John Menick Blog | Archive for July, 2007

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been more than slightly obsessed with John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ve probably seen the film a dozen times or more. I’ve read, and highly recommend, the Anne Billson’s BFI study. I’ve defended it to fellow film buffs as one of the best films of the 1980s, period. I even worked at a place called The Thing, gleeful noting on a daily basis the secret connection between my employer and my not-so-guilty pleasure. But this goes way beyond any kind of fandom I’ve ever seen. Way beyond.

For more Thing insanity please see outpost31.com.

From Yahoo News. One is art, the other, not. Maybe.

In a public reading four years ago, William Gibson was asked by a well-meaning audience member whether the viral videos in his novel Pattern Recognition were meant to address contemporary images “without context.” After a slight pause Gibson wryly asked in his dry Canadian-ized southern drawl, “Are you in school?” The laughter subsided and Gibson confessed to having to go away for a while and think about what she was asking. I thought of this exchange when reading Errol Morris’ recent blog entry at The New York Times:

I have often wondered: would it be possible to look at a photograph shorn of all its context, caption-less, unconnected to current thought and ideas? It would be like stumbling on a collection of photographs in a curiosity shop – pictures of people and places that we do not recognize and know nothing about. I might imagine things about the people and places in the photographs but know nothing about them. Nothing.

Morris’ entry is perhaps one of the most thoughtful things I’ve read in The Times in a while, and one can only hope it leads us a little closer to his upcoming film on Iraq. Lurking in the background of his essay is the question of whether or not it’s possible to have a photograph without context. Of course, Gibson’s audience member was being somewhat hyperbolic. There is always some context. But why is there always some remainder of some relation to something outside a photograph? Is it because the very fact of a photograph necessitates context: namely that someone — something — in fact took it?

I would propose a project: create an exhibition or a book or an album of photographs without context. None. Pure semantic self-sufficiency. I can see it now: scientists working around the clock in hazmat suits making sure every scrap of context has been expunged from the premises. A job for real professionals.

I’m not exactly sure why Peacemaker was on NPR this morning, since they covered the gamemaker almost exactly one year ago. Like political art that doesn’t take into account its role as a market luxury item, one has to wonder if politics should really be understood as a video game…