One of the interesting frustrations of the way I make photograms is that I can’t see what I’m doing. This image was made by repeatedly moving a handful of materials across the photographic paper, exposing with a low-angled torch. At the end of which I had, as always, a blank, a white rectangle. I’m reliant on chance and accident, which, when the image emerges in the developer, may or may not have produced something worth looking at. I made this one some years ago, but I’m posting it now because my current reading seems to be conspiring to set me thinking about how the good accidents occur.
The Paris Review sent out an email a short while ago with excerpts from an email exchange between Helen Vendler, the literary critic (aged 90, shortly before she died) and Christopher Bollas (80), writer on psychoanalysis. Vendler praises Bollas for the way his writing illuminates the ‘preceding unconscious assemblage’ that leads to a poem or work of art, the ‘hidden (to the artist) internal web of unconscious thinking that has required time to form itself……. lifting what may seem (but is not) accidental into visibility’. That’s good, I think, all the slow musing that leads to the creation of methods conducive to chance. But it’s not entirely sufficient; some accidents really are accidental, what matters is the decision to accept them.
At the same time I was reading David Toop’s book ‘Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory’ in which he quotes the American composer Alvin Lucier, ‘That was a wonderful accidental piece. You know Igor Stravinsky said “I have all these happy accidents”. Toop’s book contains many descriptions of Japanese experimental composers/sound artists, with their Zen influences, which made me take down from the shelf an old, battered, blue Pelican copy of ‘The Way of Zen’ by Alan Watts. Written in 1957, it was hugely influential in its time, including for people like John Cage. Here’s Watts writing about arts and crafts in the Far East.
’…it is always recognised that…. superior work has the quality of an accident. This is not merely a masterful mimicry of the accidental, an assumed spontaneity in which the careful planning does not show. It lies at a much deeper and more genuine level, for what the culture of Taoism and Zen proposes is that one might become the kind of person who, without intending it, is a source of marvellous accidents.’
Happy accidents – one among others in this image is those white dots on the left hand side. My finger inadvertently touched the paper as I held the bundle of materials. I didn’t intend it, but that’s ok, why not some white dots? And those little squiggles at the top – no idea what that was..
Dave Eva Photograms 