Seeing is not as simple as it looks

I’ve been engrossed in a couple of Tomato project books recently. Mmm Skyscraper I Love You is the typographic companion to Underworld’s marvellous, some might say seminal dubnobasswithmyheadman album from (checks sleeve for the date), oh goodness, 1993 !!… nearly ten years ago. Scary. Anyway, that book is a wonderful evocation of Manhattan skylines, like Robert Motherwell or Franz Kline paintings executed in type instead of paint, but even better is Process, if only for the collection of quotable lines therein. Here are some of my favourites, copied out from one of my notebooks:

What is experimentation? Basically, all experimentation has been done in film. Any kind of technique, method has been done for 100 years now, everything has been done…… it’s exhausted. What would be there to experiment? Nothing. The techniques and methods that have been developed are now on a conveyor belt. I can pick and choose the ones I like. Films come from the way you connect the parts. If you connect them well you make a good film.
Suzuki Seijun.

How about all the bad work one sees constantly. Ideas badly conceived, written, drawn, made, rushed, not loved.

How about all the people quite happy to contribute voices that say nothing, that repeat themselves endlessly and meaninglessly. That pollute our environment physically and spiritually.

It is important to recognise what is good and what is not.

Then one day you see something so beautiful you can almost not speak; its beauty, its naturalness, its honesty shames us to silence or at least those willing to be silent.
I always hold these moments within my heart. For me this is a sacred point in time.
Work should be a means of attempting to transcend the every day. To touch a point deep inside oneself and connect it to a point outside oneself. A sacred moment of recognition.
Ivor Montague. Film world. 1964

What is more interesting and offers us richer possibilities is the idea that people are superimposed over structures as opposed to the other way round. That way the variables are greater and life is more interesting.
Night. A, alvarez 1995

If there is ever one absolute, it is never more than this one: you, this instant, in action.
Charles Olsen

Seeing is not as simple as it looks.
Ad Reinhardt


posted by duke harringay at 7:57 PM