Apparitions
In response to some reflections from my last experiment--particularly, some of the thinking around the double-exposed frame that I ended up with at the end of my roll of film (see notes under photo 7 in experiment 2 part 2)--I decided to shoot a roll of double exposed black and white film. The process involved no editing or photoshop--I wanted to get the results straight from my camera, directly in the film by taking two (or more) pictures over the same frame of film. The effects are produced by physically placing/displacing myself from the scene or moving from one thing or place to the other—-bringing things together by going to them, or like… taking them to each other. Seeing what sort of dis/appears from and within the work.
There's a lot I can say about this. Honestly, it feels like the thoughts are still cooking... and I’m always hesitant about saying too much too soon. It takes me a long time to find words that feel true to what the work itself allows me to get at. And sometimes, even when I find words that feel right, saying the work is this one thing feels like asking it to stop being all the other things it is.
In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault writes about how “if the mind had the power to express ideas ‘as it perceives them’, there can be no doubt that ‘it would express them all at the same time’” (p.92). Thinking isn’t linear. Language, therefore, can never fully or accurately represent thought—as it is always “bound to arrange it, part by part, in a linear order” (p.91).
Art, however, can give form to thoughts and knowledges that precedes and exceeds verbal language. I am thinking here about Audre Lorde’s Poetry is not a Luxary, where she writes that “That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding” (Lorde, 2012, p.36). It is through art that we can “transpose [such knowledges] into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it” (Lorde, 2012, pp.37-38).
I know I’m out on a tangent here but like… Art lets me get at and articulate knowledge that language alone can’t by providing a way for me to give form to what my words cannot yet reach. And prematurely having to declare what my art is or what this artwork is saying/doing requires it to stop being everything else that it is. It forces the art itself to stop acting as that thing that makes it possible to hold these multiplicitous, multidimentional, multitemporal, co-occuring forms of knowledge.
But anyway… I’m really enjoying these. I feel like there is so much more that I can do and say by layering the photos… like, something that neither image alone could let me get at, but that comes from what happens when you bring things together… while still not having to necessarily know ahead of time what the photo might become. I still get to sort of discover what it will be through the process of making it, of exploring, of experimenting…