In the Gallery

Chaos

Storm Wave, Indian Ocean, 1964

Things at Mindport are in flux just now, with staff members returning from vacation and leaving for vacation.

In the next couple weeks we're expecting our leaking roof to be replaced and for the floor of our bathroom and "wash-up" area to receive a facelift.

The short-wave radio has a new antenna, one that eliminates the overwhelming static that was obliterating reception. You can actually hear a station now and then, when the ionosphere cooperates. (Short wave signal strengths are very much affected by the state of the  ionosphere, which in turn is strongly affected by time-of-day, season, sunspots and solar storms.)

John Ito is busy at work designing and building another intriguing exhibit. No projections as yet on the date of its appearance. Stay tuned!

New work of two artists is up in the gallery. We'll get more details posted here by the end of the week. Please check back.

Cracked!

During one period of my photographic career, I found myself photographing cracks in things. . . sidewalks, drift logs, rocks, walls. Once you start looking for them, of course, you see cracks everywhere. We take them for granted to the point we hardly pay attention, unless they're cracks of some obvious significance, like noticing that one has suddenly appeared in the ceiling or wall of our home.

After photographing cracks for a spell, I began to contemplate the interesting significance of these forms.

Cracks, or fractures, occur when stress on an object reaches a point where forces holding it together are less than the forces pulling it apart. They follow lines of maximum stress, and/or areas of minimum strength in the material being stressed. That being the case, the shape of a fracture can tell you both something about the material and something about the way it was stressed. Certain materials, for example the glass in your automobile windshield, are designed with internal stresses or weaknesses that will cause them to fracture in a particular way. Typically an automobile windshield will practically explode into tiny fragments when struck. It's designed not to break into large shards that might cause serious injury to someone riding in a car when a collision occurs.

Some materials can actually be identified by noting how they fracture. For example, the volcanic glass called obsidian exhibits conchoidal fracture, which is smoothly cupped, like the inside surface of a cockle shell. Some forms of quartz fracture this way also, and can be chipped (selectively stressed) into arrowheads, and more recently, extremely sharp surgical tools.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the phenomenon of cracking or fracture is that it's not a phenomenon restricted only to solid physical materials. Fracture can occur in the atmosphere, in the form of lightning. This is an instance when electrical stresses build to a point where the atoms in the air are torn apart into free protons and free electrons, a physical state known as plasma. Once this fracture has occurred, it becomes electrically conductive, allowing the passage of a flood of charge which we see as an instantly brilliant channel of light, and hope we're not too close. A crack of thunder occurs due to the sudden expansion accompanying the heat of the stroke. It's a literal explosion.

Perhaps I was drawn to cracking in physical media, most significantly, because of its metaphorical relationship to cracking in humans and society. We speak of people cracking, or being cracked. This is simply a state when an individual becomes stressed to the degree that something in the psyche gives way so that normal social function is no longer possible. The very same thing occurs when a whole society is placed under stress. At some point the stress creates a fracture that manifests in the form of demonstrations, riots, outright mayhem, or destructive wars.

Comparing societal fracture to physical fracture can present clues as to the origin of the former. If fractures are a manifestation of stresses acting on a material, and weaknesses within, it's obvious to ask, what are the stresses on society or an individual, and what are the weaknesses within, leading to crackups of various sorts, or even large scale war.

We're living in a period of history when these are important questions to ask. Cracks are starting to appear in the social fabric and we should be asking how they might be leading to large-scale fractures. . . that can't be glued back together like broken pottery. It's easy to remain unconscious of stresses and small crackups until it's too late to do something about them. Such manifestations of social stress as mass murder in a school or movie theater are frequently written off as “random,” events, when, in actuality they are symptoms of social stresses getting out of hand and weaknesses being ignored. The solution is to address those and not to focus on simplistic fixes such as more guns OR gun control, or ineffective security measures in schools, theaters. . . and airports. (I DO advocate prudent gun control measures, but do not believe they are the ultimate solution to violence stemming from societal stresses to which we currently seem oblivious.) All too often these sorts of "solutions" end up exacerbating the stresses that lead to a “crackup” in the first place. They serve mainly as a means of distracting us from the real work of initiating social changes that could alleviate the stress associated with poverty, abuse, and other social ills. You might say they are equivalent to smearing plaster over a crack in the wall, when the source of stress is a decaying foundation beneath the house.

Kevin Jones

Interdependence

If you've visited Mindport, you may have noticed, or even played with, the exhibit pictured at the left.  It doesn't get a lot of attention, because it's a low-key exhibit, whose message is subtle. This is not surprising, since the metaphorical statement it makes refers to an aspect of reality that most Americans studiously relegate to the unconscious realm, if they are not indeed completely oblivious to it.

The exhibit, “Interdependence,” consists of a group of magnets glued to the bottom ends of a number of stiff wires that are suspended by their top ends so that the magnets are free to move like pendulums. The magnets are oriented so that they mutually repel, causing them to space themselves apart from one-another. A rubber squeeze bulb and air hose are situated so that you can direct a jet of air at the suspended magnets. The result is that the movement of one or more magnets causes all the others in the field to move in response. None of them can move independently from any of the others.

“Interdependence” relates to ecology, which is at the core of environmentalism. Ecological studies inform us that everything under the face of the sun is affected by and affects everything else, directly or indirectly, more or less.

Instead of maintaining an awareness of interdependence and the truths of ecology, we Americans typically focus on its opposite, independence. In fact, our whole traditional style of scientific research involves arbitrarily separating the subject or process being studied from its natural surroundings, then drawing conclusion about it as an isolated object or function. This can be a useful strategy at times, but more often than not, the conclusions derived from such study are misleading.

The idea of independence is a myth entwined in the roots of America's beliefs about itself. It's likely that many of the observable differences, say, between the Canadian character and the character of Americans goes back to the fact that we “won” our independence, while Canada maintained its membership in a commonwealth. To Americans, “commonwealth” smacks of socialism and we certainly want no part of that. . . unless it's socialism for the lords of banking and Wall street. We also are in love with the mythology of the West; the idea of the independent settler, and the myth of the self-made man. The fact that the frontier closed long ago, and we live in close contact with many of our fellows has yet to dawn on us. And no man is self-made these days. Anyone who manages to rise in the social/economic ladder does so either with the active help of others, or by acting at their expense.

I believe blindness to the importance of interdependence in nature and all social systems is at the root of the terrible predicament in which we find ourselves, economically, environmentally, and socially. We humans were not always so oblivious to this principle as we appear to be nowadays. Henry Ford historically realized that he must pay his employees well enough that they could purchase his cars if he wanted a market for them, a bit of wisdom that seems to have been forgotten. Most indigenous peoples realized that if they destroyed the environment that supported their lives, they would destroy their ability to survive. Many of us have abandoned traditional notions of civility and consideration, forgetting that ignoring our neighbors or treating them badly will sooner or later result in unpleasant forms of “blow-back.”

Ignorance, willful or not, of the principle of interdependence is a force behind all the ecological disasters that are currently afflicting us. We've barely acknowledged that if you clear cut all the forests, not only do you eliminate one possible sink for excess carbon dioxide, but the mountainsides turn to sliding mud, the salmon spawning grounds are destroyed, and the evaporative cooling supplied by living trees is eliminated, one more factor contributing to climate change.

Socially, certain members of society, who have managed to sequester a great deal of power, in the phantom form of money, remain oblivious to the fact that if they impoverish the “99%”, inevitably the value of money will decline, and the masses will likely turn on them, a sad lesson that has been repeated (and ignored) many times in history.

Perhaps the views elaborated here on interdependence will lend insight as to the thoughts that inspired  the creation of  its namesake exhibit pictured above. Despite the seeming non-assertiveness of its presence, the exhibit expresses an idea whose importance is such that if we ignore it, the continued survival of human beings on this planet is doubtful.

Kevin Jones

The Zen of Repetitive Form

Another Mindport staff member asked me what my current exhibit of photographic work in Mindport's gallery would be called. I wasn't sure I wanted to call it anything, but the above artbabble title tongued itself into my cheek. Not being a practitioner of Zen, I don't know a lot about it, outside of its inscrutable public face. According to my dictionary, inscrutable means, "impossible to understand or interpret." I don't know that either Zen or these photographs are impossible to understand, but both are difficult, if not impossible to interpret. A tiresomely overused contemporary phrase would have it, "they are what they are," which implies that they speak for themselves, and don't translate well into any sort of verbal description.

A thought-provoking book worth your attention is, The Tao of Photography, Seeing Beyond Seeing, by Philippe Gross and S.I. Shapiro. There's another called Zen and the Magic of Photography, by Wayne Rowe. This latter I haven't looked at, so can't speak for it, but I bring it up because its description on the website where it's sold is similar to the way I'd characterize the subject contained in the former. This is to say, whether you're talking about the Zen of Photography or the Tao of photography, we're covering similar material. One way of understanding this (un) "style" of photography is to say that it's photographing without objectification. That is, it's photography that's not about something describable as an object, like "Mom's house," "Fido the Dog," etc. It's about emotional reactions to an image as abstract form, however not obvious emotions describable in one word or even many words. It involves inscrutable imagery.

I actually don't embrace any way of seeing upon which the label Taoist or Zen, or any other named "style," has been tacked. A few years ago, after reading Gross and Shapiro's book, I ran across a photographic web site that was devoted to "Taoist" photography. The images there became tedious after I'd gone through a few of them. It seemed to me that the people posting there had fallen precisely into a "style," and that had drummed the life out of the images. Such is the peril that comes of misunderstanding books. Still, Gross and Shapiro's is a good one to look at.

I'm not holding up the photos now hanging in Mindport's gallery as being anything but images that grab me emotionally in. . ."inscrutable" ways. For a long time I've been interested in the significance my eye finds in random patterns, whether they be formed by rocks, waves, geological formations, or any other grouping of forms, usually ones found in nature. Seeing these significant patterns involves being in a certain frame of mind, a non-thinking, spontaneous, "mindful," state, which is where the Zen or Taoist reference comes in. Those labels arose because they point to the pertinent mind state, that of paying rapt attention without labeling anything.

Whether these images will evoke the same emotional reaction in you that they evoke in me nobody can say. In that connection, consider the quandary that comes with the question: "When I see the color red and you see the color red, do we have the same sensation?"  Come by Mindport's gallery and have a look. These photos might stir your imagination in entertaining ways. If they don't, there's plenty else to see and explore at Mindport.

Kevin Jones

Further Perspectives on Photography and Place

 For half my adult life, one of my most beloved places to camp and hike has been in the Four Corners area of the Southwestern US, amongst the formations of pink sandstone often pictured in traditional shoot-em-up Western films. The photo here was shot on its Northwest margin, near a geological formation called San Rafael Swell. I present the image because within it a number of ideas converge that interest me. They include photography as a portal to other worlds, weathering and decay as stimulants to imagination, and how the spirit of place impinges on consciousness. The latter I discussed from a different point of view not long ago in this post.

The Navajo Indian Reservation lies within the general area I refer to above, and this "homeland" is sacred to them. It's easy to understand that because my explorations there have rendered it sacred to me, also. Deserts, of course, have always been seen as venues for spiritual pilgrimage. You can't spend time in a desert area, especially one so rich with interesting geological features as this, without eventually feeling that you're coming in touch with something ineffable and eternal. It's not an accident that the American West has been mythologized, not only by Americans, but by people from all over the world.

The photo above expresses something of the spiritually evocative essence embodied by this particular area of the Southwest desert. To me it's an example of what Carlos Castaneda characterized as a "power spot." In case you aren't acquainted with the work of Castaneda, he was an anthropologist who wrote a series of books in the late 60s about his life in Mexico as an apprentice to a Yaqui Indian shaman, identified as don Juan Matus. Since then Castaneda's claims have been questioned, and his works considered by some to be fiction, but whether or not you believe the stories are objectively true, they are certainly evocative and emotionally credible. Having once read them, I've never been able to forget them or some of the truths at which they hinted. I also remember being uneasy about going outdoors at night for weeks after reading them. Such was their affect.

Castaneda never completely defined what a "power spot" was, other than it was a place you could discover by turning your vision inward and moving about until you settled upon a physical location in which you felt a deep comfort. Having done a lot of camping and hiking in my life, I've had experience with this feeling. Even before reading Castaneda, I was aware that some places felt better than others as camping spots, but early on didn't give it much credence as anything but whim. With experience however, I came to believe that there was more than that involved. Not only are some places strongly congenial, but there are others that exude a spirit that makes me wish to actively avoid them. I've had friends that camped in particular spots in the Southwest that exuded such hostility that they felt compelled to get up in the middle of the night, break camp, and move elsewhere. In time I've concluded that the sense of recognition that I associate with certain places is authentic, and rather than attempt to logically or "scientifically" analyze it, I prefer it remain a sweet mystery.

A scientifically oriented person I know once mentioned hating the word mystery, arguing, in essence, that there is nothing in the universe that cannot sometime or somehow be explained. I doubt that, and wouldn't want it to be true anyhow. In my view, it's necessary to maintain balance atop a fence between one extreme, allowing science and logic to dictate everything or the other extreme of refusing to give credence to physically and logically provable fact. It's the work of maintaining that balance that keeps life interesting and worth living.

Earlier, I made mention of photography as a portal to other worlds. Those worlds could be imagination, but possibly, in addition, there may be other dimensions and realms in our universe of which we are just not aware. Those of us who grew up more in the tradition of logic and science jokingly refer to manifestations of some such realms as "woo-woo." That's not a train whistle, but the sound young children make in association with ghost stories told around a campfire late at night. . . and some of the tales of Carlos Castaneda, which planted the phantoms in my imagination that sent chills down my spine when I went out in the dark. Photography is sublimely suitable as a portal because it enables re-configuration of the physically-seen universe in ways that make features evident that we may not normally notice, and which do suggest in some sense, "other worlds." Castaneda, in his account of study with don Juan Matus refers to witnessing the "crack between the worlds," which opens during occasional moments, especially at the hour of sunset. Photographic practice, when pursued assiduously, confers a comparable experience.

Kevin Jones

GIANT TASKS/tiny people

Mindport has a number of new residents, all of whom are under an inch tall, all of whom are doing big jobs – vacuuming up tangled messes, feeding each other, cleaning gum off sidewalks, recreating without technology, ending racism, confronting environmental collapse.  One rounds the corner, and there they are, heads down, working hard, chipping away, little by little, day after day, only occasionally swayed by the seeming impossibility of solving the problems at hand. 

I admire their diligence and determination in the face of what may be insurmountable obstacles, and in quiet moments I can hear them shouting to us in their tiny voices, “This is our time!  These are our tasks!  If we can do it, so can you!”