My understanding to walking as a being-in-the-world of the bushland is informed by my interpretation of the bushland, which in turn, is shaped by my pre-existing beliefs, knowledge, and expectations. This pre-understanding includes how we understand photography and the landscape with the pre-thematic meaning of this horizon being prior to the possibility of conceptual meaning. Things are what they are. and in this way this pre-thematic world constitutes the very being of things I encounter.as a photographer being-in-the-bushland. The work of photography consists in exploring and exploiting this horizon, in bringing it to the fore.
This understanding is informed by Martin Heidegger’s idea of the hermeneutic circle the idea of which of which is to envision a whole in terms how the parts both interact with each other, and how they interact with the whole. What brings all the individual beings and their interrelations together as a whole is the bushland The natural beings in the bushland — ie., trees, bark, grasses, leaves, foxes, kangaroos, rabbits and birds — are already invested in pre-conceptual meaning as they appear within the hermeneutic horizon of meaning.
What brings all the individual beings and their interrelations together as a whole is the bushland, or topos, or place. The logic of place is a dynamic intertwining of self and non-self. It is not just an artist who gives the world a picture or map of a territory, as it is also a world that imprints itself onto the body that is itself a reception of that giving. Place is is both “place-giving and place-receiving.”
The previous post mentioned the overlap in aesthetics between the modern Japanese philosophers in the Kyoto School (eg., Nishida Kitarō) and Heidegger in the early 20th century and how the aesthetic underpinning my pre-understanding’s took the form of the pre-modern Japanese aesthetic concepts of mujo (impermanence ) mono no aware (pathos or sensitivity to things), wabi sabi ( the acceptance of transience and imperfection) and fūryū (wind aesthetics.) The bushland was too dense for Ma (negative space ) and yohaku (empty space). to shape the photography.
The earth world of the bushland is one of flux, the ephemeral nature of all things and the imperfection of things that bloom,age, fade and decay. What is selected to photograph are moments in the flux of the bushland, or what is ephemeral in this world. The poetic dimensions of photography can explore, set-up and, to a certain degree, make explicit the very horizon of world in and by which particular beings (branch, grass tree) are.
The work of art (creative photography) explores this horizon of meaning and brings these meanings in culture to the images as artistic creation as distinct from a mere making. So we talk in terms of beings that are concealed emerging into presence — emerging into the light from being hidden — as the sort of things they are. For Heidegger, the artwork has the capacity to bring the physicality of beings to presence as what will always exceed our calculative or instrumental attempts to grasp it.
What lies hidden is brought into presence –a bringing forth into unhiddeness –through the work of art or poiesis. The artwork as poiesis has the capacity not only to bring forth the earth but also to open or to set up a world or a culture. In doing so it discloses a truth — a happening, an event in and through which particular beings, and thus earth and world, comes into presence in a specific image. If truth displaces but does not negate beauty, it does negate the view that art is inalienably subjective. and the object of the mere taste of individuals.
This suggests that photography is less an object, such as a fine print, and more a set of diverse actions: a photography being in the making; ever provisional and evolving, a work in progress involving the body subject and embodied perception. Photographing is less an immersion in the bushland and more an interaction with it, as it involves the embodied self and the engagement of the body with its environment bringing about a meaningful world through mimesis. I walk and act as a body. When doing is aimed at seeing, we know through our acting bodies, through our interaction with things and our shaping of the world — which in return shapes us.
This leads into the importance of touch and tactility as direct contact with the body’s skin from spider webs, burs, the prickly acacia and wet leaves and ground undermines the duality of subject and object and starts the process of overcoming the limits of the traditional content and inherited concepts of photography.
The form of the project is one of photographic fragments. The fragment is not one in the sense of a fragment being a piece left over from a broken whole (such as a glass). It is more in the Jena Romantic sense of the fragment as a genre itself that was developed by Friedrich Schlegel in terms of a system of fragments that embrace contradictory elements that generate movement. The photographic fragment does not exist in simple opposition to the philosophical system, nor does it acquiesce in the existential pathos of the individual against the conceptual system.
The project, which is a whole or totality in the sense of an ensemble of small fragmentary works, is also a fragment, another individuality, with its self-awareness of the possibility of its own failure. The project is unfinished, as it a becoming; an embyro of what is developing object; a promissory note for something in the process of becoming. The fragments point towards a project that is an always work-in-process.
This is a photographic project taking place after the wave anti-authorial arguments of post-structuralism and the anti-aesthetic arguments of the post-modernism at the October journal has receded; a time when art is alienated from truth and when photography is no longer regarded as a medium apart. Photography continues to matter as it is now a mainstream artistic practice and the dominant image making, cultural practice in the twenty-first century. It can open up possibilities for renewal, uncovering, and twisting free of the presuppositions of the aesthetic tradition and art’s relation to a non-human nature.
It is through the impulse of truth as disclosure in photography that shows that the work of art is neither simply an expression of the desire of the human being in opposition to the bushland nor something that could be mystically or mysteriously abstracted from the bushland. It counters and overcomes the divorce of art from truth and the reduction of art to mere subjective states.
Tthe fragmentary walking art project points to the historically becoming ecological crisis. Australia’s land surface has warmed by 1.5C since 1910. There is the decline of the earth in our time: — eg., deforestation and the clearing of 7.7m hectares of threatened species habitat (an area larger than Tasmania) this century. Thinking the earth in our time does mean thinking death: Australia has lost more than 100 species to extinction and more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. Australia’s current environmental protections laws permit the ongoing destruction of critical habitat for threatened species. The current laws under the EPBC Act have no teeth and the mining industry and developers have been very successful in controlling the environmental protection agenda.
The counter-capacity of an earth-oriented photography to shake the certainties of subjectivity, challenge the instrumental thinking about the earth, disclose the songs of the earth and open new cultural spaces. An eco-poetic photography has the potential to free us up for rethinking our relation with nature in a different way.