Photographic Memory

This is an exercise in Photographic Memory, or how to relate the same two subjects – in this case, ‘bush and beast’ – in a single image without too much ‘beasting about the bush’; in other words, how to ‘flatten time’. Try - when in the field composing the photograph - to superimpose another photograph, recalled from memory, over the photograph you are about to take.

Later, when comparing the seen – ‘taken’- image with the remembered image – both need to be printed the same size -, measure the distance between bush and beast. If the bush-beast distance is proportional and roughly the same in both images, you possess a Photographic Memory. By way of certification, mount your heads and hang them side-by-side (face-to-face, bush- to-bush), along with the dates they were shot, on the wall.  But be mindful of the sight of horse’s head separated from its body, it can inspire murder.

The sight of a decapitated horse’s head never failed to insight Jarry’s Dr Faustroll, 'to murder'. As the good doctor himself explains: “I do not believe that an unconscious murder is therefore necessarily motiveless: it is not governed by any command emanating from us and has no link with the precedent phenomena of our ego, but it certainly follows an external order, it is within the order of external phenomena, and it has a cause that is perceptible by the senses and is therefore significant…I have never had the desire to kill except after seeing a horse’s head, which has become a sign, or an order, or more precisely a signal, like the down-turned thumb in the arena, that the time has come to strike the blow…The sight of a very ugly object certainly provokes one to do what is ugly… Now, there is no object in the whole world as ugly as the head of a horse, except perhaps that of the grasshopper, which is almost exactly similar without having the gigantic size of the former”.

And as for over-analysing 'bushes in photographs' (as Antonioni’s film, ‘Blowup’, reveals): murderers hide in bushes. Bushes, like decapitated horse's heads, signify death.     

Hanging Around Toilets

Look at this annual ‘Bog Dinner’. Dinner a la bog is all very Bunuel - remember that dinner-party scene in “The Phantom of Liberty” - an elegant soiree with guests seated at toilet bowls instead of chairs?

But don’t worry about menu, forget the diners, look down into the skylights.

Four years later on the roof of another toilet-block, another skylight, two members of another club - a model airplane club, are plane spotting. He’s standing; she’s sitting - sitting on a skylight in a skirt, holding a pair of wings.

Every so often a head pops up inside the skylight and a face looks up her skirt. As she watches the sky, her bottom comes within inches of a toilet-dweller’s eye. She’s sat on the skylight above the Gents. Look at his white knuckles – he’s performing a fingertip pull-up, to look up. It’s like an ape-house down the Gents – talk about hanging around in public toilets! And the pilot of the wingless plane, he’s staring straight ahead, oblivious, he doesn’t ogle - he’s a model. Yet in all other respects the grounded aviator and our voyeur are fellow voyagers’; twin heads, sealed in their clear plastic bubbles, like spacemen or skydivers.

Notice the plane is named “Snipe”, after the wading bird of the same name. But snipe can also mean “get at”, or “moan”. Yet another meaning of snipe is “to shoot from a concealed place”.  It could be argued that our puller-upper, skirt looker-upper might be driven to physically performing (discharging) all three interpretations of ‘snipe’ (from the concealment of the toilet, in reaction to 'the view') at the same time.

All this ‘monkey business’ makes me think of Alfred Jarry’s creation, the monosyllabic baboon Bosse-de-Nage (literally, “bottom-face”). Bosse-de-Nage was Dr Faustroll’s fellow traveler and ‘lighter of the way’ in a speculatively designed ‘bed-ship’ the pair rowed through the rues of Paris, by night (where every so often the good Dr would buff the baboon’s shiny red bottom in order to make it function as a headlight).This is how Jarry describes the strange craft in “Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll Pataphysician” (published posthumously in 1911)

 “But this bed, twelve meters long, is not a bed but a boat, shaped like an elongated sieve. The meshes are wide enough to allow the passage of a large pin; and the whole sieve has been dipped in melted paraffin, then shaken so that this substance (which is never really touched by water), while covering the web, leaves the holes empty-the number of which amounts to about fifteen million four hundred thousand…The skiff is not only propelled by oar blades but also by suction disks at the end of spring levers. And its keel travels on three steel rollers at the same level. I am all the more convinced of the excellence of my calculations and of its insubmersibility in that, as is my invariable habit, we shall not be navigating on water but on dry land.”

Yet this still leaves the question: Is wearing a skirt on a skylight more risqué than dinning on a toilet? And those wings she’s holding; wings were just what I needed (but didn’t manage to find) to go with my gymnastic ring-halo – my ‘hot halo’ (“If I Drew It I’d Have To Do It”, October 19^th, 2009). Maybe I should hangout in toilets more.