In 1969, I attended first grade at Clarksville Elementary School (school number two of the “Twelve”). At the time, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t in first grade at Slingerlands Elementary School with the rest of my friends and neighbors – and why, for that fact, was I in a classroom with only six other kids, and not in a classroom with twenty bright post-kindergarten intellectuals.
And I think, at the time, my mother explained to my six-year-old self that I was enrolled in Clarksville Elementary School because I didn’t color my coloring books within the lines. I didn’t understand back then the concept of changing schools, I always thought you started at one school and you stayed there until you graduated from high school. As far as my little mind was concerned, I was being punished.
It didn’t occur to me back then that kids weren’t automatically branded with labels like “acting out” or “hyperactive” or whatever limiting adjective are distributed today. We just colored our coloring books outside the borders. It was a phrase that, when boiled down to the bare bone, could be interpreted as having no self control. Self-control meant that you stopped coloring when you hit the black border line on the picture. You didn’t color things with whatever color you grabbed out of the crayon box – a duck should be yellow or white, not blue with green feet, for example.
What did I care? I wanted to learn everything my little brain could absorb. What did it matter if my crayon stroke extended past the duck’s outline?
I think back to those moments because of several current observations.
As anyone who reads this blog knows by now, I have developed a serious interest in experimental photography. That includes everything from film manipulation to camera tinkering, from multiple exposures to hour-long single shots.
Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re spectacular. And sometimes they’re crud.
For me, this experimentation is an evolution into the metaphysics of photography and all its possible permutations and applications. It means going into lomography. And HDR. And Xpro. And single shot: half shot. And splitfilm. And Swissroll. And Ripscale. And a dozen other film and digital disciplines that are more than just pointing the camera at someone and telling them to smile.
But within that, I still get some derisive comments about my work. “It’s good, but…”
But. Those three letters essentially erase every compliment mentioned prior, and reinforce every subsequent brickbat.
It’s like you’ve given me a pat on the back – and then you’re searching for some Purell to wipe the germs off your hands.
Trust me. Stanley Jordan doesn’t play jazz guitar like everyone else does. But his experimentation, his desire to create something that was previously untried, has made him one of the beloved and respected jazz musicians of our time.
Can you imagine Stanley Jordan in music class, having his teachers chastise him for playing the guitar with both hands on the fretboard?
Trust me. Nam June Paik’s 1960′s experiments with electronic music, videotape and art were considered both avant-garde and frightening by those who had never thought of these media as art itself. In fact, let me throw a few more names at you. John Cage. Karlheinz Stockhausen. Wendy Carlos. Robert Moog. Frank Zappa. Experimenters and dreamers and creators, working outside the borders of conventional thought.
Tesla. Edison. Whitney. Einstein. Jobs. Haring. Galileo. Franklin. Carver. Wright. Bell. They were ridiculed and chastised, they were condemned and dismissed. And today, we can’t function in our world without their ideas, their accomplishments, their successes.
I also took inspiration from a British artist named Tony Hart. He appeared on several children’s TV shows, including “Vision On” and “Take Hart,” in which he would use various art supplies and products to build something spectacular and awe-inspiring – at least it was awe-inspiring to a kid who didn’t realize that stencils and chalk can work together in perfect harmony.
Trust me. Every time someone said I can’t do something just because it hadn’t been done before, I try to do it anyway. What’s the harm? If I fail, it just means I have a chance to try again in the next day or the next hour or the next year. Even some of my most successful pictures were developed – shall we say – over months and years of experimentation and trial and error.
But I never gave up. No matter what. Why should I give up?
That was a rhetorical question. I don’t need a rhetorical answer.
One could argue that coloring within the borders is part of control. It’s part of self-discipline.
Yes it is. No getting around that.
But why are the borders there? What do they do for us? Provide conformity? Or assimilation?
Truly, there are moments where I do stay within the boundaries. One has to in today’s society.
But believe me. Just as night follows day and six follows five… I’m always thinking about what I can do outside the border. Or how to use the border itself as part of my project.
If I keep doing this every day, every time, every moment… I can use this brain of mine for something other than just rental space in my skull.
And since I honestly only get one chance in life, one run from birth to earth, from womb to tomb, from one side of the dash to the other side…
I’ll use those crayons on one side of the border. And I’ll use them on the other side as well. And maybe I’ll use the crayons as part of the border. Who knows?