http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

Funny how a familiar technology in an unusual context can produce such an odd impression.

It’s a very strange and rather hard to explain feeling that comes from breaking the unconscious linking, born of experience, of “past” to “black and white”. My first unconsidered impression on seeing these photos, this color out of context, is that the photographs are … somehow staged, which is absurd, of course. Then the consideration begins….

Since I was a kid, I’ve often wondered what exactly “real life” looked like in 1942 for example when my dad came to the US for the first time (and took photos that I’ve seen), or in the 1910s (from which I’ve seen photos of my grandparents). What did people in the late 1800s experience when they walked around. Or for that matter, in the year 200?

I can tell myself that, yes, what everyone saw and experienced was just like what I see now but with the different trappings of time and location. Reality is reality, always has been, and it’s all in color. No different from now in any great way. But even after that intentional, intellectual exercise, there remains the sense that it must have been different; after all, it existed in black and white, didn’t it? People back then mush have experienced some kind of fog or fuzziness between themselves and their world, since that is what I see now of that time….

These photos here shoot those impressions all to hell and so I’m left with some sort of cognitive dissonance, a difficulty in accepting that the past I’ve always thought existed as different is actually similar to my present. I haven’t quite yet accepted that, but I’m beginning to see the people in these photographs as people I share a reality with.

For the most part I like the article. I knew about the Italian and Shakespearian sonnet forms, and about the volta and the quatrains and the couplet and so on. I didn’t know too much about sonnet forms apart from those two.

Mostly the example sonnets are enjoyable, but I do think Ms. Finch goes a bit far. I definitely believe that sonnets have a certain something and that that something is big. Just that she’s a bit overzealous in finding connections to other even bigger things….

One example: Ms. Finch is not good at arithmetic. That is to say, she starts talking about the Golden Mean (I think she means the Golden Ratio, see Wikipedia’s entry on the Golden Ratio), the ratio seen in nature, implying that there is something numerological and vast and universal and almost spiritual about the form of the sonnet with its 6 and 8 division, but wait, the last couplet is sometimes separated out so the numbers are … 6:8:12. (Okay, so the Shakespearian form of 4,4,4,2 version doesn’t fit this cosmological connection she’s discovered, but hey). But okay, we’ll overlook all that. The only real problem is that the numbers she uses 6:8:12 to show the ratio, to prove her argument don’t hold true in any way. If you use 12, the ratio is wrong and even if she had used 14, perhaps the number she should have used (6+8), it still isn’t right.

The proportion is:

(a+b)/a = a/b

(8+6)/8 does not equal 8/6

On a different note, at one point she says, “Paul Oppenheimer makes a convincing argument that because the sonnet allowed room to struggle with oneself, it marks not only the beginning of modern poetry, but the beginning of the modern idea of our ‘self’ as having a complex internal life.” Whoa. I guess I should do some research and read Oppenheimer, because I gotta figure that people way before sonnets were written in English, way before there was English, there were people thinking that we had a “complex internal life.” Didn’t people like Plato and Lao Tzu imagine a “complex internal life”? They were probably too busy doing math.

So, I may be way off on that last bit, that it’s only in the modern era that we are special enough to think ourselves to be internally complex, but I’m pretty sure about the arithmetic part.

I need to first read some Paul Oppenheimer and see if he can support his view of ancient thought and fuzzy math. And then perhaps I need to write a sonnet that does some fancy math that proves an impossibility, something like the lyrics to “I’m my own grandpa”, and have it published in the Contemporary Poetry Review.

It took me quite a while to get into it. Eventually, it was humorous and interesting. As the blurb on that page says, he says, “Mi ideal no es componer, sino generar texturas”. It’s not about composition, it’s about texture. But it’s texture at a bigger level: color, rhythm, space and juxtoposition are part of the “texture”. So, why isn’t it composition? Maybe it is too.

Bert Krages’ pamphlet on “The Photographer’s Right.

Very useful. Helpful when trying to document the corporate and government absurdities (and worse) of life.

The show, as always, was nicely hung in the open space, giving each piece room.

IMHO, best pieces: two photo portraits by Titus Heagins of North Carolina and a piece by Claudette Jocelyn Stern, a fun compilation of found objects; “not my favorites”: well, without giving names, see below.

Favorites:

The portraits by Mr. Heagins (Machette Fillé, Sodo 80 and Madam, Sodo 80) were what portraits should be, with the depth of the intimacy captured being as much a function of what the photo allows the viewer to bring as of the look and circumstances of the subject.

Baker’s Dozen: found objects in each of the cups in a table-like found object which itself looked like some industrial muffin tin. Fun with not a jot of the pretense in most of the other work in the show.

Not my favorites:

• 3 pieces, each made of 12 squares of old wood, each with a hobo marking. Next to the pieces, a legend of each symbol and and its meaning. With nothing open to any interpretation and not being what one would call “art of execution” either, the only thing left was the pattern in the grain of wood.
• A mixed media piece which, try as it might, seemed almost a forgery of what might be some real outsider art.

In between my faves and my not faves were the rest: large digital prints with no soul and pieces deconstructing symbols and signs, occasionally juxtaposing them in ways that tried very hard to be “unexpected”, which, if I’m not mistaken, has been done before.

No one has, IMHO, done signs and symbols better than Luigi Serafini in the Codex Seraphinianus. See its unofficial web site.