The Cortex Of A West Coast Bride
Photo essay, 1995
Programming Note: In the Summer of 1995 I was working as an usher and ticket taker at the local movie theater in Kingston, writing my thesis on The Three Graces, and doing lots of photographic experiments with television stills in the evenings. These experiments reached a critical mass when I began to assemble them into small one-off books, inspired by Henry Bond’s ‘Deep, Dark Water’ film.
I’d found a fantastic bookbinders in Embankment that specialized in legal publications and were something right out of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. They worked with me to create a number of bound books, including both dissertations I produced during my time at Kingston, as well as a number of other creative projects. This photo essay was the first experiment I did in collaboration with them.
““...later she explained how, on a daily basis, she had to really push, just to bring herself down to the level of the mediocre. “
What is it for a work conceived and subsequently executed as/art practice' to be analytically described as 'impenetrable'? It is true that this presents a contradiction in terms, assuming that to some degree, every experience of supposedly usual consciousness is 'penetrable', and therefore including all facets of debate? As is often the case with discussion of this nature, the arguments can be reduced to that of language. The way in which we primarily communicate our mental 'penetrations' to each other. Coupled with these problems of communicative language are the almost pre-symbolic elements of perceptual 'looking'. Is it the case that we often 'look' without 'seeing'? Or maybe we prefer to 'see' without 'looking'? What do these terms mean? Perhaps this is but a mere by-product of the symbol saturated western hemisphere, whereby stimulated 'looking' becomes little more than chewing gum for the eyes.
Yet what am I suggesting by a work described as 'impenetrable'? This word (it is after all, only a word) alludes I in a sense to some form of aesthetic and mentally conscious state of not-knowingness, yet it is exactly this quality which provides an all to essential mystique.
It could be said that impenetrable works appear to stand in defiance of rational interpretation. There is often either so little or so complicated a degree of aesthetic stimulus that the inherent 'search' for narrative contention can either prove too contradictory or too sparse to merit sustained interest.
This unpredictability and uncertainty of interpretation is thus either a complicated conceptual form of structuring, or an element which enhances an object's fascination. To focus upon the non-ability to discuss a work creates the paradoxical situation of doing exactly the opposite. People have always had an innate urge to talk about what they've experienced. Is impenetrability possible without alluding to some other form of perceptual stimulus, past or futuristic? In saying this, I am referring to a state of autonomy which goes beyond that of the Modernist debate, in so much as the work does not even refer to the elements of its own production.
In bringing together this collection of conspicuously disparate images (immediately reminiscent of the production of Frankenstein's monster), a free rein is perhaps given to interpretation. Read narratively, as autonomous individuals or as particular groups (in the sense of 'chapters'), the visual stimulus supplied here creates the paradox of at first seeming to be a meaningless arbitrary selection of photographic imagery. It then appears to perform (by the very fact that the images are all 'joined' in the context of this book) in an indescribable, yet obviously not impenetrable way. Perhaps to posit a discussion of this nature is merely a question of 'pre-penetration' assemblage.
Matthew Shadbolt
London, September, 1995
