WHENEVER WHATEVER

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT IS ASSUMED THAT ART IS MEANT TO EXPLAIN THINGS, to illuminate the dimmer corners of our perception. Or at least that’s what the logical side of our brain wants to believe.

In fact, art is not a settler of disputes, but rather a disrupter. It starts more arguments than it decides, and, properly done, poses more questions that it can ever answer. Art is meant to upset the applecart.

Nearly every enduring piece of art, that is, work that has had a sustained impact over time, enters the world as a despised outlier. The first words that great much of great art are not “what genius!” but more like “what is that supposed to be?” And so it goes with photographs, the ones we view that others have created and especially the ones we create ourselves. We have, of course, certain intentions for pictures as we plan them, but, in many cases, some other spirit gets into our head, in the nanosecond-long decision to shoot or not shoot, and it can leave us with pictures we might even like, but certainly do not understand.

I don’t know where this came from.

It’s not a particularly attractive subject, and as chronicle, narration or commentary, it doesn’t really justify its existence. And yet it got here, and, I have admit, I rather like it. I just have nothing to say about it.

Sometimes an image just is, and despite all the overwrought captions that might accompany it, from critics, museum curators, or we ourselves, it may never be anything else but what it is. It doesn’t fit a ready-made category; it doesn’t change the world. It just represents a frozen abstracted moment snatched from billions of such moments, all those other times in which we might have snapped the shutter but, for some reason or another, didn’t. Photographs are a random sampling of time, and sometimes the sample presents nothing other than a cipher. And I suppose that’s okay. And even if it’s not, it’s art, so in most cases, all we can do is ask, “what’s that supposed to be?”