Some kind of directness of image which would obviate all that narrative guff. You can find it in Surrealism, traditional ghost stories, 15th Century engravings of witches’ cats, in unwriterly reports of hallucinations, madness, alien abductions. A clear, if incidental, implication of something past what can be seen in the image itself. (That’s to say: Does the engraver indicate, here, something extra to the idea of witchness or catness or “the diabolic” ?) Of course I’m not saying it would be more than words on a page. But it would be the exact opposite of an ad, which never stops nudging & winking & coming on to you, as pumped up with semiotics as a tennis player is with hormones; or a “story”, which never stops producing neat rationales for its own events or teaching you about what it wants you to conclude. I’m not even saying that the kind of work I mean would lift a lid on a brief glimpse of something–that strikes me as a fully-(old)fashioned narrative in itself; only that, in it, the obvious & the not-obvious would be superposed from the beginning. It would be full of images which believed in their own charisma. I’m looking for a word like “purity” to describe images like these, even though they clearly aren’t pure. What you see is not what you get, even though you’re never offered anything else. There would be some kind of honesty & simplicity in the way they were offered, because they wouldn’t need to be packaged for consumption (though of course they might be quickly annexed as a style). What comes to mind again is Petra Freeman’s animation Jumping Joan, which you can’t get on the web, but you can see her The Mill.
8 Comments
July 3, 2008 at 4:05 pm
“The Mill” is wonderful – Chagall brought to life on some hexed ground among the beehives. Producing analogous prose would be a lot harder, because of the pressure and expectation narrative exerts. Grant image its metaphysic, and you could end up with something far closer to Brian Catling’s “The Stumbling Block: Its Index.”
July 3, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I completely love “Images that believe in their own charisma”.
Have you ever suffered from writers block ?
The process you’re describing sounds almost systematic and work-a-day even though you’re working with intangibles.
It’s fascinating to get this glimpse into how you work
July 4, 2008 at 10:18 am
Since you seem to be on a bit of a Sebald kick at the moment, I can recommend the first part of ‘The Natural History of Destruction’, a lecture he gave on how German literature failed to respond to the bombing of German cities during the war. He argues that a blunt, forensic approach is the only way of approaching a horror that is in fact incommunicable, and inconceivable even to those who experienced it.
Thinking about it alongside horror fiction reminds me of the conclusion to the last episode of Christopher Frayling’s series ‘Nightmare: The Birth of Horror’ about ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, ‘Dracula’ and ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. Frayling is standing in a field and asks why the genre faded away. He quotes from a late Holmes novel that talks about dark clouds over Europe (or something) and argues that the pleasurable frissons of fear delivered by these parlour stories that concerned largely private dramas became irrelevant in view of the carnage that the early 20th century brought. The camera pulls out – it’s a helicopter shot – and it turns out that the field is a First World War cemetery, a grid of identical white crosses, in which he becomes lost. Nothing expressive or nuanced about that kind of horror; the machine age and machine death, in which individual recollection and testimony become inadequate to the task of evocation and description. Maybe.
July 4, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Hi Julian, thanx for that, also for your email with the extracts from the lecture, which I got this morning.
Hi Veg clothing. I get block but I don’t mind because I figure it’s nature’s way of telling me I’m doing something wrong. Therefore I don’t call it that, either. I’m not going to learn anything by using a cliche to describe an important event in my own experience. Rather than call it block, & tie up, & spoil everything with some panic fix, I put it in a drawer–which that might be a month, it might be 5 years–until it fixes itself. It always does.
I’m interested you found what I wrote “systematic”. I wish it was. It is whistling in the dark, really. I have always wanted to do what I describe in this post, but I don’t think for a moment I’m clever enough–or “pure” enough–to do it. Tim Etchells, though, is that close.
Hi Martin, yes. But there’s The Green Child, which shows it might be done.
July 6, 2008 at 11:43 pm
you could easily be talking about Goya….but you are trying to talk about that thing that nobody can really nail in an explanatory way. It is fascinating for me to watch you try to do it with images—I often scramble to put words to my paintings because people ask and rather than take out my uzzi (oh, it only) I try to let the magic take shape in my mouth and fly into the air. My place is littered with their crashes…ones footsteps crunch.
But you have done it so sneakily elegant that I almost buy it.
…and “pure” is the right word.
July 28, 2008 at 6:28 pm
[...] but the way it is written is telling you something yet more. If you can decode it, of course. Some kind of directness of image which would obviate all that narrative guff. You can find it in Surrealism, traditional ghost stories, 15th Century engravings of [...]
September 2, 2008 at 4:25 pm
You can see Petra Freeman’s Jumping Joan on the web here…
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/1994/jumping
September 2, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Gary, thanks. That’s fantastic!
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