone would understand and admire”; the other, “lopsided; no one would understand immediately.” The artist obviously agreed about the likely reception of these two works — the delicate painting now in the Kunstmuseum Solothurn [below] and the radical View of Notre Dame discussed here [above] — for he did not include the latter among the recent works illustrated in Les soirées de Paris that May; indeed, he did not exhibit it until 1949, when it was “regarded as an unfinished sketch to which Matisse had unaccountably signed his name.” Twenty years after that, it would be celebrated as a presciently abstract work of art.

View of Notre Dame, 1914. Oil on canvas

It is not a sketch; neither is it an abstract painting, except in the sense that Matisse suppressed detail and condensed the scene as presented in the preceding composition — or, better, compositions. For, during his first tenure at the quai Saint-Michel, his studio from 1894 to 1907, the artist had painted several views from his two windows looking north onto the Seine and would do the same between 1914 and 1917. Among earlier works that look right toward Notre Dame is a painting from 1902 [first below] that forms the compositional prototype for the pair of 1914 canvases.

A Glimpse of Notre Dame in Late Afternoon, 1902. Oil on canvas

Photograph of Notre Dame from the window of Matisse’s studio

View of Notre Dame, 1914. Monotype on chine collé

All of the above, including the illustrations, is from the book Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917 by Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield (2010).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Discard the Rest

This is more from an essay The Waste Land in the collection of essays Homer to Joyce by Wallace Gray (1985):

… When he returned to London [from Margate and Lausanne after treatment for his “nervous breakdown”], Eliot turned over to Pound a poem [The Waste Land] almost twice the length of the one we now have. It was a jumble of poems: lengthy imitations of Pope in heroic couplets, snatches of verse written as an undergraduate in Harvard, and exercises in mysticism.

Eliot’s attitude toward Pound’s editorial judgment was one of absolute confidence, an attitude that Pound himself shared. The uncut original manuscript of the poem finally came to light and was published in 1971. We can now see that without Pound the great poem would not have existed: much of it is quite bad. (However, those who love Eliot’s poetry cherish even the bad parts and are grateful for the entire manuscript.) Now, Pound was an astute editor and critic, but I doubt if even he suspected the design that was there. Rather, it seems to me that what Pound did was to pull out from the mass of poetry all that was superb — that which had the greatest intensity — and discard the rest. He did not change the order of the sections that remained, but he did make suggestions for rewriting many lines, and actually rewrote some.

I am not contending that Pound co-authored the poem; rather, that he found the poem — found the parts that, because they were Eliot’s deepest and most intense concerns, were the best of the poetry. There are lines of feeling and sensitivity connected in a central thrust throughout the poem; these remain, they were not written by Pound, and they are what make the poem a great poem.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Ghost Stories

This is from an essay The Waste Land in the collection of essays Homer to Joyce by Wallace Gray (1985):

… Eliot said about his “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” that all he was trying to communicate in that mysterious poem was a sense of foreboding. He certainly succeeds in doing that, but he overpowers the reader of The Waste Land with the reality of a more forbidding and threatening world than Eliot could possibly have imagined when he wrote the poem. One does not have to be young to respond to a poem (“Literature is news that stays news” [Pound]) whose every line is a newspaper headline announcing not imminent doom, but that the Bomb was dropped five minutes ago:

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The above passage, along with many others in the poem, should be responded to as one responds to overwhelming music rather than solely by the means of rational inquiry. Eliot’s famous “objective correlative” theory, in which he states that one of the poet’s tasks is to find external images that are the correlatives of internal states, applies also to the music of many of his passages, passages in which the music of the images is all, in which it is fruitless to ask what the images mean, because what they mean is to be apprehended not comprehended — felt with the viscera and muscles rather than with the mind. … When it comes to such questions as why the rock is red, and what is the relation between the rock’s shadow and “your” shadow, one should respond with Mr. Prufrock’s admonition: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it’/Let us go and make our visit.”

Eliot loved to tell and listen to ghost stories, and The Waste Land is a ghost poem, full of unidentified voices of the dead, phantoms, invisible prophets, a wounded Fisher King, the ghosts of the past — Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Dido, Coriolanus, Queen Elizabeth I, Leicester, Parzifal, Saint Augustine, and above all, Tiresias, the old, blind prophet who confronted Odysseus and Oedipus and who is, in this poem, “throbbing between two lives” — the past and the future, the male and the female, and, most horrifying of all, throbbing between his life and your life.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

(In)Sufficiently Stilled; or The Line is the Feeling

… ‘ … It’s not described, it’s happening … The line is the feeling.’

This is from an essay Charm by Richard Shiff in the book Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons (2008):

… To appreciate a work of art and to reflect on the value derived from experiencing it is one thing; to investigate the causal history of the work is another. The pursuit of causes often proves unrewarding, for physical and emotional effects converge and the sources of an artist’s emotional shifts are not necessarily retrievable. ‘It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting,’ Twombly told David Sylvester in 2000, ‘not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it’s like coming through the nervous system … It’s not described, it’s happening … The line is the feeling.’ The term ‘feeling’ has the advantage (for some, the disadvantage) of failing to distinguish between external and internal causes of sensation. The line is ‘not described,’ for description amounts to an ordered narrative, plotted out by linguistic and pictorial precedents. Instead, the line is something ‘happening,’ a feeling. Both ancient and modern thinkers have recognized this as a serious distinction: there are things sufficiently stilled to be described or pictured, and there are things in flux. ‘You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is,’ Henri Bergson wrote, ‘whereas the present is simply what is happening.’

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Against Contempt

The title serves well as an indication of the genre to which this book belongs. Directed to the general reader, it is an attempt by a philosopher of science to assist her in dealing with the problem of demarcating science from non-science.

This is from a wonderfully scathing review written by Barry Barnes of the book Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I wish I could post the entire review; I’ll settle for the last part, jumping in near the end:

… Another chapter which raises intriguing issues is the final one: ‘Who’s Your Expert?’ Here, moved perhaps by his readings of postmodern bunk, Pigliucci goes reflexive. He asks why readers should believe what he has written, given that they will ‘likely not have the time to fact-check every assertion’. It’s a little late in the day perhaps, but after hundreds of pages pounding away about the importance of evidence he does at least eventually recognise that there is none in his book. The most that will be found there is testimony, and indeed the problem this poses merely recurs if one follows citations and has recourse to the literature of the sciences. …

… The problem of expert credibility is of course the problem of how experts accumulate the trust and epistemic authority that make them what they are, something that Pigliucci comes close to recognising, even though he does not state it in so many words and persists in treating ‘authority’ as a no-no word. The methods he actually recommends to non-specialists for use in the evaluation of the empirical claims of a supposed expert are listed under the heading ‘Back to Reality’. They include comparisons with the opinions of other experts; checks on expert qualifications and how far they are relevant to the domain involved; and searching for peer reviewed papers by the expert. God only knows what reality Pigliucci thinks he is coming back to. What he provides here is basically a template, not merely for argument from authority but for circular argument from authority: to evaluate expertise look to certain sorts of authority; do not worry if these sorts of authority are precisely those that reside in and constitute the expertise that is thereby justified. (As it happens, this isn’t necessarily bad advice, but it helps to know what you are doing if you follow it.)

Fortunately, one might think, ‘fact-checking’ is not the only general strategy Pigliucci recommends for evaluating expertise. He also proposes scrutiny of the arguments deployed by experts, to check for ‘logical fallacies and weak links’. Here he is recommending examination of something that, unlike ‘evidence’, is directly accessible in written sources. Pigliucci’s own text, for example, is replete with circular justifications of the kind I have just referred to, and some might wish to regard these as ‘weak links’ casting doubt on his credibility. For my own part I disagree, or at least I do not accept that purely formal criteria of good reasoning are in themselves helpful as indicators of credibility and trustworthiness. Most texts ever written, including most scientific and philosophical texts from Plato and Aristotle on, are replete with deviations from them, and in none are they absent. But the incidence of non-sequiturs and so forth in a text is no good guide to credibility.

It is not that good reasoning is unimportant. It does indeed merit critical scrutiny, but attention to context is crucial as this is carried out. In Pigliucci, for example, the explicit aim is to compare, discriminate and demarcate, and the aspects of good reasoning most worth attending to are those that make for reputable and trustworthy comparisons. Considered from this perspective, the circularities in his book are of marginal relevance. Indeed they might be regarded less as flaws than as helpful reminders of his commitments, of the passions to which his reason is enslaved, as it were. What is far more important is whether there is consistency in his treatment of the things he compares, both in the standards of comparison employed and in how the standards are interpreted and applied in practice. The reader should have little difficulty in confirming how comprehensively the text falls short in this crucial respect. Again and again its distinctions and demarcations are rationalised by appeal to standards rather than being products of their consistent application. Indeed the relevant demarcations can seem so intuitively obvious to Pigliucci that he forgets even to make them. His very first paragraph, for example, having asserted that to distinguish sense from nonsense is a moral duty, ends, by way of illustration, with the remark that ‘pseudoscience can literally kill people’. He would have done well to have paused at that point; and taken thought.

I suspect that there is no way of presenting the knowledge and methods of the sciences to general readers that does not fail in some important respect. And the comparison of these with alternatives, whether those that engage in competition with the sciences, or those that pretend to be sciences themselves, or those that rub along with them, peacefully co-existing at other locations in our elaborate division of technical and intellectual labour, is inordinately difficult, as Pigliucci is obviously well aware. But he does not even try to meet the challenge this implies, choosing instead for the most part a facile approach that covers its limitations with the truculent style and affectation of contempt for one’s fellow human beings increasingly encountered in the literature of the science wars. The sciences deserve better than this.

Hear, hear. I am so sick of the way arguments of all kinds nowadays seem to instantly polarize participants into “sides” where confidence is manufactured out of emotion — rage, fear, personal alliances — rather than rational, reasoned consideration of the evidence and ideas under discussion. Read the whole review. It’s excellent. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Feet Are Here

Imagine that you can have this time any way it comes
easily, that a doctor wrote you a prescription
for savage joy and they say they can fill it
if you’ll wait a moment. What springs to mind?
Do you turn and walk out of the drugstore, intent

on the bus that stops at the corner of 23rd Street
and after an eternity pulls up with a hiss
just as the red light is changing to green?

— (above) from the middle of The Binomial Theorem by John Ashbery

Rumours sift across a bald apologia.
The feet are here.

— (above) the last two lines of The Inchcape Rock by John Ashbery

3.

It is important to be laid out
in a man-made shape. Others will try
to offer you something — on no account
accept it. Reflected in the window
of a pharmacy you know the distance you’ve come.

Let others taste you.
Sleep happily;
the wind is over there.
Come in. We were expecting you.

— the third (and last) section of Litanies by John Ashbery

　

This nice clear next verse (below) is for Dr. C who  can become quite distraught when he sees Ashbery poems.

The spoon went in
just right,
stirred the coffee,
was removed and lay
on the saucer, silent.

— first verse of A November by John Ashbery

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/