when I wasn't in Weimar

 more polaroids HERE

Walking along fields

      

It has been a long time since I made my favorite walk. I live on the edge of Weimar and it only takes me 5 minutes to be surrounded by empty fields, stretching out into all directions. I love to let my gaze wander around while my feet move forward, standing still from time to time.
I brought a book along because at the end of my walk, there's my favorite cafe. They have the best coffee in Weimar and serve a decent croissant.
It always takes me about an hour to get there, I guess I could be quicker but there's usually something catching my attention, or a photo has to be taken, or I get lost in a thought and my pace slows down. The fields always intrigue me, their color, the lines, the small things happening. While walking I thought about my plans for this semester. Last summer I embroidered my thoughts in a three-piece walking suit. This semester I want to develop this idea further.

In the Kaffeeladen I opened my book. John Berger, About Looking. I had actually brought it because it was lying around and I still hadn't read it. I quickly discovered it had been the right book for this day. In this book, Berger explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. One of the first essays is called "The Suit and the Photograph". Berger writes about August Sander's well-known photograph of three young peasants on the road going to a dance, as well as some other photos of men in suits. There is a reference to Goethe in the essay which was precisely what I read (in other words) in Henri Bortoft's book "The wholeness of nature. Goethe's way towards a science of conscious participation in nature." yesterday evening before I fell asleep: "There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory." But the biggest surprise of all was the last essay in the book. It is titled "Field" and if I could I would have quoted the whole essay here, but let's stick to some quotes.
"This field affords me considerable pleasure. Why then do I not sometimes walk there - it is quite near my flat - instead of relying on being stopped there by the closed level crossing? It is a question of contingencies overlapping. The events which take place in the field - two birds chasing one another, a cloud crossing the sun and changing the color of the green - acquire a special signficance because they occur during the minute or two during which I am obliged to wait. It is as though these minutes fill a certain area of time which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin".
He explains how any field, if perceived in a certain way, may offer this experience and then describes the ideal field, the field most likely to generate the experience. Then he goes back to describing some of the events that might happen in the field. And how they relate to the field. "You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are sitll occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events."
He then explains why he first referred to the field as a space awaiting events and later on as an event in itself. The last line in the essay is the best one.

"The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life."

(John Berger, About looking. Bloomsberry 2009, "Field", p. 199-205)

passing a landscape

"... everyting is made up of fleeting glances, to be kept close at hand for a journey that sometimes gets rough."

Tonino Guerra in "Instant Light. Tarkovsky Polaroids" p. 7

out of control

The lightness of life; the things inbetween; the seemingly unimportant happenings; the beautiful absurdity; the poetry of the moment. These are things I’ve been struggling to catch in my work ever since I started making art .
As an artist I’m using a lot of different media. I like to work site specific. I usually build installations, using carloads of tv’s, materials you would never have thought of, performers, text, garbage, you name it. I’m fighting, thinking, cursing, running, sweating, building, destroying. I’m filming, writing, drawing, talking. And sometimes I push a small red button. I push the button of my sx-70 because I know I have to at that specific moment and out comes a tiny image. A small world. Complete in its size, its colour, its meaning. I push the button and I don’t want to do anything else for the rest of my life. The installations disappear. The struggle stops. This is it. There’s nothing to add, nothing to change. An instant artwork. The magic of light.
Now and then the polaroids do end up in an installation. Or in a performance. But usually they are what they are. On their own in their own world. Representing a portrait, a landscape, a thought. Sometimes a beautiful image, sometimes a conceptual work but always real in its mysteriousness. Because I only pushed a button and the rest just happened.

In this world with endless possibilities I’m delighted to be guided by a camera that makes it impossible for me to be in control. I’m spending more and more time to figure out what the possibilities of this beautiful medium are and how its limits broaden the horizon of my art practice.

my house is a stranger

when I'm not here

Sarajevo

Fade to black

I managed to get my hands on a few of the last packs of "Fade to black" Artistic Z Polaroid film in the world. This polaroid film was produced by the no longer existing company Polaroid and this particular badge of film was actually a faulty product. Once the film got out of the camera it looked beautiful but within minutes the colours started to change, getting darker and darker, turning into a completely black image within 24-72 hours. I'm still not sure how, but I have the feeling I could do some interesting things with this film in a semester devoted to memory.

The other day I was talking to people about how you sometimes remember the photo of a particular moment and not the moment itself. Something completely the opposite is desribed in a book in which people write about how they remembered a particular moment because they very specifically chose not to take a photo or because something went wrong in the process of catching the moment (it's somewhere in my house, I'll post the title later). A few weeks ago I was in Buchenwald and was amazed how everybody was taking photos of the ovens in the crematorium, almost without looking at them, just being concentrated on taking the image.
There's a lot to say about the medium of photography and how people use it and I might write a bit more about that soon. But first I'm going to try out the "Fade to black" film.