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Emily Shevenock
Residence of New Hollows
Poetry first published December 2009 in 2River
Assertions Gained from a Sensitive Influx, a Series of Sensations, and Detached Expressions and Promptings from the Imagination
[A tiny booklet; defining characteristics on the scenes of the wall and room space]:
Images notate references of the environmental climate, or a foreseen environmental proposition of an allocentric, societal observation re-marking selfhood. The climate simply alludes; contradicts; and/or complements, in variances of subjective through objective response, the scenes within an introverted, solitary self. Depending on color language and subject in a series, the latter sentence may fit in reverse, the image appearing first as the social workings and interpersonal impulses of the human condition, the inner self underlying. However fragmented or “fragmented” the idea of hollow becomes in relation to a binding by societal constraints, inherently it suggests allegorically the inhibiting of the “the artist” and her pulsation of medium. Though, this societal inhibiting should not entirely color, or become the sole factor or foundation intending the context of the book. In someway, there is no intention but to document “erratically” (“irrationally”)1 then transfer rationally into proper proportions. Proportions reason a project, changing radically from project to project, and through articulation—asymmetry is symmetry where Project 1 is in relation to Project 2, or vice versa. Although wholly contained in their own compartments, language and visuals frequently meld, becoming somewhat inseparable. I stress the melding of language and image just as I stress the document or photograph explained into further details by my inner response –which is not necessarily subjective—but an objective/detached understanding of unseen information2 in the environment combined with the understanding of the literal, outer, surface environment. More concisely, this combination reveals [objective] subtext into tangibility. Through additional surface definition to each image, the resulting visual qualities render a series into its complexity. Working with an image series until it “appears correct,” is described above, yet also intuitive. Enhanced through color language (within) or lack of color (without), the work is dealt through multiple series all at once, beginning spontaneously, sometimes predefining the message before taking any [given] image/s, though usually not. The only method always adhered to is the full frame/never cropping. Projects ultimately are layered, and can be viewed in sections, yet layer again into entire books or exhibits, including texts of short fiction and writings. The results form a cohesive, complete work in seamless fragmentation.3
Historical Relevance: Subjectivity or emotion might continually elude intra-historical relevance by appearing instead as objective expression through the immediacy of articulated perception.4
I have been writing for quite a long time. Halfway through what life has done yet not fixed, age XV, I used an inherited Japanese Topcon. It was taken to a camera shop once, then broke again and bordered useless. X X X. Artistically, I learned to use what I could, implying only that which allows itself to be used.
—
Notes:
1 Please note the necessity of placing the erratic and the irrational within quotation marks. Set more singularly [without doing so], the terms are as fit as demeaning the entire rationale of hollows, as they are ever subject to [antiquated] prejudice/s.
2 The senses are alluded to here. I make no distinction as to how many; too much theory is simply cheating (theory out of context is sincerely thrilling). Also alluded, [and] in combination are the inter-personal and intra-personal.
3 Ultimately a narrative [cohesiveness] is formed, at times aesthetics and/or content associates, or not. Attempting to differentiate between confused or cohesive in a final work is absurd. To define subtle or “subtle” is the seam [opposite]. Clarification is the penultimate in seamless fragmentation.
4 Biography; specifically the artist’s– Please note historical relevance [goes] hollow. This again is allusion to the allegory, but even the allegory negated, it interrupts any intra-binding to rigid boundaries. This is a voluntary; intra-history pauses [during the project] then [perhaps or sometimes] repeats itself during other courses of the non-project.
—
Other Shows and Publications from The Residence of New Hollows:
INVISIBLE CITY, ISSUE 4, DANGEROUS BODIES, JULY/AUG 2009
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
5 photographs selected from the essays “Baby Pillow” and “Bard Motel,” www.invisiblecity.org
Online magazine exploring the “contemporary theoretical idea” curated by Marlaina Read
POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, JAN 2009
METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK, NY
4 x 6 ink-jet print, origins of toned silver gelatin, titled Glasses from the series Markings
1/10 sold for Visual AIDS though the gallery auction
2/10 sold by gallery placing me in contact with art collector
Related links
some really interesting images here. the piece grew on me as i went along and i enjoyed the mixture of styles. photographic not really my normal cup of tea but i liked being out of my comfort zone for a bit!
Interesting. It kind of reminds me of Alan Sokal’s work on Social Construction.
I always like pictures, which are completely different than mine. Keeps me looking and thinking.
Thanks for showing.
I’ll have to come back later to view again. Not sure what’s going on here.
visually stimulating, although I’m not quite sure yet what’s going on. Have to think about it some more.
But the text…. I do wonder – is it intentionally written so that it’s difficult to understand? it just seems way too convoluted, almost as if the intent was simply to sound “artsy”. If there was serious intent to communicate something, I just have to believe it wouldn’t take much effort to make it more accessible. But then maybe it’s not meant to be accessible? hmmm…
Carsten–Addressing “convoluted,” I write how I write, with regards to content and structuralism. I do not like the word “artsy”–not in relation to a description of the general essay– but subjectively, as a word. I wouldn’t mind if the word got lost from the English language altogether. But I do think you are entitled to an opinion bordering the same descriptive qualities the adjective “artsy” might possibly suggest…conjecturing on its replacement: Without proper thought, “artsy” replaced by the new word/description, might convolute original intentions where there are now two, completely differing implications.
“Before considering the question that is seemingly always the most immediate one and the only urgent one, What shall we do? we ponder this: How must we think? For thinking is genuine activity, genuine taking a hand, if to take a hand means to lend a hand to…the coming to presence of Being.”–Heidegger
“I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.”-Derrida
Emily:
surely, it’s not a surprise that i love the story (if not the statement). Language is a well from which we both excavate that which is both of us and made for us and the arrangement of all things is the way we shift-shape the world into sense.If not through negotiation then at the least through the warped and warping characters of time and place and odd idiomatic thought. Pictures are vowels and valves that allow, in one meditative form or another, the opportunity to turn upside down all that came before us and all that which we imagine. Sing it right, sing it wrong, sing it as song.
What i love best with work, in any form of story telling, is that all, in truth, is a calculation, a strange and deranged arragement of addition and substraction. All things enter us and yes, miraculously, mysteriously, we shelter and sift through so that it appears that what we’ve appeased from both the world and our imagined selves is a kind of linguistic calculus: we arrange the world even as it arranges us, deftly.
As pictures, I love the indiscriminate acceptances of style and moment, of bashing and baking together both film ad video, color and monochrome, document and conceptual, for in truth, we are just as that: the world, and being itself, is constructed from an extraordinary arrangement of things that rhyme together and thinkgs that clash. In one sense, this story (for me) is as a metaphor for joy, for experienial thought, for negotiation and for the process itself of constuction. some of the pics are gorgeous and haunting and haunted…and even the more pedestrian ones serves as marks, as small memories of the act itsel of telling a story: an abacus of visual consonants and vowels….both Proustian and Marker-esque…
in truth, the story (for me) is as a static (in the sense of plates and not in a pejorative sense) version of Marker film. chris Marker and inanother sense, that extraordinary book ‘wisconsin death trip’ haunt this elegiac story. Marker, one of my heros, has ‘spoke’ long and deep about the nature of language and it’s negiotation with imagery: a wound really. so too this story is haunted by by the work of derrida and semiotics and the heady scent of Baudrillard…that wild sweep of velocity, reality and clucking lost things….
and in the end, what pastes it all together is just that: that we are dampened and dipped by all that neural shit that spins around inside our head and hives and to make sense of that is both a wreckage and a wrestling…and i celebrate this piece for that…
now, Emily, i have to also say that as a writer and photographer myself, i too found the statement humorous. I kind of cross-hatch between my beloved David Foster Wallace and Kathy Acker pitche against cliched art speak…I say this as someone who writes about art and helps artists (student and artists) craft their own statements….parced, I’m not sure that the essence of real structuralist theory is aptly applied here, but that is my great lament of the academy…and i say that as a member….so, i’ll tell you a story….Giorgio Agamben recently wrote about the loss,especially in art schools, of the talent to articulately write about both the creative process and the consequences of this; he blamed (i think reasonably) the introduction of one skill (the ability to write clearly and argumentatively) into a setting defined by the antithesis of written articultion: the production of images (art schools). I have to agree…obfuscation is not clarity just as structualism is not about the reistance to lucidity and elegance in argument….
you subjectivity is magnificently alive and beautiful and inspired…and what you wish to accomplish,structually speaking, is contained remarkably within the dance and architecture of our photographic images (and te embedding of the words)…but the statement is, oddly, inert….and I say that to you with the greatestof respect….as a writer, philosopher, photgraher and just plain old reader othings…
but thank you for sharing your vital and imagintive story….
i loved it :))
cheers
bob
bob – very eloquently put, much better than I possibly could. you said “obfuscation is not clarity just as structualism is not about the reistance to lucidity and elegance in argument” – exactly.
“We have here a reason why the comprehension of the concept cannot extend to infinity: we define a word by only a finite number of words.” –Deleuze
Mr. Black: I am not without humor. Should the lack of something non-humorous interfere with humor, call it non-written. Call the written: “oddly, inert.”
Mr. Black and Carsten: “Clarification is the penultimate in seamless fragmentation.” This statement rephrased: In argument, lucidity and elegance are the penultimate to obfuscation in structuralism. [When] structuralism fails, it fails not without origin.
“..Come back to us. However cold and raw, your feet
were always meant
to negotiate terms with bare cement.”
–paul muldoon
“dad, why do your poems sound so much like the flap at the bottom of the door”-my son, when he was 9
Emily, who is Mr. Black?…that sounds like the name of a certain Irish novelist writing bestsellers while he stalks away some time (http://benjaminblackbooks.com/ ) away from galloping his winter’d pen over the loom and loss….
I’m not THAT old my dear….
humor, that is in the end, all we have, is it not?…what with all our collapsing, colliding structured rhymes broke’-wide by time and tin, yes…., really…and well, indeed, the written surely is, inert-doddly, dead when compared with the words on the tongue, the pics on the flash of the addled head…
surely, a poet as yourself, sees that, clip;’dip of nape…
but alas, a lovely lift of a laugh, eye that’s the rub, thank god :))…
as to the “Clarification is the penultimate in seamless fragmentation.” well, god damn, both Nabokov and John Shade are rolling in their grave…..I trust even Foucault might break a smile over that….
i’m laughing and crying at that….so, i guess the point is moot, infinitely…
and who says we define a word by a finite number of words?….words are cages/castles but what lay inside them is infinite as well as being carriers of time…
as a poet, i suspect you know that and do not need Deleuze….
nor should you have to argue comprehension
laughter means more….just as the sound of a word is the weight of it’s meaning, just as the ghost of the image is more than the scribbled description of it on the page…
ok, gotta fly gotta fly….birdie bye bye :))
welcome aboard sister E…and please, no more fucking MR. Black…egads ;)))))))
running
b
The Deleuze quote could be negated this way:
We only use words in order to communicate concepts. Therefore a concept in itself could theoretically be infinitely comprehended if not shaped into words.
Thodoris! :))))))))
THAT IS EXACTLY RIGHT…damn, u must be either a buddhist monk or Levinas’ love child! :))))
i was trying to be more playful to get a shimmer a-glow from Emily….Deleuze should have smiled more…i know, i once attended a lecture he gave…
i’m buying a whiskey for you and panos and civi when i get over…
and Emily, drinks on me when my wife and i get down to Bkyn late in the summer
b
Different picture chapters presented as a whole make an interesting narrative.
The statement reminds me of reading something I wrote which I thought was very good when I was a teenager.
What can you say. Discordant, orderly, random… original!
Just can’t figure out what’s going on betwicks me ears when
I view this. Thank you Emily and David AH.
Visually, I was mesmerized by your work, but as to the accompanying text I have no idea what I just read. Maybe your words just reach beyond my ability to comprehend. Maybe I just need some coffee. I will pedal my bike to Metro Cafe, drink some, return, and then read it again and see if makes sense to me this time.
I assure you, this is not a put down. I have no doubt but that you are brilliant in every aspect of your work. I just don’t understand. Although I love him, Faulkner can sometimes be a challenge for me as well.
I don’t mean the captions – I found them to be great fun, even when they made no sense to me for they did, as you suggest, meld image into language. I could feel the poetry of that melding.
I have read and watched the whole piece twice, and still don’t get it. Must be dumb….Am I the only one?
I like many of the images a lot and often the sequencing is very well done. I can’t tell whether the text is some kind of meta joke or what. Either way, it doesn’t work. Worse than that, it seriously detracts from the overall quality of the piece. It goes from very, very compelling to borderline trite. Is that too harsh? I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t really like the photos. My advice is to read more. Maybe take a class from some writer you really respect.
Bob, I know you mean well but I think that was really out of line mentioning Kathy Acker in this context. Have you read Blood and Guts in High School? Can you imagine what Kathy Acker would could have done with a digital camera and Photoshop if she were good at it? That might have been the end of art as we know it. Why would anyone continue to bother?
Can you imagine what Kathy Acker would could have done with a digital camera and Photoshop if she were good at it? That might have been the end of art as we know it. Why would anyone continue to bother?……… a bit naive in terms of what happens/happened in the art world context…….. despite that we have that lovely lady http://www.orlan.net/ doing great stuff
As far as the essay goes it is very much dysfunctional but not in a positive way, sometimes it implodes within itself and loses the thread. Now if that is the intent it fails as there has been an effort made to bring it back to a sort of logical context via the supplied text, this unfortunately leads to a bored mediocrity. ……….
a bit naive in terms of what happens/happened in the art world context……
You say that like it’s a bad thing? Guess I’ve still got several feet in the literary world.
Yea you end up limiting the visual opportunities for yourself
Muddled confusion at it’s finest. I’m not entirely sure if I’d consider that a compliment or criticism.
yep
Well, when I went out to grab my bike and pedal to Metro, there was a hard mix of cold rain and snow falling, so I drove the 2.5 miles to get there instead. When I came back and again tried to read the text, I had as much difficulty trying to grasp what you are saying as I did the first time. It is possible that, had I been able to ride my bike and get the oxygen pumping through my brain, it might have made a difference.
For now, though, I fear I remain lost. I don’t discount the possibility that it’s just simply over my head. So I guess you need to decide whether you want to communicate with folks like me or not. Your photography does tell me that you have talent and I congratulate you for earning a spread on Burn.
Not having gone to art school or having read poetry extensively I assume I am missing something here. I have overwhelming faith in Bob and use him as a kind of guidepost. Having googled Deleuze I have learned something that I didn’t before, so thank you for that. From what I can gather a Nietschean, Freudian, Marxist perspective (not value statements just objective description). I do like the idea of transcendental empiricism, we need more of that.
From Wikipedia on Deleuze’s values, ethics and politics:
“In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe history as a congealing and regimentation of “desiring-production” (a concept combining features of Freudian drives and Marxist labor) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification). Deleuze, following Marx, welcomes capitalism’s destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating, but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market.” Sounds pretty cool, and matches an undercurrent of public sentiment.
Here we have broad ranging philosophical concepts with photography used a medium to observe and explore. Does it work? I don’t know. Could any medium have served in place of photography to communicate these ideas. Probably. Does it matter that Emily’s chosen medium is photography. Probably not. I guess here is where for me at least modern art and photography coalesce as when fresh water from mighty rivers find home in the seemingly infinite ocean. The mixing of higher ideas, intellectual concepts and philosophical rigor with the lower depths and radical humility of the collective unconscious. Somehow these opposites meet, clash, reject one another in polarity and finally integrate into each other.
This piece made me think. Assuredly a good thing. My personal criteria for a successful is essay is to make me think and just as critical to make me feel. I can’t say that I felt anything after viewing this piece, but that is my subjective experience. Maybe on a different day, with a different personal transit things may have been different.
Congratulations on being published on Burn and all the best,
Frank
Laughing my ass off. Frostfrog. I am still laughing as I write this.
W. Kimbell. Maybe! LOLOLOLL
Bob, you’ve met your match. Frank, I can’t even read past your first line. I can’t see for the tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. Whoops, I went back and read, [...I use bob as a guidepost.] I am going to stop breathing soon…
Emily, I enjoyed the captions too. I have to admit this essay is a tough one for me. I did not see connections between the captions and the photos however. Just liked the captions. The photos confused me to the point that I was oddly, inert.
Burnians, what’s not to love?!?!?!
I thought number 9 was quite nice. Emily do you write to inform?
Encouraged by Lee’s answer ;) I woke up this morning and went through the whole thing a couple of times…
…..
…..
…..
….. ok, I’m starting to find some photos stimulating. There is also something about the sequencing that I intuitively like (and I say “intuitively” cause I still don’t get the essay).
The text is still beyond my comprehension though. Pretty much an alphabet soup for a non native English speaker….
Did anyone read the foot-notes? Also, where “historical relevance” reads near the end of the essay is simply the beginning of an artist’s biography. The 4th foot-note explains this, but I do not think there is a big enough/clearly defined space denoting the end of the essay and the beginning of the biography. The essay is simply an artist statement tailored slightly to The Residence of New Hollows– “which is not necessarily subjective but an objective/detached understanding of unseen information2 [see foot-note 2] in the environment combined with the understanding of the literal, outer, surface environment. More concisely, this combination reveals [objective] subtext into tangibility.” Perhaps everyone missed this vital point, yet the first sentence does the alluding…
The first sentence needs one small detail (one word) changed: “Images notate references of the environmental climate, or a foreseen environmental proposition of an allocentric observation and of SELF-HOOD.” The word “allocentric” already alludes to the “societal observation,” thus a non-intended repetitive error. The meaning is adjusted by replacing ‘societal’ with ‘Self-hood.’ ” This idea of “self-hood” and the “allocentric/societal” is weaved through the entire essay…
So Harry–yes, I write to inform, in this case. The written essay is not a short fiction piece, though it may contain qualities of prose-like behavior.
Bob Black: I find the prefix of Mr. a formal nicety not meant to improperly or artificially enhance your actual age. Does your wife like apricot cocktails? Or does she just like the late summer? How would I recognize her?
W. Kimball: My love and studies are with the English language. Its nearly certain I may come across as “alphabet soup” to the non-native English speaker. Yet, certainly the essay/artist statement is not needed to enjoy the visual work. Let us pray not.
Michael Webster: I may be naive in terms of what happened/happens in the art world–would you care to define this further? (If) I am naive about the mechanics of the art world outside of the art?–I doubt this. (If) I am naive about the art in the art-world–I feel a bit blessed.
Imnants: I do suspect I am permanently dysfunctional to some/many (but only in regards to my art.)
Thodoris: Nice Deleuze negation.
*Any playfulness does not preclude the serious intentions of all content.
Michael :))…
yup, i’ve read and LOVE most of what Acker published, not only Blood & Guts (which i actually read in highschool, ’cause at the time i thought it was cool for a 16 year old to carry a book like that, though it didnt win me any dates, alas), and she remains a touchstone for me…her literary howls and her life……Acker was a poet and a magician and a banshee of the highest order….i didnt mean that Emily’s statement resembles in any way Acker’s brilliant, cacophonous, blood-strewn prose, but that her statement was like a mashup of all the stuff that art-schools inject into their students: a mashup of the first order ;))….a little derrida here, a little structuralism there, a little foucault and a lot of piling up of language into a wreck…..that in mind, i did try, before running out last night to ‘deconstruct’ emily’s statement….(i did my time in a lot of philosophy/critique seminars) and i get what it seems like she’s after, which is this: it’s impossible to define the creative process and especially when using hollowed (halo’d) concrete finite blocks (words) to express the inexpressible (thoughts/encounters/language/emphemeral state of being)….BUT….one can say that much more clearly….:)))…sorry for the confusion
Frostfrog: yes….i’m with you all the way…
Lee ;’))))…..good god, if that is what my prose boils down too, then i want no crown at all….
gotta skip, big family day
b
Bob Black: as foot-note 2 suggests: “The senses are alluded to here. I make no distinction as to how many; too much theory is simply cheating (theory out of context is sincerely thrilling). Also alluded, [and] in combination are the inter-personal and intra-personal.” OR any resembling to any theory already existing, was purely coincidental, i.e. “too much theory is simply cheating.” This is, Documentary. Further reading supplementing similarities in the desire to be more informed about what was written in the Natural, will assume an after-knowledge effect.
*thrilling in the above commentary should be italicized.
Some of the quotes flying about this PLACE, are rather sublime.
You’re a reservoir, Bob.
Well, I remain flummoxed.
Paul, me too.
Back in English Lit 101 “politics and the English language” was required reading.
Trying to make sense of this is way too much work I’m afraid. I like a couple of the images, although the lack of what we normally consider technical quality is hard to get past.
I’m trying to stretch here, and will spend a bit more time with it.
Oh No! I wasted wasted all my years reading novels and poetry. The dark-room years from ’93-’06 possibly did damage to my technical skill/s. My new-found interest in art and the law is possibly doomed…
Were I an illiterate newborn practiced only in digital processes, I might concede to have a valid view-point. But I digress. I think I’ll look over some Latin and Lobjan for the rest of the day, then maybe get a haircut.
Emily:
it does not serve the vision of your work or it’s joy to denigrate…..one of the requisites of both writing and creating and, most importantly, sharing with others is the acknowledgment that your perspective and viewer’s perspective is just that, a shimmering glimmer of ephemeral time and not some grand or grandiose righteousness….shit, we’re all stuck in the throats of ourselves…there is no need to dismiss those who dont like/dont get…it’s cool…though haircuts are lovely things, indeed….
as one of the cats who spends most of his time here celebrating the work of others, as a lover and maker of things, i think it’s fair to understand the grief that that statement caused, and it’s not necessarily about foot notes at all (and yes, i did read the footnotes…i’m a diligent reader, im afraid too diligent at times)….
as for the “find the prefix of Mr. a formal nicety not meant to improperly or artificially enhance your actual age. Does your wife like apricot cocktails? Or does she just like the late summer? How would I recognize her?”…
well, i find the prefix Mr., a paternalistic and cloyingly denigrating term use to suggest either age or indifference or some hierarchical relationship which doesn’t apply here at all, unless you call me ……among colleagues, a pleasant bob/emily suffices…so please, call me bob….as for my wife, she prefers early spring, late autumn and while she loves apricots (who doesnt), she doesn’t drink…that’s my familiar duties….you’d recognize her by the deftness of her caring voice and the size of her heart…and yea, but the turn of her smile, which is quite a smile indeed…
running to take her to her show
pictures, even for a poet, can sometimes out trump the carriage of shackled sounds…..
again, i think it makes more sense to concentrate on the country of your visual story rather than the pronouncement of the statement….but, ok, David Foster Wallace spoke better of that than I have:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwS5pEfcQNk&feature=PlayList&p=4BDB4A7D023F97D9&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=11
all the best emily
mr. bob
No Grief here, Bob. I enjoy a good debate and dismiss no one’s opinion simply by disagreeing or debating otherwise. I like the prefix Mr. for its detached formality, and do not find it a bit paternalistic or cloying. But to each his own, and cheers to Freedom of Speech. I agree the country of my visual story should be the focus. But as I mention–and as you can see– the melding of visuals and language are sometimes–often–inseparable.
A pause should perform well, too.
My wife just got a haircut and it’s gorgeous. Or at least she is underneath it.
Bob, another great and true line of yours, “we’re all stuck in the throats of ourselves…”.
And your wife, Marina sounds utterly lovely.
Emily
With regard to the issue of tech quality.
While I can appreciate a certain amount of dis-regard or even contempt for the medium as part of an artistic statement, I fear that too often, it is simply lazy image making. Variations of “I know the quality sucks, but I really wanted it that way” were stock excuses I heard often during my years teaching photography.
Here are a few specific criticisms.
#5. I’m not sure why a fuzzy image due to camera movement seems to be OK as long as it is art. There are times when camera movement can enhance a photo, but this is not one of those times.
#9. Dirt and damage on a fogged and poorly scanned neg. Again, not sure why dirt, dust, scan lines, etc
are acceptable as art.
#10 This is a very intersting image. But does it really benefit from being so badly pixelated and turned into mush? This comment applies to many of the other images here.
#13 A delightful image, but appears muddy and blocked up and soft on all three monitors I have viewed it on.
#21 This looks like an copy from an old xerox machine. Again, how does this poor photographic quality enhance your piece?
#22 My favourite photo from this bunch. Nice photo, again, muddy and blocked up.
I may just go and shave my head now.
Maybe this is a better indicator for some http://www.2river.org/2RView/14_2/poems/shevenock.html
burns’ biggest Achilles heal is the sheer volume of unresolved essays that are posted. Eventually the audience will start losing interest both in viewing and commenting. Some of the essays need to be posted when they are fully resolved in the photographers mind otherwise all is just a muddle of text and images and a ……. wait until tomorrow situation.
I am guilty of this my first essay bum not as in person mute all done and dusted and it has not been altered since.
The second essay was a unresolved dismal failure, it was all over the place, images removed,some images were eventually cut from the book, orders changed all to accommodate the net, it was crap and of no benefit to the audience nor me ………………….. the intended media was always in book form not the net ( etrouko is a series of three books of 150+ images, etrouko I and etrouko II are completed and dummies printed etrouko III will be done within the month).
Back to the point, if stuff is not resolved and jumbled text is used to support what “might be” the whole caper not very viewer friendly. Sure comments, suggestions are made but it cannot lead to fruitful discussion or real conflict of ideals that something resolved like Roger Ballen’s essay There is a certain presence about a finished piece.
The single selected photo section is under utilised my image posting of was a lot more fruitful than my pesky/shitty last essay atleast the image sat comfortably as completed photograph.
The essay I should have posted is http://www.etrouko.com.au/im.htm
Oh my goodness. Hilarious. The Kentucky Derby party just broke up and I could hardly wait to get on line again and read the comedic goings on here on Burn. But over all what comes across for me from all the comments is that a picture is worth a thousand words, and when an essay tells a story without the thousand words it has truly been successful. Is that what a photo essay is for any of you here on Burn? It has been a topic of discussion with many of the essays presented–too much explanation, not enough explanation…Where is Civi on this? Panos?
damn, why do you make it so difficult?
why not leave the love-fest for difficult wordings and sweep the effort of thinking under the rug..
and just write how you feel?
Imants, thanks for posting the 2River link, that helps.
It can be that since English is perhaps my 3rd or 4th language I’m not able to grasp the writen text up here fully, it reads more like an instruction manual about how I, as a viewer, have to see the work in images posted, than anything else. The poems along with the pictures make a lot more sense..
I would agree with Gordon about the quality, but cannot sure, since it’s rather difficult to make sense of all of it as a ‘ONE’, as opposed to several pieces of one work, like it has been presented here, with this text instead of the poem.
Don’t know if any of this makes sense.
Interesting, but quite confusing. Most of the photographs seem more like missed shots recuperated with post-production, which I find worked only for a few of them. Although, I appreciate the artist statement, the message does not get through to me. This is probably due to my lack of knowledge of the poetry in the backdrop. In all cases, it is great to see different work, and the openness of burn to all types of work.
Lee..:)..i wasnt about to but since you called me out…
“Obfuscated code is source or machine code that has been made difficult to understand. Programmers may deliberately obfuscate code to :
1)conceal its purpose or its logic to prevent tampering,
2) deter reverse engineering or
3) as a puzzle or recreational challenge for readers.
It is a form (NEED) of security through obscurity. It is a form of security through obscurity.
Emily, congratulations for producing and opening sentence in your introduction that makes no sense: and then telling us that “the latter sentence may fit in reverse”!
I’m a native English speaker. It’s alphabet soup. If you asked five readers to explain what you are trying to say you would get five different explanations, so; if attempting an introduction to your work and motives, you failed.
I didn’t even look at the photographs. This is an unprecedented achievement on your part as I devour photographs like others do air.
Mike.
It is a form of security through obscurity.
————————————————
To understand better the NEED for security…in other words insecurity please go to the website and read the writers biography…
Im not gonna copy and paste because i dont need a lawsuit from a lawyer native speaker..
;)
ps:(let me add :) and ;) just in case)
Usually we argue that photographers do not need over intellectual artist statements to accompany their photos/essays..etc…
I usually carry an anti acid anti intellectual umbrella for this matter (or simply do need read those obfuscated newspaper style puzzles/artist statements)…
In this case it is all reversed…
I will gladly read the poem and the intellectual scripture and i will pass on the dressing..i will pass on the photos…I will congratulate the poet/writer/philosopher/comedian i will read and read again and i would suggest the author to look deeply into stock photography and find photos to accompany/dress the writings..
No reason to do both…
(yes i would buy Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s “latest” philosophy book but im not sure i would be interested in his latest Blurb photo dummy, Aperture photo book or even Burn essay..)