the scores of ishmael wadada leo smith, ten freedom summers, and the specter of race
I need add nothing here.
You’re An Idiot
I have devised a mental exercise for myself in which I look at a photograph and try to see it without allowing my mind to identify any objects in the photo. Just lines and shapes and tones, but not faces or cars or whatever is recognizable. To see without recognition. While not very easy, it’s possible to an extent.
But I realized it is seemingly impossible (without powerful drugs) to do with sound and speech. Once a sound is heard, if it’s recognizable, it’s almost impossible to hear without recognition. Speech is the same way; if it’s in your language, you can’t hear it without meaning. If bottled as music or poetry there is some hope, as the thinking mind can be overcome by the unnatural or the absurd. But otherwise, you’re trapped.
Ah, mind of distinction, you’re a useful idiot!
This is why art must be of no use.
(assembly by Dina Knapp, photo by the author.)
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The Old Man Checks His Phone
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The Art Job
“I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” ~ Sojourner Truth
That which is invisible
Because of its nature
As unreflective of light
And unresponsive to pressure
Like scores, and programs and instructions for instance
Like the Fifth Symphony, or the Dharma,
or any story before it’s told
or gods of all sorts;
All of those things or non-things
All of those potentials
Undetectable and immeasurable
Without form or substance
Vastly outnumber what appears to be.
The artist’s job,
He said with arrogance
Is to make a representation,
Speaking in metaphors,
Of what is invisible.
Not to make shit up.
It Doesn’t Mean Anything
It is often said that a good photograph tells a story.
Maybe so, but a great photograph doesn’t.
It is a single sound, a word, if you must think of it that way.
A message without meaning.
Speechless and silent, it stays put
As the light hit the sensor.
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In the 21st century
Any monkey can make art.
I’m trying to make a decent photograph.
Leica didn’t acknowledge the existence of electricity until 1985. Images are made with photons, not electrons.
In the future, after the age of electricity, we will do all our work with light, and everything will be as it appears.
We shall be as gods.
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The Momentum of History
Mass in motion,
Matter through space
It is non-fiction
With weight and inertia.
A boulder rolling
Downhill in time
Flattens out patterns of data
Like craters on the moon.
In ink of crushed bones and feathers
Innumerable body parts
Rusted machines and blown out buildings
What we call a story
Is pressed onto pages
As images.
The fiction we conjure
From marks left by rocks in time
This is what we tell to our children.
History has momentum
Because it is made
Of matter in motion.
And it doesn’t matter, really
What the TV says.
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