The Ongoing Why? - Part II
I used to feel some pressure to see and build more clean, pure versions of the realities we were chasing. There was a sense that all the messy layers hiding beneath it all should somehow be smoothed and sanitized. Some truer reality was waiting to be revealed before us, if only we could strip away anything impeding it.
Yet I’ve never really sensed that these versions of reality carried much truth at all.
A view is already layered with loaded frames by the time we arrive at it. It carries countless wants, remembrances, fears, pressures, climates, hours, along with thousands of small interactions quietly shaping its different surfaces and meanings.
And a camera’s eye can never simply record these layers as it flashes past. Nor does a painting, screen, projection, or symbol merely reflect what we already want to know. I realized how we all choose, reframe, and re-edit continuously, myself included. And more often than not, these edits go unnoticed. But nonetheless, the messier elements continue to creep in.
And that seemed important in reading images — even necessary.
Despite our strange appetite for purity — the real image, the authentic taste, or the supposedly untouched or unmediated world — I’ve come to believe that a richer, more powerful reality exists in those messy inconsistencies underlying them all. These are never just problems to be omitted. But the greater danger remains that we often forget they ever existed in the first place.
Reality accumulates. It layers in the mind. It collects histories, pressures, memories and countless other gazes, each altering things in some other’s time.
And perhaps this is what makes artworks become so powerful. They can remind us that seeing is something we build and participate in as a constant act of discovery, not just omission of anything difficult.
Yet I’ve never really sensed that these versions of reality carried much truth at all.
A view is already layered with loaded frames by the time we arrive at it. It carries countless wants, remembrances, fears, pressures, climates, hours, along with thousands of small interactions quietly shaping its different surfaces and meanings.
And a camera’s eye can never simply record these layers as it flashes past. Nor does a painting, screen, projection, or symbol merely reflect what we already want to know. I realized how we all choose, reframe, and re-edit continuously, myself included. And more often than not, these edits go unnoticed. But nonetheless, the messier elements continue to creep in.
And that seemed important in reading images — even necessary.
Despite our strange appetite for purity — the real image, the authentic taste, or the supposedly untouched or unmediated world — I’ve come to believe that a richer, more powerful reality exists in those messy inconsistencies underlying them all. These are never just problems to be omitted. But the greater danger remains that we often forget they ever existed in the first place.
Reality accumulates. It layers in the mind. It collects histories, pressures, memories and countless other gazes, each altering things in some other’s time.
And perhaps this is what makes artworks become so powerful. They can remind us that seeing is something we build and participate in as a constant act of discovery, not just omission of anything difficult.