The Moral Dimension of Art: From Pigment to Pixel
The moral dimension of photography
The moral dimension of photography is a subset of the moral dimension of art, in general. Any art requires materials for the art to be made: painting, in Lascaux, required pigments and a wall. Whether the pigments were derived from minerals or vegetables or animals, they required processing materials—they required a change in status from the purely observational to the active. Not that I am criticizing the procedural necessity of being, or the necessity of being procedural. I make things.
From pigment to pixel, we have not eluded the dilemma of getting things from nature with which to make things which are aesthetic. Apart from aspects of our worlds’ wisdom traditions, we pay little attention to meditative, transcendental, or spiritual opportunities for satiation, fulfillment, or sublimation. The reason is that we are too busy buying stuff we can’t afford to trick people we don’t know into thinking we have riches we don’t possess. Art, too, is a game played in the material realm. But it has always been a bit sirenic, economically: the relationship between time invested and money earned is inverse (for most artists). What can explain this paradox? Why spend time doing something that decreases the amount of time we have to acquire more resources were we to spend our time differently?
Perhaps art offers a different kind of compensation. Self-actualization? Fulfillment? Something akin to meditation? And perhaps this makes the sacrifices of time and resources worthwhile. Looking unsparingly at human activity, we can not necessarily say that even meditation gets a moral pass; the space we exist in, albeit minimally, could be space necessary for others. Gluons and other matter-traversing particles excepted, to be is a positive act that spatially dispossesses a potential other, and this is the moral cost of existing. Please don’t misinterpret this as an apology for existence—I find my life, unremarkable as it may be to those around me, an unbearably exquisite privilege; the observation, from someone who not only loves life but also enjoys photography, is driven by the same boundary-expanding-double-edged-mental-chemistry that gave us Martin Luther’s 95 theses or Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling…The Pilgrim’s Progress of John Bunyan or the electrifying theories of Nikolai Tesla…the relentless engineering passion of Howard Hughs and the perceptive parables of Hans Christian Anderson, and many other known and unknown sufferers. To be obsessive is not a blessing at first. And, sadly, for many it may never be one.
But with hard work, a descent can be turned into a triumph, and a disorder can provide new cognitive capabilies of movement, thought and communication. Falling toward an axis, we may be spared prematurely crossing into non-existence and asymptotically scraping ‘rock bottom, rise in an equation of purposeful self-expression.
Calligraphy is a 1-bit artform.
In many ways, it is the opposite of photography: the former achieves expressive potential as a result of its limitations, whereas photography and related branches of imaging transcend the biological limitations of seeing: from atom smashers and x-rays to Webb telescopes, we are a species obsessed with seeing…the tiniest things or strings possible to the total temporal unfurling of the universe itself…and we also wish to bridge this scalar chasm with a single theory. Go, us! We are nothing if not driven.
I bring up calligraphy for two reasons: we are tracing the movement of art from Lascaux to Leica, and I am a calligrapher as much as and at times more so than I am a photographer. And I am a member of the quantum tribe of obsessive compulsives who wrack themselves with guilt for things they have never done and in all likelihood never would—I liken it to being a sentient stone in the middle of a go-board with all the stones around you turning black…and on the verge of losing consciousness, a light from within causes the capitulation of the other calculi regardless of the missing stones on the other sides of the transforming lines…but you see you need to change the rules. Respectfully, you are a disruptor. The realm may be religious or political or literary or any other area we exist in…for me, it is aesthetically. I had to justify art morally and as an act of hubris. For I can’t imagine living in a world without art.
Vegetarian photographers and non-image producing camera-less photographers might have difficulties finding the appropriate venues for submission of work that they feel effuses the core axioms of their identity. What I mean is those who are capable of just ‘being’ or ‘witnessing’ as passive form of art creation may not need to make things. But those of us who aren’t, artwork must, as James Baldwin stated in his essay on living in a small village, not merely be the repository of smiles that seek to ingratiate, but rather should be the positing of work the embodies “the weight of our complexity” as human beings. Just as a sensor registers the force or the weight of a photon, so too does culture register the weight and complexity of the totality of artists lucky enough to offer up their work. Artists are the children of culture. But who were the parents of creativity?
That is a metaphysical question. A religious one, even. And my foray is meant neither to be exhaustive of exclusive of the reader’s convictions vis-à-vis creativity. Of the parents of the artist, perhaps one is the air and the other is the earth. Perhaps one is loving recognition received as a child and the other is fear of disapproval. The parents of the artist are experiential, biological, spiritual, cultural, paradoxical, economic, ideological, illogical, and any other categories you might want to add to the litany—art is the inevitable child of existence.
As in life, so to in art. The child often becomes the parent. It is the artist who becomes the art and the art that becomes the artist. James Joyce’s evolution from Portrait of the Artist to Ulysses. Or Picasso’s portrait of an altar boy to his inhabitation of the artist in Las Meninas. Read Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence and consider the strong poet in the city of the dead as one who not only accuses time of running the wrong way, but begs the conflation of the poetic and the spatial. Or Bloom’s Taxonomy. Or Maslow’s Hierarchy. It is the YAWP. It is Nietzsche’s fusion of Apollo and Dionysus.
I must return to calligraphy, which, as with many other endeavors from knitting to Morse code, has tells or indicators or signatures that reveal authorship. Photography can, too…but to achieve this is rare. Sometimes, identification is the objective: we have brands, logos, jingles, colors, fonts, and an array of markers to show “who” did something. Then there are times when anonymity is the goal: masks, proxies, disguises, subtlety or subterfuge—in a way, you might say that projects that seek author-project identification are Apollonian in nature—they are projects of the day. (With exceptions, of course.)
And projects that seek secrecy are Dionysian—in the sense that confusion, misdirection, inebriation, and other ruses of the non-linear are deployed to conceal. However, there are obvious exceptions, and this is most likely a misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s ideas. And of the evening, when we have waited long enough and outlasted daylight, we suffer fear and we escape with this or that agent of alteration. We huddle. We seek another to generate warmth, to love, perchance to perpetuate. The art of the night manifests itself in the museum of us, our population, our continuance, our growth. We are creatures of motion, of activity, and of memory.
To return to the difference between calligraphy and photography, let us return to the bit-depth of each art: calligraphy is notably a dark ink on a neutral ground. Darkness and light. Light and dark. Yin and Yang. Photography depends on dynamic contrast and high bit-depth to create as realistic as possible rendering in 2-dimensions of our 3- and 4- and more-dimensional world.
A Hierarchy of Artistic Needs
Both art forms seek internal evolution—there is a hierarchy of needs that exerts influence over their domains. Calligraphy, in the Western tradition of the artform and in several styles of it in the East, is clear writing. Again, it eschews the tells of the individual writer and embraces the most ideal form of the written character. It pays homage to self-similarity and recognizability. It celebrates sameness. Discipline. Perfection. It is highly Apollonian.
But what we might call Actualized Calligraphy is idiosyncratic and unmistakably ascribable to an individual writer. Photography, too, may be categorized from basic to individualistic. Were we to map art in general, or the art of the calligraphy in particular, onto Maslow’s pyramid, we would get something like this:
5. Actualized Art: highly idiosyncratic, asemic, unclear, non-conforming, genre-expanding, quantum
4. Esteem-Driven Art: self-promotion, self-referential, concerned with group recognition
3. Relationship-Driven Art: cleverness, tenderness, authority, surrender, concerned with intimate recognition
2. Safety-Driven Art: pragmatic, commercial, monetizable
1. Basic-Art: identity transmission, warnings, art for art’s sake in the sense of handprints on cave walls, etc.
With some reservation, this essay seeks to straddle two artforms. It was meant to be the manifesto of museum of digital photography, but calligraphy, and especially asemic writing, which I liken to visual jazz, is the post-modern coda of Lascaux and of painted art in general. With a key difference. Calligraphy is a reflection of the entire body and the psychology of the artist…it is structurally mereological with the identity of the artist. Photography can be, too.
I’ll never forget seeing Uta Barth’s work for the first time. The wonder. The solidarity. I am Leibniz to Newton in some of her studies, having done parallel work unaware. Please forgive me if you are reading this, Uta Barth. I don’t seek aggrandizement or mean to be immodest. I feel nothing but the thrill and what they call the ‘shock of recognition’ in your work. The same is true with my calligraphy and the asemic writing of Henri Michaux—more on parallels later. Barth defocuses, collects rectilinear wallscapes of shadow and light, sees languages of symbols and also a possibility for the fuzzy, pre-linguistic caul we might be living under in spite of our own high impressions of ourselves. Apart from Uta Barth, I knew not of the work of any other esteemed image maker until recently encountering the greatness of William Eggleston. You see, I come to the world of this artform as an outsider. I am sure I will read myself into the world. But I wanted to be a bit of an Alexis de Tocqueville and a Rene Girard before I became familiar with and familiarly blind to the tropes of the professional photographer’s world.
Artforms don’t want to sit still.
Or perhaps artists don’t. The latter stir up the former because of the need for novelty. We need to explore—one of my favorite quotes is from William Blake, exhorting us to behold infinity in a grain of sand—we can explore in any direction, in any space or no space. It is akin to foraging—it is akin to finding food or water, to satisfying basic survival needs. We must move for we have had to move for so long now we cannot cogitate if we do not perambulate: we cannot think if we don’t walk. Socrates founded his peripatetic school on this very principal.
And we seek to do more than think and walk. We seek to chew gum at the same time. And to snap forward facing images—we have migrated from the caves and the valleys and the fields into the ubiety of the urban and the urbanity of the modern world…from foragers, we have become flaneurs. There is no greater moment, intellectually, for me than that of the advent of the flaneur.
If you don’t know what one is, please let me offer some insight: a flaneur is a person who walks a city, sensitive to surprise, expectant of wonder and yet always bewildered at it when it arrives. I realize the incredible privilege I have had to have been a flaneur with a camera in Tokyo and in Taipei and in other magical cities. I realize what it means to have had that time. And I am grateful.
Foucault. It is funny he hasn’t been featured until now. With his panopticon. The all-seeing technocracy he predicted and feared. It is here. Is there a way that an image-maker can be behind all the cameras at once, in the center of the sphere of information gathering? Yes, and no. We are multi-centric, overlapping image collecting centers, objects in the fields of the vision of others. We are knitted into an existential fabric that is, unfortunately, invisible the moment it is made—for our actual wormlike signatures of being are unsustainable and unrecordable. Of course this idea comes from Donnie Darko, in which our tunnels were rendered visually. But we must make do with the dandruff of existence, the images and sometimes the reels of what we have been up to. There may be multiple loci of observation, but will we ever be united in consciousness and processing, a hive-mind that could see all at once? Would we wish to be? I leave that to each of you to decide for yourselves.
This essay has unfortunately produced many stubs.
It has gone briefly in this direction and that and then moved on, energetically, rhizomically (if one may make an adverb out of a rhizome) to pursue something related. Welcome to my mind. But then it should not seem so strange—all of us, I imagine, move from thought to thought. From branch to branch, memory to memory.
Earlier, we had set out on the project of a moral forensics of art. We found that art needs materials, and that materials cannot volunteer themselves. Thus, they must be extracted. We wondered if there might be exceptions or workarounds. We explored meditation and non-movement, as did Melville in Bartleby (Melville, again, looked at both the madness of obsessive movement and the forlornness and surrender of non-movement in Moby-Dick and Bartleby) but determined that we would need not-only non-movement, but non-occupation of space and time. But is unknown non-existence enjoyable or peaceable?
How do we justify the things we do? The art we make? The languages we speak? The diseases we spread? The love we share? Perhaps we don’t need to. Explanations all seem vulnerable. Art is beautiful—but must we seek beauty? Art can be ugly. But mustn’t we eschew the uncomfortable? You may be hearing echoes of the Tao here. But to speak of the Tao is to misrepresent it. Yet speak we must.
Art, language, love—their counterbalances of emptiness, silence and passionlessness—are the numbers in our cultural arithmetic. We, the people, are the variables that elevate cultural arithmetic to cultural algebra. Yet we seek more. We seek symbolic languages that encode and decode the entire mystery itself. We have been since Lascaux. That is what artists wish for. All artists, be they physicists or saxophonists. We desire more—imaginary numbers, potential numbers, irrational numbers. There is magic in the craquelure which exists in fine networks over the seeming functionalism of our daily realities. As my 100-year old friend says, we are looky-loos. But that is not a passive art. Nothing could lead to more mischief, more magic, more healing, and, possibly, understanding, than the aftermath of looking. Which is an allusion to another book on the significance of painting: The Aftermath of Images. We then must enter the darkroom and develop what it is we have seen—that darkroom is less and less frequently a literal place but rather a process specific to a discipline within a culture—but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is hard work and making mistakes and then learning from the mistakes. The museum matters because, if anything, it too can show us the stubs, the directions we went in and the errors we made or the roads we didn’t have time to travel. A museum exists on the island of the Königsberg bridge system, but the island has millions more bridges and more are being built with every visitor. For we are bridges, not buildings. We move through space and time with the precious cargo of memory and biology in the hope of allowing both their strongest chances for survival. That is what art is. The treasure chest, the boxes we put everything into, the wish for our future—and we are the boxes. And, ironically, it becomes a selfless act when we think of it this way—we are saving for the futures of future generations.