On Lens Flare, and Art as Accident
Let me pick up where I left off last time. What does it mean, in the context of art-making, to do something by accident, or by mistake, or unintentionally, inadvertently, and so on?
I should begin by pointing out that these are not all synonyms. A mistake, compared to an accident, is necessarily unwanted: a soccer forward may score a goal accidentally, say by trying to pass to another player and slipping it into the net instead, but one wouldn’t call that a mistake. It’s only a mistake if the goalie does it. And something like Koons’ fondness for kitsch (see my previous entry) is none of these things: it’s perfectly deliberate, merely heterodox. But mistakes, in particular, have a curious way of becoming the language of art.
A good example is lens flare – those little bubbles of light that show up on photographs when the camera is directed at the sun, fixed in still photography and gently floating across the screen in motion pictures. There was a time when lens flare was considered an obvious flaw in a photograph, a mark of amateurism or carelessness, and images including it were discarded. So far as I know, it’s not something the human eye does: it’s an artifact of photography, a purely mechanical error, and as such, anti-realist and unknown before the age of film (I can’t think of any pre-photographic painting that includes it). It was a mistake.
And then, very quickly, it was deliberately sought after, and became a trope for “lots of sunlight”, and, paradoxically, a sign of naturalism, or at least of nature. According to Wikipedia, the first deliberate use of lens flare was in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s movie Woman in the Dunes, in 1964; and then it shows up in films like Easy Rider; and then, if I recall my childhood correctly, in mainstream things like Coca-Cola ads from the early 70s.
So there you have something going from being a hideous technical error to an element of image-language so self-evident in its meaning that it can be beamed into every household in America, without explanation, and everyone will know what it means, all in about 7 years. That’s pretty remarkable. And by now it has passed into cliché: there’s a Photoshop plug-in that will add flare to any shot -- of course there is, there’s a Photoshop plug-in for everything – and it’s used a lot in wedding photos, science fiction movies, that sort of thing.
This happens in music all the time: guitar distortion is an obvious example. And it comes up in less universal ways pretty regularly. When I was recording Michael Fracasso’s record, we were mixing one day and there was an odd moment where a riff showed up as a strange echo in the cacophony of a song. We couldn’t figure out where it came from, so we isolated the track: upon inspection we discovered that while I was dubbing a guitar part using only the drums as a backing track, I’d had miscounted one of the changes and played it a measure late, so that in the final mix I was momentarily playing four beats behind the rest of the band. It sounded pretty good, so we kept it. That kind of thing happened a lot.
I think it occurs whenever someone is using an instrument, and cameras and guitars are both instruments of a sort. It’s an artifact of performing, it’s somatic, and it leads to art which is fundamentally beholden to the kinds of mistakes that occur when people interact with machines. (Though not always: I once had the following exchange with William Eggleston:
JL: How often are you surprised when you get your film back?
WE: Not very often. I assume it’s going to be the way I saw it. Of course, I have stuff where I didn't realize the exposure dial...I thought it was at 250 and it really was half a second. That will happen. But I don't lose any sleep over it.
JL: Because the other thing that always strikes me about photography -- at least for me -- is how accidental it is.
WE: I don't go for that. I don't think mine’s accidental a bit. I like very much the idea of making a lot of photographs appear accidental, but that is definitely a joke, and that’s not a great deal, that’s just a personal thing, for me to have some fun.
That said, I don’t know whether I believe him. Eggleston is a deeply contrary and disingenuous man, which makes conversations with him a lot of fun. But maybe he’s telling the truth here.)
An exact analog doesn’t exist in writing: the closest thing to it is a typo, and I’ve never made an interesting one. But it’s not as if everything is deliberate in writing, either. You can create broader mistakes by, for example, inadvertently giving two characters the same name, even sometimes indirectly, say by calling one Liz and another one Beth. That’s something you may find you want to leave in, to create a mysterious symmetry, or take out because it’s simply thoughtlessness. But doesn’t happen often.
Still, writing is not as deliberative as it appears: I don’t intend my sentences or plot points to come as they do, they just sort of emerge that way, and “accident” is as good a way to describe them as anything. Occasionally I’m asked, about a phrase that someone finds especially nice, “How did you know to put it that way?” My answer is, “‘Well, how did you come up those exact words, in that exact sequence, to ask me that question?” Exalted language is much like quotidian language: it emerges from the mysterious force of thought mixed with the equally mysterious form of language, and I say ‘mixed’ because the first doesn’t necessarily precede the second — “How do I know what I think until I see what I say”, as Forster put it. It is, in the most literal sense of the term, unintentional, as almost all language is. We’re all blurting, all the time, it’s just that sometimes we’re better able to aim it in the right direction: with practice we have more interesting accidents.
This, too, happens: we take credit, those of us who take pictures, or make music, or write, not for what we do, but for what we keep. The deliberation comes when you’re rewriting, or sorting through a few hundred photos, editing or comparing takes, and have to decide whether this curious thing you came up with is worth keeping. This is especially true of photography, where the ratio of attempts to successes is unusually high. But it happens across the board. A photographer may take a few hundred photos before he or she finds the one that works (Robert Frank took 27,000 when he was shooting The Americans, and used a total of 83); a writer may write 10 or 20 drafts; a musician may record 5 or 10 takes. Producing them is, in many ways, the easy part, the harder part, and the part less discussed, is deciding what to keep. I’ve never taught writing, but if I did, I’d allow my students to bring in one story, and we’d spend the rest of the semester learning how to rewrite it.
Misused equipment, thoughtless blunders, and preconscious expressions: these are all means of turning the undeliberate into the deliberate, mistakes into accidents, and accidents into authority. You might say that that’s what art-making is, or part of what it is, anyway: “This happened, for no real reason that I can see, but I like it, so I’m going to make conscious decision to keep it.” And that’s when your work becomes truly yours.