Of a Dwelling Perspective

Dwelling, of course, belongs to the philosophical toolbox of Heidegger and expresses the most essential dimension of Dasein, that of Being-in-the-world. Indeed, writes Heidegger, “Dwelling...is the basic character of Being, in keeping with which mortals exist.”30  “To perceive the landscape,” wrote social anthropologist Tim Ingold in an influential essay published in 1993, “is...to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image stored in the mind as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past.”31 Calling for the adoption of a “dwelling perspective” on landscape, Ingold develops metaphors of visuality and aurality that…bring together the qualitative aspects of lived space and time.ⁱ

Once again I find myself circling around the same set of ideas that have preoccupied me for a good while now – but with each new space I work in, the direction shifts a bit.  This notion of dwelling, of being, is a critical component.  When people ask me about my projects (although I hesitate to use that term much), and what exactly it is I’m doing, I generally tell them I’m responding.  Acknowledging and embracing this has led to the particular approach I seem to have developed beginning with Goldfield Studies that naturally carried into the Airfield Studies.  The working title for the Icelandic segment (chapter?) of these field studies is currently, Mountainfield Studies.

To be open to response can be tricky as, to a certain extent, it discourages advance preparation, at least of the sort one might engage with to prepare for the undertaking of a particular project, story or idea.  I absolutely admire my fellow artists (many of my closest friends work in this manner) that undertake ambitious bodies of work that are anchored in factual research and rely on extensive analysis of archival materials (I’m thinking right now specifically of Jessica Auer – currently trekking through the Yukon territory, making work related to the 19^th century gold rushes in relation to the role photography played at this pivotal point in history – and also of Ann Shelton, whose project, in a forest, had her travel around the world making photographs of a heavily researched group of trees, given out by Hitler during the 1936 Olympic Games).

I think I just have a different way of dwelling, and of coming to know the content of a space.  Sometimes I worry I’m just coming at things in a half-assed manner, but it’s the only authentic route I’ve yet to find, for myself.  Any rate, all of this blather is really just to say that I’m excited to continue my post-response research through a new stack of readings, including the Tim Ingold book referenced in the Lefebvre essay above, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, as well as the various books dealing with mountains mentioned in an earlier post, and most likely a revisit to some old favorites (Schama, Bergson, Merleau-P…).

It’s been a bit difficult to get a sense of how the images I’m gathering here in Iceland will come together as I really need to print them and pin them on the wall, move them around, but there are a few things happening that I’m paying attention to already – the junctures between spaces, heavy visual fields of undulating matter – and the perceptual unease (for lack of a better term) evoked. 

Imagine a film of the landscape shot over years, centuries, even millennia. Slightly speeded up, plants appear to engage in very animal-like movements, trees flex their limbs without any prompting from the winds. Speeding up rather more, glaciers flow like rivers and even the earth begins to move. At greater speeds solid rock bends, buckles and flows like molten metal. The world itself begins to breathe. Thus the rhythmic pattern of human activities nests within a wider pattern of activity for all animal life, which in turn nests within the pattern of activity for all so-called living things, which nests within the life-process of the world.ii

ⁱ From Martin Lefebvre’s “On Landscape in Narrative Cinema”, see Lefebvre’s essay for his noted references, available HERE. 

ⁱⁱ Tim Ingold, as quoted in the Lefebvre essay.

A few more studies are below.  

Click on image for larger view.

Welcome to This

A few from this summer's excursions

So, what’s this all about?  Well, that remains to be seen.  For now, I’ve decided I need a place to compile things – notes, pictures, video clips, quotations, excerpts, ephemera – so I can go back through everything and make a more concerted effort to bring it all together.  As this summer came to a close, I felt that familiar feeling of my artwork and the research/thinking around it starting to slide off into the background as I geared up for the school year.  Inspired by my friend Jessica Auer’s research/photo blog, The Viking Explorer, I decided to try something a bit similar.  I’m going to use the forum of a blog as an on-line (and public) journal, where I’ll hopefully be able to accomplish a few things, 1) keep the work going by imposing a requirement/promise for one post of original content per week, 2) get the writing out on the page/screen, without worrying about formality, creating an archive of already typed out notes, 3) possibly, maybe, engage in conversation about some of my thoughts/ideas/imagery with those who come across my posts.

Now, I don’t necessarily expect much of an audience for this clearly self-indulgent venture.  Like I said, it’s really more of a place for me to plunk the stuff, keep it out there, get it going, etc.  But, I really would like to chat about ideas and images and will gladly welcome any comments/conversation.  And, if you’re in my part of the country/world (Winter Park, Florida and Asheville, North Carolina) getting together in good old-fashioned real time would be fantastic.  (I’ve got some absurdly grand plans to host a residency based around visual art and philosophy during the summer months in the next year or two – if that sounds like your idea of a good time, let’s chat!)

And, about the blog title – Between the Already and the Still More – that’s paraphrased from a (translated) Alain Badiou line in Being and Event (thank you, Leigh-Ann Pahapill for suggesting this text).  It actually reads, “Infinity is the Other on the basis of which there is – between the fixity of the already and the repetition of the still-more – a rule according to which the others are the same.”  Yep.  Admittedly, one of my main goals is to sift through the dense texts I struggle with, but that excite me to no end in terms of how I think about applying these critical and philosophical ideas to my work in photography, film and video.  Ever since I was introduced to Henri Bergson in graduate school (thank you, ShonaMacDonald), I’ve found that I can think more clearly about my own work, and can discover what my true interests are, what I’m really trying to get at, via the thoughts of minds much more complex than my own. 

Here’s a caveat, of sorts.  I often find myself torn between two poles.  I’m not a trained philosopher by any stretch, and I’m barely an intellectual.  Maybe ¼ intellectual, ¾ dirt road.  I engage with this stuff because it’s what I enjoy and what seems authentic to me.  I’m not going to make any apologies for being too theory-based, or for not being theory-based enough.  And believe me, I feel pressure from both “sides” often enough.  But, that’s not what all this is for.  So, keep that in mind (note to self).

What’s up for me in the coming weeks?  Next week I’ll post some work-in-progress photographs from some stops-and-starts from 2012.  I’ll include a particular image that I think is going to prompt the direction of my thinking for a bit.  In the following weeks I plan to include short video clips of in-progress sequences, notes and sections of text and my response to certain passages, etc.  So, basically, the idea is to get up new visual work and some writing that relates to it each week.  I’m planning to do lots of work in the studio with the 4 x 5 camera using b/w film, but will continue to shoot color digital and video – might combine things. 

Tomorrow, I start on next week!

See you/me, then…..

xodroe