Artist Identity: April 2012

On Silence and Blur

“I Love Silence” David Hockney

It is my intention in this essay to interpret the use of silence and blur in my practise, and to examine the work of other artists and photographers, whose use of silence and blur have determined the understanding of the context of their work.

Silence and Blur are two important aspects of my work. Silence and blur create a visual language in my practise that depicts my memories, experiences and philosophy in life. They are integral to the way I see the world that are influenced by my faith in Mystic Christianity, and my interest in Zen Buddhism. “Peace I leave you and Peace I give you. I do not give peace as the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled and do not be afraid” (John14:27). There is a deep spiritual association in my work; it is my faith that demands I listen to the silence, and it is in the silence that I find peace. In the silence I understand more of who and what I am, and what I see.

To look upon the land, was to commune with a visual hieroglyphic in which everything was part of a larger symbolic whole. In this approach the land as a natural form is alive with potential meaning, so that the photographer can see the world in a grain of sand. The camera transposes it as part of a larger mythology of spiritual and mysterious presence. (Clarke. G: 63)

Hockney (2005 – 2011)

David Hockney in an interview on the BBC said “I love silence.” He has completed a series of paintings depicting the landscape of his home in East Yorkshire. The work was produced over a six year period and depicts his great love of large open spaces, painted on huge canvases. The paintings were done at intervals during the seasons, showing how the landscape and all its vibrant colours continually change. In his silence, he captures the intensity of the colours of every season. Looking at his painting I can almost hear the landscape and all its sounds. He has captured the essence of the landscape in his obvious love of his native land in the silence. To my eye, he has become one with the land. The silence becomes the emotion, and the emotion becomes a picture that allows a depiction of the essence of what it is that is seen.

"When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence." Minor White (1908 – 1976) annedarlingphotography.com

This quote by Minor White is one that I have never forgotten since I first heard it. It inspired me to find the silence I sought, and in the silence to develop the style of photography that I enjoy. The blur in my images is a depiction of how I see the world in that silence. It is the mystery of everything that I seek to capture.

“You must know yourself and your subject well before you can take a picture. You must become one with it.” (Lester. P: 700). It is the silence that allows me to become one with my camera and my surroundings. It is in the silence that I find things I do not expect to find. In silence I shut out all knowledge and knowing, all emotion, worry, fear and longing, to see my vision with clarity. The silence is my clarity.

I posed several questions to myself of what silence means to me when thinking about writing this essay. The answers that resulted were that those that walk in the silence are the spirits of loved ones no longer here physically, but are a presence in my heart that guide me, as I live my life remembering them. The one who speaks to me in the silence is God. The God that I believe is ever present within me, and who is my conscience and my motivation. Silence is everywhere. To sit or walk in silence is to listen intently to my intuition, and to everything that is living, or abstract or present around me. Out of the silence comes creativity and knowing. It is silence that enables me to see what I may otherwise miss, or something that has been blindingly obvious, in the silence, awakens my awareness of it. “The phrase blindingly obvious implies when something is sufficiently evident it reaches a point at which we are blinded to its presence, rather than reminded of its presence” (Miller. D: 51)

What I see in the silence is the beauty of nature, the presence of loved ones and the voice of God. In the silence I hear everything that is present in the moment; I hear that which is intuitive and instinctive. Without silence there is only noise. My senses in the silence are more acute. If I allow the silence to penetrate my being, then my senses are allowed to do their work. Silence takes me to another realm of my consciousness, to the secret mysteries that are otherwise lost to me. For me the silence brings with it a profound understanding of my life and the importance of this life. This may be a poetic understanding but nevertheless important to me.

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost”

“The Poetics of Space” (1958) Gaston Bachelard (1884 – 1962)

www.goodreads.com

Silence feels like freedom. Silence is the freedom from the interruption of noise and allows my senses to function together. There is harmony in silence. Silence does not exist as complete silence. There is never complete silence, either within myself or outside of me. My mind will not completely stop thinking even in meditation. And outside of me, the silence is filled with sounds. The sound of birds singing, the sound of the clock ticking, the sound of traffic, the sound of the leaves blowing in the wind, silence is always a sound. Silence is a means to hear those outer sounds without interruption or disruption. Silence is important to me because it enables my creativity to take place. I need silence to fully work in harmony with my camera.

It is the silence that always accompanies me where ever I go with my camera. I enjoy the silence, and I am content listening to the sound of silence. My images are a result of being in the silence. When I discovered, or realised that this is the important aspect of my art, I began to see how the silence is portrayed in my images. There is a mystery in the silence, and it is the mystery that appeals to me. I like not knowing exactly what it is I see, and although I do not always know for certain what that something is, I find comfort in the silence and in the ambiguity.

Image Silence from Nothing Penny Davies (2012)

In my research for this essay, I watched and listened to John Cage (1912 – 1992) being interviewed on silence.

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking and talking about his feelings or ideas about relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic here on sixth avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking, I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound, what it does it gets louder and quieter, it gets higher and lower, it gets longer and shorter, it does all those things that I’m completely satisfied with that, I don’t need sound to talk to me.

People expect listening to be more than listening, and sometimes they speak of inner listening, or the meaning of sound. When I talk about music, I’m talking about sound, that doesn’t mean anything, that is not inner but is just outer, people say you mean it’s just sounds, thinking for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sound, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are, I don’t need them to be psychological, I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or president or that it’s in love with another sound…..laughs….I just want it to be a sound.

(John Cage)

John Cage was a composer who was fascinated by emptiness, silence and sound. He wrote a piece called 4’ 33” (1952). He said that silence and sound could not exist without each other. This piece is pure genius. A piece of music that is silent for 4 minutes and 33 seconds that has 3 Movements. I "listened" to it and found it amazing that everyone in the audience seemed to be entranced. No one was making a sound, except a couple of coughs, just as if there was actually music playing. The conductor cheekily wipes his brow after the first movement, which makes everyone laugh and eases the tension in the auditorium. The tension in the Barbican Hall when it was being “played” was very apparent. After the ending of each Movement, everyone stirred in their seats, coughed, blew their noses and shuffled a bit. It was quite extraordinary how the behaviour of people was the same as it would be for an actual "sound" piece of music. In my opinion the score is rich, original, surreal and enticing. As there is no actual music being played, the “listener” is listening to everything else making a sound. This was the essence of John Cage’s idea, that there may not be any notes on the sheet music, but there are still sounds to be heard. John Cage and I do not have the same beliefs about silence and sound, I do believe that you can listen to an inner silence as well as the outer silence, but this does not detract in any way for my complete enjoyment of the piece.

The story of 4′ 33″ originally we had in mind what you might call an imaginary beauty, a process of basic emptiness with just a few things arising in it. . . . I did have an idea something else would happen. Ideas are one thing and what happens another. John Cage, “Where are we going? And what are we doing?” "John Cage and Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence" at the Museum d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. (James Pritchett)

http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/07/29 John Cage (classicalcomposers.org)

Conductor 4’ 33” Lawrence Foster (YouTube)

I am prone to use blur in my images which is a direct result from my love of being surrounded by silence. I really like using depth of field. I enjoy the aesthetic of everything in the background of an image being out of focus. There is a kind of mystery to this. You have to look deeper into an image when it is out of focus. You have to work out what it is that you see. Since I discovered the work of Uta Barth, she has been an important influence in my own work. I am fascinated by her concept of the act of seeing. She encourages the viewer to look at her images not fleetingly, but to really look. Uta Barth’s images have very little content and rarely any subject matter or the physical presence of an object. They appear to be empty spaces, but in fact have so much content to the viewer who takes time to stand and really look into the picture. The imagination takes over and the viewer can be reminded of their own experiences and memories within the images. Margaret Cameron first used blur and remarked when her work was criticised, “What is focus, and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus” (1864) (Mirzoeff.N:67)

Iago by Margaret Julia Cameron

(Arts.guardian.co.uk)

“The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer – a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discerned that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are not evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing but “photographic seeing” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.” (Susan Sontag: 88)

When Margaret Julia Cameron used depth of filed in her photographs to give her image a blurred effect those around her criticised her work. It was said that “She should not let herself be misled by the indiscriminate praise bestowed upon her by the non-photographic press, and should do much better when she has learnt the proper us of her apparatus.” Cameron’s work was misunderstood and her photographs dismissed as unworthy of attention. During the 1860’s she was an English housewife in her forties, a formidable character who had a strong presence of mind who did not adhere to the normal conventions of photography at that time. She was an imaginative and innovative photographer who developed her own style. It is said that “she bullied her sitters unmercifully” (Badger. G: 31). She had been inspired by Wilkie Wynfield to whom she wrote in a private letter “To my feelings about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success.” (arts.guardian.co.uk). Wilkie used a painterly effect in his photographs which at that time were very different to the commercial studio portraitists who used sharp focus in their work. Her work was unconventional using soft focus as a narrative text. In the Colorassi portrait (Iago) she rejects the convention of making the point of focus the eyes, settling instead on the lips. That the moist-eyed model’s introspective gaze is also directed towards his tightly pursed lips draws the viewer inexorably to the mouth. Iago’s fate, it should be remembered, was the penury of guilt and shame, and his final words are a vow of silence: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word” (Act v, scene ii, line 305) (Howarth. S: 39)

Uta Barth Ground #95.6 (1995)

(Beautyinphotography.blogspo.com 09.03.2010 @10.37am)

Barth has experimented with depth of field, focus and framing. Of her work she says “the question for me is always how can I make you aware of your own activity of looking instead of losing your attention on the thought about what it is that you are looking at” (Lee:36)

As with Margaret J Cameron, Barth disregards the traditional rules of photography in order to develop the imagination and create a deeper insight into the aspect of “seeing.” In Barth’s “Ground Series” (1991 -1996) the use of blur is extensive. These have been compared to works by Richter and Vermeer for their delicacy and lighting, and the painterly style of her photographs. Barth says that she “is interested in the shared territory between panting and photography which arrives out of established conventions of picture making” (Lee; 58)

Barth experiments with, and explores our sense of vision, and questions how we look at the things we look at. Charlotte Cotton suggests that “the space between the viewer and the photograph become part of the interplay between space and subject, seeing and not seeing” (Cotton: 133). By playing with soft focus and blur, Barth manages to capture the most everyday items in an extraordinary way. The white or pale colours can create an emotional response form the viewer to recall memories and moods of their own personal experiences. The images are ambiguous in meaning and have a unique hypnotic quality. There is an interaction of peaceful quietness and meditation. “Artists transform traditional ideas of space and time into a new idea of totality of moment, an idea which refers to wholeness” (Kapoor: 34). Barth’s images elicit completeness, even though her images have no narrative, they can be seen as a depiction of the whole. Barth shows in her images an imaginative glimpse of the world around us (Cotton: 134)

Blur is an inter play between space and subject; it creates a mood that can provoke an emotional response. There is room for the imagination to wander, to search the recesses of the mind for memories and lived experience. I have come to the conclusion, that in my practise, silence and blur are inseparable. One comfortably exists with the other. In silence I seek mystery, and in the use of focus I sense that mystery.

JOHN CAGE

http://youtu.be/pcHnL7aS64Y

I typed out the transcript to the Interview as I wanted to read and understand what John Cage was expressing about Silence. I find it easier to understand when I have written something, than I do when I only hear it.

(The noise of traffic in the background, JC sits with his cat in his apartment that looks down on to Sixth Avenue)

"When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings or ideas about relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic here on sixth avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking, I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound, what it does is, it gets louder and quieter, it gets higher and lower, it gets longer and shorter, it does all those things ...... I’m completely satisfied with that, I don’t need sound to talk to me.

We don’t see much difference between time and space; we don’t know where one begins and the other stops. Most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of as being in space. Marcel Duchamp began thinking of music as being not a time art, but a space art. Sculpture Musicale – different sounds coming from different places and lasting, producing a sculpture which is Sonaris and which remains.

People expect listening to be more than listening, and sometimes they speak of inner listening, or the meaning of sound. When I talk about music, I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything, that it is not inner, but is just outer, people say you mean it’s just sounds, thinking for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are, I don’t need them to be psychological, I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or a president, or that it’s in love with another sound…..laughs….I just want it to be a sound.

I’m not so stupid either, there was a German Philosopher Emanuel Kant, he said there were two things that don’t have to mean anything …that is don’t have to mean anything in order to give us very deep pleasure. (Talks to cat and laughs).

The sound experience that I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. The silence almost all over the world now, is traffic. If you listen to Mozart or Beethoven you hear that it’s always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see that it is always different." John Cage (1912 - 1992)

MARCEL DU CHAMP

With Thanks to http://www.abdn.ac.uk/french/duchamp.shtml for the following two images.

Portrait of Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Du Champ Installation "Mile of String"

http://youtu.be/TYGUERvcjZQ

I listened to this with my headphones on, and at times thought there were sounds coming from inside my house. There were surprising sounds that made me jump, and then laugh at myself for doing so. There is the sound of a Squeaky Toy and the sound of a Musical Box that is tuneless ... a little disturbing ...and then there comes the surprise ... a Horn ...just one sound of the Horn to jolt you out of your comfort zone! The Music Box continues and begins to jar a little on the nerves...I think "when will it end".....then finally there is a recognition of a nursery rhyme that you question .... is it or isn't it.... the the sounds end.

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