A tiny commentary to the 21:21 piece.
I hid the comments from this entry. It was very nice that there were some, but what they mainly showed me was that I should have taken my time to explain the drawing and the sister photograph.
This is an all an experiment, it is an investigation, it is a very fragile new project. I am just figuring things out here and so I am very sensitive to any commentary. So maybe I should not be showing this piece here at all? I want to share it and I want to publish it here just to mark the time and date for myself. The piece is in the open now, it can not be really ignored.
I had an entire introduction written for the drawing and the photograph, but then there was not enough time to find all the correct links and to check all the correct facts.
I know that photography and drawing seem to be distant relatives but somehow they can intersect and photography was born from drawings. I think this is one factor that has been forgotten over the years. Photography was supposed to be an automated process of drawing, it was supposed to be the objective draftsman. Photography was born out the frustrations that drawings are so not-perfect.
Well, the final results are not. One factor of most photography is its synchronicity. All elements of a frame are captured at the same time. I know that there are cameras that do not do that, cameras that collect their image line by line... but most of the images we see are just incredibly thin slices of time, captured at the same time in all of the corners available to the film plane exposed to . This feels like the way we see things, but it most definitely is not. This quick final result creation is not the way we perceive the world around us. Our eyes are pretty great little extensions of our brains, but their optics are obviously very much, hmm, cranium enhanced? We thing that we see the world as a whole, but we actually see the world as a story. It is not dimensions we see, we experience a sequence of little events. Our eyes are guided ballistically by our brain to check for crucial well known elements of objects. We then think we see a car a person, things, art... but we just acknowledge them, we do not really see them as a whole. It takes a long time to actually see something. (try it!)
And even if we take out time to actually try to see something, when we combine the 5% of our field of vision that we actually can put in focus at any time, when we combine these little impressions into a bigger picture, when we finally become so familiar with an object or a piece of art that we have the feeling that we know it as well as the artist who created it, then we stil do not, and never will, because it was only the artist who saw the original vision and then the failure or success of the creation and then the moment when it was time to finally stop. It is a big deal. Some pieces take years to complete because it is such a difficult process for the artist.
An artist whom I very much admire has had a canvas prepared for months and months, the outlines of an object marked on it, ready to continue, but then there was life, around the piece that somehow intersected that disturbed, the flurries of events that had to take place in order to bring the piece to an emotional as well as a visible completion.
A large percentage of what we can look at in museums and galleries are equivalents of taxidermie zoos, they are the remainders, the final split seconds of works. Not really their lives.
I know that many art critics see a very strong disconnect between the work and the artist. The creation process does not really matter, it is the classifiable results that count. Many artists since Duchamp have managed to distance themselves from even the process of making things, and there will barely ever be a moment when the entire process of how basically soil and living matter is turned into drawings and paintings will be documented.
What I was trying to somehow focus on was the very controlled window that leads to these drawings that as end results might seem very flat and just somehow confusing, or something that could maybe be a decorative element more than anything else.
By seeing these drawings as exposure however, as mere exposure of paper to me with a pen. And by then showing that this exposure does not happen in itself as a split second moment, but as a very linear process in so many ways, it might become possible to take a better glimpse at the pre-final life of the drawings. Before they are declared "finished."
These drawings seem to not be composed and yet they all are obviously related to each other, as if following some secret composition. Each one of them is a bit of a story... by documenting their creation by creating sister images, that in themselves are flats, and not video sequences, time is translated into the third dimension. The er any line in the drawing on the photograph, the younger it is, the farther in the distance of the paper it appears. What we see in the photograph is the drawing in a three dimensional space, as time travels from the very first line to the very barely visible last.
Tom Friedman made this piece in which he wrote his name in a spiral until the ink in his ballpoint pen ran out... it is a bit like that, except that I am probing and translating a much thinner slice of the thing called time.
Does this make sense at all?