White - unto the White Creator -

The Time magazine images at

http://lightbox.time.com/2012/08/23/the-convention-draws-near-the-romney-ryan-road-trip-to-the-party-in-tampa

show the current Republican candidates for President and Vice President campaigning and fund-raising in New England and Long Island. One hundred percent of the people in every photograph are white.

But in one of the photographs (by Lauren Fleishman) the personnel have become invisible. Their traces exist only outside the image frame. A moment prior to the image's time, something human, perhaps even something unwhite, created its composition and then removed itself. Alone before the composition now, we see a still life of an airplane's tray table in repose. Resting upon it are a plastic plate in green and yellow imitation wicker, a white napkin on which rests a single chocolate chip cookie, and a transparent plastic cup of milk. As the beloved hymn of the party of the War on Christmas says,

All is calm, all is bright.

Like a tag on a toe in a morgue, a caption informs us that the cookie is still warm. When old age shall this generation waste, it will remain.

Malevich, just think how much greater an artist you might have been if you had only owned a dacha in East Hampton!

Sources: Emily Dickinson, "Publication is the auction" (Fr788) and Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White. Click to enlarge.

Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world

The fat man appears to be airborne over the ship's deck, hovering with arms stiffly extended forward and down like landing gear. His cushiony, shock-absorbing hands appear to be huge, but perhaps that's an illusion produced by foreshortening. In his image, outlined by a rectangular frame of decayed photographic emulsion, he is strongly foreshortened at every point.

 "W. N. McMillan." G. G. Bain collection, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.18560/  

Click to enlarge.

At and around the man's hands, further decay has accentuated the contrast between the image's light and dark areas. The decay has done an artist's job: it has shaped an outline.

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An outline is usually a line of demarcation which an artist lays down between his creation and the rest of the universe. Here, however, outline is an index of decay. The universe has invaded the physiology of this image like a virus and set it to manufacturing a counterfeit of the artist’s death-defying gesture of separation from time.

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And the optics of photographic image-making have bloated the man into an incipient sphere: a fruit rounding as it ripens toward decay.

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The rounding has been preserved in its incipience, however. It comes to us educationally, preserved through natural history as if it and we had been destined from the beginning to face each other from opposite sides of a vitrine.

Surrounded by the Library of Congress’s explanatory words, the image is a fat mute struldbrug surrounded by volubly signifying youthfulness. The words singing in the surround are a choir of still unravished brides.

Vanishing point

Clattering past the intersection of 63rd Street and Halstead in the summer of 1929, the Chicago elevated train transports its riders no higher than the second story. Black and white is its milieu. On the cover of the 1993 University of Illinois Press reprint of James T. Farrell’s naturalist trilogy Studs Lonigan (1932, 1934, 1935), the words provide a splash of color, but that's an anachronism. In its original, this book was monochrome.

Click to enlarge.

He seemed to be choking.

“Mother, it’s getting dark,” he called feebly.

He gasped. There was a rattle in his throat. He turned livid, his eyes dilated widely, became blank, and he went limp. And in the mind of Studs Lonigan, through an all-increasing blackness, streaks of white light filtered weakly and recessively like an electric light slowly going out. And there was nothing in the mind of Studs Lonigan but this feeble streaking of light in an all-encompassing blackness, and then, nothing.  (856)

Once upon a time, says the fable, a young Chicagoan named Studs wasted his life and then died of pneumonia. As he lay dying, Communists were marching through the streets of his city, singing, "A better world's in birth" (835). That juxtaposition of bodies on a page constructed out of words, says naturalist theory, is called symbolism. Symbolism is a system of notation intended to make visible naturalism's idea of God -- that is, a metaphor which naturalism called "the Forces." But outside the library, the optics of Chicago seem to promise that if you take the doctor’s advice and avoid congestion, you can soar on perspective right over the symbol, ascending through layers of beauty from black iron to an empty heaven the color of Chicago’s pearly, lake-reflected light.

 The original of this facsimile poster was captioned,

"Rapid Transit Lines, Fast . . . Reliable."

And it isn't only in Chicago that black pours forth light. In Rome, one evening early in the Fascist era, sounds poured from a black phonograph and filled a room with white arms, white dresses, and a receding perspective of white bodies beginning to learn from the music how to step out of themselves and become airborne. We have the pictorial evidence before us still. Composed into a single motion by their music, the bodies will dance forever. In pure motion around themselves, dancing the force of their song just out of our hearing, they seem to ask us only the simple question that the urn posed for Keats: Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

I found the little advertisement tucked inside an old book. For some eighty years the turntable spun in the darkness between words. In the light it's spinning still. Clamorosi successi!