some fragments of an introduction...

"a remembered event is infinite, because it is merely a key to everything that happened before and after it."
w. benjamin

"he could find himself in the only environment in which he could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say, entirely outside of time"
m. proust

"the fairy in whose presence we are granted a wish is there for each of us. but few of us know how to remember the wish we have made; and so, few of us recognize its fulfillment later in our lives"
w. benjamin

"proust listens attentively for the echo of the past; benjamin listens for the first notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past"
peter szondi

"technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relationship between nature and man"
w. benjamin

bits from translator's forward and introduction to walter benjamin's berlin childhood around 1900, belknap press, harvard, 2006

when a picture's worth 31 words...

caution: steps

work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

walter benjamin, from 'one way street'

finding the magical correspondences in trying to be a windmill...

nature creates similarities. one only need think of mimicry. the highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man's. his gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.

this faculty has a history, however, in both the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic sense. as regards to the latter, play is for many its school. children's play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. the child plays at being no only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train. of what use to him is this schooling of his mimetic faculty?

the answer presupposes an understanding of the phylogenetic significance of the mimetic faculty. here it is not enough to think of what we understand today by the concept of similarity. as is known, the sphere of life that formerly seemed to be governed by the law of similarity was comprehensive; it ruled both microcosm and macrocosm. but these natural correspondences are given their true importance only if seen as stimulating and awakening the mimetic faculty in man. it must be borne in mind that neither mimetic powers nor mimetic objects remain the same in the course of thousands of years. rather, we must suppose that the gift of producing similarities - for example, in dances, whose oldest function this was - and therefore also the gift of recognizing them, have changed with historical development.

the direction of this change seems definable as the increasing decay of the mimetic faculty. for clearly the observable world of modern man contains only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples...

image, anonymous 1920's snapshot. text, excerpt from walter benjamin, on the mimetic faculty, from reflections, translated by edmund jephcott

when books are like butterflies...

some images of one of the sound installations i presented in kortrijk belgium for the happy new ears festival, which opened a few days ago. the piece was installed in the old beguinage in the center of town on the second floor of the st. anne's hall, and is titled 'when books are like butterflies'. it was loosely inspired by georges rodenbach's book bruges-la-morte, not so much the story, as the atmosphere of the text. i began by notating every sound in the book as well as every color in sequence, and then used the lists to generate a sound work, a text work, and a set of images. the text and images appear in the form of dust jackets, which frame the speakers playing a 13 minute audio piece through 15 speakers (and the images are mostly from the backgrounds of some of the old music photos i typically run on airforms). rather than create an illustration of the text or a work that conceptually fits cleanly into a single resolve related to the text, the piece presents numerous paths through the same information, allowing the sounds in the book to manifest themselves in different forms (i.e. as sound, text, and image). my main interest is in creating a space of intimate wandering, where one has to get close to the books not only to read and see, but to begin to approach the activity of listening with the same intimate response to reading and looking at small things. even though they are birthed from the same source, the text sound and images do not inform each other as much as they offer different paths of experience.

this optical unconscious

"immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. no matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the hear and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. for it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: "other" above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. it is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. details of structure, cellular tissue, which with technology and medicine are normally concerned - all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. yet at the same time, photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things - meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable."

walter benjamin, little history of photography, 1931

image: cabinet photo circa 1890 of a bridge being built, and enlarged details...

a button can be the stage of your fate...

“there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. naturally his existence is tied to many other things as well… to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is, their usefulness, but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.”

“to the true collector, the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth”.

“every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories… for what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order”

“one has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. as he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them, into their past as though inspired.”

“ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects. not that they come alive in him, but it is he who lives in them.”

walter benjamin, illuminations

(of course, the old photo above is not walter benjamin, but one of my favorite snapshots in the archive, of john clark and his collection of 22,000 buttons...in terms of the photo, the notion that the strand of buttons is running from the inside of the storfront window to his shoulder outside, like a long hideous snake, is mind bending...)

wonder...

i was recently asked to write a text about collecting, that will be published in a few weeks. a few things came up, specifically a revisiting of walter benjamin's text on book collecting and translation, which i hadn't read since undergraduate school. i would highly recommend re-reading illuminations to anyone and everyone who reads this blog. i generally prefer the dentist to theory, but benjamin's writing is pretty darn sublime, and he absolutely nails the complexities of being a collector. i'll most likely post some quotes by him here at some point.

the other thing is that i remember the exact moment and the exact object that began my collecting trajectory through life. you can see it above. i'll post a link to the article when it runs; but suffice to say in 1972 i saw baseball cards for the first time, and became obsessed with this one. it wasn't the player, it was the picture, and i think the following quote by henry miller (about film!) sums up what i seek in objects (as well as the things that i make)...

"exhausted by longing, the spirit of man strives perpetually to surrender its burden through wonder... wonder expands the inner orb, making it wax like a golden moon. at the full, the darkest recesses of our soul are illuminated."

h. miller, art in cinema