Begin Again: Some Thoughts on Writing and Photography

I’ve decided to make some changes, expose the unfinished thought. Meaning is not fixed, not locked into the image, and really you don’t write just about pictures, you write around them, in lengthy detours, botched experiments; it’s a side-long glance, oblique fragments never making a comprehensible pattern, but almost and often that’s enough to open the mystery, its catalyst. The worst thing is to assume you have an answer. Everything here is provisional anyway, drafts of drafts, second chances. The only kind of writing that interests me is a high-wire act, right on the edge of failure, of incoherence even, whatever is left, whatever is scattered and not whole. So don’t tell me what you mean – I don’t want to know, and why would you think it matters? Even the post-conceptual standard of intention over gesture, an art of galleries where nothing is at stake, can certainly cherish indeterminacy, or seem to at least, but won’t always risk the deeper, more profound chaos that flows under carefully ordered surfaces, with things half seen, half remembered, the dream-life of reality. We never lived in sign-systems or outside of them, but in improvised leaps between the points of light in an otherwise darkened landscape and there is no theory for that, no position to articulate, just the strange music of intuition, not knowing how far it will take you – if anywhere at all, but willing none the less, to draw back the curtain. The absent spaces between the image and what you had intended: this makes the art. Criticism can – or rather it should – open up these spaces, make them legible. That’s all… Of course, what you see is never only what you see; layers of meaning, moving through the image, in eclipses and contradictions, blind-spots. You don’t need the key, but only describe the experience of looking, in all its complexity, in maddening circles, a dialogue between the artist (in the work they’ve made, though probably not in what they think of as their intention) and you, on the outside looking in. Sometimes the chemistry works and then sometimes it doesn’t, when there is no recognition, no sense of being complicit. To separate the piercing, urgent, valuable photographs from the dross is always a calculated risk, but seeing through is what matters, to cross the border into some unprompted meaning, into what is possible, to begin again. In finding why some photographs matter and others do not, it is significant too that there is some fugitive rationale for all of this, a context, if you are not to fumble along in the dark, getting endlessly lost. We have few reliable maps, but it’s true that not all pictures carry or sustain a weight of meaning. To justify this interrogation there are the ones that last, that draw you back time and again, doubtful but always challenged. Lasting art (and its criticism by turn) is an equation that won’t be solved, but only followed intact – a confrontation with the mystery of appearances.