Yesterday I was talking to the writer for my YYZ show essay. This is germane because it (sort of) signals the first time I've had to had a coherent sense of what this project has become. Sometimes "garage sale" seems the best way to describe it.
Last week, while reading Errol Morris' "Believing is Seeing", and specifically the chapter on Roger Fenton's Crimean War cannonball photo(s), I came across this gem:
"War is a peculiar thing. —Inaugurated by the whims of the few, affecting the fate of many. It is a difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops."
So I'm not sure if this show of mine is going to have coherence, but Morris, at least, seems to offer commonality with the idea that there's little coherence in a war zone, and that, perhaps it is a garage sale of competing ideas, images and possibilities that when taken from a distance form the kind of entity that you might pull over to the side of the road to peruse.
No comments:
Post a Comment