sliced bag

At dinner this evening, Terry Smith - professor of History of Art at the University of Pittsburgh, and on his way back from a conference about contemporary Chinese art at Princeton - was telling me about the photography of Michael Cherney, a Brooklyn-born photographer/book maker/conceptual artist who works in China, and who selects parts of his images - looking for just the right sliver - blows up that part - breaks it up into equal sized sections - prints these onto xuan paper, fixes them onto backing sheets, dries them, and has them bound into a traditional accordion-style form.   "On the most elemental level" - I quote from what little I've been able to find out about him online - "Cherney's method allows photography, where one fixed viewpoint is a given, to serve Chinese painting tradition, which is not tied to a fixed perspective.   Enlarging the sliver and then sectioning the enlargement causes the fixed eye of the camera to lose its foundation and serve the flexible perspective of the Chinese tradition."

No homage to China, here - the bag is one that I bought in Santa Fe flea market a good few years ago, even if the brocade and beading and rich coloring is indefinably Oriental rather than otherwise.   But I was interested in the disorienting prospect of filleting up an image - a relatively simple, but already tending towards abstract shot - in a way that refuses any stable position for the eye.   My first attempt, though, was rather too much as though I'd simply shot the view through a latticed blind, so I experimented with moving one slice just slightly out of kilter, and with making the spaces between the slices just slightly irregular.   One of the things that I like about this is the idea of creating a sequence that absolutely refuses to be a narrative one.