The most interesting part of this photo is the position of the diamond shapes. At first it seemed to be floating, suspended above the wild bush, bringing order. Then I noticed the strokes of the lines were as though painted onto or etched out of the photo. The photo shows me to the center and then I realize the ordered lines are imperfect and the corners don't meet. Well now I wonder how center that center is.
Okay but how could the viewer see order in the wild blue sky? The photo disorients the perspective of the viewer because you can't tell if you are looking down on this scene or up from the ground. Now the viewer must read between the lines, so to speak, to see the bush without the imposition of a false order.
This image is not an image of nature. Instead of the very common depiction of a natural scene, this image effaces the very idea of being able to capture nature. Almost child-like, diamond-shaped lines catch the attention of the viewer to show that an image can be made of anything. Squiggly lines running across the page could have easily turned this image into something different with the same effect of anti-realism. The lines make the viewer’s eyes travel up and out, like a funhouse mirror.
This is certainly one way to see nature. I would have left the lines out and centered the image on the sky, but this is not my image. And yet, that is what is so beautiful about this image: it allows (or forces) the viewer to see in a different way. It creates its own focal point.
Why make this image black and white? Why have four white diamonds? These are the wrong questions because they presuppose a certain correct interpretation -- an authorial intention. These questions limit the image. The right questions ask what the black and white imagery do, or what the diamonds do. These are questions about affect and effects.
The way I see this image (so now you are seeing my seeing of this image) is that the color, or lack thereof, and the diamonds have a consolidating effect. Together, they focus the beauty, order, and chaos of nature into a single diamond-shaped space. This space is something you can hold on to. You can imagine putting it in your pocket and keeping it with you.
Not only can you take this space, but you can extrapolate from this image the methodology of how to use your imagery or imagination to select certain affects however you like. This image is divine. It combines the human and the natural into something more. It is complete synthesis and synesthesia.
The four diamonds painted on a black and white photo change totally what a viewer perceives in the scene. While the photo’s composition under the white lines is ordinary enough that most viewers can predict what is under the lines but it is not the lines’ obstruction of the photo that changes the image. Instead the lines move the viewers eye in a direction they might not otherwise. Additionally the diamonds seem to create a pulsating heat this seems to be from the white lines on top of the black and white photo which the eye reads as pure light.
The superimposition of rotated square shapes onto the image teases my eyes to attempt to pick out similar shapes in the background. This image has motion and stillness, the rigidity of the wide white lines eclipsing the bulrushes behind but also framing them, making a distinction between the image that is contained and the part of it that isn't. The fine lines of the plants exist in contrast to the broad strokes of the brush, distinguishing each other from one another.
Here is a plant which to me represents nature, or what should be a natural occurrence, which has been placed within a black and white filter and abstracted from its natural colors. As a second means of saying "look, this is a picture and NOT a plant", the artist has drawn several concentric diamonds over the plant.
These hand-drawn diamonds are not blue or green or orange, but rather white. I must ask: Why white, if one could choose any color? The answer appears to be that even the diamonds are within the filter. No color could be used since the entire image has been degraded to black and white. The implication is that both the plant and the diamonds are on the same level of existence. One is no more real or natural than the other. Both are just features in an image.
tape, bandages, braces. stiff and still and white. they are prescriptions for an answer, a way, a route through tangled chaos. they're not a suggestion, they're a force, like gravity. i am small, i am lost. i want to find my own rhythm in the weeds but follow their magnetic path. where are they leading me? then i see it, right where they predicted, a little boy hiding in the brush. how is a boy so small? they were right, i could never have found him all by myself. is that a boy there? i'm pretty sure i see him. or are the mangled shadows disguising as paper thin images, extracting my trust? am i seeing someone or looking for someone? should i trust my eyes or depend on my... now what would that be?
These concentric things challenge the viewer as any discovery does—with frustration, disorientation, breakthroughs, resting points, and the mechanisms for understanding enmeshed throughout. The rhombuses are not concentric, but conrhombustic. How about conrhombustic diamonds? Diamonds that radiate from an origin and simultaneously burst in suspension, as satisfyingly as the affect of a coconut that finally cracks after relentless knocks on the concrete.This image is a magnificent unfolding of persistence and discovery which beams with the myriad refractability of a flawless gem—the conrhombust!
This image reintroduces its viewer to nature, an ever-present flowing of beauty by its own means. With this event, looking at everything from anywhere astounds without form-making and name calling and meaning. Nature’s perpetually self-revealing awe gets magnified through the “defiance” of the conrhombust. The conrhombust shows how fragmentation and reformation are an essential process of nature. A sometimes jarring, but ultimately grounding process. Plant, sky, clouds, conrhombustic diamonds, no one more right or wrong than the other, all present themselves as interwoven, overlapping objects of pure quality, unopened presents eternally primed for discovery.
The diamond shapes act as a guide, telling the viewer where to focus. Yet even with this guide, it still seems almost impossible to focus on the center, because in reality, there is no center. Nature is filled with movement and this image is nature, in its most natural state. While the diamonds act as a contrast to the fluid movement of the grass, they are not successful in preventing the movement from taking place. The diamonds attempt to stabilize a destabilized world, the diamonds attempt to make static and world which is already always dynamic. The diamonds fail.
The four white diamonds imposed establish the focal point of this black and white image, a black center. Yet the white diamonds also draw my attention towards the edges of this image; the corners of the white diamonds act as arrows. My eyes instinctively focus on the center and yet quite naturally shift right and left, up and down.
The diamonds contrast with the plant and sky. The diamonds stand rigid whereas the plant and sky are carefree. The diamonds are intersecting the field and sky, while nature intermingles with them.
The series of diamonds are arranged in a way that draws the gaze of the viewer towards the center. They guide the viewer's eyes towards the center of the diamonds, which also happens to be the physical center of the image. However, there does not appear to be anything of particularly noteworthy at the center. It is just another patch of the plant, and maybe even more simplistic than the other parts because most of it is just a dark patch with few distinguishable features.
After this initial impression, it becomes notable that the arrangement of diamonds also forms somewhat of an optical illusion where the central diamond both seems to come out of the image or sink into it. When the center sinks inward, the gaze of the viewer is drawn into the dark patch of grass in the center of the image, as previously discussed. When the central diamond rises out of the image, however, it pushes the gaze of the viewer away from the center and out wards the sides, like the viewer is falling down the sides of the rising structure of diamonds. Then, the viewer is forces to focus on the outer edges of the image, at the sky and the sides of the plants, because the white diamonds obscure and distract from the part of the image that they cover.
This image screams to me...it screams, lines on top of nature. It's so frank with me that I begin to realize this screaming is not coming from the image...it's reflecting my own sight.
My assumptions violently overpower my perception, and my sight becomes merely my own insistence to see lines on top of nature. As I infer as to how these lines are placed, I reject them as an inherent part of the image.
My seeing is overridden by my thirst for knowing...my desire to take apart the image, separate pieces of it into a timeline of its production; and so I keep seeing lines that were placed on top of a photo of nature.
The blatant clashing of real and fake is slowly breaking me down... I begin to stumble upon my own perception.
I'm deceived by my own assumption that this image cannot possibly exist in a place and time of my world...because in fact it does, right here.
The diamonds call your attention to your eyes' mechanism of focusing. Why do you privilege the center of the image? Why is it that whenever you aim a camera to take a picture you place your subject in the center? The image behind the diamonds is subjectless. It is not about the mound of weeds behind the diamonds. The center of this image is meaningless. The diamonds both highlight our focus and announce its utter uselessness.
If an omniscient being was looking down at the viewer, where would this omniscient being place the viewer? It is impossible to place the viewer in this image. If the viewer is looking at the image from the perspective of the pyramid (the multiple diamonds potentially form a pyramid), the viewer would have to be elevated from the ground and positioned at a certain angle. If the viewer concentrated on the bush the viewer would be face-to-face with that image; it's directly gazed upon. This presents the image of having a dual nature. Viewing it from one angle will render a totally different affect than viewing the same image from a different angle.
This image does away with the assumption that a canvas has to be blank. The underlying photograph is no longer just a print, it becomes the foundation of another image. The painted diamonds don't particularly speak to the background, yet they can't be separated from it either. The white paint blends in with the black and white photograph, perhaps suggesting they're the same thing afterall. Both images, together making a new image.
This image displays the power a mark can have on an image. These simple brush strokes completely restructure the architecture of the seeing-event. These lines change the image’s affect which creates a life outside of life. It is the visible world folding back over itself ad infinitum.
The camera catches every aspect of this moment without bias; it is the rise of the banal. But these diamond shapes shift the viewing perspective and the viewer can’t help but look upon the image both passively and actively. What is the image, the plants or the lines? Foreground and background are effaced and the image becomes one. Nothing is outside the realm of play; everything is within the plenum.
The image is framed by a series of diamonds, progressively decreasing in size; the frames ultimately terminate, creating a center of the image. The center, presumably a place where the "meaning" of the image is located, pushes back at the reader. While the presence of one, if not two, small figures can be discerned in the image's center, the diminutive figures do little to assist the reader. In other words, providing a reading of the figures is nearly impossible because of their size. It is this impossibility that shifts the reader's attention to the rest of the image, much of which is quite beautiful. The captivating elements of the image, some of which might have otherwise gone unnoticed, include the plants parts blowing in the wind.
Hence, the aesthetic qualities of the image is highlighted by the exact mechanism that initially directs the reader's attention elsewhere.
‘Crop circles’ is an term that need not imply a thing that is circular.
The cutting-through of the crops may be angular, repetitive, and totally contrived. What matters is that the crop be both at the center and the periphery of the image.
Viewers might perceive this image as unnatural. Precisely to that point, diamond lines no longer allow viewers to recognize or categorize this image. It might encounter as a distraction of that wheat grass but, then, this image itself is an image itself in making. It seems like it’s been painted with white coloring line over a photo. It no longer gives an eye a resting place but, it keeps it on the move as the image is constant shift in motion. Its remind of that Quinoa film when that guy was flashing his hand to the camera as the music came along with it, to insist everything is in the film. He had the control over the image he was making. Even the music was his. This streak of lines seems to do the same effect. It just flies out and insists upon viewers that this is an image and these lines are nothing different than the image behind. The lines can be the emphasis of notification of the image in creation. Like that flashing of hands with music, this line flashes viewers with restlessness. It’s all just one image.
The epicenter of this piece proliferates in ripples, both by nature and by man. The outside voice folds into itself multi-fold: the photograph encompasses a natural occurring taken place outside—blades of grass, the sky and clouds. And yet there’s another voice, which strikes the viewer as something outside the frame, yet it is folded inside the frame. It is the image-affect of the encounter between rippled blades of grass and its viewer, pierced through the eyes of the viewer and folded back into the frame. This image captures the relationship between the viewer-image affect that is neither one nor the other yet simultaneously both. The emergence of a new mold, a new affect takes shape.
The four acrylic diamonds mediate among the viewer who wants a photograph, and a photograph. Begging for a photograph, the viewer’s viewing is jerked about between the acrylic diamonds, as if this viewing is a camera’s viewing being switched back and forth within a series of four, indexed, zoom presets. This jerking-about opens the image to at least two, perhaps less than obvious, discourses. The first is the movement of the image. The jerking-about is a stuttering, and as paired with hand-painted diamonds and the affect of hand-made, this stuttering makes this image move a bit like a clumsy flipbook, though not nearly as cute. The second discourse is a discourse of seeing. The acrylic diamonds that arrest the viewing of a photograph expose the viewer to photographic seeing. Being tangled-up in the indexed zoom, it becomes difficult to privilege anything within the frame. The jerking-about holds the viewer within the event of a viewing rather than before an object viewed; but, then what of the prairie grass? The viewer takes in what she can, with no time to privilege anything. Situated, rather uncomfortably, within a zone of indetermination, it is not clear whether she experiences the prairie grass blowing in the wind, the flipping of a clumsy flipbook, or just simply the fact of unprivileged, photographic viewing.
an image operating in multiple dimensions according to different logics all at once. there is the 'natural' plane, depicting an eerie and ambiguous cavity. there is the sketchy geometric plane of the rhombus which acts as a portal into the image 'behind' it. offering a new depth, a penetrating an apposite viewing. this is a play of texture and spatial relations that functions with pleasant discord. a psychedelic opening up, an expansion into new dimensions
What really gets me about his image is the different ways that dimensionality can go. the image is simultaneously 2-d and 3-d, as are the two distinct figures, the plant and the diamond. the diamond shape is 2-d, but it is painted, it is 3-d.
The convergence of diamond shapes radically re-positions the viewer with respect to the image. The white lines, apparently superimposed, structure the process of metabolically digesting the image. The lines literally demarcate the frame into fragments, determining the order and speed with which a viewer can take up the image. And yet, the diamond shapes themselves do not perform a hierarchization of the image (the center diamond demands no more of my attention than the outer one). Rather, this proliferation of frames parallels the infinite multitude of ways of seeing. After all, one particular frame is no better than any other.
The image seems to etch in itself a dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, between the viewer and the tall grass. The successively growing white diamonds obstruct the viewer's vision of the grass. The markings of the diamonds are conspicuously imperfect ones, gesturing to the human hand having deliberately and indelibly scratched over the image of nature. The stark brightness of the etchings amplify this sense of artificial obstruction. Not only do they cover some part of the grass, they prevent the viewer from focusing on the grass that is left between the diamonds. But could it be that the markings, in defamiliarizing the viewer from what would have been a rather mundane capturing of the earth, not only obstruct the viewer from something but make something new of it?
The white markings undoubtedly obstruct the viewer from the full detail of the grass, but they amplify and in a sense uncover its sense of radial movement. Would this sense of movement be apparent in "natural", "pure" viewing of this image as unmarked? Certainly not as much, and yet it's undeniable that such movement is part of the grass' splayed posture and not merely some fabrication of the human hand. Thus this image denies any notion of fullness or purity in an unfiltered, natural viewing of the natural world. An unfiltered image leaves some traits apparent and others latent, just as an obviously inflected one amplifies some things and obscures others. It is just as one sees a thing according to Bergson. One does not see a thing in all its qualities. One sees an image of select qualities of the thing according to its importance to the viewer's action or memory. Never is presented a full, true image of the object in all its detail, for such a viewing does not exist. Every viewing of a thing is skewed and inflected, thus there is no inherent difference between a "natural" and an "artificial" viewing of thing.
The painted diamonds, slanted rectangles overlapping nature beg the viewer to question what it means to frame an image, to frame an object. The separate diamonds frame each other and yet they also frame the plant, contain its wildness within their multilayers of framework. The frame of the image itself seems like less of an imposing frame, a less prominent frame than the bold white frames of the paint. If anything the white painted frames serve to illuminate the plant, make the viewer seek it out and appreciate it more so than the outer franes edges ever could--the frame within the image dominates the frame without.
Very strange; if we accept the text at the bottom to be a part of the image itself (which we should), and take the words to mean what they mean instead of abstracting them into simple shapes, then we are made to feel as if the image is lying to us. The image is obviously not acrylic and not 11" X 14". Yet, perhaps just as we shouldn't take images to be pointers to meanings outside themselves, the text, seen as image, might also be stripped of meaning. Strange indeed.
there are frames within frames. no escaping the engulfing feeling. there is nothing to lack because it is all encompassing and pure creation. the black and white adds to this hyper imposition
The diamond shape is but one layer. The cattails are another. The sky background is another. It is a confusing photo if a narrative is applied, but makes its own strange sort of sense. Sure, some cattails with a diamond overlay- why not? It's kind of fractal in nature, interestingly. Maybe the diamonds are speaking to the overall shape of the explosion of the cattail bush. Maybe it's a play on what our eyes do when looking at objects.
The diamond shape is but one layer. The cattails are another. The sky background is another. It is a confusing photo if a narrative is applied, but makes its own strange sort of sense. Sure, some cattails with a diamond overlay- why not? It's kind of fractal in nature, interestingly. Maybe the diamonds are speaking to the overall shape of the explosion of the cattail bush. Maybe it's a play on what our eyes do when looking at objects.
This image seemed, at first, almost juvenile and delinquent. Like when you see a "vandalized" picture of a person with a mustache that some genius Sharpied on. In truth, this image is not ORIGINALLY a picture of a plant with diamonds newly drawn on top of it.
It is not a modification OF something. It is an entirely new and original image, but at the same time, not. There are no such things as "covers," and yet. In this marbled paradox, the image shines in all its joyful glory.
In perceiving, what do you privilege? The rhombuses juxtaposing the image offers new frames for the viewer to approach the image. There is the image as a whole, the images within each rhombus, the rhombuses within the rhombuses and their images and the images outside of the rhombuses. I have hardly begun to exhaust the variable viewpoints/perspectives present in the image, leaving the reader with an infinite way to view the image, along with an ever expanding way to privilege the perceptions within the image. The smallest rhombus offers insight into the darkness of the image, however it simultaneously contains the darkness of the center to reveal the detail and brightness of the rest of the image.
An initial viewing of this image seems to indicate that the paint somehow tarnishes or ruins the photograph. It might seem like the image has been destroyed by the vandalism of these diamond shapes conspicuously painted in the center of the photo. In actuality, however, this image has now become more complex. The image--which now includes the paint and the photo itself--creates a multiplicity of affects that gives the image more vitality.
The diamond shapes induce an interesting visual reaction to the viewer, seducing him or her to focus in the center of the image, as if there is something of significance. However, all the eyes focus on is just a particular zone of the image. What the viewer must realize is the democratization of this picture, in that there is no central point of focus that should be privileged while the rest is ignored. The image as a whole must be taken in.
Gursky's camera extends beyond the image capture mechanism and through the lens of photoshop. Here that manipulative lens becomes visible. Were the diamonds not there, the viewer would be unaware it was seeing an image of an image, seeing the manipulation of an image. How then, would the viewer ever know this? Indeed, the viewer can not. Hence, paradoxically, an effect of the special depth of this image is the flattening of all images -- the image is just whatever locks up with the eyes of the viewer, and whatever locks up with the eyes of the viewer is just image.
What are we looking at? Are the diamonds actually in the photograph? They appear to be laid on top of the surface of the photograph of the plant. In that case this is a photograph of a bunch of diamonds painted on top of another photograph. This is a photograph of a photograph. The layers of this image point to different levels of remove from reality. There's the real plant, the photo of it, the real diamonds and the photo of that. However, these layers all being present the viewing of this image is no less an event, a reality. It takes up a different space than the plant yes, it takes up a space that is constituted by the viewing of it. It is constituted by its viewing.
wow, pretty late on this post! :( Life...gets...crazy. Here it is anyway:
The image uses a controlled external tool of added lines to fundamentally change a naturalistic scene into one of possibility. No longer does the viewer simply see plants blowing in the wind, but he/she is given three, four, five, ten (and on..) ways to view the image: as an overhead shot of diamonds/squares, leading to a tunnel; as the top of a pyramid of tilted squares or rhombi; as a folded 2-dimensional symmetrical design; as a flat picture of plants blowing in the wind, with white marker drawn on it; as five stacked squares on top of one another, and on. The more the viewer looks directly in the center, the more he/she experiences variations of the same image, which says something about its ability to transform a natural black and white scene into a performative artistic experience.
The wavering diamonds are actively projecting the multiple dimensions of the image. Are these diamonds jumping out from the plant or falling in? It's hypnostizing - there is this crazy sense of movement! I hope this isn't too symbolic but: It's as if this plant's vibrancy and life manifests in these diamonds.
This image proliferates play. From the entitled ‘Untitled’, to the four white-lined diamonds, this photo does not privilege a real over the artificial; rather everything exists in play. Thus, there is no mark on an image, there is only the image. There is no heading below the image, there is only the image. Everything seeing is the event of seeing the image and its affect.
What’s striking about this image is the placement of the diamonds over the plants. The presence of these incredibly artificial diamonds over the plants, the plants which seem natural, would appear to place these two aspects of the image in opposition; artificial versus natural. Yet, neither the diamonds nor the plants hold priority over the other in this image, rather the emphasis shifts as quickly as the viewer’s eye shift between foreground and background. When taken up together the white diamonds act as an organizing factor rather than effacing the plants. The diamonds cut the plants into different segments, giving the viewer numerous bit size ways to take up the image.
Each week, we will consider an image. This image may come from anywhere—from a painting, the news, an art photograph, a picture of my child.
Your job is to read this image. You need write only four lines; you may write more. Inflect the image. Give it a spin. Make us see what we may not be seeing. Take up the image, do something with it, then give it back to us—in words.
The goal is multifold. It is to learn to reckon a diversity of images. It is to learn the art of the riff, the spin, the take. And, in the end, I hope we have created an exquisite symphony, a chorus of voices, each distinct, each singing an image in its own register.
ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED. You may miss 3 classes during the semester. For each class missed after that, your grade will be lowered a full grade—from an A to a B.
EVERY weekend, I will post an image on this blog. By Thursday's class, you must write a response to that image as a comment on this blog. -You will have to create a Google account. -Please use your name in your identity so I know who you are when you post your comment. If you already have a Google identity but it does not reflect your name, please create a new one. -Your comment can be brief; in fact, it should be—anywhere from 3-10 lines. Try to make it pithy, astute, sharp. -These are not optional: each one you miss will translate into the loss of a full grade for your class participation grade.
There will be three papers scattered through the semester; they will be @ two pages long. These are not optional. If you fail to do one, you will fail the class.
Grading -Class participation: 30% -Paper 1: 20% -Paper 2: 20% -Paper 3: 30% -I WILL NOT GRANT INCOMPLETES.
The most interesting part of this photo is the position of the diamond shapes. At first it seemed to be floating, suspended above the wild bush, bringing order. Then I noticed the strokes of the lines were as though painted onto or etched out of the photo. The photo shows me to the center and then I realize the ordered lines are imperfect and the corners don't meet. Well now I wonder how center that center is.
ReplyDeleteOkay but how could the viewer see order in the wild blue sky? The photo disorients the perspective of the viewer because you can't tell if you are looking down on this scene or up from the ground. Now the viewer must read between the lines, so to speak, to see the bush without the imposition of a false order.
ReplyDeleteThis image is not an image of nature. Instead of the very common depiction of a natural scene, this image effaces the very idea of being able to capture nature. Almost child-like, diamond-shaped lines catch the attention of the viewer to show that an image can be made of anything. Squiggly lines running across the page could have easily turned this image into something different with the same effect of anti-realism. The lines make the viewer’s eyes travel up and out, like a funhouse mirror.
ReplyDeleteThis is certainly one way to see nature. I would have left the lines out and centered the image on the sky, but this is not my image. And yet, that is what is so beautiful about this image: it allows (or forces) the viewer to see in a different way. It creates its own focal point.
ReplyDeleteWhy make this image black and white? Why have four white diamonds? These are the wrong questions because they presuppose a certain correct interpretation -- an authorial intention. These questions limit the image. The right questions ask what the black and white imagery do, or what the diamonds do. These are questions about affect and effects.
The way I see this image (so now you are seeing my seeing of this image) is that the color, or lack thereof, and the diamonds have a consolidating effect. Together, they focus the beauty, order, and chaos of nature into a single diamond-shaped space. This space is something you can hold on to. You can imagine putting it in your pocket and keeping it with you.
Not only can you take this space, but you can extrapolate from this image the methodology of how to use your imagery or imagination to select certain affects however you like. This image is divine. It combines the human and the natural into something more. It is complete synthesis and synesthesia.
The four diamonds painted on a black and white photo change totally what a viewer perceives in the scene. While the photo’s composition under the white lines is ordinary enough that most viewers can predict what is under the lines but it is not the lines’ obstruction of the photo that changes the image. Instead the lines move the viewers eye in a direction they might not otherwise. Additionally the diamonds seem to create a pulsating heat this seems to be from the white lines on top of the black and white photo which the eye reads as pure light.
ReplyDeleteThe superimposition of rotated square shapes onto the image teases my eyes to attempt to pick out similar shapes in the background. This image has motion and stillness, the rigidity of the wide white lines eclipsing the bulrushes behind but also framing them, making a distinction between the image that is contained and the part of it that isn't.
ReplyDeleteThe fine lines of the plants exist in contrast to the broad strokes of the brush, distinguishing each other from one another.
Here is a plant which to me represents nature, or what should be a natural occurrence, which has been placed within a black and white filter and abstracted from its natural colors. As a second means of saying "look, this is a picture and NOT a plant", the artist has drawn several concentric diamonds over the plant.
ReplyDeleteThese hand-drawn diamonds are not blue or green or orange, but rather white. I must ask: Why white, if one could choose any color? The answer appears to be that even the diamonds are within the filter. No color could be used since the entire image has been degraded to black and white. The implication is that both the plant and the diamonds are on the same level of existence. One is no more real or natural than the other. Both are just features in an image.
tape, bandages, braces. stiff and still and white. they are prescriptions for an answer, a way, a route through tangled chaos. they're not a suggestion, they're a force, like gravity. i am small, i am lost. i want to find my own rhythm in the weeds but follow their magnetic path. where are they leading me? then i see it, right where they predicted, a little boy hiding in the brush. how is a boy so small? they were right, i could never have found him all by myself. is that a boy there? i'm pretty sure i see him. or are the mangled shadows disguising as paper thin images, extracting my trust? am i seeing someone or looking for someone? should i trust my eyes or depend on my... now what would that be?
ReplyDeleteThese concentric things challenge the viewer as any discovery does—with frustration, disorientation, breakthroughs, resting points, and the mechanisms for understanding enmeshed throughout. The rhombuses are not concentric, but conrhombustic. How about conrhombustic diamonds? Diamonds that radiate from an origin and simultaneously burst in suspension, as satisfyingly as the affect of a coconut that finally cracks after relentless knocks on the concrete.This image is a magnificent unfolding of persistence and discovery which beams with the myriad refractability of a flawless gem—the conrhombust!
ReplyDeleteThis image reintroduces its viewer to nature, an ever-present flowing of beauty by its own means. With this event, looking at everything from anywhere astounds without form-making and name calling and meaning. Nature’s perpetually self-revealing awe gets magnified through the “defiance” of the conrhombust. The conrhombust shows how fragmentation and reformation are an essential process of nature. A sometimes jarring, but ultimately grounding process. Plant, sky, clouds, conrhombustic diamonds, no one more right or wrong than the other, all present themselves as interwoven, overlapping objects of pure quality, unopened presents eternally primed for discovery.
The diamond shapes act as a guide, telling the viewer where to focus. Yet even with this guide, it still seems almost impossible to focus on the center, because in reality, there is no center. Nature is filled with movement and this image is nature, in its most natural state. While the diamonds act as a contrast to the fluid movement of the grass, they are not successful in preventing the movement from taking place. The diamonds attempt to stabilize a destabilized world, the diamonds attempt to make static and world which is already always dynamic. The diamonds fail.
ReplyDeleteThe four white diamonds imposed establish the focal point of this black and white image, a black center. Yet the white diamonds also draw my attention towards the edges of this image; the corners of the white diamonds act as arrows. My eyes instinctively focus on the center and yet quite naturally shift right and left, up and down.
ReplyDeleteThe diamonds contrast with the plant and sky. The diamonds stand rigid whereas the plant and sky are carefree. The diamonds are intersecting the field and sky, while nature intermingles with them.
The series of diamonds are arranged in a way that draws the gaze of the viewer towards the center. They guide the viewer's eyes towards the center of the diamonds, which also happens to be the physical center of the image. However, there does not appear to be anything of particularly noteworthy at the center. It is just another patch of the plant, and maybe even more simplistic than the other parts because most of it is just a dark patch with few distinguishable features.
ReplyDeleteAfter this initial impression, it becomes notable that the arrangement of diamonds also forms somewhat of an optical illusion where the central diamond both seems to come out of the image or sink into it. When the center sinks inward, the gaze of the viewer is drawn into the dark patch of grass in the center of the image, as previously discussed. When the central diamond rises out of the image, however, it pushes the gaze of the viewer away from the center and out wards the sides, like the viewer is falling down the sides of the rising structure of diamonds. Then, the viewer is forces to focus on the outer edges of the image, at the sky and the sides of the plants, because the white diamonds obscure and distract from the part of the image that they cover.
This image screams to me...it screams, lines on top of nature. It's so frank with me that I begin to realize this screaming is not coming from the image...it's reflecting my own sight.
ReplyDeleteMy assumptions violently overpower my perception, and my sight becomes merely my own insistence to see lines on top of nature. As I infer as to how these lines are placed, I reject them as an inherent part of the image.
My seeing is overridden by my thirst for knowing...my desire to take apart the image, separate pieces of it into a timeline of its production; and so I keep seeing lines that were placed on top of a photo of nature.
The blatant clashing of real and fake is slowly breaking me down... I begin to stumble upon my own perception.
I'm deceived by my own assumption that this image cannot possibly exist in a place and time of my world...because in fact it does, right here.
The diamonds call your attention to your eyes' mechanism of focusing. Why do you privilege the center of the image? Why is it that whenever you aim a camera to take a picture you place your subject in the center? The image behind the diamonds is subjectless. It is not about the mound of weeds behind the diamonds. The center of this image is meaningless. The diamonds both highlight our focus and announce its utter uselessness.
ReplyDeleteIf an omniscient being was looking down at the viewer, where would this omniscient being place the viewer? It is impossible to place the viewer in this image. If the viewer is looking at the image from the perspective of the pyramid (the multiple diamonds potentially form a pyramid), the viewer would have to be elevated from the ground and positioned at a certain angle. If the viewer concentrated on the bush the viewer would be face-to-face with that image; it's directly gazed upon. This presents the image of having a dual nature. Viewing it from one angle will render a totally different affect than viewing the same image from a different angle.
ReplyDeleteThis image does away with the assumption that a canvas has to be blank. The underlying photograph is no longer just a print, it becomes the foundation of another image. The painted diamonds don't particularly speak to the background, yet they can't be separated from it either. The white paint blends in with the black and white photograph, perhaps suggesting they're the same thing afterall. Both images, together making a new image.
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ReplyDeleteThis image displays the power a mark can have on an image. These simple brush strokes completely restructure the architecture of the seeing-event. These lines change the image’s affect which creates a life outside of life. It is the visible world folding back over itself ad infinitum.
ReplyDeleteThe camera catches every aspect of this moment without bias; it is the rise of the banal. But these diamond shapes shift the viewing perspective and the viewer can’t help but look upon the image both passively and actively. What is the image, the plants or the lines? Foreground and background are effaced and the image becomes one. Nothing is outside the realm of play; everything is within the plenum.
The image is framed by a series of diamonds, progressively decreasing in size; the frames ultimately terminate, creating a center of the image. The center, presumably a place where the "meaning" of the image is located, pushes back at the reader. While the presence of one, if not two, small figures can be discerned in the image's center, the diminutive figures do little to assist the reader. In other words, providing a reading of the figures is nearly impossible because of their size. It is this impossibility that shifts the reader's attention to the rest of the image, much of which is quite beautiful. The captivating elements of the image, some of which might have otherwise gone unnoticed, include the plants parts blowing in the wind.
ReplyDeleteHence, the aesthetic qualities of the image is highlighted by the exact mechanism that initially directs the reader's attention elsewhere.
‘Crop circles’ is an term that need not imply a thing that is circular.
ReplyDeleteThe cutting-through of the crops may be angular, repetitive, and totally contrived. What matters is that the crop be both at the center and the periphery of the image.
This is a crop circle.
Viewers might perceive this image as unnatural. Precisely to that point, diamond lines no longer allow viewers to recognize or categorize this image. It might encounter as a distraction of that wheat grass but, then, this image itself is an image itself in making. It seems like it’s been painted with white coloring line over a photo. It no longer gives an eye a resting place but, it keeps it on the move as the image is constant shift in motion. Its remind of that Quinoa film when that guy was flashing his hand to the camera as the music came along with it, to insist everything is in the film. He had the control over the image he was making. Even the music was his. This streak of lines seems to do the same effect. It just flies out and insists upon viewers that this is an image and these lines are nothing different than the image behind. The lines can be the emphasis of notification of the image in creation. Like that flashing of hands with music, this line flashes viewers with restlessness. It’s all just one image.
ReplyDeleteThe epicenter of this piece proliferates in ripples, both by nature and by man. The outside voice folds into itself multi-fold: the photograph encompasses a natural occurring taken place outside—blades of grass, the sky and clouds. And yet there’s another voice, which strikes the viewer as something outside the frame, yet it is folded inside the frame. It is the image-affect of the encounter between rippled blades of grass and its viewer, pierced through the eyes of the viewer and folded back into the frame. This image captures the relationship between the viewer-image affect that is neither one nor the other yet simultaneously both. The emergence of a new mold, a new affect takes shape.
ReplyDeleteThe four acrylic diamonds mediate among the viewer who wants a photograph, and a photograph. Begging for a photograph, the viewer’s viewing is jerked about between the acrylic diamonds, as if this viewing is a camera’s viewing being switched back and forth within a series of four, indexed, zoom presets. This jerking-about opens the image to at least two, perhaps less than obvious, discourses. The first is the movement of the image. The jerking-about is a stuttering, and as paired with hand-painted diamonds and the affect of hand-made, this stuttering makes this image move a bit like a clumsy flipbook, though not nearly as cute. The second discourse is a discourse of seeing. The acrylic diamonds that arrest the viewing of a photograph expose the viewer to photographic seeing. Being tangled-up in the indexed zoom, it becomes difficult to privilege anything within the frame. The jerking-about holds the viewer within the event of a viewing rather than before an object viewed; but, then what of the prairie grass? The viewer takes in what she can, with no time to privilege anything. Situated, rather uncomfortably, within a zone of indetermination, it is not clear whether she experiences the prairie grass blowing in the wind, the flipping of a clumsy flipbook, or just simply the fact of unprivileged, photographic viewing.
ReplyDeletean image operating in multiple dimensions according to different logics all at once. there is the 'natural' plane, depicting an eerie and ambiguous cavity. there is the sketchy geometric plane of the rhombus which acts as a portal into the image 'behind' it. offering a new depth, a penetrating an apposite viewing. this is a play of texture and spatial relations that functions with pleasant discord. a psychedelic opening up, an expansion into new dimensions
ReplyDeleteWhat really gets me about his image is the different ways that dimensionality can go. the image is simultaneously 2-d and 3-d, as are the two distinct figures, the plant and the diamond. the diamond shape is 2-d, but it is painted, it is 3-d.
ReplyDeleteThis image has me quite in a trance.
oops, I didn't read the comment above mine before I posted...
ReplyDeleteThe convergence of diamond shapes radically re-positions the viewer with respect to the image. The white lines, apparently superimposed, structure the process of metabolically digesting the image. The lines literally demarcate the frame into fragments, determining the order and speed with which a viewer can take up the image. And yet, the diamond shapes themselves do not perform a hierarchization of the image (the center diamond demands no more of my attention than the outer one). Rather, this proliferation of frames parallels the infinite multitude of ways of seeing. After all, one particular frame is no better than any other.
ReplyDeleteThe image seems to etch in itself a dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, between the viewer and the tall grass. The successively growing white diamonds obstruct the viewer's vision of the grass. The markings of the diamonds are conspicuously imperfect ones, gesturing to the human hand having deliberately and indelibly scratched over the image of nature. The stark brightness of the etchings amplify this sense of artificial obstruction. Not only do they cover some part of the grass, they prevent the viewer from focusing on the grass that is left between the diamonds. But could it be that the markings, in defamiliarizing the viewer from what would have been a rather mundane capturing of the earth, not only obstruct the viewer from something but make something new of it?
ReplyDeleteThe white markings undoubtedly obstruct the viewer from the full detail of the grass, but they amplify and in a sense uncover its sense of radial movement. Would this sense of movement be apparent in "natural", "pure" viewing of this image as unmarked? Certainly not as much, and yet it's undeniable that such movement is part of the grass' splayed posture and not merely some fabrication of the human hand. Thus this image denies any notion of fullness or purity in an unfiltered, natural viewing of the natural world. An unfiltered image leaves some traits apparent and others latent, just as an obviously inflected one amplifies some things and obscures others. It is just as one sees a thing according to Bergson. One does not see a thing in all its qualities. One sees an image of select qualities of the thing according to its importance to the viewer's action or memory. Never is presented a full, true image of the object in all its detail, for such a viewing does not exist. Every viewing of a thing is skewed and inflected, thus there is no inherent difference between a "natural" and an "artificial" viewing of thing.
The painted diamonds, slanted rectangles overlapping nature beg the viewer to question what it means to frame an image, to frame an object. The separate diamonds frame each other and yet they also frame the plant, contain its wildness within their multilayers of framework. The frame of the image itself seems like less of an imposing frame, a less prominent frame than the bold white frames of the paint. If anything the white painted frames serve to illuminate the plant, make the viewer seek it out and appreciate it more so than the outer franes edges ever could--the frame within the image dominates the frame without.
ReplyDeleteVery strange; if we accept the text at the bottom to be a part of the image itself (which we should), and take the words to mean what they mean instead of abstracting them into simple shapes, then we are made to feel as if the image is lying to us. The image is obviously not acrylic and not 11" X 14". Yet, perhaps just as we shouldn't take images to be pointers to meanings outside themselves, the text, seen as image, might also be stripped of meaning. Strange indeed.
ReplyDeletethere are frames within frames. no escaping the engulfing feeling. there is nothing to lack because it is all encompassing and pure creation. the black and white adds to this hyper imposition
ReplyDeleteThe diamond shape is but one layer. The cattails are another. The sky background is another. It is a confusing photo if a narrative is applied, but makes its own strange sort of sense. Sure, some cattails with a diamond overlay- why not? It's kind of fractal in nature, interestingly. Maybe the diamonds are speaking to the overall shape of the explosion of the cattail bush. Maybe it's a play on what our eyes do when looking at objects.
ReplyDeleteThe diamond shape is but one layer. The cattails are another. The sky background is another. It is a confusing photo if a narrative is applied, but makes its own strange sort of sense. Sure, some cattails with a diamond overlay- why not? It's kind of fractal in nature, interestingly. Maybe the diamonds are speaking to the overall shape of the explosion of the cattail bush. Maybe it's a play on what our eyes do when looking at objects.
ReplyDeleteThis image seemed, at first, almost juvenile and delinquent. Like when you see a "vandalized" picture of a person with a mustache that some genius Sharpied on. In truth, this image is not ORIGINALLY a picture of a plant with diamonds newly drawn on top of it.
ReplyDeleteIt is not a modification OF something. It is an entirely new and original image, but at the same time, not. There are no such things as "covers," and yet. In this marbled paradox, the image shines in all its joyful glory.
In perceiving, what do you privilege? The rhombuses juxtaposing the image offers new frames for the viewer to approach the image. There is the image as a whole, the images within each rhombus, the rhombuses within the rhombuses and their images and the images outside of the rhombuses. I have hardly begun to exhaust the variable viewpoints/perspectives present in the image, leaving the reader with an infinite way to view the image, along with an ever expanding way to privilege the perceptions within the image. The smallest rhombus offers insight into the darkness of the image, however it simultaneously contains the darkness of the center to reveal the detail and brightness of the rest of the image.
ReplyDeleteAn initial viewing of this image seems to indicate that the paint somehow tarnishes or ruins the photograph. It might seem like the image has been destroyed by the vandalism of these diamond shapes conspicuously painted in the center of the photo. In actuality, however, this image has now become more complex. The image--which now includes the paint and the photo itself--creates a multiplicity of affects that gives the image more vitality.
ReplyDeleteThe diamond shapes induce an interesting visual reaction to the viewer, seducing him or her to focus in the center of the image, as if there is something of significance. However, all the eyes focus on is just a particular zone of the image. What the viewer must realize is the democratization of this picture, in that there is no central point of focus that should be privileged while the rest is ignored. The image as a whole must be taken in.
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ReplyDeleteGursky's camera extends beyond the image capture mechanism and through the lens of photoshop. Here that manipulative lens becomes visible. Were the diamonds not there, the viewer would be unaware it was seeing an image of an image, seeing the manipulation of an image. How then, would the viewer ever know this? Indeed, the viewer can not. Hence, paradoxically, an effect of the special depth of this image is the flattening of all images -- the image is just whatever locks up with the eyes of the viewer, and whatever locks up with the eyes of the viewer is just image.
ReplyDeleteWhat are we looking at? Are the diamonds actually in the photograph? They appear to be laid on top of the surface of the photograph of the plant. In that case this is a photograph of a bunch of diamonds painted on top of another photograph. This is a photograph of a photograph. The layers of this image point to different levels of remove from reality. There's the real plant, the photo of it, the real diamonds and the photo of that. However, these layers all being present the viewing of this image is no less an event, a reality. It takes up a different space than the plant yes, it takes up a space that is constituted by the viewing of it. It is constituted by its viewing.
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ReplyDeletewow, pretty late on this post! :( Life...gets...crazy. Here it is anyway:
ReplyDeleteThe image uses a controlled external tool of added lines to fundamentally change a naturalistic scene into one of possibility. No longer does the viewer simply see plants blowing in the wind, but he/she is given three, four, five, ten (and on..) ways to view the image: as an overhead shot of diamonds/squares, leading to a tunnel; as the top of a pyramid of tilted squares or rhombi; as a folded 2-dimensional symmetrical design; as a flat picture of plants blowing in the wind, with white marker drawn on it; as five stacked squares on top of one another, and on. The more the viewer looks directly in the center, the more he/she experiences variations of the same image, which says something about its ability to transform a natural black and white scene into a performative artistic experience.
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ReplyDeleteThe wavering diamonds are actively projecting the multiple dimensions of the image. Are these diamonds jumping out from the plant or falling in? It's hypnostizing - there is this crazy sense of movement! I hope this isn't too symbolic but: It's as if this plant's vibrancy and life manifests in these diamonds.
ReplyDeleteThis image proliferates play. From the entitled ‘Untitled’, to the four white-lined diamonds, this photo does not privilege a real over the artificial; rather everything exists in play. Thus, there is no mark on an image, there is only the image. There is no heading below the image, there is only the image. Everything seeing is the event of seeing the image and its affect.
ReplyDeleteWhat’s striking about this image is the placement of the diamonds over the plants. The presence of these incredibly artificial diamonds over the plants, the plants which seem natural, would appear to place these two aspects of the image in opposition; artificial versus natural. Yet, neither the diamonds nor the plants hold priority over the other in this image, rather the emphasis shifts as quickly as the viewer’s eye shift between foreground and background. When taken up together the white diamonds act as an organizing factor rather than effacing the plants. The diamonds cut the plants into different segments, giving the viewer numerous bit size ways to take up the image.
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