RED CLOVER, TOTALITARIAN FACTORIES, DOODLEBUGS & SEMANTIC HEROISM

August 29, 2009

Today’s big news is that it’s Friday. I discovered this remarkable fact at approximately 4:15pm. Prior to that fateful hour, I thought it was Wednesday.

This disorienting knowledge has left me feeling rather brain-akimbo for the remainder of today, and brought on the very mildest yet tenacious of existential fugues.

My closest supposition is that I did, in fact, experience a bit of a tuxedo-pleat of daisy time, which I so irresponsibly invoked yesterday. Cat time, daisy time, vegetable time, there are so many clocks to keep track of.  Given the nice relaxed state in which I awoke, I think I quite liked being a daisy for the two human days that I can’t remember – what took place beween human-wednesday and human-friday?   Once I surrendered to Friday as a human, I was rewarded with buckwheat and curry for dinner, and three and a third  homemade apple tarts for dessert.

I guess daisies just eat sun. Some consolation.

This daisy came home with me from the prairie today:

Not sure what happened here – like a good German, Agfa Clack decided it needed a boutonniere for Friday night?  It is most charmingly tucked in the little switch between manual and bulb setting. So romantic. Perhaps the cameras had planned a bit of a party tonight and didn’t invite me. Given that they are my cameras, getting dressed up probably meant smearing dirt on their shutters, adding some mildew to the lens, perhaps a soupcon of extra rust on a mysterious extraneous part that will have sheared off by tomorrow morning.

First sign of a good party: the extraneous dematerializes.

The sun came out for 65 minutes today.  I can’t spend too much time in a little attic tower with…gasp…words. They are like worms. They slowly begin to eat the brain, and colonize. Then they begin to reproduce.

It’s ghastly.

Thus, I had my cameras loaded up and at the ready, hanging on the doorknob, and when the sun emerged, out we went.

Visual input cleans out textual input, and vice versa. So making pictures after several days of words, well, it was a treat.

Linda the chef alerted me to faerie-diamond droplets on the asparagus tendrils and we went out to explore. A marvelous organic garden with aesthetically satisfying compost heap. I ate little orange tomatoes whilst the sun oblliged and frustrated, intermittently.

The wonderful thing about working with broken cameras is that they are quite considerately already broken, so when they break a little bit more, it’s not a catastrophe. Indeed, they break a bit more every time I work with them. It makes me love them more – I take the broken part, stick it in my pocket, keep going. One camera stopped adquately rolling the film, so I grabbed a bunch of film wrappers from my pocket and presto – stuffed them into the spools to leave the film less room to misbehave.

You know you have a keeper when you can fix it with garbage. Wonder why this is so satisfying to me. I think it’s such a victory to have designed and manufactured a piece of machinery that is such an indefatigable ally in the practice of art.

I keep hearing that the concept of resilience is replacing that of sustainable. I love words supplanting words because of market forces. I still like Mary Wollstonecraft or Christine de Pisan: you can write a truth in 1430something or 1790something and it simply holds up in a nice clunky, effective, straightforward blue jeans of philosophy kind of way.

Resilience replacing sustainable?  Sustainable development…everybody can get behind that. Resilient development? Hm. Could be Darwininianly sinister. I imagine we will have “sustainable resilience” and “resilient sustainability” yabble at us for a while, and we’ll all nod and smile and run to the dictionary to see what all the fuss is about.

SUSTAINABLE: has capacity to undergo, experience, or suffer (injury, loss, etc.); endure without giving way or yielding.

RESILIENT: returning to the original form or position after being bent, compressed, or stretched.

So a sustainable 1930s camera undergoes significant daily field damage, and does not give way. My cameras are certainly not sustainable.

And a resilient 1930s camera experiences horrific field damage and miraculously returns to its Nazi-era factory specifications. Nope. Not that either.

What I like is something that has the capacity to undergo, experience, suffer or endure injury, loss, bending, compression, or stretching by allowing itself to be changed by the experience, and transformed into something a little bit more interesting every day.

Pardon me whilst I consult the thesaurus.

Here is something for your viewing pleasure to pass the vegetable time whilst the author is in consultation:

All right. Cool yellow wall, eh? WTF is going on? You tell me.

Give me a hardy camera.

I do quite like that it carries on to include “unduly bold’ and “foolhardy.”

As though the other Nazi cameras are sitting around saying to the Nazi camera that will in future be mine – you know, mein lieber, it would be much better to document the gas chambers. Why are you being such a fool and going off to work for a Jew in the cold and the rain in Illinois?

And another one, facetiously, flower photos. Sie sind so speziell. You’re going to take flower photos. For an artist. Oh meine Güte. Betrachten Sie Sie. Eine Kunstkamera.

A great many – well, okay, all – of my cameras were designed and manufactured with the express purpose of documenting the glories of whichever right wing authoritarian regime felt most like documenting its particular process of repression.  I suppose in prior days, there were folks floating around with a crowbar and a pyre, and then in the mid 20th century we came up with media wars.

Escuche aquí, Paco, we need to make a camera that this war cannot destroy. This thing needs to be resilient. Document our guns and bombs. Quizá una lente resistente agradable para capturar una buena violación.

I have Franco cameras, Hitler cameras, Mussolini cameras, Peron cameras…no wonder they pick flowers when they go out into the garden.

There is great pleasure in repurposing these cameras, one by one by one. I imagine they never really wanted to do their filthy business.

So they are certainly not interested in returning to their original form (resilient) and they are absolutely not sustainable.

Who knows what my cameras have seen in their 80 year lifetimes.

But the beautiful thing is that every time they break, they get a chance to become something a bit better than they were before…capable of making photographs that no other camera could possibly make. Not just one of a million little cameras, all alike. One of a kind. The more they break, the more lovable they are.

The glimpse of the sun was so brief today, it was rather like the sky itself was a camera, and the clouds opened their aperture to let us see the sun and CLICK.

It was during the cloudy portion that I changed out the films in the cameras, and discovered Today’s Semantic Hero: a little baby potato bug crawling around the inside of the lens housing.

You can sort of see it in this picture.

Ain’t it cute? Hanging out in there, hitchhiking its way into the afternoon’s photographs? Resilient? Sustainable?

that is one HARDY bug.

A hardy little art love bug.