Where Do We Go Now! (On geography)

In the varieties of Curator (curatorship) vs. Commissaire (commissariat) belief there is quite a different proposition that I’m more inclined to lay my preferences, the figure of the Composer (composition). By concentrating on the first two: in the first, one has a divine agency personification, while, in the second, one has an entrusted executive character; whereas, on the proposition to the later variety one is the one who puts together through direct manipulation of visual materials as a written testimonial work. Secondly, what the composer does is from a more pragmatic faith; he/she composes a symphony by selecting particular instruments (artists) for producing particular sounds (art works) (The French Nicolas Bourriaud brought a more contemporary term that could have been applied. DJ (deejaying) is, however, a term that is more related with art production and less with artistic discourses on life issues.) The composer is more interested in people’s descriptions rather than their explanations.

There were varieties of aesthetical experiences throughout the centuries that we need to take seriously as the variety of composition. Meaning with this thought that the artistic arrangement of parts of a picture was well-know and commonly practiced by painters: three white female bodies over here, two tanned men over there, one or two toddlers surrounding the ladies, a peacock somewhere around or in the middle of them, and some red and blue pigment covering some parts of both sets of naked bodies composed in an harmonious, agreeable and truthful form that should allow the narrative to flow easily, for example, was the way through Rubens’ descriptive painting propensities. The artistic arrangement of the parts of a picture is a theory about why our theories matter. The nature of something’s ingredients or constituents, the way in which a whole or mixture is made up is not a destination it is our means of transport. The question about the action of putting things together, arranging them, i.e. formation or reconstruction, is not whether it is the “true” or the “real,” but, rather, how would our life be better if we believe in it?

So, the successive application of functions to a variable, the value of the first function being the argument of the second, and so on… can never be a resting-place. It can only be a tool or an instrument, i.e. in a classic composition we don’t believe in violins. We play them, and throughout the act we became disruptive by interrupting the passive structure that it might represent or acknowledge what is the violin. In the process, our mental and moral qualities may seem more distinctive to an individual. Nonetheless, the only thing that matters is the composition’s distinctive nature, its individuality; that, which describes, characterises what is what it is. That someone’s usual pattern of behaviour has consequences. I want to know where the construction of a landscape within a working aesthetical/conceptual framework can lead/take us, rather than how we have come through by our own theories. This, above all, affects our conduct.

What is creative about Irit Rogoff’s theory-making is that it creates consequences. It also interrupts by causing disturbance on the systems of government. In this sense, Délio Jasse’s, Carlos Palma’s, Jane and Louise Wilson’s works are compasses, not maps. They point to while enclosing the limits of a particular area in the construction of memory. When Délio Jasse asks about any particular truth, his work examining the dynamics of moving away examines some of its adjacent consequences. In particular, interruptions caused by the resultant dynamics derived from movements on the dislocation between different socio-cultural spatial environments. The dynamic takes effect when we succeed at moving away from something, “an addictive project in which but of newly discovered perspectives are pasted on to existing structures, seemingly making it acceptable to the pressures of the time.” Carlos Palma’s assumes that the criticality of photo-storytelling takes shape “through an emphasis on the present, of living out a situation, of understanding culture as a series of effects rather than of causes, of the possibilities of actualizing some of its potential rather than revealing its faults.” And, Jane and Louise Wilson’s pictures are spaces of transition. Their photographs identify humankind’s effort in filling space with something that determines what is, “it does allow us to shift the burden of specificity from the material to the reader or viewer and prevents us from the dangers of complete dislocation.” All of the photographers (bodies of work) equip us for our particular creative and pragmatic task as to be a theorist. Through criticality we give emphasis on “a cultural inhabitation that performatively acknowledges what it is risking without yet fully being able to articulate.” As it is thought “sound” was always there, but the Judgment of Paris wasn’t. And yet, are we making additions to the condition of possibilities, as we know it, or are we revealing more and more of what’s already there?

We can say that Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman’s photographic works are technical visual clauses. Complex technological unspaced phrases prefixed with symbols that are related to human endurance and with feelings. Strange moments. Their photographic images arise from a particular performative capital taking the form of a silver metadata expression. In the mechanical expression #HowToKeepARelationshipWithMe (2012), they look at “trending topics on Twitter and use the publicly available GPS metadata to track and photograph the” geographical locations in where the “tweet” was sent from: on a park or in a private garden, in a station, at the corner of a street or in from of a house or a building, etc. By means of this operational mode they create a collaborative work that is, particularly, focus “on the cultural understanding of distance as perceived in modern life and network culture.” They explore the indistinct space that lies between memory and witness, between remembrance and evidence. Their images function both as a visual archive and as a visual evidence of what might have had happened, the enlarged field of possibilities in-between.

A great storyteller knows that a good story can’t have any gap or else it wouldn’t sustain itself. It wouldn’t be veridical, believable, or real! If there exists a space within the story, it is a trap; it can became a devise used to lead us in to believing in something different. While the existence of a space, not intended, will allow to an invagination, a new story will be born from within that, which might contest and deny its genesis, its original. Which will be leading us into the copy, the technological reproduction as specified by W. Benjamin in his seminal text about photography. In this latest way, the story brought by Larson & Shindelman conducts us into the endless field of possibilities of what can be technically considered as being from the silent witness condition. That which the collaborative wants us to believe is the possible composition wrote from a particular reality. However, with this composition, reconstruction, they only add on to the story; they do not invalidate or disrupt the thoughts we are immersed in.

The truth is that photography is the technical process that is able to visually capture memories in the conveying of the storytelling. In the sense of we see through its technicality to reconstruct or compose events, statements or settings, which will be present as evidences, as a testimony, or as a signature about what might have had happened and been. Because, presently, images have become a crucial element in stories and narratives meant as entertainment, education, cultural preservation, or instilling moral values. They fill the whole of what is our everyday life, from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep, as advertising, in dialogues, or when engaging in social relationships, and throughout our sleeping condition, as dreams. Take for instance, in “#HowToKeepARelationshipWithMe Understand me when I can’t explain and just be there for me” (2012), we have an image of what looks like an empty train station in New York. There is no prediction about the image, only technical evidence that someone was there and tweeted a message that might have had been received by someone else. The image predates writing and also shows the limitations of photography – as image – in terms of narrative capacity in a digital-democratising age. It needs to be predicated in order to be meaningful. Then it will be that evidence, that testimony, or signature about a possible condition in human relations or activities. Why do they need to be meaningful?

This way of categorising the possibilities of experience tells us that Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman body of work is situated somewhere between two extremes or recognised categories. It is in an intermediate place. An in-between reflecting its physical features and atmosphere, and how human activity can affect and is affected by these. Lara Shipley’s discussion, “Coming, Going and Staying” (2013), on those people living on the borderlands of Southern Arizona (USA), is more neutral, leading us to the outside. The influence of the camera in Lara Shipley’s is less pertinent and interfering; it is absent and less disruptive. Although the subject being discussed both by Lara Shipley and by Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman is still the same – the in-between – the object of their photographs is distinctive. Lara Shipley is focused on human relationships and interactions within a particular place, in-between two systems of government different in form, but equal in representativeness; the practice being developed by the other two has its field of action being much more felt on the conditions expressing the relationship which separate practical issues resulting from a technical interpretation, manipulation, and application, i.e. the people being photographed and their surrounding environment. They tell stories more related with the idea of and practice of control of that social equality, almost as is a humankind autobiography without a self in it. Whereas, Larson & Shilndelman’s photographs subject matter are both what is “captured” within the camera framework – deserted urban landscapes – and photography’s technicality. However, both bodies of work are contradiction and confusing, as both are explicitly a proposal for visual memory and witness, i.e. they present evidences. What is then that they do present?

What is strange to the contemporary audience is the ability to remember things. This powerful condition is a regretful and fearful avoidance and dependence from visual mnemonic devices; the past has been forgotten because all the evidences have been lost. The abandonment of urban landscapes by people that is captured by the camera can be interpreted as a given up completely of a way of thinking, of a course of action, or a practice. Today we are more likely to use devices to store things to be remembered than our mind. Making the innate capacity that we, as humans, have to return to a previous state after it has been altered useless. The natural remembering that we need and use as evidence of something that might have had happened is abolished and substituted for something else, something that might washout any vestige of the myth of redemption. Which history? When we do know that memories have the future in mind! Any attempt, thereafter, to rewrite the past, as in Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman “Hashtag” series, persuade us of an urge to remember how we are being urged to live.

Bibliography:
Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Accessed February 26th, 2013.

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Part V - Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman.