BirchLane.net

February 2003 

Thursday 27

Affirmation.

Wednesday 26

Projects.

Tuesday 25

Restoration.

Monday 24 

One Year. One year ago today I joined deviantart. In the past 365 days I have posted 2029 photos to the site. I have commented 1631 times on other artist's work. Artists have commented 1633 times on my photographs. I have chosen 310 favorites from the work of others. I am not sure what all this means, but my work has generated great love and admiration; some significant praise, in fact. One person writes:

The lights, the shadows, a moment of life. You know, I saw this (your photo) on the front page and clicked it and, of course, it was from you. Not unusual that I see something I like and its yours. I read this quote the other day, it made me thing of you: "Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era." -- Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942), U.S. photographer. Quoted in PM (New York, April 1941). You know, you record the look and feel of an era and make wonderful art while at it.

These kind of comments, of course, have brought me great joy; and they have encouraged me to move forward with both my work and the BirchLane Press publishing projects: from issues of BirchLane, to a special issue of my work, from special one-of-a-kind books feasturing the work of other artists to seeking grants and fellowships to pursue the work more intensely, more focused (the Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth projects come to mind), from continuing to document my life to finding a way (damn) to make some money from all this--from merchandising the greeting cards to distributing art books. So, here I am, last Friday, stern and serious; I need to find some humor in my life!

Sunday 23

If Kant Were Around Today. I read the story about Vaclav Havel in this week's The New Yorker and it made me walk into the study to find "The Dimension of the Present Moment" by Miroslav Holub. In his essay, "If Kant Were Around Today," Holub writes (in part):

When, in the conclusion of his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant speaks of his famous starry heavens and moral law, he becomes for a moment a poet: "I see them confront me and link them immediately  with the consciousness of my existence, The first  (the wonder of the starred heaven) begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and expands the connection in which I find myself into the incalculable vastness of the worlds upon worlds, of systems within systems, over endless ages of periodic motion, their beginnings and perpetuation. The second (the wonder of the moral law within) starts from my invisible self, from my personality, and depicts me as in a world possessing true infinitude which can be sensed only be the intellect. With this I recognize myself to be in a necessary and general connection, not just accidentally as it appears to be the case with the external world. Through this recognition I also see my elf linked with all visible worlds. The first view of a numberless quantity of worlds destroys my importance, so to speak, since I am an animal-like being who must return its matter from whence it came to the planet (a mere speck of the universe), after having been endowed with vital energy for a short time, one does not know how. The second view raises my value infinitely, as an intelligence, through my personality; for in this personality the moral law reveals a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of sense. This is true at least as far as one can infer from the purposeful determination of my existence according to this law. This (determination) is not restricted to the conditions and limits of the life, but radiates into the infinite (trans. Carl Friedrich)." Kant's thinking, hardly comparable with what we ruminate about in our time off, was based on a system of closed systems and universal laws.....if (he) were around today, he could hardly think of refuting the diversity of possible scientific views and of seeking a unified system of priori principles. He would be the first to realize the significance of singularities at all levels, especially the singularity of life. If Kant were alive today, I say he would devote himself to negative entropy, hypotheses about the origin of order and chaos, and theories about the spontaneous growth of complexity in closed stationary systems with a constant flow of energy, just like Prigogine (Order Out of Chaos, 1984) ; and just like Prigogine, he would hate free speculations and would still hold on to categorical imperative on all levels. At least in the same sense of the statement uttered by Uncle Gottfried in Romain Rollands' Jean Christophe: 'Do what you can, the other's don't even do that!'"

Saturday 22

What would Margaret Mead Say?

In the wake of the events of September 11 and beyond, William O. Beeman, secretary of the IIS and professor of anthropology at Brown University, has written an op-ed piece reflecting how Mead might react to these attacks and our response as a nation. Postscript to September 11--What would Margaret Mead Say? William O. Beeman Few Americans today realize that anthropologist Margaret Mead, the most famous social scientist of the 20th Century, was also one of the most profound commentators on war and America's response to violence. It is appropriate to ask what she would say about the attacks of September 11 and the Bush administration's war on terrorism if she were alive today. The short answer is that she would have some deep insights into why we are fighting in the first place, and suggest that we become aware that our cultural tendencies can work both for us and against us. She would also urge Americans to start planning for a post-war era in which we envision co-existence with our opponents even as the conflict continues. In this 100th anniversary of Mead's birth, academic celebrations are taking place across the country in commemoration. Most academics have forgotten that Mead was an active advisor to the U.S. government during World War II, and during the early days of the cold war under the aegis of the Office of Naval Research. With her friend and mentor, Ruth Benedict, she founded a research project, Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures. This project was designed to investigate the cultures of the modern nations with whom we were allied and with whom we were fighting, including Germany, Britain, Russia, France and Japan. Not the least of these was the United States itself. Mead's study of American Culture, And Keep Your Powder Dry has just been reprinted in a new edition. It is as fresh as the day it was first published in 1942, and as sobering for Americans trying to make sense of the sudden violence in their lives. In World War II Mead warned that "If we let our generals and our statesmen involve us in international threats and reprisals which fail to bring out the strengths in our character--we may lose. To win we must take accurate inventory of our American character." Part of that inventory was to understand both why we fight and how we fight. Americans, according to Mead, see aggression as a response rather than a primary behavior. However, our aggression must be in proportion to the strength of our opponent. The "fear that a boy will be a coward contains in it the fear that he will also be a bully." This is an accurate account of the inception of conflicts we have engaged in since World War II including those of September 11. When struck, we do not want to be thought of as cowards, so we strike back. However, American fear of being thought a bully also accounts for the public outcry when we seem to have exceeded our mandate for aggression, as in the post-Gulf War bombing of Iraq. Balancing these tendencies against reality is an imperative for effective response in the future. Mead also pointed out that as a nation we have a strong drive for achievement, and tend to see organized conflict as a finite task to be completed. Once finished, we walk away from it, and move on to the next task. This is an excellent trait in that it emphasizes completion of a job, a dispassionate view of it, and a tendency not to hold long grudges. However, it also keeps us from seeing the interconnections between conflict events, and blinds us to the need both for follow-up and prophylactic planning. This is a fairly accurate account of our conduct in helping counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980's. We neither predicted it, nor planned for the post-conflict period, and we are paying a price for our tendencies. However, Mead's most important warning for Americans was against the national disposition for isolationism, which she saw as an outgrowth of American individualism. Mead believed fervently that humans need to cherish the cultural diversity of the world, because in this diversity lay the hope for human survival. She didn't mince words. In 1965 she wrote: "the people of the United States are still hoping to build the future of the United States as if the country was as separate from the rest of the world as this continent was before the first voyage of Columbus. Yet we are in the world as we have never been before . . . we have not yet really taken our place as a nation among nations, recognizing that each is essential to the safety of all." The need to work toward a world without war in which all humans have a stake was paramount in Mead's philosophy. "Those who still cling to the old, simple definition of patriotism have not yet recognized that since Hiroshima there cannot be winners and losers in a war, but only losers. And they are vocal out of desperation about a world they do not understand." Mead's challenge to Americans to cherish the cultures of the world was also a challenge to cherish our own, but to have the courage to change when our cultural tendencies become dysfunctional. Facing this task may be more formidable than any foreign military operation we could ever devise.

Friday 21

Fluffy Omelet. Were we poor? Or did we simply enjoy eating fluffy omelets when we were newlyweds?

Thursday 20

PacMan. Driving home from an appointment I discovered this "cafe" in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Wednesday 19

Embracing Accidents. An excerpt from The New Yorker: "Angels and Instincts" by Judith Thurman (A Julia Margaret Cameron retrospective):

Colin Ford argues plausibly that Cameron's first camera had to be a gift that she was already at least partially competent to use. She set up a laboratory right after the New Year, and it took only four weeks of fumbling to make her first satisfactory print, the portrait of a nine-year-old girl named Annie Philpot. "I was in a transport of delight," she wrote in an autobiographical sketch, "Annals of My Glass House." In the month that followed, she produced what Cox calls a "torrent of magnificent pictures"—more than three dozen, a remarkable number considering the labor that each one required. She was working with fragile, twelve-by-ten-inch glass plates. First, she washed and polished them; their fastidious cleanliness was essential. Next, she treated them with a freshly mixed collodion emulsion. Its distribution had to be perfectly even. The plates were bathed in light-sensitive silver nitrate, exposed while still wet, rushed to a darkroom and developed with a solution of pyrogallic acid, then rinsed twice—with water and potassium cyanide—and sealed with a coat of varnish. To make prints from the negatives, she floated sheets of fine writing paper in a solution of egg whites, left them to dry, then soaked the albumen-coated paper in the silver nitrate. Negative and paper were exposed to daylight; then she fixed the fresh print with hypo and washed off the fixative with buckets of well water. The color of the image was adjusted with a sequence of toners, some of them toxic. Most of these operations were performed more or less blindly, in darkness. The chemicals stank; the collodion streaked and peeled; dust on the plate left white blotches; the hypo turned her prints green; the silver nitrate reddened the albumen; the lethal cyanide blackened her clothes, table linens, and skin, and rightly terrified her—it was probably responsible for the chronic breathing problems that she, like so many nineteenth-century photographers, suffered as the years passed. She wrote to Herschel frequently for technical advice and moral support in that experimental period ("Pray! Pray!" he replied. "Be more cautious!"), and she "felt [her] way literally in the dark thro' endless failures." But Cameron, as Cox notes, worked by "embracing accidents." The short focal length and fixed aperture of her first lens produced an image that was sharp only at a small "sweet spot" at the center, and she adopted what she called "the fluke" of her first out-of-focus portraits as a hallmark of her style. Even when she mastered the physics and geometry of taking an impeccable image, she preferred suggestion to definition. Before almost anyone else, she grasped the power of photography to iconify a face, to mythologize a name, to propagate a desire—and that intuition is at the heart of her modernity. ......"Portraits," Carlyle wrote, "are the candle by which we read history." Cameron, in that sense, is a votive artist. But the builders of great pantheons seldom get to rest in them. She was an exception.

Hanne points us here.

Tuesday 18

Creation.

"The reason you create music or art or write is in order to put things in a way you can possibly deal with it, and death is one of those areas. But we don't seem to spend much time with it, do we? If you're accused of being morbid or bleak, then you're onto a good thing, I'd say. Cos our culture is the most fucking desperate culture, desperately trying to avoid anything vaguely depressing, which is alarming because what's the result? Well, we all know what that is, don't we? We're at a time when we are being presented with undeniable changes in the global climate and fundamental issues that affect every single one of us, and it's the time we're listening to the most hokey shite on the radio and watching vacuous bullshit celebrities being vacuous bullshit celebrities and desperately trying to forget about everything. Which is fine, you know, but personally speaking, I can't do that. With what I do, it's not even to do with necessarily taking yourself seriously, it's just to do with 'Well, no, I think we use music as a way of turning bad energy into good energy.' Or making something out of inexpressible emotion, which could be useful." Thom Yorke

Monday 17

Weather "Alert."

Sunday 16

More of the same.

Saturday

Wyeth.

Friday 14

Another Accident.

Thursday 13

Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. My next photography project.

Wednesday 12

An Accident. This is find driving home at night. It is dark and cold and I can't hold the camera steady, but I love what the camera saw.

Tuesday 11

Knives. Daryl calls me into the other room to watch the info commerical on "Miracle Knives."

Monday 10 

Emergency Planning. We're planning for a disaster.

Sunday 09

Found Art.

Saturday 08

Fear and Foresight. A phone call from Danielle prompts us to ask "Are We Prepared?"

Friday 07

Snow--again.

Thursday 06

To What Purpose. Dorothea Lange said:

The benefit of seeing...can come quickly if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image...the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate......the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

And what is the purpose of photography? To paraphrase John Cage when he talks about writing music: "One is, of course, not dealing with purposes (but with images). Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."

A moment of revelation: On a cold winter's day, at age eleven, I am at a boy scout sleepover in the woods of Northwest New Jersey. My father is with me. I journey into the woods by myself and stop at a stream and marvel at the insects that run across the water. "Bruce," my father says, "what are you doing." I answer "Look, Dad." And he looks and he and I stand there together watching these tiny insects skate across the water's surface. "Beautiful," he says.

And I keep thinking I will walk and I will continue to see the word "drain" below the ice and later meet someone on the street, in the coffee house, in the woods and she (or he) will smile at me:

Wednesday 05

Fences. Robert Frost wrote in "Mending Wall:"

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Research online tells me "Mending Wall" was said to be one of his favorite poems. It is about the building of a wall between two men and their houses, however, looking deeper into the meaning, the poem seems to suggest the establishing of boundaries between elements of the physical world as well as the inner world.  The two neighbors in this poem seem to be building the wall initially about territory, but it really seems to be more about marking boundaries to stop arguments. 

 "We keep the wall between us as we go;"  suggests that they are working together, but trying to keep each other apart as they do so, and so creating a boundary.

 There also appears to be little communication between the two men, in that the neighbor only seems to say one thing: "Good fences make good neighbors." It does not suggest that they converse much, and the whole idea of building a wall in the first place separates them up.

Maybe the poem is really about creating boundaries between things, in nature, and how theys should not really be there. Life, nature--people should be free, rather than fenced in by walls, physical or otherwise.
       

Tuesday 04

Thinking. It has been both a very exhilarating and  somewhat sad experience I repeat day after day and night after night going through my old negatives. Images that cheer me up soon bring me down. Images of laughter and youth, which then haunt me:

William Wordsworth wrote:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore--
Turn whereso'er I may, By night or day,
The things which I have seen I can see no more.
......Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
......The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed,
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
......But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing:
Uphold us, cherish, and power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
......What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be......

"Ode, Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood"

Virginia Woolf writes: "That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories--what one has forgotten--come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible--I often wonder--that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?......I see it--the past---as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery......and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. But the peculiarity of these...strong memories is that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture. Perhaps this is characteristic of all childhood memories; perhaps its accounts for their strength."

I think I am doing too much thinking about all this; the wandering thoughts of a middle-aged man (Ha! I never thought I would say it; in today's mail a letter from AARP!).

I will write more about this.

Monday 03

Seeing. I read the following today at a friend's site:

how
much
life
is
happening
outside
your
narrow
walls?



can you tell me
what you missed today? can you
tell me how the wind tasted or what
song it sang today? can you tell me who
you passed on the street and how they felt and
where they were going and where they came from?
can you tell me what colour the houses are a block away
from your well worn track? can you tell me what stories the
people you pass everyday would have told if you had stopped
to listen? can you tell me what you would have found, what marvelous
treasure abandoned if you had only opened your eyes and taken the path not taken?

More of her art can be found here.

Sunday 02

Hold. From an article in today's New York Times Magazine on Gary Hart, entitled " The Outsider :"

...... Hart proceeded to horrify his audience (during a luncheon speech in Denver) by explaining how easy it would be to ship a bomb from Singapore to Long Beach, put it on a train for Newark and detonate it by remote in Chicago. ''It is going to happen here,'' Hart warned. ''Next time, will it be New York City? I don't think so. It'll be Denver, Cleveland and Dallas. I think it'll be multiple targets and biological.'' If the United States invades Iraq, Hart said, the danger will be exponentially greater. ''However else you feel about the Iraqi war,'' he said, ''don't assume that it's going to suppress the threat. It's going to stimulate the threat, and our finding is that we're not ready.''

Saturday 01

Art Feast. Yesterday was an art feast. I first stopped at Houk Gallery, marveled at the current exhibition and took a photo of Jenni, the gallery director. 

Then saw an interesting exhibit of paintings by Lois Dood ("Windows and Doorways: Three Decades of Painting") at Alexandre Gallery, wonderful prints of Kertesz at Bruce Silverstein, Bernd and Hilla Becher at Sonnabend (and Candida Hofer), fascinating and meditative encaustic paintings by Shelia Berger at Nicole Klagsbrun, and David Salle at Mary Boone.

Writing in The New York Times, Deborah Solomon said: "You can say he captures the process of thought, the fleeting images you see in that space behind your eyes, where everything seems either urgent, or pointless, or probably both......The women in the painting mark a departure from his earlier women...they're descended...directly from Vermeer's serene maids and housewives, who are often shown alone in rooms and appear to relish their solitude."

Salle: "One of the reasons that still-life painting is inherently compelling is because from the beginning it was a representation of the fleeting nature of existence. The objects in the painting are all that is left behind. But this is painting...is only nominally a still life. It's a dismantled still life."

Are the women stand-ins for himself? "I feel identification with everything I paint."