Discovering Duane Michals

I Had Forgotten That I Had Grown Old by Duane Michals, 1989

Facebook put a post in front of me a few days ago: “You may be interested in: Artist Talk with Duane Michals, an online event sponsored by the Princeton University Art Museum,” and the invite came with an enigmatic black and white photograph of a shirtless man, half in shadow, holding a bird. I know this is the equivalent of walking by the xerox stapled to a telephone pole like some goth punk band poster, doors open at eleven. Or: Avian-friendly roommate wanted, with the ripped telephone number fringe.

Oddly though, the post connected. The image was arresting. I planned to attend.

I’d been daydreaming about slowing the scroll of images that don’t just stream but course through my life’s digital landscape, this swift, drifting current. My ‘feed’ needed a fast. I missed standing in front of wall in a gallery, losing time inside a frame. Every photo I take or see lately after a while is just a document, a recording, an image with a time stamp. I might need someone to show me how to reframe that effort with some joy, some feeling, some intention.

A Zoom connection. A bow-tied art history professor greeting us from a dignified, classically appointed room somewhere in Princeton. A mild apprehension (am I about to be told what to think about Art? Did I sign up to be superserious?) broke with the split screen addition of Duane himself: 89 years old and joyful, impish, in the moment.

He started in the 1970s with what felt like punk DIY spirit to me: “School is for rules,” he winced, implying all you needed was to follow your desire, learn your craft by doing, and be open to your creativity and discovery. “Anyone can photograph tears,” he warned: don’t copy someone else’s truth. He was chasing that arresting thing, that heart-capturing moment.

“I’m not interested in what something looks like,” he said. “I want to know what it feels like.”

The indie punk creed of not ‘selling out’ always felt a little immature to me, an effort that tied one’s nonconformity to some exclusive club. Disconnecting over connecting. Duane didn’t buy into it either, and brought his way of seeing to commercial work as well. And he wasn’t elitist about the days of working in a darkroom: he smiled with wonder at the freedom in the current technology of phone cameras, thinking about how much more deftly an artist can get to their idea.

He combined text to his images early on, not as captions or tags or even poems, but suggestive stories or biographies. Some might find it naive, or that it takes away from the image. Sure, it was naive, and naked. A decision to reveal, not conceal. Honest yearning.

His work with sequential imagery reads like film stills; you could imagine the 2021 version of him pulling stills from a video, distilling an essence into potent shots. Adding dialogue like a graphic novel.

He explored multiple exposures back when the discovery of what he captured wouldn’t be seen until the film was developed. More collapsed storytelling. Using the powers of the medium to connect.

Love and death are two of the themes he is still exploring in his art. We all have loved and lost. Stop and look again. It was all so beautiful. The memory blurs but the photograph says: See! Beauty remains.

Duane inspired me to not overthink, and to reveal something, knowing it will become part of the work. His talk left me with a lot of his work to explore.

Some time later, moving through some yoga poses at home, reaching the challenging ones I have to work for every time, I recognized a dichotomy that exists in my own efforts. My own struggles. I snapped this photo as a record and a reminder: change your perspective, humble yourself, and you will be able to lift the world.

Brian Ward, “Surrender/Strength,” 2021

So, Thought Construct?

The name’s a bit thinky, sure. I want to use this blog as a garden where I can plant little thought-seeds Johnny Appleseed-style, and move on through my digital landscape knowing they’ll sit there dormant or sprout away. A thought construct to me is any idea of the mind that can be explored, built-upon, pruned, re-built, renovated, and maybe someday become real. Then what does it become, when it jumps into our reality?

What happens when we build an idea?

Everything about Architecture is a thought construct until it is built: every drawing or model or image of a space. Every line or color or perceived shadow. When we stand inside a built work, small as a room or vast as an Olmsted park, it may confirm your thought construct, or it may feel like something else entirely. Did you catch my use of the word “feel” in this thinky intro?

Fiction is a thought construct: storytelling is a way of weaving all of us into a connected narrative through places and times with truths and untruths, a structure made of words that when assembled can reveal who we are: think of the characters’ psychology welling up in a novel, or the thought-reconstruction of histories and biographies. Poetry is the spoken, irreducible condensate of a thought construct.

Painting is any thought-construct applied to a two dimensional surface.

Music is a thought construct pulled from noise.

Photography: a thought construct framing a stolen or captured image.

Film might combine all of these thought constructs into a dream-viewer or dream-displayer.

“Culture is everything we don’t have to do.”

Brian Eno said that (In his book A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, which i just finished). The statement draws a blurry line around civilization’s needs, and puts art and sport and culture outside of it. There are form vs. function arguments coiled up in that statement too. Design probably inhabits that blurry zone (‘We need shelter: What does it look like? We need clothes, a fork, a wheel, a phone..’). But our eyes see color, therefore we have art. We are animals that move: let’s dance. Our brain remembers: retell it in a story. It’s all survival. In the end we have to do it all. I don’t want to draw a circle around Architecture and exclude anything.

Eno’s book is a diary but more so, collecting passing thoughts and deeper ones that grow into major themes and moments in his work in later years. It connects beyond his own work into teaching, music production (he was working with Bowie, U2, and James at the time), and family time. Seeking, not always finding. The book is buoyed by essays and thoughtful pieces that are unafraid and honest and unabashedly smart.

I am not a renowned avant-garde artist. I will never daydream with Bono about the next U2 song. I will never hatch an artistic movement like ambient music. But I am someone who thinks and feels and looks for ways to incorporate what I find into art or my work. Eno’s book was very revealing about life: He was roughly my age when he wrote it, and the honesty in sharing the desperate thoughts, scary thoughts like: Is this work any good? Am I repeating myself? Is the idea-well dry? I can relate: I often go through periods where I am squeezing a full sponge of creativity, but then that sponge needs to sit and do nothing. Absorb. Inevitably, the quiet message comes back through out loud: I’m just getting going! Will I have time to do it all! I think of photos of myself taken at half my current age: I want to shout to that kid, “You were right! Don’t stop now!”