when the dust settles......

when the dust settles, everything stays the same, or not entirely

what is the story I want to tell you?

what is the story you would like to hear?

where do we meet in the middle of these two desires?

imagine two people meeting each other on a road, each one travelling alone. the sudden appearance of the other unsettles and heartens at the same time.

what are the first words they say to each other?

why is speech so removed from written language, why do we speak words so carelessly?

worn out clichés and the gentle loss of words.

i never wrote about it before (art and what it means to me). it might become the biggest cliché ever.

like a huge balloon that fills an entire room, o please, will someone please pop it?

stupid inflated ideas about worth.

that this pause lasts a whole lifetime, in parallel, absolute parallel to the life that travels, ticks, grows in the wrinkle on my hand.

void. and blooming crescences

decrescences.

the chatter fades. the slight blips and crackles. ruffles of dust pass by

doors open

doors close

is this the story you wanted to hear?

no?

try again.

imagine two people meet at a busy bus stop, on a busy day, in a busy city, each one travelling alone, together. the bus doors hiss closed. your conversation took me into the following week.

so, I stand, eyes open, ears open. I don’t speak for a week. I don’t sit down for a week. my back grows strong (I’m walking).

my thoughts amass, form a multitude and then disperse politely.

in every situation the small things have power.

we now look to you, storyteller, to be our guide. the reversal of centuries.

the shoes are shod.

the stamps inked.

what about the letter sent but not received?

what thing was missed?

there was a picture in his wallet of a woman he met during the war but never saw again.

then fifty years later he saw her, he took no action.

completely stilled by the realisation of her presence,

but you want to hear some other topic don’t you?

how the horizon starts from the ground up

how meaning evades and permeates every possible surface and how all our ideas are corruptible.

to be more hopeful

I like mystery, I’ll confess.

dinda fass 3 June 2012

even in dim light

i know, i know, it took a while...but here you have a short film made back at the end of January / beginning of February this year. If you have looked at my other films (see previous post Films!) you will see that i have tried here to develop a film of longer duration. i wanted to try placing the central section of the film, which is a moment of concentration and pause, within a longer non-narrative structure. i used some old film footage which i made on a super 8 camera back when i was in my early 20's with some words written recently. on reflection, i think there are a few films (or perhaps ideas for films) within this short work. i'm happiest with the central section, it could be that the rest belongs to another story. the artist and film-maker Raul Ruiz in his book Poetics of Cinema writes:

'Every film is incomplete by nature, since it is made of fragments interrupted by the director's cry of "Cut!" When we attempt to complete these fragments, several different films will answer the call. If we consider each fragment of a film as an airport, then we can accept the idea that multiple films will land there.'

There is a nice story that goes with the filming day. My friend and fellow student, Ikue Konishi, on her way through the park the same evening or maybe the next day, saw the black ballon tied to the tree and took this photograph. She thought it might have been some alcohol inspired adventure and was surprised when she saw the film.

if anyone feels like posting a comment about this post, please do, i'm still reflecting on this work, in particular the relations between short concentrated clips and longer non-narrative duration.

don't look away.

1...2...3

'living coin'

'We have, then, to get beyond the non-event of information to detect that which is resistant or refractory to it within its very process. To find, as it were, the 'living coin' of the event - to play on the way it is 'cashed in' in the sphere of information, as we do with the way the phantasm is 'cashed in' in the economic sphere. To make a literal analysis of the event, as one does of dreams, against all the staging procedures and batteries of commentary which merely neutralize it. Only events set free from the information system (and us with them) generate an enormous power of attraction. They alone are 'real', both unforseeable and predestined, for though there may be nothing to explain them, everything in the imagination is ready to embrace them.'
Jean Baudrillard

fleeting

actions, observations, meetings, infatuations, time, minutes, days. moments in time, the senses alive. the moment you are capturing probably only lasted for a few minutes, or maybe less. seen from a distance they are disjointed, not connected to a life. isolated fragments of light. time rushes on but we hold, and remain framed by something fleeting.

combines (part 2)

rain soaked glows

did you see me? i bought a newspaper to distract myself and you were still there. maybe you were waiting for someone. i can't remember where i was going or coming from. this black night with shallow reach. water flows along the streets, floods thicken, we are all drenched. what will you see when you look everyday? rivers of people push from day to night. looks slick on rain soaked glows. splashes everywhere. back and forth. effervescent lights. activity. a few times i walked home from work, it took hours, but i didn't care. so much noise and dirt and as if the city was a mountain and my home the top.

the domestic / for stories

there has been a pause in posts here while i was busy making new work, writing essays and getting assessed for my course. i have made a new film which i will post very soon i promise, but meanwhile here are some photographs of domestic situations. i made a folder of domestic images a few weeks back and have been thinking about them for some time. i took them in various places in the last 18 months not just in my own immediate environment. i'm interested in how stories can develop while looking at photographs, some more than others of course. if there are any images which spark a story in your mind, or a fragment of a story, i would like to hear it. (please feel invited to use the comment section below)

don't look away.

 

.

new images and a (very) short story

 

We watched an excellent film about the artist Francis Alys last night; the way he walks and walks reminded me of the start of a story i wrote many years ago:-

On the advice of my friend Flapjack, I closed my eyes opened my mouth and let the liquid slip coolly and darkly down my throat. I opened my eyes and opened my mouth and before any sound had the chance of escaping, Flapjack, who in fact has not been a friend for very long, was talking. Talking, except I couldn't hear what he was saying. Maybe he was speaking in one of the many languages that he made up whilst he was travelling alone, on foot, across the acres of loneliness that inhabits his heart. An hour ago I would never have imagined he could talk this much but now he was eased. Looking at me, his lips moving, his eyebrows bobbing up and down I couldn't help but laugh. He stopped. I stopped. And we starting walking. We were always walking that was what we did, just walk. It was Flapjack who inspired me to walk further than I normally did. He never wanted to go back along the same path in the opposite direction. Sometimes we'd leave by the front door of my house and come back through the the back door because even just one retraced footstep was a repeat, a familiarity. I could understand that. These days our walks lasted longer and longer. Days ran into months and I recall I have neither left by the back door nor arrived through the front door for I don't know how long now. We don't carry things with us for more than a couple of hours. Usually. But Flapjack had been carrying this phial of unidentifiable liquid with him for seven days. He'd hold it up to sunlight, dawn light, dusk light and moonlight. Each time the shade of black would be different but always, in the end, black. He didn't tell me where he'd found it and I didn't ask.
Dinda Fass 1996

films!

in the summer i made two short films which i have mentioned before. although they are both still in sketch format and not in their final edit i have decided to upload them now to my blog (via a youtube channel which i have created today). i want to share them, and i hope by doing so to move on with my film work - to mark the place as it were - and proceed from this point.

recent work in the studio has been a combination of close analysis of my photographic images (for content and  narrative sparks). organisational activities like getting my photo archive in order and some experimental try outs making use of the wall space in the studio to make some loose collages using objects which i collected (and used last year in installations) and found and original images. what i have discovered is, that what i really want, is to use this collage gesture in the making of a film. materiality is very important to me, the real sensory experience of things, their shape, their colour, their sounds, their texture and i think i can make this tendency i have to be closely aware of the material quality of things to come through with film media.

yesterday before going to sleep i read an excellent short essay by the English poet Ted Hughes called 'Words and Experience', in a short book he wrote in 1967 called Poetry in the Making', on the experience of life in relation to poetry.  another book called 'Don't Ask Me What I Mean' edited by Clare Brown and Don Paterson has helped me to realise that the way i create my work is very similar to the descriptions poets give of their writing process. time and again, poets say that words have their own life, their own intentions, that 'the poem allowed the poet to discover it much as a water diviner is permitted to come upon water'. this theme repeats itself in the contributions from appox 100 poets in this book. what interests me is that somehow, with poetry, this is accepted as a process, whereas in visual art when i say the same thing, that i want my images and objects to have their own voice, for the intentions to arise from them, people look at me funny and say ' but no.... but of course you are the one deciding', i dont feel like that.

what i didn't realise before now is that there is a big possibility for me to make visual poems.

this is what i want to continue with.

in the studio

i am playing in the studio with how to present the combinations of things i am working on. recently i rearranged the space so that i have two big walls to lay things out on. there are hints of narrative which develop by putting images and objects together in this way.

 

 

 

 

photography - groupings and analysis

a few weeks back i went through all my photographs ( mostly 6 x 4 prints) taken since i was given my first camera, (a Pentax K1000 when i was eighteen - been through a few different ones since then though) for the purposes of trying to reflect on the types of things that i have photographed, and what has kept my interest over the years. Here are some of the groupings i made from the collection, they are things that i thought belonged together. i realised whilst doing this that some of the most interesting images to me were ones with some kind of absence - empty washing lines, close ups of hands/feet, objects isolated from their environment.

don't look away.

background + now

just over a year ago i swapped a full time job in the construction industry which i had been doing for five years, for a two year Masters in Fine Art at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, North Netherlands.
some would see this as a strange step but for me it made perfect sense. although i enjoyed my job, which took me to Glasgow, Ipswich, Liverpool and London, i had a growing sense of not quite being in the right place. i had a couple of studios and group shows in this time where i was trying to develop my own work as an artist, at the same time as working in my job, but i realised that in order to progress my ideas i needed to be in a learning environment. although i am still working more hours in a job here in The Netherlands than is ideal, the difference between working in a building project office and delivering mail on the streets of Groningen is that i feel there is now more thinking space, and less demand made on my job related performance.

having spent my first year of study here experimenting with sculpture, installation and film (some results of which can be seen in earlier posts on this blog) i have reached a point now at the start of my second year where i am trying to focus my work into three specific but related disciplines: photography, film and writing.
at the moment i am in the production stage where i am taking photographs, writing daily, editing film material and arranging my thoughts on what type of films i want to make. and all this in the conceptual frame of the 'poetic image'.

during this process i am reading about the general nature of the poetic from the viewpoint of literary poetic works (Octavio Paz, Samuel Beckett, John Berger, Henry Thoreau and some literary theory), the poetic principle in photography (Jean Baudrillard, Gabriel Orozco), by attending regular film screenings at Shadows Film Club and by trying to analyse my output in terms of where i feel i am closest to my intentions.
which is all very well but the hard part is working out how to combine these activities in the studio into a finished piece(s) of work.

below some more images from my local area (the project i started a couple of months ago).
the next post will be some of the written work i have been working on.

don't look away.

 

blackboard writing

writing is becoming more and more important, and i am trying to write everyday. the way i write is by allowing words to form on the page without trying too hard to create meaning or order. the first draft is my original material which i then refine in the second and third drafts. by cutting and pasting sections together, i make connections between phrases and words.  

at the moment i am looking for ways to combine writing, film and photography. these three blackboard panels from my studio are an immediate way to see exactly how a piece of text can function outside of a notebook or off the written page. 

the more i write, the more i want to write. in part, it is about re-discovering the qualities of words themselves, and in part about accessing experiences in the present, and experiences in the past.

the first one is dedicated to Mo Jupp.

don't look away.

 

experiments with text and image