Filipovic ~ Groom ~ Batchen ~ Borges: Past, Present, and Future

    I have always loved photography and with a camera in front of my face from time to time, it has occurred to me more than a few times that the present moment will continuously escape you if you are constantly trying to freeze it. As Geoffery Batchen put it in his article "Life and Death" (2010), photography is a "temporal movement back and forth between past and future."Looking back through photos that I take on a particularly beautiful location, it occurs to me that the time I spent composing, analyzing, tweaking the angles--the more I felt as though time evaporated. Maybe I didn't appreciate the present moment and the people who were around because I was so obsessed with getting the perfect photo.
The beautiful thing about photographs though is that they are, in themselves, timeless. Elena Filipovic argues fervently that time strictly a linear progression, claiming that  "there is no way to escape time." Films are in themselves, timeless because they are not bound by the laws of a linear progression of time. Flashbacks and flash forwards are quite clear, and in reality, these types of things exist too. When people are in a state of deep meditation, your mind is almost in a true state of euphoria. Its not that you aren't bound by time, rather that time is quite lucid and less structured. Dreams in the REM cycle of the brain are also quite similar. The person dreaming isn't living within the bounds of the 24 hour cycle. I have found through my own dreams that activities within the dream become quite stretched out and hard to decipher.  Really, as I read and reread and reread these articles again and again, it frustrates me that I cannot get a firm grasp around what time is!

What is Art? Can Art change the World? Saltz Reading

       Being a cat person and all, naturally, I enjoyed Eric Fischl's comparison of Art to the relationship a person has with his/her own cat. When you call the cat over, it will most likely walk in your direction, rub its face on a chair or coffee table and then look at you from afar. You can not expect art to just give you some sort of instant gratification, you have to wrestle with it, play with it, experiment with it. As Saltz clearly states in his article, "The Whole Ball of Wax", 'The moment you think you understand a work of art its dead to you.' As both a creator and a viewer of art, I understand that the ideas, process and the final product goes through an evolution process. Even an artist themselves has to be open to change because nothing goes exactly as planned. Art is like nature, always changing but never out of place or out of the ordinary.