Mathew Pokoik - news

I’ve been reading and listening to Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I’m becoming deeply convinced is one of our greatest modern storyteller’s. Tonight I read the following remarkable and poetic passage from his book Dreamtigers - that so wonderfully speaks of the life, mystery, and duality of being an artist.

Jorge Luis Borges, 1963, ©Eduardo Comesaña

Borges and I

It’s the other one, it’s Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me through the mail and I see his name on academic ballot or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, Stevenson’s prose. The other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor. It would be too much to say that our relations are hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature justifies my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has managed to write some worthwhile pages, but those pages cannot save me. perhaps because the good part no longer belongs to anyone, not even the other one, but rather to the Spanish language or to tradition. Otherwise, I am destined to be lost, definitively, and only a few instants will be able to survive in the other one. Little by little I am yielding him everything, although I am well aware of his perverse habits of falsifying and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things long to preserve their own nature: the rock wants to be a rock forever and the tiger, a tiger. But I must live on in Borges, not in myself - if indeed I am anyone - though I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or than in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I passed from lower-middle-class myths to playing games with time and infinity, but those games are Borges’ now, and I will have to conceive something else. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one.

I do not know which of us two is writing this page.

It was recently suggested to me to look up the work of the French post-modernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and I have begun to work through one of his earlier works The Consumer Society. I am quite taken with his work; already after only a brief introduction, I’m finding it to be a remarkable analysis of the state of our global culture. As more and more of my time is spent involved in communication through my laptop this opening passage gave me pause for reflection:

There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather – on a rising statistical curve – with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages. (p.25)

I’m imagining a soundtrack to this passage along the lines of “the age of Aquarius” morphed into “the age of Affluence”, a hallucinogenic journey through the idealization of the 60’s morphing into our modern object / consumption / sign based culture. I’m finding in Baudrillard many of the themes that have possessed me to travel around the world investigating signs of signs of signs, the loss of the authentic, the increasing homogeneous global village. Our modern media based relationship to the center or rather an illusion of centrality, an illusion of the real, an attempt at a modern day object/sign based Utopia, which is after all a “no-place”. I almost fell of my seat after reading the following passage, it was like finding a long lost brother:

What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [le vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality with the dizzying whirl, for the heart of the Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, the ‘Heart’ which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security.
So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message – all these things we ‘consume’ – represent our tranquility consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion of the real (even where the allusion is violent) than compromised by it.
The content of the messages, the signifieds of the sign are largely immaterial. We are not engaged in them, and the media do not involve us in the world, but offer for our consumption signs as signs, albeit signs accredited with the guarantee of the real. It is here that we can define the praxis of consumption. The consumer’s relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility – nor is it one of total indifference: it is a relation of curiosity.

I’ll leave you with the following image from ‘the global city’ dealing with an image of images in the making, being transmitted out to the nether regions of our mass communications system:

Mathew Pokoik, NASDAQ Studio, Times Square, NY

I’m currently in Birmingham, UK, for my first ever-formal portfolio review at Rhubarb-Rhubarb, such a strange and curious event. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this type of thing, a large group of photographers meet over a couple of days with a wide variety of photo industry reviewers, ranging from museum and gallery curators to magazine editors, stock photo agencies, and variety of other industry types, its a great way to make contacts and begin relationships.

After presenting my work time after time today, honing my “spiel”, frankly I’m a bit tired of all this talk about myself! When I came upon the following passage while reading this evening, It temps me to embrace it and speak only in mythological images for the next two days of reviews. This is from the Italian novelist Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For The Next Millennium, a lecture on literature titled Lightness:

The only hero able to cut off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield. Thus Perseus comes to my aid even at this moment, just as I too am about to be caught in a vise of stone - which happens every time I try to speak about my own past. Better to let my talk be composed of images from mythology.

To cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the lightest of things, the winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.

Maybe Perseus needs to become the patron saint of photography? This particular art form based on images caught in a mirror