sense organ

Like any aspiring artist, or artist who aspires, I am self-absorbed.  I look at my photos and see into myself.  More accurately, I measure my reaction to my own photos and try to construct paradigms of my identity from this raw data.  Like an engineer who constructs a towering edifice from certain predictable mathematical laws, I build my identity from attitudes about my own photos.  They often come as a surprise to me, like impressive bowel movements.  Why do I feel this way?  What am I searching for?  Why is this appealing or unappealing?  Where is that line between self and societal conditioning?  Is there truth in an image to be extracted, gem-like, from some damnable abyss of meaninglessness?  Is truth a swimming, swarming thing, like a school of silverfish, whole but not whole, movement only imagined through the illusion of singularity?  I don't know.  Maybe I don't even care.  I just know what I like.

I am a sensualist.  Most people are, though few would isolate it as a distinguishing characteristic of themselves.  I crave particular sights, smells, sounds, tastes and sensations.  In photographs, I enjoy capturing rich tactile landscapes.  It's easy.  Cheap.  Hackish.  But who cares?

Better technology has made my naval gazing even more rewarding.  Visual culture moves ever-forward towards a pinnacle that is unspoken.  Giant fucking Transformers who morph via 268 individually animated movements that, when viewed frame by frame, make complete mechanical sense.  A galloping horse will have all four hooves off the ground.  Sex underwater, on public buses, in Walmart bathrooms, in bullet-time.  Cameras that zoom and pan and pull and wedge themselves in every conceivable crack in the universe.  The new holocaust is played out on pixels, blurs, the unseen and unseeable.  I want to see everything.  This is state of the art.  This is progress.  What Linda Williams calls the "frenzy of the visible."

Contour and texture give expression to this desire.  A photo so rich in small detail that it evokes a ghost-response, a contact high, a sticky, cold, wet, warm, whatever feeling on the tips of ones fingers & tongue.

So what of it?  Perhaps this goes towards answering the question "where do I leave off and where does culture begin?"  My photos are so often like visual fast food.  Endlessly appealing, filling, yet ultimately lacking any nutritive value.  They only lead one down a cycle of desire, attempts to fulfill that desire, desire fulfilled and desire sprung anew.  Consumer Capitalism.  The blueprint of open market theory etched between my neural synapses.  There is something better, faster, cheaper, easier, more controllable, more reproducible that will scratch my itch.

It's time to question the itch and the scratch.  Blow them up together, like the Romeo and  Juliet of suicide bombers.  Make them explode and take a bucket and mop to the pieces.  Spread the mush over my toast and eat it at 6 in the morning before coffee.  Before talking.  Before thinking.  Just eat it up.  Eat it right up.