Nuance and Immediacy v.2020

The dramatic prevalence of the image over the written word in our present moment is akin to a return to the Lascaux caves: immediacy has its advantages, but nuance isn’t one of them. -Claire Messud, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, 2020

2020 as narrative, as a story of starts and stops. The gaps where memory seeks the link to before and after. How to picture this? Does the word immediacy imply a fleeting lack of depth? Does absence of nuance suggest a claustrophobic space? To me a picture can reverberate, a sonic, temporal extension of the contingent place of the moment. Modulation shapes nexus, rain drops begin to fall, a toss of pebbles onto the shining, intersecting ripples across a stilling pond, a cave wall flickers in firelight.

Along the urban edges during my walkabouts I take-in instances of graffiti — spray-can writing/marking/painting — which I will name chromotope, morphing from chronotope to extend an obscure and complicated metaphor, convergent chromings, images rippling. A year disappears, time becomes space, folds into place. Nuance? Dunno. 2021 may tell…

Note: In general I am fascinated by spray-can “throw-ups” (large, bold, mural-like letters, words, names), especially when layered. (I do not like generic tagging.) By moving in closely and photoing detail-as-rectangle an abstract image emerges. This form of appropriation creates a new apprehension of color, texture, and depth.

Note2: Claire Messud, an accomplished and prolific novelist and critic, in her essay, from which the above epigraph appears, writes: "The written or printed word enables the transmission of thoughts and experiences across centuries and cultures. … The dissemination of the written word, from the time of Gutenberg, has enabled us to tell stories of great depth and complexity, and to share our analyses of these stories. I don’t just mean literature: history, too, is the analysis of human stories; as are psychology, anthropology, law, and philosophy."

Note3: I was drawn in, intrigued, by Messud's characters, her style of storytelling, in her novel The Woman Upstairs, 2014.