Photographic and Philosophical Musings

“Silently welcomed home” is how I describe the experience of returning to a grove of mesquite trees and being present among them in the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona. A camera marks the occasion.

Later, after selecting one of the images, I crop it into a visual matrix of fifteen smaller images, print and frame them, then mount them on a wall.

The effect seems quite pleasing.

But, tiring of ‘realism”, I remove the photographs from the frames, leaving only the black cardboard mounting boards, change the orientation from vertical to horizontal, and hang the installation in our entrance hall.

By eliminating any surface image, I frustrate any attempt to see an underlying reality other than a void. Somehow, this new installation gives voice to the futility of any attempt in art to express the inexpressible, to express any underlying reality.

Western thought is based on the idea of center – an origin, a truth, an ideal form, an immovable mover, an essence, a God which guarantees all meaning: Art, words, and language serve as signs mediating this original, irreducible object. The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, takes exception to the assumption that signs are capable of referring accurately to a transcendent reality that exists outside of language. For Derrida, there is no knowledge of ‘reality’, but only symbolized, constructed experience. Abstract or non-objective art seeks to uncover a signified transcendent by erasing signifiers and discovering pure form.

There are fifteen frames in my installation, underscoring the view of philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard that meta-narratives with their claims to Truth are crumbling and are being replaced by smaller, heterogenous local narratives, narratives that cannot lay claim to any such knowledge.
If art is about surface and the paradox of an underlying unreachable reality, then by eliminating the surface in empty frames, the viewer is faced with the ambiguity of confronting a void.

To emphasize the paradox, I decided to hang the work in a virtual gallery challenging the viewer to question what is real.

The objects depicted in the lower right frame are duplicate images of a woman pushing a shopping cart in her unwitting search for the transcendent which, of course, is happiness.

But we can’t escape the illusion of our experienced reality, so I asked my granddaughter to pose in front of the installation. She willingly obliged, or so it seemed to me,