Lilith and I returned to Eucalyptus this morning. When we got close, reds and greens shone through black sap. A face looked back at us, two knot holes for eyes, one for nose; a brown streak fell perpendicular, running into the black nose hole. Owl, someone thought. If we assign wisdom to owls, why not to a tree? They're certainly more wise than Trump’s lawyers.
A portrait of an owl in a tree; both happen according to chance, the eucalyptus from a seed, the face in my eyes only. No one else gets close enough to see Eucalyptus staring back by way of owl. If abstraction in a tree is dubious (who creates its shapes?), then what is realism on the same tree? It’s a realism that comes of audience, not author. Tree is not author but gallery wall, painting by anonymous--not “by,” but “from.” Eucalyptus owns authority without authorship, a gallery space without curator. It’s as if art appeared by chance, so we took authorship in a photograph. I’ve made a work of art of the owl in the tree, but it’s still a photograph of something that has no intended origin. The tree’s subconscious hooks into mine like an invisible umbilical.
Witness is similar:
the photograph of a young girl in Gaza intends her not as art, but as historical moment, becoming art. If that
sounds cruel, it is. How the girl got to this point of extremity involved another's intention, Israel’s destructive authorship. How
photographer got to girl (without themself getting bombed) is also
intentional. But this girl in this ruin evades anyone's intention. The girl is not art to herself, nor to
Israel, but as image she reaches out to us with her eyes. Our eyes in
her eyes can be no contrivance.
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