Post 39: Looking

Closeness is important for writing. What kind of closeness? I have to feel like I’m looking at something in order to write about it, which I believe is often why I write about the things I am looking at. What is this closeness you have when you look at something?

?

Seeing something is to experience the truth of there being nothing between you and the thing you are seeing. Maybe not nothing at all, but where something would prevent you from seeing what you’re seeing, there is nothing. It’s nice to think of emptiness as the space occupied by sight. Sometimes seeing has the felt experience of that particular nothing that allows it to take place, but often it doesn’t. I only experience the nothing when seeing is incredible, when I am seeing something incredible. In looking at a striking thing, there is a wonderment about the sight of it being there at all. A “how could it be?” kind of feeling. Seeing something incredible is to feel that the sight at hand has been exposed, or even that it has been exposed to you in particular. To see something that is (that looks?) incredible, and of course it’s hard, impossible, to define what incredible is, but very easy to feel what incredible feels like, is to be made aware that something is being shared, put forward into that nothing space of the action of vision. Even more, seeing is to participate in something shared (the sight is the shared thing), commonly without realizing something has been shared and without realizing you are participating.

wow

I’m reminded now of this Ken Friedman invention:

There is the page, there is your eye, and there is the space, “the distance,” between those two things. This distance is usually the place that the sculpture is not, or could not be. Typically, a sculpture is not a length, but a point in space. And there is only a length around it because it is in fact a point. This length, the distance, is what I had been calling the “nothing"; only here, it is the sculpture itself. (What happens to the nothing when it gets taken up by the form of the sculpture?) Thinking with the terms of Ken Friedman's three-part structure, a sculpture (again, anything looked at?) is at the end of a line that begins with an eye. Though perhaps I’m taking a leap to call this a line. It's only a distance. But doesn’t an action (seeing) happening across a distance (space) create a line? Am I always asking myself what a line is? I suppose the real thing of interest here is how the three parts–eye, distance, and page–interact. 

To visualize this:

(notebook from @soupmd_ <3)

I unconsciously left room for this guy's smile between the "p" and "t" of "sculpture":

In the eye-distance-page setup, I’m made aware of some kind of distinction between a sculpture and a sculpture being seen, brought to the surface through the differing systems of a sculpture at the end of a path and a sculpture somewhere else on that path, somewhere earlier. Is it always true that sculptures at the end of a path that begins with an eye (this sounds like a riddle) are sculptures that are visible, and sculptures that occur somewhere else on this path--in Ken Friedman’s instance, in the middle--are sculptures that cannot be seen? All visible sculptures (I love a world where you have to distinguish visible sculptures from invisible ones) are at the end of a line? It's true that in order for Ken Friedman’s sculpture to be in the "middle" of the line (for the typical order of seeing components involved to have been rearranged for this to happen), the reordering had to be pointed out, as in called attention to. I wonder about a sculpture only being able to be in the middle of the seeing equation if it itself is the declaration of itself as a middle. As this isn't usually taking place, surely seeing happens in a certain way when you think of what you’re seeing as an end. In what way is this? I can name a few other things that appear at the ends of lines: periods, bagged groceries, sometimes ice cream cones.

To pick up a different part of this, is Ken Friedman’s work a sculpture being mimed? The central question I'm aware of with the work overall is the question of if his sculpture is a sculpture at all. Does a sculpture that takes over the space of seeing simply become seeing, not being able to hold onto the identity of sculpture when in this seeing zone? Or is it really a sculpture (imagine something really being a sculpture), but one we only have access to through the indication of it we're given? I think if it is to be called a sculpture, it's a mimed one, as miming involves something invisible being articulated and taking form at all because of something visible. This feels like a whole category I am interested in. I used to think the interest was in things that didn't exist, the nonexistent things in themselves, but really it's not about nonexistent things being left in their own depths, but finding ways to call out out the fact of nonexistent, invisible, or imaginary things (these three words have very different connotations and I'd like to use them all) are out there, so to speak. Finding ways to identify (identification being a known act) things that are unknown. Pairing up a there with a not there. This in turn makes me think of what I’ve learned is a praecisio poem--praecisio (Latin?) being something like the act of making a point through silence, and praecisio poem, defined in an anonymous comment on one of Geof Huth’s blog posts1 as "where the poem itself is empty, but there is a title."

~

Here was a woman I was looking at one day:

I don’t think she knew I was looking at her (although didn’t we make eye contact a few times?), but she definitely had no way of knowing that I was seeing what I was. I want to say I wasn’t so much looking at her as I was looking at the illusion of her wearing a giant coat of bushes. Bundled up in it. I wonder how much Ken Friedman’s “Distance” is like this small illusion. Did Ken Friedman create the illusion of a sculpture--not actually present even though indicated to be? (Calling it an illusion feels very different than calling it a mimed sculpture--an illusion is something not real and a mimed sculpture is something real.) In Friedman's terms, I'd say the woman as she actually looks and as she's actually dressed is equivalent to the page, while the woman as I see her here is the sculpture. What I experience is what has been framed for me.

Often, depending on where you are, there may be an audience to your looking in the form of someone looking at you. This woman might have been that for me. That person could ask themself: What does looking look like? Other times, you (I) may be somewhere private, and looking only seems to happen in one direction. In these cases, you are the audience to the sight of the things you see. Though, John Berger says this about man, or, a “he,” looking at an animal: “And so when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him.” I don’t see this to mean there is always the possibility of looking being turned back on you (but somehow saying that feels like a step to getting at what I do see), but something more like a recognition of the lines of looking, and the arrows at the end of them, being all over. Somehow this seems to get at that you are your surroundings as your surroundings are you. You are the subject and the setting. Even though you’re not being seen by your setting, the seeing arrows still go both ways?

1 Geof Huth's blog is the sole reason my blog exists on blogger.com.