Is there, in truth, no beauty?
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008I’m going to bite off more than I can chew today. The Artist Wanted competition I had entered has come to a conclusion. Much to my ego’s disappointment, I won neither the professionally judged competition nor the popularity contest. But I would like to draw the attention of anyone who reads this to the person who did win. His name is Pete Eckert, and he is apparently totally blind. No really. That’s not a comment on his work. His work is amazing. There’s a depth to it that I’m not used to seeing in photographs. The judges made an excellent choice.
On one level, I can totally geek out on the science of light and visual perception with this. I always found the character of Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation rather fascinating. I didn’t identify with him quite the way I did with Data (or Spock or Odo, in other series), but I was always interested in how a blind man could see what is invisible to everyone else. What human beings see is not reality. We see an interpretation of reality. Visible light is a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. X-rays, heat, microwaves, the color green… they’re all the exact same thing vibrating at different frequencies. We’ve just evolved these structures that we call eyes, and they, along with the optic nerve and visual cortex, take a thin slice of those frequencies and convert them into electrical signals that the brain uses. Hearing works in much the same way. Hell, every sensation you have is an electrical impulse in the brain. So I was always fascinated by Geordi’s VISOR, which took a larger chunk of the EM spectrum and converted it into electrical signals for Geordi’s brain. Geordi could see the invisible, because the line between visible and invisible was drawn somewhere else for him. That’s an ability I’ve often wanted for myself, thus my interest in infrared and ultraviolet photography, but the line between visible and invisible is probably in a different place for everyone. And not just on the physical level either.
When I received the e-mail today informing me of the show reception for Mr. Eckert, in which it stated that he was “totally blind,” I’ll admit with some embarrassment that my first thought was of the movie, Pecker, in which the hot new artist at the end of the film is a completely blind photographer. The whole film is a humorous comment on art and photography in general (well, and fame and celebrity, but I’m not addressing those), and the moment is played for laughs. However, what Mr. Eckert does is absolutely art, and I find it extremely inspirational. This is what makes it art, in my opinion: “I am not trying to depict the sighted world. I am trying to show the world I now see using my other senses.” His work shows us the truth of his reality. That’s what art is about–the truth. It’s not about beauty. But the truth can be beautiful, and in Pete Eckert’s case, it is. And for someone who has lost their physical capacity to see to produce work like this–images that are so intense, so beautiful, so real–should, at the very least, remind us that our limits, like our vision, are often only in our heads.
The opening event is on Thursday, August 7, 2008, from 6 to 9 PM at the Leo Kesting Gallery at 812 Washington Street, New York City. If you have the means, go.
