Everything in its Right Place
January 26, 2012
Everything’s finally squared away re: the Armory show. Fires were put out, loans were secured, problems were solved, pleas were made, itineraries were shaped. Everything in its right place. So I can stop worrying now, if I were that sort of person. Pleased about success in both writing and art. If I could be pleased. All I need to do now is hand-write some sonnets, buy a big box, make a mockup and ship everything off. So I should be relieved.
Instead I’m thinking about chaos and failure. Why? Because 85% of a successful writing or art event/credit/etc. involves a fair bit of chaos and failure. And things are resolved but doubt lingers because of factors I’m not inclined to discuss even though this is a pretty raw and unvarnished forum, generally. And what I’m also thinking about is the precision of both the men in suits and the butterflies in the Armory show, the precision of slowly inscribing a sonnet and placing a square of color in just the right place, plans executed calmly and gracefully. But that’s not how things work.
So I went in search of chaos and failure in my archives and found some that really appeals to me right now because there’s no real possibility of precision here, no way to enhance the photos below. What they are: I had a Holga in 2004 and used it to take some purposely overlapping and leaky photos, which I later scanned in four long strips. I cut the strips up digitally so you have the twelve sections of the final presentation, which in my head is the beginning of an installation, not a settled body of work. So things are unsettled. Because that’s just how things work.
