"Navel Gazing, Previsioning Blogs"
Self portrait... Polaroid circa 1999.
Besides MU standing for Maker Unknown, mu is also a buddhist
thought/word/concept.
A few years ago a client/friend gently pushed me into terra
incognita. I spent a couple years traveling through this strange landscape
trying to develop a new language for myself. She wanted me to apply for an artist-in-residence at the
Headlands Center for the Arts.
She took me and another friend, Tony, to a talk there about
the program and to listen as current residents of the center talked about their
work. At the end Tony and I looked
at each other and coined the phrase “We got nuthin' ”, meaning our commercial
art world couldn’t communicate with the art art world. After making the commitment to her to
apply I set out trying to make the leap from one side of the land over to the
next.
The next couple years found me along California beaches
right around sunrise shooting things.
I love the almost un light at that time, it’s very non
directional….shadow-less. What I
was shooting at that time wasn’t about the light, it revolved around other
things.
One morning along Moss Beach I watched a solitary pelican
forever floating inches away from the leading edge of a wave. It glided without flapping his wings
for hundreds of yards. I guess the
wind coming off the wave was enough for flight. It was tripping me out and I started to think about the
necessary stages in evolution to go from single cell amoeba to a hollow bone
large creature capable of gracefully moving above the water.
The Buddhist say once the mind has a thought it will immediately
have the opposite thought. It’s
the whole duality of the universe thing they’re speaking about here.
And so my mind flipped and I thought “no way this is
evolution, there’s got to be a god making all of this happen”.
My mind flips again…”Nope, no god, that is uber silly to
think Paul, ain’t no thing upstairs designing this. The design is flawed and an all mighty god could not design a flawed system. It’s
evolution.”
I’m standing there flipping my mind back and forth. The pelican is gone now.
I have a un-fall to my knees epiphany….who the hell cares if there is a god or not. Not important at all. The world that is before us is the
world that is before us. It’s not
important how it got here, when it got here, why it got here. There is no answer.
This is MU.
I went back to the morning's shooting. The gist of what I was doing this morning was to photograph things that were tossed upon the beach by the ocean. In this post I talked about how arriving at a finished photograph with clients is painfully slow. I again wanted to counteract this so I would pick up the wave thrown things and arrange them once, without thinking. How they came to rest is how I photographed them. I wanted to make the temporal separation from the ocean to my background as fluid as possible. I wanted to be rid of the analyzing mind in the composition and use rather the part of the mind that "knows." See, pick up, place down.
This is MU
My application to the Artist-in-Residence program was denied.
This is MU.
