August 29, 2006
A Midnight Waltz With Spirits
A midnight waltz in Chornobyl, now that's kicking death in the teeth.
--Martin Cruz Smith, Wolves Eat Dogs
by Jerome du Bois
It's been beyond disappointing, this past week, to witness the complete lack of response to Catherine's stunning post on her spirit photography. Her evocative illustrated narrative, for one thing, takes the reader on a journey through fear and into wonder, with side trips into making artworks out of what she has digitally captured as she tries to make sense of what has entered, and lingered in, our lives. And then the photographs themselves, fraught with mysterious beauty, beggar explanation, since they are simply point-and-click digital images made with a perfectly functional Canon EOS Rebel. No tricks, no manipulation, no mistakes, and yet they could stand right next to, and blow away, all the overwrought work by Jeremy Blake or Wolfgang Tillmanns or Gerhard Richter, not to mention all the "spirit photographers" out there with their corny websites. She considers it her masterpiece, which she worked on incessantly for most of the summer.
I can understand how most of the locals would ignore her piece. We've burned our ticket and our bridges in this toxic town --a place as poisonous as Chornobyl (yes, that's how they spell it in Ukraine)-- because we've pointed to both their lack of high artistic standards and their elevation of mediocrity and stupidity as worthy of exhibition. We're surrounded by small minds with degenerate appetites. So we're reduced to waltzing at midnight, all alone on this small bright screen, when I know that a show of these photographs, blown up on gallery walls, and accompanied by interactive audio of her story, would be compelling beyond words.
But it's those other visitors out there, in other states and countries, who really puzzle me.
From Michigan to Illinois to Maryland, from England to the Phillipines to Spain --nothing. They drop in, look briefly, and leave. It makes me wonder what happened to wonder. And the appreciation of haunted beauty. Hundreds of creepy websites will show you pictures of the dead, and dozens claim to exhibit ectoplasmic entities, but only this one displays the longing from the beyond, as these spirits, bereft of their beloved bodies, keep kicking death in the teeth --to no avail. It's life on earth they miss. Believe me, I've listened to lots of channelers in my time, and whoever or whatever was speaking through them, these entities never had anything to say about the landscape of the undiscovered country. Which leads me to believe it's no place to envy.
Please take more than a moment --take your time-- to study, really study, the photograph below.
Little House In The Big Graveyard, 2006. By Catherine King. All rights reserved.
Spirits, in their desperate desire for connection, reach out to touch the streaming light, and manage to bend it slightly, like lifting a woman's hair from the back of her neck. But they darken the sky with their presence as well. Many days they have lingered around our cabin door, in these hard times.
Perhaps, as Catherine has written, we two are cursed. Cursed by a door that opened and let in a flood of sadness and mystery, and the knowledge of our fragile contingency. A knowledge that others run from. But whether they look back or not, it's gaining on them anyway. So we stay and face the darkness and dance, invisible as the spirits that surround us.
Posted by Jerome at August 29, 2006 08:05 PM | TrackBack