skandalon

The better I got to know him, the more his productivity awed me. I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I’m shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man’s-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I spent most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn’t fit the wrong pieces next to each other.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 55

• Jul 27, 2010 link notes tagged: art author novel writing word thing creation creativity composition relation fragment destruction Paul Auster Leviathan

art communication woodblock_print photo photographer design fragment frame world book painting composition

✖ Via Aphelis ― Kunisada: Fragment of the World

This is a woodblock print by Kunisada depicting a Scene from a Kabuki play (c. 1850). I scanned it from the excellent book The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore. Here’s Shore’s comments about the illustration:

“Japanese woodblock prints use the frame in a way that is more reminiscent of photographs than of Western painting. It has been suggested that it was a result of the Eastern scroll tradition ― seeing the infinitly variable croppings that occur when viewing a scroll as it rolled from hand to hand. Perhaps by examining what it gives these prints their sense of photographic framing we canclarify what photographic framing is.

Notice how, in the upper right of the picture, the frame gives emphasis to the angel’s hand staying the sword. The angel is described with the greatest economy: the artist has given the least information needed for us to read this being as an angel. There is something slyly wonderful about our ability to make an interpretation based on this minimal description.

Now, notice the leg jutting into the image from the lower right. It is really amazing that the artist chose to add this. It doesn’t relate to any of the action in the picture. It is entirely extraneous. It typifies the sort of seemingly arbitrary cropping that occurs when the frame of a photograph slices through the world. While it doesn’t relate to the unfolding drama of the picture, it does imply that this drama is a part of a larger world.”

From The Nature of Photographs, 2nd edition, New York: Phaidon, 2007, p. 64-64 (Amazon).

About Kunisada:

“Utagawa Kunisada (1786 - 1865) (also known as Utagawa Toyokuni III) was the most popular, prolific and financially successful designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints in 19th-century Japan. In his own time, his reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.” (Wikipedia)

• Jan 23, 2010 link notes tagged: art communication woodblock print photo photographer design fragment frame world book painting composition