considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

This is my favorite time of year. In class you're making pictures that couldn't have been predicted even a few short weeks ago. I'm enthralled by the process, this convergence, this transmutation of one thing into another thing, idea into material, image into body. I don't know how it happens, even as it unfolds right in front of me. Last Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Central Library we heard Trio Solisti perform chamber music from several different eras. As always, the comfortable elegance of the Dweck Center was the perfect setting for a quiet reprieve from the rush of the end of the term. (I've written about the Library's concert program here , and I still recommend it strongly.) The end of the afternoon brought Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition . You've probably heard it before; I'd heard it many times but never knew what it was called. (Click the 'play' button to hear the Promenade opening.) The story behind this comp...

In the desert outside what has become Yuma, Arizona, people made a picture of God. They etched it into the surface of that hard bright land -- hands, feet, mouth, body, thin lines stretching wide and long across the emptiness, until the emptiness was filled. And day by day throughout the year God lay on that dry flatness and watched the people come and go, to the river, to the fields, hunting, dancing, telling stories, singing. Stepping across the line of God's foot a father would say something quiet to his son to mark their passage, and the son would respond in kind to his father. Once each year the people would gather to walk the body of God together, tracing the worn path from head to torso to foot, and then back, on the other side, to the head again. As they walked, perhaps, they cleared brush and small stones from the etching, restoring a short section erased by the summer winds, or in another place, a part of God's arm that had been washed away by the winter rain. ...