WAVE
MUSIC
From BOMB
Magazine, Fall 2003
"Without
contraries there is no progression."
William
Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The path to my recent work
began during my first visit to the Frick Museum in 1971, when I found
myself in front of
Rembrandt’s portrait of Nicolaes Ruts. In the painting an aristocratically
robed, intelligent, and kindly looking man is standing next to a
chair, holding a piece of paper. As I looked at the portrait I was
dumbfounded
by the fleshy, breathing quality of the figure, the palpable atmosphere
that surrounded him, and the clarity and specificity of the moment
that was depicted. The air between the painting and my body seemed
charged with electricity.
Ruts had a sure, relaxed grip on the piece of paper.
I became fascinated with his thumb, its shadow, and the gentle bend
of the paper. As I got closer to the painting, the image dissolved
into scumbled and smeared paint and patches of color. Rembrandt’s
dance of paint abolished the thumb, the shadow, and the paper. Except
that when I stepped back, Ruts was completely intact, including his
thumb, and was still staring at me. And he was still breathing. I
looked back at the thumb. And his breathing stopped. And the paint
reappeared. And so on. Until I started to shake my head and laugh.
The painting was a conundrum, a nonstop delirium
of visual facts in conflict with one another. It shifted from image
to paint and back again. I was transfixed by my inability to hold
the "facts" of the painting in my mind and simultaneously
hold onto a single, integrated truth.
Which brings me to a second event that shaped my
path in artmaking, and more or less codified the first experience.
I read Immanuel Kant’s "Analytic of the Sublime," which
Robert Rosenblum referred to in his elegant essay on Abstract Expressionism, "The
Abstract Sublime." Kant describes "the bewilderment, or
sort of perplexity, which, as is said, seizes the visitor on first
entering St. Peter’s in Rome. For here a feeling comes home
to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea
of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum, and,
in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself,
but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight."
Kant’s "emotional delight" was similar
to my experience in front of the Rembrandt. Seemingly graspable facts
become elusive. Knowledge contradicts itself. And the experience
of that contradiction is thoroughly and inexplicably life affirming.
Life is momentarily heightened beyond normal experience and permanently
altered as a result.
For me, that has become the defining characteristic
of art, as well as my goal in making it.
* * *
I have been photographing waves for five or six
years along a stretch of beach in Long Island, from Wainscott to
Amagansett. In 1998, in a little under two hours, I photographed
the waves generated by the proximity of Hurricane Bonnie to Georgica
Beach in East Hampton. In water up to my waist, I managed to take
250 photographs of the unending metamorphosis in front of me. The
sky went from white to black, and finally to a strange blue. The
waves varied from about two to twelve feet in height, and the surf’s
aspect shifted back and forth from foam to liquid granite. It was
a spectacular display, and I was an ecstatic, but soggy, photographic
witness.
I don’t know if the story about Turner strapping
himself to the mast of a ship during a storm is apocryphal, but if
it is true, I can understand why he did it. Nothing is more vivid
or real than the collision of a storm with the sea. Photographing
hurricanes could very well be the least abstract experience of my
life.
The pictures of Hurricane Bonnie, which were taken
with a Mamiya 7 medium-format camera, remained as contact prints
for about two years while I completed other work and finished building
my darkroom. During that time, I also began to explore the possibilities
of large-format photography and, almost as a learning exercise, photographed
the small, elegant, midsummer surf in Wainscott with a Wisner 4x5.
It turned out that my skill with the various tilts
and swings of the Wisner was less than adequate, and when I printed
the negatives, I found that the images were out of focus on the edges
if they were printed at any significant size. On the ground glass,
or as 4 x 5" contact prints, the focus problem had been undetectable.
The results of my efforts were disappointing because the purpose
of moving to a larger negative was to enable me to make extremely
large prints with a high degree of sharpness and very little grain.
I found myself referring to the Wainscott images as Horizons,
a title in keeping with what seemed to be their true subject. A few
of the small Horizons were pinned to the studio wall, an interesting
counterpoint to the work in front of me, which was proofing the 46
x 56" Hurricane prints. They were a sad reminder of a typical
creative setback.
As the proofing unfolded, it seemed as if the hurricane
itself was going to engulf the studio. I took that as a good sign.
Photography’s astonishing capacity to present reality and enable
us to relive past experience was evident. But as I worked on the Hurricanes,
my eyes kept shifting to the small Horizon "failures." Their
serenity was an interesting juxtaposition to the romantic violence
of the Hurricanes, and they were so wonderfully small. Even
more striking to me was the pure gray tone representing the blue
sky. The gray tone was very abstract.
During previous years of work with the medium,
one of the most surprising and important things that I discovered
about black-and-white photography was that in spite of its original
purpose of depicting the world around us, it had a natural tendency
toward abstraction. The discovery occurred while I was using a technique
known as pre-fogging, when I accidentally added too much pre-exposure
light to a print. On development, my image turned a deep, abstract
gray. With a few more "mistakes," I had realized the obvious.
If you added extreme amounts of light, you made an abstract, black
object. If you did nothing to the paper except develop it, you made
an abstract, white object. Ad Reinhardt and Robert Ryman would have
felt right at home.
Toward the end of the Hurricane proofing,
I realized that some of the Hurricanes contained skies that
could be coaxed into the pure gray that existed in the Horizon images.
I began to push the sky in one of the Hurricane images in
that direction, and I felt the possibility of an interesting and
contrary maneuver. What if the Hurricane images were flanked
by abstract rectangles of gray that corresponded to the sky tones?
It was a simple idea, rooted not only in the images themselves and
the Horizon "failures," but in the constructed photographic
abstractions that I had made previously.
And that led me to a bigger question: What was
the difference between a pure gray sky and a pure gray anything else?
The answer was absolutely nothing.
So why not just photograph light itself, in its
purest form? Was it different from a photograph of a pure blue sky?
The answers to these questions held out the promise of destroying,
once and for all, the notion of an irreconcilable gap between reality
and abstraction. The investigation also promised to strip photography
down to its essential elements–light, film and paper.
My project had grown past hurricanes to become
simultaneously aesthetic and conceptual. I grabbed my Mamiya 7, opened
up the front of my enlarger, and shot straight into the light. By
photographing the light from the enlarger that I would later use
to make the prints themselves, I closed the artistic loop completely.
While I finished proofing the Hurricanes,
I followed a second line of investigation by working on the new "lightscapes." As
I worked, I came to realize that their true subject was as much the
film they were shot on, as the light they were aimed at. In fact,
as I proceeded, I began to see the "lightscapes" as "grain
portraits."
Having eventually photographed the light from my
enlarger with a variety of film types and other, large-format cameras,
I proceeded to develop the film in various ways to explore the resulting
changes in the shape and structure of the film grain. I began to
feel like a sculptor, but a sculptor working on an insane nanoscale.
Instead of using chisels to carve marble or an acetylene torch to
cut steel, I was using chemistry to shape miniature grains of silver.
The day I printed the first Grain prints
at the same size as the Hurricanes, I arranged them on the
wall together. I expected trumpets to sound, that the effect would
be unified and transcendent. The perfect art conundrum. It was, of
course, a self-conscious disaster.
The direct juxtaposition completely undermined
the best qualities of the individual components. The Hurricanes were
diminished in their immediacy and the Grain prints were static.
In frustration, I took the Grain prints off the wall and threw
them on the floor in the corner of the studio. As I continued work
on the Hurricanes, the Grain prints just lay on the
floor, face up. The Hurricanes went back to looking pretty
good. But the Grain prints were muttering to themselves in
the corner. And I caught them staring at me with rather baleful looks
on more than one occasion.
One day, during a break in the Hurricane work,
I pinned three of the Grain prints back up on the wall next
to each other, but oriented vertically instead of horizontally, because
that was the only way they would fit on the available wall space.
Once they were up, I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
As I looked at them, something led me to see the
flat gray rectangles as light-filled spaces. Was it photographic
expectation - the notion that the basic spatial elements of our world
would be in all photographs? It was impossible to look at them and
not see into them at least part of the time. And at those
moments they demanded to be perceived as sky. But then, without notice,
they would snap back, taut and abstract as could be. The overall
effect was not unlike that described by Kant in his "Analytic
of the Sublime." The work seemed impossible to comprehend, yet
created a certain "emotional delight." The experience reminded
me of looking at James Turrell’s mystical sky portals.
Over the weeks that the first large Grain prints
were up on the wall, it seemed that part of their quality lay outside
the dialogue between their perceived "image" and their
evident abstraction. There was also the simple beauty of the paper
itself, which was augmented by the different sizes of the prints
in their unfinished state. In addition to creating Grain prints
on varying sizes of paper, I decided to underscore the paper issue
by printing on Warm Tone and Matte papers, as well as my standard
Ilford Glossy.
In order to push the definition of a photographic
series to the edge, I picked one 4 x 5" negative that had just the
right characteristics and began using it as the sole "image" for
the entire Grain series. I made well over a hundred 8 x 10" studies
of the Grain image on the three different papers.
But could I undercut the traditional concept of
a photographic series with the Grain image, and successfully
connect it to the Hurricanes, which celebrated some of photography’s
most established traditions?
The answer to this question developed over a period
of months, during which time I had a few studio visits from artist
friends with markedly different interests and perspectives. They
all found the simplicity and unfathomable quality of the Grain prints
compelling. But I had trouble accepting them.
Were these Grain prints more than just an
investigation? Were they functioning as art at all? The only word
that I could use to describe the Grain prints was "impossible."
* * *
Many months earlier, a musician friend had mentioned
to me that he had created an album back in the ’70s that almost
ended his career. He described it as an exploration and celebration
of some of the essential elements of rock and roll: "rhythm,
noise, power, and emotion."
He deflected more than a couple of my requests
to borrow a tape of the music. I suppose he thought I wouldn’t
respond positively. But when I was in the last throes of my struggle
to embrace or reject the Grain prints, he told me that, to
his utter astonishment, the album was being re-issued as a CD. He
lent me his copy of the newly re-mastered album. The music held me
transfixed. It certainly wasn’t easy listening, but it was mesmerizing
and at times surprisingly beautiful. It was difficult, stripped down
and generally opaque, but it contained flickering passages that invited
the interpretation of motif, arpeggio and even melody. Or was it
just musical expectation?
In light of my own work, I thought of Walter Pater’s
statement in "The School of Giorgione": "All art constantly
aspires towards the condition of music."
My friend and Walter Pater teamed up to quash any
final doubts I had about the Grain prints.
* * *
As work on the Grain prints proceeded, I
felt that I needed to find a link connecting them to the Hurricanes,
but one that would not undermine the aesthetic dialectic between
the two series. The Horizon images became the perfect bridge.
Their necessarily small scale ensured their proper role. If they
had been similar in size to the Hurricane and Grain images,
they would have inserted themselves too strongly between the other
two series. And their position on the continuum of abstraction and
realism, classicism and romanticism, was ideal. The Horizons became
the natural division between the Grains and the Hurricanes.
As I selected and proofed the Horizon images,
I became increasingly aware of the impact that the Horizon series
had as a unit unto itself, as well as the strange intensity of the
individual works. They may have been small, but they asked big questions.
They had the aesthetic power to pull one in, and the conceptual power
to make one think.
* * *
As this project has unfolded, it has taken on a
life of its own. When I began writing this essay in 2001, it was
not yet complete. Using different types and sizes of paper to make
the Grain prints proved to be a mistake, another wrong turn
in the process of creation. The entire paper issue eventually seemed
irrelevant to my goal. But what was the goal? Or, more accurately,
what has it become?
I think it has become an effort to create a new
version of the established, and connect it to a new definition of
the essential.
Certainly the project is no longer just about waves,
hurricanes, sky, grain, abstraction, or conceptual structures. It
has evolved into something else. It has become a meditation on the
medium of photography as much as a photographic reflection of our
world.
If it is successful, it will produce some version
of Kant’s "emotional delight." I hope it has become Wave
Music.
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