HOWL & WIGSTOCK ‘03
I enter Tompkins Square Park in the East Village and wander dazzled and exhilarated through throngs of festive people and performers. This is HOWL, a week of events and performances in the area. The wire mesh fence around half of the park is hung with large white canvases. Various artists brush or spray paints according to their inclinations. I observe fewer politically oriented canvases than expected in this bastion of liberals and radical left. Gentrification along these once mean “Alphabet City” avenues and streets has changed the demography. HOWL aims to restore the sweaty, glory days of artists, musicians, poetry readings and performances along Avenues A, B, C & D which are bounded by 14 th and Houston streets in Manhattan.
The “Wigstock” (annual cross dressing affair) group of lesbians, transvestites, male homosexuals and wigged celebrants gather at the old band shell to perform rowdy, raucous, lewd beyond belief songs and dances. Outrageous is the theme for the wigs and costumes. One very plump brightly clad lady sports fake decorated tits bigger than baskets over her a U.S. flag costume. Others bow under huge yellow or purple wigs, are half-naked or simply scandalous. I cheerily inveigle them all to pose for my camera. That is what most are here for, adulation, reinforcement, pleasure, appreciation and scandal.
I dance around the milling groups of performers busy making up, posing, using cell phones, chatting, embracing, having a ball. Colorful and bizarre, moment after moment emerges for a split-second then fades back into the melee. A wary eye, speed and intuitive reflex action are keys to capturing the images. I'm smoked, fueled up, full of adrenalin at the challenge and the joy of working at the flamboyant limits.
THE WAY OF A SEEKER
I seek knowledge of everything, a vaulting if impetuous ambition. My journey on this earth, like yours, is a privilege. I don't want to miss a thing. My practice of the art of photography is not a career devoted to making images with a camera for various commercial uses. Nor is it simply to make images for transformation into “fine art.” I employ my camera in a symbiotic relationship with myself, just as the sword is the soul of a samurai. It is a tool to discover and re-invent the world—every far-flung part of it—art, science, man made and natural phenomenons, everything, everywhere. It is a tool for viewing, examination, deciphering and introspection, much as our human eyes will become if we teach them how to see.
THE ZEN OF LIGHT
I've been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it's worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light. That's all you can say, really."
— TOM STOPPARD, Night and Day
The light sees everything. When you are asked, “Do you see the light?” you may nod, yes, of course. The metaphor refers to “vision” or “insight” in your mind and is no substitute for what your eye cannot see or comprehend. Most of us love nature — running brooks, green hills, rivers and cataracts, snow clad mountains, forests of quiet groves, murmuring breezes in trees, birds whistling or chattering—the list is endless. We enter these lovely places—beaches or lakes, canyons or wildernesses to relax—to shed our daily rounds of routine and stress.
At ease, we usually enjoy these surroundings without really seeing them except as we are used to seeing them. Hidden from our casual glances is a world of strange beauty.
In 1969 the sculptor and potter Isamu Noguchi wrote about, “my close embrace with the earth...a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions.” He spoke of the essence of Zen philosophy in the way I understand and practice it. The following concept of Zen comes from the website amacord.com:
The special transmission of Zen is the realization of the Buddha's enlightenment itself, in one's own life, in one's own time. This experience has been realized by Zen students and confirmed by their teachers for over 2500 years.
Central and indispensable to Zen is daily Zazen practice. It is this practice that is the "direct pointing to the mind of man." Zazen melts away the mind-forged distances that separate man from himself; leads one beyond himself as knower, to himself as known. In Zazen, there is no reality outside what exists here and now. Each moment, each act is inherently Buddha-nature. While sorrow and joy, anxiety and imperturbability cannot be avoided, by not clinging to them we find ourselves free of them, no longer pulled this way and that. With this self-mastery comes composure and tranquility of mind, but these are by-products of Zazen rather than its goals.
— EIDO TAI SHIMANO ROSHI , Abbot of the Zen Studies Society
Zazen is usually practiced in a lotus sitting position, which, for me, is very uncomfortable. In an essay, “Zazen Posture,” Taitaku Pat Phelan writes that it is possible to practice zazen sitting in a chair or lying down.
(See www.intrex.net/chzg/posture.html.) The ability to focus the mind on nothing is a key requisite. Shall we practice it? I find it difficult to do.
In an essay called “Zen Meditation: The Seat of Enlightenment” we read:
“We tend to see body, breath, and mind separately, but in zazen they come together as one reality...It is...important to be patient and persistent, to not be constantly thinking of a goal, of how the sitting practice may help us. We just put ourselves into it and let go of our thoughts, opinions, positions - everything our minds hold onto. The human mind is basically free, not clinging. In zazen we learn to uncover that mind, to see who we really are.” (www.mro.org/zmm/zazen.shtml).
The light within our minds may be turned on by pursuing the goals of Zen. I dislike pedantic practices and prefer to seek enlightenment through accidents, the serendipity of the unexpected, epiphanies which come from eyes wide open inside and out. There are no rules which should not be broken when you are ready. Failing is the greatest path to enlightenment.
ZEN & ENLIGHTENING
A very talented young artist e-mailed me after viewing my website. She wrote, “It is refreshing to see someone who speaks the language of the old masters. One who has explored his work enough to see past the work itself. You have indeed achieved what you set out to do, you have become your photos, and managed to embody all of the chaos and structure therein. Never have I witnessed such attention to color and detail since that of the old art school of the 50's...I realized your determination and embodiment of curiosity in my own dreams...”
Thanks to her. May her dreams be wild and free. My own work is still beginning. It is an endless challenge to learn and grow. The art of seeing and becoming what we see is a lifelong task. Isn't that the condition we seek when we truly confront our world? Instead of keeping a distance imposed by the demands of civilization, society, instructors and peers, we struggle to merge nature with our own natures.
Another young writer wrote of Part I of The Art of Seeing, “The essay is pure poetry. Clearly the most life-encompassing reflection on photography I have ever read. Meditating on the relation of art and science reveals the unique interconnection of all aspects of life and humanity. I recommend keeping the essay intact. It is an amazing service to anyone who wants to broaden his or her perspective on photography and art. It is also so amazing that an artist can discuss his work with such clear definition and understanding of his own process. This is the work of a real writer, thinker, feeler.”
Another young lady wrote about my website, “I have seen a rose photographed a thousand times, maybe more, but I have never been allowed to visit the glass-city that exists on the edge of the moist pedals or introduced to the island of the hardworking insect engulfed by an ocean of dew. I had a laugh with an Aborigine who couldn't shut his mouth and found myself strangely inspired by the minuteness of a cruise ship.”
These lines are very flattering. Much more important, they reveal insight, vision and awakening on the part of these kind viewers which gladdens my heart. To share with others is a privilege and a duty.
A fine balance of spirit with matter can only occur when the artist has so thoroughly submerged himself in the unity of nature as to truly become once more a part of nature—a part of the very earth , thus to view the inner surfaces and the life elements .
—Introduction: Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics
In the hands of Noguchi and other Japanese sculptors such as Yagi Kazuo and Kitaoji Rosanjin whose work is presented in the book, the ceramics become pure sculpture, “...a close embrace with the earth.” To see these ceramics metamorphosis into earthworks is to begin to see beyond the utilitarian or the decorative. We penetrate deep into the symbiosis between spirit and thing, the ultimate oneness of Zen and life. After seeing a catalogue of Picasso's ceramics, Yagi Kazuo is quoted as saying, “...unexpectedly I felt my whole body tremble. Until then I had viewed pottery made by painters with the eyes of a potter, but now I seemed to feel myself examined by that painter's pottery...to point out ironically the vagueness of my understanding of the more fundamental nature of pottery as such.”
Yagi stopped submitting his work as craft. His pottery being one with the earth, he saw his creations in a new light. The craft becomes the potter.
The potter becomes the sculptor. The vision we seek demands that we discard our preoccupation with the tools and the style of what we practice, whether using our eyes or a camera. Artists know and learn this by discovering and uncovering their deepest feelings. They express what cannot be seen.
ONE WITH THE EARTH
Earth is the mother of beings; the sky is her husband, the moor her star, the sun her polestar. She is the lap, back, and maternal breast for mankind...In fact the deepest secrets of life are hidden in the bowels and tunnels of the earth...Earth is thought of as a living being.
—Amadou Hampate Ba, Malian humanist Quoted in The Way of the Earth , T.C. McLUHAN
The art of seeing comes from the deepest identification with the earth. In a sacred and mystical way, we transport ourselves and become that being which is one with the earth. All of our desires to see, to experience the radiant beauty of the earth begin with metamorphosis into a seeing human being. This shedding of mortal dross resembles a hermit crab, which sheds its shell and becomes vulnerable to its enemies. It is a necessary transition to the next phase of being. Back and forth, we veer and turn seeking the light, which transfixes our souls like silver arrows, arrows of immortal light. In this state of being, we see. We cannot remain in this state for too long a period. We must return to deal with the world around us every day. We learn to make these returns short. Each day radiance beckons. Shall we embark on this journey? We must if we would discover our true selves.
I feel this transformation keenly in wild places. Arriving in Antarctica, I see light bestow a shimmering radiance on floating ice palaces. The whiteness is so pure I could be back at the beginning of time. “Afloat” on a sea of grass in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, I seem to become one with murmuring grass, wattled cranes carving arabesques in the pale blue sky, streams which lead away into tall reeds, the distant trumpets of elephants. At dawn one summer, I fly in a light plane at almost twenty thousand feet over Mt. Denali in Alaska. I am one with the rosy snow clad peaks and gigantic winding glaciers tinted purple in the shadows. Winging in a helicopter over the Seychelles, I peer out of the open door at emerald green waters and dissolve into the solitude that envelops me. Close to home, peering through my camera lens into the heart of a flower in Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I am engulfed in the mysterious depths. Vision and body, mind and spirit, heart, soul and passion fuse into one flaming beacon. Like quasars billions of light years away, I am light.
In 1953, Drs. Moon and Spencer...proposed that light from stars traveled along curved pathways in a mathematical framework known as Riemannian space. If this were the case, they argued, then light from the most distant stars would reach earth in substantially less than 20 years.
I am the fiery fusion of black hole energy accretion. I sparkle in space like a string of cataclysmic fireworks larger than the Milky Way galaxy. I race out to the ends of the universe at the speed of light. I am light. I am light which explodes from giant dying stars, which consumes entire galaxies and reduces them to space rubble. I am the black hole at the center of every unimaginable fiery event. I am light's domain, the dimension of infinite possibilities and consequences, which spin the very universe. I am infinite. Therefore, I am.
“If Hubble's law for the expansion of the universe is extrapolated to include the quasars, they would be many billion light-years away and consequently as luminous intrinsically as 1,000 galaxies combined.
To account for such brilliant light, astronomers believe that quasars are super massive black holes in galactic nuclei, releasing energy by the accretion of matter through a rotating viscous disk.”
—www. lupinfo.com/encyclopedia.
‘TOWARD AN IMPURE POETRY'
I present the following quote from Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda edited and translate by Ben Belitt (Evergreen). The poem shouts, sings, groans and murmurs about the world and the human condition. To touch the earth we must become part of the earth. If light is the blood and guts of the stars, then poetry is the coalescing shapes of our whirling minds.
It is well at certain hours of the day or night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed along dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all harassed lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things--all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.
In them one sees the confused dim purity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and finger prints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.
Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.
A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idols and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.
The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding--willfully rejecting and accepting nothing, the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument played without respite yield us its solacing surfaces, and the wood shows the thorniest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency, the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.
Let no one forget them: despond, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment--moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all the hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's occasion, essential and absolute.
Those who shun the "bad taste of things" will fall on their face in the snow.
AN IMPURE ART
I devour abstract art, especially the abstract expressionist or New York School of painters; Twombly and Basquiat, de Kooning, Gorky, Pollock, Kline, and Rothko among others. Chaos, and the subtle order hidden in chaos, sets me free. The New York School's free wheeling work smashed barriers to new vision with much credit due the trail blazing of Picasso, Matisse, Gorky and others early in the century. They, the new innocents, saw by not seeing, by merging with their paints and canvasses in a flamboyant, bully bellicose burgeoning of the human spirit unfettered, wild and free, sprung from the earth. They sensed and saw the random improbabilities of our unseen world within worlds, of a universe running amok, or at the least unpredictable according to quantum theory. In that indescribable and coalescing chaos, as is seen in fractals, the universe spawns, spews and embodies an improbable and magnificent order. Can we see it?
While looking at the large-scale structure of DNA in genes, several teams of scientists hit upon an unexpected mathematical orderliness within it. The presence of a nucleotide base at any point in the DNA sequence seems to correlate with the position of similar bases 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 positions away. Because this pattern seems to hold at many different scales, the DNA appears to have a structure like that of fractals, the mathematical objects that look the same at any magnification. Wentian Li of Rockefeller University, H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University, and Richard Voss of IBM found this self-similar relation in the genomes of a wide variety of cells, from bacteria to mammals. Stanley and the others have speculated that the fractal pattern may help to protect DNA from errors during copying or translation.
—Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia
That's delicious. Let's go further. My mind and yours are digital quantum computers according to recent theories. They are faster by a factor of trillions than the greatest supercomputers. Because my mind and yours are quantum computers, there is no limit to what they can become and what they can see. In The Quest for the Quantum Computer, author Julian Brown writes that quantum computers do not obey the laws of physics, as we seem to know them. My brain and yours inhabit spheres of probabilities, which, like electrons, exist only when we observe them. A delicious quandary, because how can we observe what does not exist? If quantum mechanics is the underlying matrix of consciousness that begins to explain the production of art. Art is randomly generated in the unconscious according to the laws of probability and chaos. An artist produces works of the greatest beauty, strangeness and prophecy which, in their random, fractal form, often are misunderstood or unappreciated in their time. Splendid. Artists and works of art herald the dawning of every new age.
According to quantum mechanics, a property of a particle does not have a specific value before the property is measured. Quantum mechanics can calculate the probability of different values turning up in an experiment. But it is incorrect to say that any particular value exists until it is measured.
—Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia
Here we enter unholy shaky ground. If we cannot observe light, we cannot see. But we do observe light and the effects of light on the world around us. Does this mean that what we see is a series of probabilities? Yes, because every one of us sees the world differently. At any moment, we can learn to see beneath the surface of things. Our vision transcends our definition of vision. Light, which operates at the quantum level, organizes our brains as well. We must drink deep in this wellspring of probabilities and possibilities, just as Odin drank deep at the Well of Wisdom after paying the price of giving eye to the giant, Mimir the wise, who guarded it.
I need but one eye to enter the depths of my camera's vision. Long ago, in Norse mythology, the world was made and the giant frost ogre Ymir spawned the first beings.
Young were the years when Ymir made his settlement, there was no sand nor sea nor cool waves; earth was nowhere nor the sky above, chaos yawned, grass was there nowhere. The sun turns black, earth sinks into the sea, the bright stars vanish from the sky; steam rises up in the conflagration, a high flame plays against heaven itself.
— CAROLYNE LARRINGTON , The Poetic Edda
STORM KING
Do you or I exist? Does light exist? I live and work in the world of light with the greatest joy and enthusiasm. I welcome its blazing beauty and enjoy its enigmas. Not long ago, I visit Storm King Art Center. I come to see the sculptures displayed across the green hillsides, Calder, David Smith, Lieberman, Nevelson, Moore, Noguchi, Abakamowicz, among others. Then I want to see them with my inner eye, with my digital camera, with my random, improbable eye. The day is perfect, a blue sky with wisps of cirrus clouds. I stalk the large works like a jaguar in a rain forest, aware that they are impregnable. How can I see them? Noguchi wrote about his “close embrace with the earth.” My views of the way these large sculptures embrace the earth at Storm King provokes a new vision. I sense that the green hills, the foliage bedecked trees, the brilliant sun which casts shadows, the blue skies and wispy clouds become a magical stage set, a stage set of the inner mind. It is my first visit to this theater of sculpture. I walk in a trance, trying to see beyond the usual, the printed catalogues of these sculptors works, the photographs in books. Art is universal.
I want to claim my own perceptions and vision from these abstract monuments. It is easy, too easy to just ‘see' the towering metal shapes, brilliantly painted sculptures, welter of interlocking, thrusting, convoluted forms.
I sculpt with light, holy light, light which presents its mystery as though it were easy, just a matter of opening your eyes. What will you see? Can you conjure up the spirits of light, the eternal radiance, which honeycombs the universe, immortal and limitless? “I can call up spirits from the vasty deep,” said Lord Glendower to Prince Hal in ‘Henry the Fifth. “So can I and so can any man,” quoth Hal, “but will they come when you do call? It is a seeking worthy of a god and we are all gods. The greatest power on earth is the ability to see, to see the unseen world, the real world, to see what isn't there. It is the Holy Grail, the chalice of all wisdom, all knowledge, all knowing. Why lay fallow on this earth in an untilled field when you can blossom with the radiance of wild flowers in every season? We are dreamers, not see-ers. When we learn to see, we will see into each other's heart as well. To love another human, to love the sky, the sea and the earth, isn't that heaven? On with the show!
It is not true, It is not true that we came to live here. We came only to sleep, Only to dream.
— Cantares Mexicanos
DIGITAL MAGIC: SEEING THE UNSEEN
The art of seeing in the digital age is reborn like the globe girdling ocean renewing itself after millenniums. Tides which sweep across the earth, tides which rise in Antarctica bearing cold waters to the warmer climes, are like the tides of digital information which threaten to overwhelm us or to renew us. We are born again on the great wave of technological progress. We live on the cusp of history, which now and forever suddenly surround us. The next half-century holds surprises we cannot imagine. In Technology and the Future , Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The art of seeing is a kind of magic. We learn to see what isn't there, although, like waves of light, which do not exist in time and space, as we know them, what isn't there pervades the universe. We are submerged each second in almost infinite showers of subatomic particles, massless particles, the entire electromagnetic spectrum of which, only a tiny part is visible, that which we call light rays.
The digital age frees a photographer from the constraints of film, processing and labs. Now totally in control of his or her art, like a painter or sculptor, the image-making artist is free to imagine the unseen world. Inner vision becomes true vision, as with all art. I know of no dividing line between what a human being can imagine and what he or she can create. I know of no dividing line between what is real and what is fantasy. All of art is fantasy, which transforms the world each day and makes it a place of wonder, astonishment, love and joy. Please do not ask me if I am happy. An artist who is passionate about his or her art cannot be otherwise, although I would not define it in such simple terms. Happiness is the courage and bliss of doing what you want to do, come hell or high water.
Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask "how," while others of a more curious nature will ask "why." Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
— MAN RAY
I attend a crafts fair at Lincoln Center where I stroll about and make a few images. I see a man with a strong face, lined and contoured. He beats slowly on a square drum. I ask if I may take his photograph. He assents. We discuss his work. He makes drums. “I am incredibly happy and lucky,” he says. “I do what I love all the time and I get paid for it.”
“What does it take?” I ask.
He pauses, “You must be passionate and you must work very hard.”
I cannot imagine a better definition of a rewarding life. Food, shelter and clothing are necessities. They alone cannot bring happiness. Happiness is a mythical monster breathing fire, a chimera which defies the idle seeker, a dragon which scorches the materialist whose pleasures come from endless acquisitions. Worse still are the power seekers, for they can never control themselves and find pursuit of happiness a tormenting swim in whirlpools of avarice, malice and back stabbing. We are all gifted, creative, and potentially, whatever we desire to become. In this society born of affluence and, often, overwhelming greed for material things, people too often may exchange spiritual growth and creative development for the tawdry cheap goods of position and commerce.
Vision seeks itself in nature. Vision came from aeons long conditioning during the course of evolution's perilous journey from trilobites to mankind. We are bestowed eyes, which are miracles, yet they see little that is not obvious to everyone. When we embark on the voyage of seeing, unseen horizons swim into view like rainbow schools of tropical fish. It is not necessary to interpret what we see anymore than we must interpret a much-loved Bach fugue, a bass solo by Ron Carter, or a fado in Portuguese by Amelia Rodriguez. We hear the music clear and lovely. Learning to see without allowing our minds to put thick clouds around the real world is a lifelong challenge. I welcome it. Each day is a new adventure.
Cherish your visions. Cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.
— JAMES ALLEN , As a Man Thinketh