Concept of the other: or to know thy self

She knew, "it's only real once."
1982, kodalith film printed
on black and white photographic
paper.  

I have been thinking about the concept of other ever since I started looking at the shadow idea.  Is the shadow just another component of other?

 In order to know the self, other has to be acknowledged.  Could the shadow be one of your others? I put the image, above, here to also illustrate that this isn't something new.  (I will be doing an entry on some of my earlier photo work as well.  It was all non-silver, contact printing.  A lot of it dealt with "catching the shadow".)  I did make some notes, in my journal/sketchbook, awhile back when I was working on "waiting to mend," the piece just before "LEFT."  I remarked, in my notes, about how things were coming back to me.  Old ideas which never left...even technical devices that I had used when I was getting my undergraduate degree, were sneaking their way back into my thinking.  What work I did have out, a lot of it is buried and a lot of my sketches were ruined last year when my basement got flooded during a record setting down pour...first rule, don't store work in a basement (or books.)

The work I looked at reminded me of how I used to think, process and how I went about composing and putting ideas into practice.  I was always trying to figure out my place...the role I played in the circle that was my day/night, personal/social...even my interior self examined.  All my work, regardless of the media, was "image and text."  It was like trying to communicate (speak more directly.)

 Another remanent from the past is the opening paragraph from Nabokov's Speak Memory. "A cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  Although the two are identical twins, man as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour.) I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth.  He saw a world that was practically unchanged - the same house, the same people - and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence.  He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell.  But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated."  This started me thinking, what if you did go back in time to a life your remember living...and you were not there.  That your past did not contain you.  Maybe like a shadow that doesn't appear some days. There are days (light) that causes us to not have shadows...is the relationship between object and shadow mutually inclusive/exclusive?

Words like ontology (of or relating to the nature of being), epistemology (nature of knowledge...how do we know), phenomenology (study of conscious experience), one -ology after another kept racing through my thoughts.  (I went to school when hermeneutic was big: methodological principals of interpretation.   Today these words still bounce around in my head but probably don't have as much of a blow. I mean, is questioning really going to give me answers, or more questions? )  And,  there is also that little matter of quantum theory that somehow sneaked in as well.  My interpretation of that went something like this.  Time is a linear concept.  We move through time, similar to a train that goes along a predetermined line (not to be confused with pre-destiny.)  Anyway, in my thinking, you could at any time slice into this "time line" and there you would be. So you could exist in multiple places at multiple time.  Also, at the time, I was very fond of T.S. Eliot.  Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, opens: "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past./If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable./What might have been is an abstraction/Remaining a perpetual possibility/Only in a world of speculation." Read by me as, just what is time...no two timing devices (except the digital) ever seem to be show the same time...time really is an abstraction.  Our sense of time is really not a tangible "thing."  You can't hold it.  So how do we know of it's existence...?

So there you have it.  In a nut shell...Is it possible to be the being in the reflection and the reflection.  To see and experience oneself both in the present and the past...I see a lot of that in the work that I'm thinking about and doing.  It is very reflexive of who I am, my relationship to the other and who the other is.

A phrase that actually prompted the next piece, which I have sketched out (below) is,"her mother's shadow began to merge with her's,/She worried about loss, loss of her identity."  Nothing biographical about this!!!  Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror or a picture and thought about resemblance...that you were looking like your parents (maybe it's that latent retinal image, but that happens to me.)  The first time I really saw my mother in me were my hands.  I have my mother's hands.

This was the sketch I did based on the phrase:
"her shadow..."  It is a performantive piece.
You read the phrase as you get closer and
the voice should be whispered, reflective.

view #2

 closes view, #3

  But now for a little update on LEFT.

A look at the back.  After Jude  showed her magic diary cloth,
I had to take a peak too.  Not as good as Jude's but..

Where the rectangles all started.  I originally added
the cloth appliqued rectangle...which had the effect
I was seeking: slight relief off the surface, separation of the
object, boundary, barrier.  Then, what to do next? I decided
to continue the idea by adding a few more cloth rectangles, and
some that are just stitched.  The same day I decided to do this,
Jude Hill did a talk on pulling elements together, integrating elements
(I took this to mean union, cohesion not just separate
floating objects.)

view of the only two figures
that are seen as one: before
the larger figure starts to separate
away from the smaller figure

added stitch rectangles to the left
most figure (shadow is starting to
separate) . Larger figure is just
left of this that is in back
of the first cloth rectangle.

detail of center top section, mostly stitched rectangles

Imagine this as the right side of the cloth...should have rotated it! how the cloth
and stitched rectangles interact.

Hope you got through this post and that I didn't get too distracted

More images of the cloth can be seen on my flicker page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69022257@N06/

Plato on my mind...

Today I'm stitching away...it is gray, windy and probably all the remaining leaves on the trees may just have to fall.  Or so it seems.  Only the O'Henry leaf will remain, it remains for us to find it.

I have been thinking a bit about the Allegory of the Cave from Plato's Republic.  The allegory deals with prisoners that are chained in a cave and only get to see shadows on the wall and perceive this to be reality. They have no concept of what reality really is.  (This is my summation in a nut shell.)  Of course once they are let out of the cave into the sun light and actually do see "the real," they don't know what/how to deal with it and long to return to the cave. And do.  This reminds me a little of stories you hear about blind people who have their sight restored.  They have to relearn their surroundings and people they knew by voice since their sense of reality has been altered.

 Plato also goes on to deal with the issue of Form and Idea.  Here he asserts the the non-material world  (abstraction - ideas or ideals) and not the material world of change which we know through sensation, construct  our highest and most fundamental reality.  In many ways I think this is believable.  If you think about it - what forms our ideals, the image industry...media.  (?)

So what does this have to do with my current stitching project (LEFT)...well, it's the shadow.  I think the shadow image is the most important feature to me.

Thinking about the shadow this way, I decided I needed to add another figure, hence, the shadow on the left emerged.  This cloth is a little darker - camera flashed washed it a bit.  I also decided I wanted to add a little dimension to the cloth...nothing to pronounced just a little more surface to introduce the concept of separation.  A boundary layer, defined as: a region of retired fluid near the surface of a body which moves through a fluid or past which a fluid moves; a bounder. Thinking that this might present a region where one body could not reach another body with noticeable ease.  

closer look at the shadow figure

I also added the "applique" type edge.  I brings forth the surface and contrasts the unfinished edges.  As Jude states, it a nice play with the edge. 

In thinking about how in someway, are lives are like shadows, I started thinking about simulacra.  Theories that were presented by Jean Baudrillard.  It was a much discussed issue when I was in graduate school so forgive me for the chit chat here.  I copied the following from Wiki because it would take me forever to get it all out and I probably would make it even more confusing...I guess this is also a issue about the separation of people that social media has brought about.  That school are considering that their students not learn writing (penmanship) because most of them are typing.  Conversations are mediated through mechanical means, etc. Those few entries that Jude did with written  text instead of typing were nice...all this and more brings me to this issue (but I have to say, not all media is a negative.  It allows  me to share here with  you, and other places in the media sphere.) But still...makes one stop to think.  So could a mere shadow bring all this about? ha.


Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of images, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is irrelevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". The page six refers to the volume titled Selected Writings. 
2. The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality, but can hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".
4. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.

So there it is...or here it is...or was. My update. 

keep going...inspiration

Today is Pablo Picasso's birthday.  Born in 1881.  He said, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." So wouldn't it be lovely if it was that easy, but maybe that's what, why, and how we have decided to do what we do. I wanted to take a shot of this old gnarly mulberry tree that I've been walking passed and today I finally remembered to slip my camera into my pocket just to discover that the tree was being sawed down...I was upset with myself but more with the man who was doing it.  Why not let nature and time progress as it should - to it's own beat.  But, I guess living in the city that isn't as possible for trees as for those that reside in forests, woods and far from man.  Still, I wish it had turned out differently for that old mulberry.  I once had to cut a tree down, a grand old pear tree.  It had become infested with carpenter ants and soon it would have toppled, but it probably wouldn't have fallen in the right direction but instead would have hit my house.  Funny thing was, that I actually decided to ask for it's forgiveness by giving it a hug.  I swear that I could feel the soul of that tree and that it had some understanding of what was going to happen.  Still, I don't really eat too many pears these days because I remember the sweetness of those pears and miss that tree.  


But back to stitching.  I have been following along with Jude Hill's work and blog, I hope you all go there for a visit. Some wonderful stuff to see and learn and people to get to know.  She's been a huge influence on things. 


I am currently working on a piece, the piece that is pictured on the top of this blog.  The short title is LEFT...the last line is ABSENCE.  I am trying to figure out the sequence of the wording and how/where to place it.  The color is influenced by the work of Anselm Kiefer What I like about his work is that it is very textural and the fact that is is mono-chromatic.  I have seen some of his work "live" and there is a real feel of encaustic layering.  I don't look at his work from a political point of view I just look at it as material for visual reference. In that sense this image (right) reminds me a little of that color, non-color:

This caught my attention the other day.  It is a photo of water standing atop of some asphalt not quite dry.  The oil has come out of the tar causing slicks to form.  A few leaves have been caught on the surface. (a sort of mini early evolutionary period - where life began!)  All of these things added fuel to my thinking about the cloth: LEFT.  


LEFT's narrative is dealing with the absence of the other.  Who is that other - it could be anyone really but we all do feel the absence of someone at one time or another.  In this case it is a child that has been left by someone - a parent, sibling, loved one...but as the other moves away from the child, the shadow grows in size.  I've also been dealing with shadows in my work so it will be as interesting to me to see how this develops.  I did take a philosophy class in school that dealt with the shadow - darn if I had taken better notes or had a better memory....

so this is where the piece is today.  I'm as interested in seeing how it progresses as I am in the evaporation of the water and the "oil" slick and how that hole is filled where that old gnarly mulberry stood.