SUFFUSING AND SUSTAINING:
Howie Feeds Me is a haunting, and lushly original
work which begs for and encourages the deepest sorts of conversation while
simultaneously beckoning us to a suffusing and sustaining solitude. The work
topples the tunnel of light which the computer too often forces upon us,
turning the tunnel instead into a river, a suffusion, a permeation, an
illumination flowing over screen, the viewer's body and room alike, a spilling
out of light and life echoed, repeated and anticipated within its constituent
images.
It may strike some viewers as
curious that Dianne Hagaman terms Howie Feeds Me a sonnet sequence, yet nothing
could be more apt. In the sonnet's
formal confines the sonneteers traditionally found manifold spaces, unending
inward unfoldings, a linguistic origami for the play of language and human
emotion. The captioned and moveable loops of Howie Feeds Me similarly evoke the interleaved
balancing of forces which scholars traditionally talk about in sonnets. In
traditional sonnets the eight and six or twelve and two of the poem's larger
rhythms work not "against" (the typical, wrongful word) but in
conjunction (or disjunction, these are after all the same thing) with the inner
rhythms of rhymes and enjambments and caesurae and so on. So too for Hagaman
the larger rhythms and interplay of her collected images here--diurnal,
quotidian, mortal--join and sever and link and juxtapose.
The sonnet has, of course,
traditionally been a lovers' form, a sounding of the heart in both senses of
that word. While there are (blessedly) no sounds in this work, there are many
moments--a laughing group poised at a dinner table in festive light, a snowy
landscape under streetlights--when you could swear that the screen whispers to
you. Yet that other kind of sounding, the plumbing of depths, whether heart or
river, is everywhere here. Light rather than lead plumbs the full flow of love
and life here.
The oddly displaced, and thus
pleasing, syntax of Hagaman's evocative captions dislodges the way we look at
language (literally) but also of course how we look at all, and especially at
the contraposed images. Hagaman's
gift for contraposing and juxtaposition is something that the photographers,
new media practioners, artists, and others who were fortunate enough to
experience her privately circulated and legendary "hypertext quilt"
will recognize. That previous work's monumental virtual space (five by five
feet viewed through the screen's mere fifteen or seventeen inch lens)
juxtaposed images of Native Americans in Seattle's Pioneer Square with images
of them in their native grounds.
Viewers scrolling over the surface of the virtual fabric stitched a
richly compelling, even heart-wrenching, meditation on those large words
culture, humanity, and civilization as seen through the small moments of real
people's lives.
Howie
Feeds Me operates
similarly. Anyone who has spent time with Dianne while she is working knows
that she is nearly always making images. She shoots constantly (almost always
with high speed film and great depth of field), the Leica a natural and
unobtrusive choreography, a loving gesture, as ready as her ready laughter, its
rhythm like breathing. Hagaman's
art is thus truly paradoxical, an unchosen choosing, an unmediated mediation,
the distinctly feminine interface which feminist media theorist Heidi Tikka sees as both a flow and a kind of
skin, "a porous and breathing surface through which a variety of exchange
takes place."
This is a genuinely interactive
work, not just in the technological sense, but also and more importantly (as
the title suggests) in the intellectual, spiritual, erotic, and sustaining
senses. Which is to say our senses.
It is literally sustaining work, one which feeds the eye and heart and soul and
mind. The nurture of its title is everywhere evident and mutual, being fed is being, an action,
not what happens to one. Every screen feeds its viewer-reader. The effect of the
work is finally neither scenic nor poetic but erotic, a touching and feeding
both. This kind of loving
interaction requires acquaintance in the deeper sense of living with and
through, inhabitation, how we are only sometimes acquainted with our own eyes
and what they say to us, the language they use a little displaced, dislodged.
Howie Feeds Me is a true love story and a story of true love and truly a (love)
story. Its moveable loops are the essence of narrative, the mergings and
permeations, the odd angles reconciling into longer rhythms and repetitions,
light into shadow giving forth light. There is a story here, and it is one we
make in our seeing through (a phrase I love for its doubleness: the lens and
the persistence, what a marriage is, what a word or an image is). The
resolutions are multiple, every ending an opening. Hagaman's looped stories, not only accumulate around the
main screen's wonderfully Oulipian sonnet of
song titles, but also play against the
more verse-like captioned loops, recapitulating the simultaneous oppositions,
the push-pull of the heart's flow, weaving these rhythms into a delicate,
luminous and powerfully symphonic work.