The cruel practice of art

To die alone is such a terrifying prospect. To die without desire being fulfilled is even more terrifying. Am I the sum total of my frustrated desire? I am painfully aware of my mortality. There is the sense that my day will come, sooner than I’d like. There is the awareness that my desire for youthful beauty is more than likely out of reach. At the core of this angst is the desire to leave some sort of record that I was here. My photography is a mad race against time in achieving this. If I explore all the painful facets of my desire, perhaps I can kill it. Georges Bataille writes:

We know that possession of the object we are afire for is out of the question. It is one thing to or another: either desire will consume us entirely, or its object will cease to fire us with longing. We can possess it on one condition only, that gradually the desire it arouses will fade. Better for desire to die than for us to die, though! We can make do with an illusion. If we possess its object we shall seem to achieve our desire without dying. Not only do we renounce death, but we also let our desire, really the desire to die, lay hold of its object and we keep it while we live on. We enrich our life instead of losing it.

One of my favorite models used to correspond with me using the signature “expression equals life.” There is that duality chasing me again. Creation of erotic imagery supplements desire. It fuels it as well. It is within this conflict that I create. I don’t create for your masters. I create for myself. Bataille writes in The Cruel Practice Of Art:

Yet it is from this double bind that the very meaning of art emerges – for art, which puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, offers us ravishment without death. Of course, this ravishment could be the most inescapable trap – if we manage to attain it, although strictly speaking it escapes us the very instant we attain it. Here or there, we enter into death or return to our little worlds. But the endless carnival of artworks is there to show a triumph – in spite of a firm resolve to value nothing but that which endures – is promised to anyone who leaps out of the irresolution of the instant. This is why it is impossible to pay too much interest in excessive drunkenness, which penetrates the opacity of the world with those gratuitously cruel flashes in which seduction is tied to massacre, torture, and horror.

Don’t let it be said that I worship death, though my personal demons have made this possible on occasion. The creative urge, properly fulfilled, gives my life meaning. The visions I capture are not for everyone. I am not trying to be in a magazine, have my work captured in an ad campaign or sell a clothing line. Not that these are not legitimate goals for a photographer. I am creating a world that makes sense to me, and the process getting there may be as important as the end result.