arrested questions: april greiman’s drive-by shooting questioning the world:
1.
We live our days presuming to know the world, or, at the very least, to know our present moment in the world. If nothing else, at least the instant of experience seems to us to be accessible in a semblance of fullness: sounds, sights, textures, the materiality of the sensual world seems immediate and unmediated. Upon this bedrock of sensation we build perception, then cognition, then the higher structures of our consciousness. Our view of the world is a construct, a rhetorical argument in our ongoing debate with the realities of the world and of each other. As a construct, it must always remain subject to criticism, and questioning this construct is tantamount to questioning our entire worldview.
Critically, one listens to an argument looking for premise and structure. As every strong philosophical warrior knows, the best place to contest an argument is at its premises, that is to say, at its axiomatic foundation. “Etant donée....” “being given…,” says Marcel Duchamp, echoing science in the title of his last work: Etant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau/2. le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.), upon the given we build reality. Hence, to challenge an argument, the “given,” the axiom, that which is taken for granted, must become the not-given, the not-granted, the foundation no longer available to support a superstructure of conclusions.
After the premises, the second best place to confront an argument is at the weak links in its logical armature, the faults in the syllogistic structure itself. Premises can be wrong, and arguments can be poorly constructed, and all sorts of erroneous conclusions can be assembled upon the fallacies that ensue.
What is at stake in such considerations is not just rhetorical advantage. As with just about everything we endeavor, what we pay for, we pay with our lives - each argument contains an epistemology, a way of knowing the world, a set of principles that soon permeate how we come to see the world and ourselves in it. Sometimes, most times, when what is at issue is minor, when its consequences are too quiet and subtle, we do not notice the effect of a misunderstanding. Other times, when what is at issue is quite fundamental, the consequences, once understood, are hard to overlook or overestimate.
Now, what if what we take for granted, the immediacy of our moment in the world, is not granted? What if, by selective acts of questioning through the use of attention and technology, the premises and structures of the given become not only not-given, but are actually, beautifully, taken away? The more deeply and sharply focused this questioning of assumptions is focused, the higher up the structure of our constructed reality the shiver of reconsiderations must tremble.
2.
The basic epistemology of our global civilization is based on a few core elements: space-time, mass-energy, information-entropy, wave-particle, the notion of the atomic, and so on. Much of this worldview is abstract, counter-intuitive, and at odds with our immediate sense of reality. What if, with a digital camera and its attendant toolset, one began to question our immediate sensation/perception/cognition of the world by placing an overlay of these core elements (space-time, mass-energy, information-entropy, wave-particle, etc.) upon the given moment, so that the moment itself became not-given? That is to say, what if, with a simple digital camera and acts of heightened attention, one converted this abstract contemporary epistemology into a corresponding phenomenology, the formula into a lived image, making the counter-intuitive and abstract present and concrete? Reality itself would then shift, a new sense of the world would emerge, and we would no longer be able to walk into the day with old perceptions.
In this exhibition, we are considering work presented under the heading of “drive-by shooting;” we are aware that this is digital work, work assembled of bits and pixels, the “atoms” of information and image in our time. Moreover, motion and violence imply space-time and mass-energy. Little by little we see that, together, the formal and actual elements upon which these images depend establish a nearly one-to-one correspondence to space-time, mass-energy, information-entropy, wave-particle, and the attendant notion of the atomic, as outlined above.
What is a “drive-by shooting” anyway? What do these words imply, once we break through their surface, linger on them, dig into them, look at them through this filter I have put forward?
3.
“Drive-by” implies a timeframe, a narrow window of opportunity, a bracketing of the “now” between a near past and a near future. Paradoxically, the velocity of the drive-by results in a dilation of time - the moment which would have been instantaneous is now extended to fill the duration of the drive-by, the span between approaching and leaving the scene, and attention shifts temporal gears - the normally imperceptible duration of the drive-by gets stretched into a length of time we can attend to, and higher actual speed then implies slower perceptual motion, implies longer attention, implies greater revelation of detail, in a chain of cinematic consequences we would normally overlook.
“Drive-by” also implies a vehicle, a driver, perhaps also a passenger, in any case an Heisenbergian observer who, by observing, alters reality, and a trajectory, a course, a path, in other words various and complex flavors of agency and intention, activity and passivity, contingency and purpose, knowing where you’re going - or realizing you’re being carried wherever the road and the driver want to take you.
“Shooting,” in turn, even if random, implies aim (intention, of another kind now), giving (attention) and taking (a picture, a life). Coupled with driving, it suggests an animal or urban safari, an expedition, and, in the end, the fundamental act of the hunt. And, of course, there is an allusion to an act of focused violence, and violence is nothing if not the sudden and disruptive transfer of energy.
Here, then, are gathered the elements of the epistemology of our times, elements that are at once perceptually unfamiliar and yet accurate to how we actually know the world intellectually. Like wormholes in space-time, these works tunnel through the differences between the intellectual and the perceptual, and offer up a shift in how we can attend each moment.
In “Camera Lucida,” his brilliant essay about photography, Roland Barthes articulates a way of comprehending what differentiates one expressive medium from another based on a threefold structure. First, there is the “studium.” the level of competency in the medium; second, there is the “punctum,” the point the medium is trying to make, and, In “Camera Lucida,” his brilliant essay about photography, Roland Barthes articulates a way of comprehending what differentiates one expressive medium from another based on a threefold structure. First, there is the “studium,” the level of competency in the medium; second, there is the “punctum,” the point the medium is trying to make, and, third, there is a second, more profound “punctum,” a “stigmatum” the “stain” through which a work addresses not only its subject matter, but its entire field. It works like this: I see a photograph that moves me: I register that it is a well exposed, well composed photograph (the studium); I see that it is a photograph about, say, to make the example topical, a gang war, a street battle about to happen, which is why it was taken in the first place (the punctum); so far, so good, but I notice the date: the gang war has already happened, the gang members are already dead, the catastrophe that appears imminent in the photograph has already transpired. Barthes isolates this as the core of what photography is about, this oscillation between what is imminent and what is already enacted, to which the photograph, as photograph, gives evidence. There is a claim upon reality that the photograph makes that other expressive media do not make: this, which will be, is already past. Its evidentiary claim is so strong that is collapses time.
What then of digital photography, what of the work of April Greiman, of these “drive-by” shootings? Are these photographs in the sense that Barthes has described? Or is their “stigmatum” of a different order? If they do not give evidence to what will and has already transpired, what do they give evidence to?
4.
Surely, they are handsome, beautiful, accomplished, at the level of the “studium” they are strong and confident; surely, there is a point to their being photographed, persistently, over the last two decades: their point, their “punctum,” is the title of this show - “drive-by shootings, “ investigations of capture of the attention to fleeting time, among other things. But their “stigmatum” the part of them that punctures us till we bleed a little, till there is a stain on our armor, what is that?
Shot, selected, edited, cropped, processed, these images are a distillation of strange transformations, of moments of transmutation, the precisely chosen parts of an image in which time and light conspire to have us question reality. They do not rely on a claim to reality; in fact the disdain the ordinary that remains ordinary. Instead, they methodically undermine reality and seek out all that is aberrant, but not gratuitously so. They seek those changes that are telling: traces of light become solid, near and far reverse, location becomes indeterminate, solid figures become ghostly, trees whirl into dance like flames in a vortex, the normally subservient digital grain of pixels becomes as carefully attended to as any conventionally figural element of the image, the still world becomes animistic, and the whole is suffused with the mood of a hallucination not induced by drugs, but rather by an accuracy to the rendition of what a moment may feel like if the hierarchy of the world collapses - not as an accurate record of what any specific moment in the life of any specific person feels like, but as a proposition of a potential moment in the potential life of a potential person in a potential but unspecified circumstance, in a potentially infinitely reconfigurable world. Seeing them, one can imagine being there (but where?), being someone (but who?), being in an important temporal pivot point, at a decisive juncture (but to what?), and feeling a perceptual vertigo, the dizziness of a moment between moments, like catching the blur of what the world looks like as you turn suddenly to see who is behind you, friend or foe, thrill or threat, and in the turning discover that your sensory world is just a construct that this moment is forcing you to question. In the end, the stigmatum of these images is not their claim on objective reality - what has transpired - but their embodiment of an awareness of the objectivity of mutability in both the world and in the construct we call our consciousness. Their stigmata are potentiality and transformation themselves, the strange superposition of quantum states brought to a scale we can understand in images that are forever polyvalent and vibrating. They are not statements; they are not answers; they are not even questions: they are the act of questioning itself, arrested.
