First love a lie: a novella
She made this drawing of this young actor from a magazine and sent it back to the magazine’s “P.S. I Love You” section. This section was where lovesick admirers could send their drawings of their beloved idols (the instructions were to send reproductions only, no originals, please). Eight months later she was in the supermarket looking in the magazine and there was her drawing!
As a result, she discovered what she should probably have known anyway — that dark could be beautiful.
While working on this idea she knew she wanted to see additional companion pieces and she was very interested in the way that narratives could be expanded and reconfigured in multiples.
They mediated the intimate interaction with her body, at times even replacing her body;
But most importantly, they located her body within the culture.
If she had to sound-bite what the content of her work was about, she’d have to go with “unfulfilled longing.”
Unapologetically romantic and, currently, terribly out of fashion.
It’s all light and shadows and a piece of paper — who knows, right?
This reminds her of Cubist collages made by Braque and Picasso around the early 1900s in
To work through the idea more quickly, she began making preliminary structures in miniature scale. At some point it occurred to her that if she considered the maquette as a self-sufficient medium, the scale change itself could add new layers of experiential complexity.
She liked the idea that it’s not a frozen moment but it occurs in a very brief interval of time. It’s almost like the description of a Futurist painting, but a Futurist painting of it would be very dynamic with a lot of bravado, and this was very simple.
with each succeeding piece, she became more and more like a narrative, and her body became, increasingly, a character.
and, with a stubbornness that she was born with, she demanded him to take notice — and never forget.
CHAPTER 2
this is my most personal project, the one that doesn’t really go far from myself, and from which i should step away if I want to grow.
CHAPTER 3
This first image is the image he constantly searches for. This first image will stand as the parent of all his work that comes after it. In the interim he has only the “just sufficient.”
He sends her this image as such a parent. In it she sees the glimmer of what he has been seeking: a sensual visual vehicle and yet one depicting a detailed conceptual narrative.
At some point, he is able to conceive the possibilities and the power of illusion that photography offers.
In his mind, she imagines a place where small spring flowers would be as big as his brother and sister.
This exemplifies concerns basic to all his subsequent works: the relation of image to text, of real space to imaginary space, of description to narrative, of stillness to movement.
In everyday life, the relation between words and images is one of dependency: words are used to explain an image, or images are used to illustrate a text.
“This is a temporary installation or performance, whose document is more than a document because the primary or only way of experiencing the art, event, or installation is through a photographic reproduction.”
He acknowledges that for many, including her, the experience of art is achieved primarily through photographs.
This is particularly important, because it forces him to find the motivation for work in the “simplest” of things.
It becomes a new beginning for him.
And for her…
CHAPTER 4
While he has been an artist his whole life, having drawn, painted, postered, and photographed throughout his childhood and through college, the threshold that this particular piece represents is one in which her attention, his vision, shifts from the primarily visual to the conceptual and philosophical significance of sight.
He wants to get it so big that it will be hard for her to experience it as a whole. He wants to force her to scan it, to experience it almost like it was a landscape she is traversing.
She then begins to feel that his notions of frustrated meaning and conflicting gestures are being expressed in just about all of the art he makes.
And when she views this now, it confirms her belief that he has a single story to tell and that his struggle is to reinvent that story over and over again in pictorial form.
It is an attempt to make a mimetic image where the repeated gesture creates a skin and the act of painting becomes like the caressing of the form. While the format documents a physical memory it also reminds her of the slapstick humor of the double take.
Soon this found knowledge becomes an impediment, as too much research often can, and she remembers absolutely clearly that moment when he realized that the only way through it all was to use fiction.
Through this he realized there might be a lot more to photography than just making more nice photographs.
Photographs could question photographs.
This assumption produced a lot of bloated, self-absorbed work with little sensual reward, and a self-reflexivity bordering on narcissism.
It was funny and sad at the same time. It was about art and life at the same time. He realized that for him art was like making love letters for strangers, whatever form it took.
Now it represents an urban line of expectations projected upon the dream of suburban utopia, the dream of a good life the right way — a horizon that is constantly imploding.
He sees this as a new prospect for turning the ordinary into theatrical tableaux.
First time he ever sees her face. First cut. First time he realizes life is a series of firsts, then she dies, which is a first.
