Crayon

Hallway, Octavia Street, 2008

Accidents

Tierney Gearon, Frame 11, 2007

I’m not that into Tierney Gearon’s new pictures. But the critical reaction to them has been interesting.

To review, Gearon has been showing in LA and London a series of pictures titled Explosure. Each is a double exposure created, she says, entirely in the camera. People have responded in two ways:

First, there has been general wonderment at the claimed absence of post-production, unalloyed by much real skepticism about the claim itself.

Second, there has been almost universal acceptance of the role of accident in the creation of these pictures. Gearon herself got this ball rolling with statements like “art comes out of accidents” and “double exposing them inside the camera . . . allowed the magic of an accident to happen!!!”

The magic of an accident!!! What could it mean?

I saw a guy get hit by a San Francisco Muni bus the other day. Although this happens so often that some might question whether it’s ever really an accident, I feel pretty confident that no art was created, and no magic either. So that’s probably not the kind of accident Gearon was talking about.

More likely she just meant the accidentally magical effects of superimposing one exposure on another when you have less than total control over the results. But is that art? Isn’t it just the relatively minor thrill of coincidence? Can art actually arise from mere happenstance?

Maybe it can.

I used to be interested in the I Ching. At least to Westerners like Carl Jung, the key concept underlying the I Ching is “synchronicity.” In the context of the I Ching, synchronicity refers to the predictive power of the coincidence between patterns made by thrown yarrow stalks - or coins, or whatever you want to throw - and the patterns of human existence.

In a broader context, these “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events” are seen as manifestations of universal archetypes, as keys to the collective unconscious. Thus, an art created out of such coincidences might have some kind of special access to the dream life of the world.

The Surrealists thought so. That was the function of the “automatic writing” devised by Andre Masson and used, with varying results, by Joan Miro and Jean Arp, among others.

And, if you’re willing to stretch a little further, it’s synchronicity that accounts for the expressive power of works as diverse as Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and the stained canvasses of Arshile Gorky.

But Gearon’s work isn’t like that. In fact, there’s very little unconscious about it. Sure, the process of double exposure results in accidents, but they’re local accidents, in no way essential to the work. Gearon chooses the scenes to be superimposed. She doesn’t shoot at random, or with a blindfold.

In other words, these pictures aren’t dreams. They’re stories. And the project is just another expression of the narrative impulse which dominates photography today.

Gearon herself summed the whole thing up in an interview last January, in which she said: “Two boring images suddenly become more interesting than a regular photograph.” That’s about right.

North Coast

Tandem Taking Off, Fort Funston, 2008

Funston

Tandem Preparing for Take Off, 2008

North Coast

In the Dunes, Fort Funston, 2008

Funston

On the Path (Large Headless Dog), 2008

North Coast

In the Dunes, Fort Funston, 2008

Crayon

Garage, California Street, 2008

Crayon

Parking Lot, Sansome Street, 2008

Crayon

Wall, Filbert Street, 2008

Death to Everyone

Carp

My girlfriend's ex was standing around in his kitchen the other day when he began to behave a little strangely. Unsteady. Confused. The next morning he was worse. His daughters took him to the hospital.

He has encephalitis. Brain fever. No one knows where he got it. No one knows how it will turn out.

Sometimes I forget myself and start to worry about the future. Whether there will be enough work. Enough money. Stuff like that. Not very often. But sometimes.

A thing like this snaps you right out of it.

The Critic at Work

Someone asked why I haven't been writing much. I guess the truth is that I'm a little tired.

I'm tired of being critical, for one thing. (Especially when it's so clearly not working.) But I really haven't seen much lately that I genuinely like.

I did see a pretty good movie the other day. In fact, the Julian Schnabel documentary of Lou Reed's Berlin is excellent. Sad song, Lady Day. And Antony (without the Johnsons) gives a strange and twisted performance that itself is worth the price of admission - or your Netflix bill, more likely.

And Louis Menand had a review of a biography of Donald Barthelme in a recent New Yorker that I particularly liked. Not only did it have a bit on post-modernism that encapsulated the difficulty modernism still poses for those who think they've moved on, but it reminded me of how good a writer Barthelme was. I had all his books once, and I think I'll go buy some of them again. (And J.D. Salinger's too, although I can't remember what brought him to mind.)

But if you're worried that I might go all blissful on you, let me just tell you that Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island is about as despicable a book as I've ever read. I have no idea why I bothered to finish it. (Yes I do. It's got good sex, or at least Humbert Humbert would have thought so.) Here's probably the most coherent thing in the book:

". . . for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies, and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation for the majority of our intellectual and moral conceptions."

I mean, is that puerile or what? What is wrong with this guy? Not to mention the apparently sizable number of people who think this stuff is meaningful. Talk about crapola.

There, I feel better already.

North Coast

Glider Over Dunes, Fort Funston, 2008

Funston

Dunes, 2008