Peter Yumi

Eggs, a photo by Peter Yumi on Flickr.

Eggs without bacon

jane2a, a photo by Peter Yumi on Flickr.

Today I have been meditating on John Cage writings. This morning I read a bit of Silence before heading out the door.

here are some of his writings that have resonated with me today.

I believe that the use of noise

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.

“Does one have something and then proceed to add another thing or does one have something; move into it; occupy it; divide it; make the best one can of it?”

“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it” –John Cage

The last two and a half years I have been extremely disciplined in my practice.  I wake used to wake up every morning and make my collage work, then I switched, now I work when I get home from my “job” .   I stay up late in my studio sometimes till 2 am, cutting and gluing and talking with my girlfriend. We listen to music, smoke an occasional cigarette, the whole thing is really relaxing.

The other day I was not in my studio, instead I was up in the kitchen trying to make something to eat.  It was the most difficult thing, I couldn’t find the knives, couldn’t remember to chop something, I was a mess in the kitchen, I went down to my studio and everything seemed to work so much easier for me.  The knives I knew were they were, I knew how to cut with them, to work with my materials, I knew where every image in my huge stack of magazines and photo copies hide in their piles when it came time to retrieve them.   I have worked hard to become this comfortable in my practice, to tune my sight and my hand to accomplish more and more accurately the callings to create that I see and hear daily.  The more I tune into this, the more I practice, the more I am fed with ideas, and the more I expect myself to exceed my potential.

I told a friend of mine the other day, that I want to be the best. He asked me what being the best meant, because it’s entirely subjective,  but really, I am not so much interested in being better than other people, but chewing away slowly to get closer and closer to that expression of who I actually am.  If incense were music

Incenso Fosse Música : Paulo Leminski

isso de querer
ser exatamente aquilo
que a gente é
ainda vai
nos levar além

this of wanting
to be exactly that
which we are
is bound to
take us beyond

I have found the more I just put my head down and work, develop my work, and put away all the other voices and BS that comes with that WANT of wanting to be an artist, that I have a much clearer way of being me as an artist.   Put your head down and work, don’t worry about it, the work will take you places, but first have faith in it, work it nurture it, grow with it.  I used to expect my work to take me places and to give me things like money, fame, sex and power. It was like a had a beautiful person in my life that loved me more than anything in the world, and she was right in the room with me and all I could say is ‘WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO FOR ME ?’  I now know, that it is, what am I going to do for my art.

Fetish

1.

an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency.

2.

any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect, or devotion: to make a fetish of high grades.

As digital photography has pushed out film photography, we are seeing the fetishism of film photography. It always happens when I technology changes. One of the things that really stand out to me is when leather dash boards and seats were replaced by vinyl and plastic.  They little fake leather stitching was added to make it appear as if it was leather, even though we knew it was not leather.  Or how about the e-books, and how they make the digital pages appear as paper turning, no need for that, but yet it exists.  So we must have a need to resist adaptations in technology.

I see some of this fetishism in some collage artists, who either refuse to use digital technology, or work to make their digital collages look like they were made with paper.   Recently I have discovered a school of collage in which the artists work to make their collages look like they could have only been made digitally, while they only use scissors and glue to make their creations.   In Marjorie Perloff’s book The Futurists Moment, Perloff writes

” Perloff traces the word “collage” throughout centuries around the world.  This mode was practiced in twelfth-century Japan, manifesting in pasted papers, it appears in the form of Mexican feather mosaics and it appears in the way Russian artists represent religious icons (with jewels, gems, pearls, etc.).  Perloff defines “collage” through the French word “coller,” which: “refers literally to “pasting, sticking, or gluing,” as in the application of wallpaper” (46).  The Futurist collage, as mentioned earlier, is different.  Perloff presents a different definition of collage, which she teases out from Marinetti’s manifestos—a series of works that are a collage in themselves. Marinetti argues: “the earth shrunk by speed.”  Perloff elaborates: “by new means of communication, transportation, and information, demands a wholly new verbal art, one that can express ‘the complete renewal of human sensibility about by the great discoveries of science’”(57).  The shrinking of the world also demanded new visual art.  The collapse of space and relationships between objects in a collage represents the way in which technology shrunk the world.  Other techniques such as bold colors, fragmentation, representation of sound (“so shrill a torrent of spectacle and noise” [63]).”

I don’t think that contemporary photography is challenging photography; I rarely see a photo that has that certain thing in it that compels me. Its either snap shot photographer that is to pass as “high art” or process driven photographer that is to offer up the fetish of what once was, and often is viewed as being superior to the new.  Or the is the vapid and boring fashion photography with pouty girls and men in over priced clothes.   We also get a chance to see the pornographic images, which repeat endlessly the same image. We also get to see a mix of all of the above into a clever version of process photos and pouty models with snap shot element.   It’s not that the photos are bad, or that they are good. The photos lack a poetry to them, to me the are photo after photo borrowing off of trend after trend, in hopes of selling the photo for a magazine, or someone’s home, or a vain woman might purchase her own photo to hang in her home a sensual memento.

What is photography doing that is new? How is it keeping pace with technology?  It’s why I say that Collage is the new photography, Photoshop and mass printing have made this possible, leave  the production of images for the sake of collage, borrow heavily from those that are blinded with the boredom and endless repetition of girls in bikinis or girls staring blankly and pouting into the camera.  But it’s our job to take risks, to undo the old guard, to throw out nostalgia, to take old ideas and let the speed of the internet and today’s technology propel our ideas and our conversations with each as artists into new directions.

I read this today and it has given me further fuel to keep working on my daily practice, to not rest on what I have done, or accept pats on the back or even criticism, but to merely put my head down and work.  The bridges that I cross will be the ones I build on my own..

There is a vitality,
a life force,
a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.

And If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine
how good it is
nor how valuable it is
nor how it compares with other expressions.

It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly
to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU.

Keep the channel open…
No artist is pleased…

There is no satisfaction whatever at anytime
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes “us” MORE alive than the others.

Martha Graham
( – a letter to Agnes De Mille-)

“The purpose of the papier colle’ was to give the idea that different textures can enter into a composition to become the reality in the painting that competes with the reality in nature. We tried to get rid of “trompe l’oeil” to find a “trompe l’esprit.”…If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. This displaced object has entered a universe from which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.”

–Pablo Picasso