The Photographer or the Artist

There is a difference between an artist who works with a camera and a photographer. The difference may not show itself in the images produced by the piece of technology someone employs. The difference is in the person behind the camera. The difference is in her motivations. It's in his efforts.

The Photographer documents a world of shallow beauty. The camera becomes the frame with which she elevates the mundane to art making a ready-made of anything a lens can capture. Whether shooting a war or exposing the hidden value of a desolate parking lot, the Photographer is always hiding truth, burying it beneath images. Images lend themselves to the viewer's whim. The Photographer does to the world what the Wedding-Photographer does to love.

The artist with a camera, though, is still an artist. His work may focus on beauty, but he never disconnects that beauty from the horror with which it was birthed. The oppositions through which we come to know and feel the world are muted and skewed toward Real-Beauty in the work of the Photographer. The Artist is concerned with Truth, and Truth is expressed through fiction not as Reality. The camera can be bent toward this end, but it's inclined to manufacture reality, to frame moments into consumable bits of beauty.

The Photographer hides truth and all that makes art Itself beneath the paint on the wall onto which these framed and pretty moments have been hung to form that gallery known as Reality which supports a worldview that is entirely empty of the kind of vision by which the artist knows himself.

angel

I always looked for redemption
in a sweet girl's caress

until My i opened
far enough
to feel
           your touch
tighten
           and scratch
                  its way
                    to my
                  release

an acoustic tear

I love "I'm Still Your Fag" by Broken Social Scene.

I feel such a sweet, slow pain listening to it. The entire song sounds like the tears I was too scarred to shed over several girls I wish I'd cried because of. It expresses exactly that pain which I associate with most of those experiences I've had which contribute to my understanding of romantic love, and yet the narrative is one that is entirely alien to me.

I regret the limitations my heterosexuality places on me, but they seem to be firmly there. I enjoy toying with the boundaries of what I've been taught to think of as myself, but forcing past this particular limit would be an insult to those who've struggled with their own sexual identity.

This song does something art ought to do. It takes a unique experience and makes use of the universalizing potency of aesthetics to expand the intimate into the accessible.

Thank you for writing, recording, and playing a sadness I could never express myself.

Musing

I've always wanted to do a charcoal sketch of a beautiful woman. This piece is a description of a process to recreate through poetry what I feel when I see an artist sketching a beautiful woman. Poetry shouldn't have objects. Poetry should destroy the boundaries between subject and object, in this case between poet and muse. The poem is a transcription of that creative destruction of the boundaries between the poet and his muse.

the blankness of the page

1.
i've never felt
My boundaries
as fully as when

i cared nothing
for the mind
whose body
let Us be

2.
the pencil pressed
too firmly
against the page
means differently
when the sheet has
a table to lie on

3.
so many faces
I should have loved
one of them

why else would
i write Me's
if not to love
in place of that
thing i am
which cannot

Be

as Spring was
as laughter and flowers
forever Are

Art Fears 1

The artist reaches others through himself. He isolates and from his isolation expresses that which is uniquely his, his feelings&thinkings. What he produces is meaningful because it comes to represent what it can mean to be human. The rejection of the artist by the viewer or reader can be either a rejection of his technical skill or of his claim to being included in that which the viewer or reader considers to represent humanity.

Should the artist so closely bind his means of production to his definition of self through a sufficiently intimate recognition of Form&Function, then to fail as an artist is to fail to be included in humanity itself, to fail to be human.

Yours is such a violent love.
A love of will.
A wind.
Not a breeze.

Strong enough to push
ships across the oceans
is too strong to rock
a cradle.

Your love is for the someone
inside you made from
those who walk and hug and cry.

I would love
the walker
the hugger
the cryer
and not
the self made out of them.