Advertisements Are Sacred

I took part in an interesting conversation with Jarrod and his mother. I had been showing Jarrod an article on Alternet.org about the impending credit card crisis, which led to some interesting statements being made about personal responsibility and personal security. This morning, I realized that, as a culture, we have some kinda funny and somewhat incompatible ideas about an individual’s place in society. “The American Dream” is this weird marriage of a cult of individualism with a cult of conformity. Success appears to be a case of “I got all this stuff that’s exactly like everyone else’s all on my own, and if you sell enough of your waking hours to whatever drudgery you can tolerate, you can have stuff exactly like everyone else’s too.” I don’t intend to discuss this observation much further in this blog entry, because it seems like there’s too much to look at for this forum. But it is something worth exploring, and I intend to do so in my personal work. But I will say this: The variations of the conventional existence that are constantly being sold to us hold very little appeal to me.

I’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.

I only reserved 7 spots in the fair this year. I think I had 13 last year–11 16×20’s, 1 16×16, and 1 11×14. So I took up a lot of space. This year, I’ll be putting in 2 16×20’s, 1 16×16, 1 12×18, 1 11×14, and 2 5×7’s. So, I’ve significantly reduced my square footage. Also, most of the work I submitted last year was pretty commercial. I’ve been trying to get away from that recently, so this year, all but 1 of my images are what I would consider fine art. That’s part of a larger shift in personal goals that I may or may not discuss in more detail at another time.