From Foreign Policy in Focus and IPS (Interpress News Service): Aaron Hughes is an artist, activist, and a Veteran of the Iraq War. He served in the Illinois National Guard from 2000 to 2006 and was pulled out of the University of Illinois in January 2003 and deployed to Kuwait and Iraq in April 2003 to July 2004 as an 88M truck driver. On his return to the states he has dedicated his life to making art that will deconstruct the culture of dehumanization and hate that was so prevalent while deployed. He is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. You can see his work at www.aarhughes.org. He talks here with Saif Rahman and John Feffer from Foreign Policy in Focus. Saif Rahman: First and foremost- you are a veteran, an activist, and an artist. How does your work help to express your feelings about the war? Aaron Hughes: To me “art” provides a space to present and communicate complexity. It is not restrictive to a language, a symbol, an ideology, a system, a narrative... but instead “art” can provide a freedom to find new ways to express memories, thoughts, and emotions that can challenge historical ways of communicating. I didn’t understand the war. I did not understand the ease of dehumanization or the ambiguous, anxious convoys of nothingness, for nothing ... For the entire article, click here ...

Working my way through Derrida’s “The Truth in Painting,” I’ve tried to parse what he was saying about the frame, the parergon, but not without difficulty. Theoretically, Derrida plays off Kant’s third critique, “The Critique of Judgment,” read several years ago and now vaguely recalled.

I’ve been more a practicing theologian than philosopher, and the notion of Wild Clearing was initially conceptualized as a site of resistance, in the context of liberation theology, with the enframing boundary of the clearing the reaction of counter-resistance. The frame, in the case, is always fluid and subject to ruptures and collapse.

And since the ‘60s, the notion that is now labeled “raumgeist” here – the spirit of space (like zeitgeist, the spirit of the time) – always contained an inner-space/outer-space relationship, artistically as well as in the opened clearing of a site of resistance, mentioned above.

The Derridean/Kantean frame seems less apt to such a rupture, this parergon more a static separation between what’s inside and out, with Kant’s quality, quantity, relationship and modality the artistic characteristics at play inside, arousing pleasure without concept, purposivity without purpose. Without rereading the third critique, I also recall two infinitized characteristics that an artist engages in the act of putting the work in a frame, one quantifiable, and the other a dynamus that is unruly and wild that the artist’s genius is only barely able to gather into a work.

Derrida does a couple of things that are intriguing: 1) Using Cranach’s “Lucretia,” he deconstructs the notion of frame to place it within Kant’s parergon, pointing to the knifepoint that Lucretia holds against her flesh, and the slip of a veil across her lower body as two enframing aspects. 2) Derrida also finds a “lack” between a frame and what it encloses and demarks. This “lack” I don’t think refers to Lacan’s, but seems to be, in my difficulty trying to grasp what he means, a space that sets the frame apart from the work so that there is a rupture in the contiguity between frame and work. With Kant, a frame can either enhance or distract from a work. But the “lack” that Derrida posits interrupts this Kantian notion.

I envision this lack as the unfilled spaces in a crossword puzzle, perhaps. The characters D_ _ r _ _ a, for example, framing Jacques' nom famille, the lack in this case easily identified. As the clues, and the spaces, become more obscure and complex, so does the lack play a larger role, so that it even eliminates the possibility of conceptualizing letters that may frame a clue, leaving simply a “lack,” a trace without a trace. (Or, on the other hand, one could ask whimsically: Does a Barnett Newman painting really need an added frame?)

In the context of a liberation theology approach to Wild Clearing, as another take-off, this “lack” in the enframing boundary between resistance and counter-resistance would be the extent to which mediation would be impossible, and as well, the lack of power within the frame to prevent its collapse.

Still, of the two parergonic approaches Derrida takes, the first is the more fascinating to me, because it places the framing element within a work, which itself then encloses the work and whatever artifice might be framing it from without. This, to me, also resonates strongly with “raumgeist.” Briefly put for now, this has two senses:

1. As in Wild Clearing, the spirit of that space is the spirit of resistance within the clearing that the resistance opens, the actions of resistance and the resisters within the space forming the irregular, fluid and precarious frame.
2. As in a work of art, the content of the work can supersede the enframing boundaries – as can its formal dynamics – like a film’s effects taking one beyond the 16:9 widescreen aperture ratio, or its content within internal frames transcending those, from the spirit of the space within.

In the second sense, I think of two scenes in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy, “Bleu,” “Blanc,” et “Rouge.” In an opening scene of “Blanc,” a suitcase trundles along a conveyer. One later discovers that it encloses the protagonist, reconstituting its enframing assumption so that its interior space has a spirit quite different from what might have been initially assumed. And, in a closing scene of “Rouge,” the protagonists of the three films emerge together from a ferry disaster as the sole survivors, also adding both a different frame to the trilogy from within this scene, as well as a different spirit within the space each film engendered.

© Wes Rehberg 2007

I’m trying to work out Derrida’s notions of “trace” and his interpretation of Plato’s “khora,” with the idea of energy-field, as these may play in the “documentary” project I’ve been undertaking.

Simply put, and without references, Plato in the Timaeus talks about that which receives, or in which is inscribed the phenomena that our senses engage. On one side, it’s given a maternal receptivity, like a nurse holding a child, but on another, it’s indistinct, not a thing, but yet a place that contains the beyond beyond, the eidos, particularly the Good, which itself informs the field of phenomena, which it also contains. The latter interpretation of khora is what intrigued Derrida, and it’s this khora that he called the surname of différance.

So, I’ve been randomly filming around the Chattanooga region what I perceive to be “traces,” but as those in an energy-field, clearings opening and displaying traces, as well as being traces in themselves, and displaced traces. The notion of the khora helps nest all this, so the space of the film by extension emulates that of the khora, the space/place where the field and the traces (and the film) reside.

Problem is how is this structured over time as a film, a video? And though it is like a documentary, not fiction, by engaging scenes and people as they are when the camera rolls, what genre am I working in?

The working name for what I’m doing is “Chattatonic Traces,” but that sounds too clever and maybe reflects my own catatonia when it comes to the “aporia,” the impasse and gap I’m facing in trying to reconcile these notions and scenes cinematically.

Structure and thematic coherency are the problems.

It’s hard to figure why age has relevance to the creative spirit, or why age may be considered relevant to whether one has capability as an artist. The inspiration yet comes, the muse still guides, the capacity to work within a medium still is there. Charles Ives, composer, began his work in earnest while he was in his sixties; Henri Matisse created with cutouts when no longer able to adequately wield a brush, the catalog is long – but almost all artists do it all their lives. I’ve only worked sporadically until now.

So, at age 70, two years into video making, I try to figure out where it all goes – thus the musings of past thoughts: midrash, vulnerability, notions, documentary impressions, chiasm, dreams, and on. I work solo, these days mainly on the streets of Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. I’ve gone from older used “prosumer” equipment (Canon GL1, Sony TRV900 – which Agnes Varda used in Gleanings, and Sony VX2000) to new “prosumer” Sony high-definition cameras (HDR-FX1, HDR-HC1 [often with a Canon wide angle adapter lens]), all the while editing on Sony Vegas software – not that I’m plugging Sony or Canon, it’s what works for me.

The question of age figures in nevertheless. I work solo, out of choice, no crew, thinking of the camcorder as one might a still camera, recalling the ways Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith worked maybe, considering photojournalism, but also on movement, surfaces, reflections, textures, sounds, sweeps, images that are barely discernable, mystery, vulnerability, multiple exposures, death and life, rhythms – that is on more than journalism, but on something personal and perhaps unique, the way things “hit and fit,” as mentioned, on discovery.

What is it that is to be discovered within one’s own lexicons, elisions, vocabularies, sensibilities, emotions, and so on? Where do I go to find that? Is an audience relevant to what I do? Is acceptability? Do I look to a marketplace for artistic esteem? Yes, in a sense to all these questions, but no, in another sense, because something is lost in the creative process if one tries to discern what pleases instead of working on the creative contours of one’s own calling and gift, however measurable.

There is no “inside-track” in this sense to artistic work (I’ve been thinking about putting together something called “Outside Tracks”). Whatever is authentic is more what it’s about. Even though I try to define it, I keep coming back to what “hits and fits.”

I think the difference between me and the realists is that I want – perhaps like the surrealists – to open a scene up as if it were a mysterious memory, once forgotten and not quite retrievable. Like a dream that wakes one but remains elusive and yet impels. That feeling and mindfulness.

But I want to do this in a documentary-style setting, with realistic coordinates and images – that can be seen through, as if one would say: “I know that, that’s a person nodding his head rhythmically.” Or, “That’s a woman taking a survey, a man putting out a cigarette on a wall …” But, in this midst, is another meaning, elusive, not quite graspable, that the mind, maybe the forebrain, the soul, wants to know more about, to explore in the imagination, yet remains un-nameable.

Not all scenes would carry this tension … some would be, are, simply what is present to the senses, but the mystery-scene, once it comes, turns the others toward it, seeks interpretation in the fullest sense of mind and feeling.

Maybe what I’m really getting at is postmodern-surrealism.

Surfaces and the mystery beneath, and vulnerability, are creative themes I prefer. Surfaces become fragile and translucent, and the mystery is the Wild that opens a Clearing in the midst of the interplay between these all.

The thematics of vulnerability and mystery also relate to how body moves in the reality that presents as body negotiates in the midst of surfaces that seem impermeable to it, but which also can wound it, penetrate it, soothe it, warm it, chill it, kill it. Even the wind becomes a surface.

So the Simple Meaning presents in vulnerability at the surface with mystery lurking, may reveal a Clue, which in the presentation opens up Interpretation – not only reasoned but felt, and as well an opportunity to illuminate the Wild Clearing in Mystery, even the Mystic.

Film still corresponds to the dreamscape. Notions, in the sense I’m working with, are intuitions that become formed in the correspondence and conversation between what I see around me and what occurs within me, the relationship.

It is also like dreaming because in the filming and editing, the notion, the intuition prevails, even if I can’t find rational coordinates to explain what it is I’ve been doing. It again is what hits and fits in the sense of this relationship. I let myself "dream" the filming, the editing.

So, the “right here, right now” is something that find coordinates itself in the interactions within the film, within me and the film, and within what happens in the filming and the subject/object “out there,” which yet is actually within as it is re-presented within me.

Instead of working with script and fictional material, though, I work with la realidad, la actualidad – the actual and the real, as it presents, and as it is re-presented. The midrash is the interpretation that comes not rationally but intuitively, yet still hanging on to the ideas of “simple meaning”; the “hidden,” the “clues” that might be discovered in the viewing; the “interpretation”; and the “secret,” the “mystical” that is embedded within the film, the video.

Like a "dream" – it presents.

In this, the landscape is a character, all of it – the color, light, texture, all the parts that fit within the frame. Its character changes, but remains prominent when the human figures emerge. (“Under Fire” is the 1983 film that moves from Africa to Central America, specifically 1979 Nicaragua during the Sandinista uprising against the Somoza regime, with Nick Nolte, Ed Harris, Joanna Cassidy and Gene Hackman in lead roles.)

Point for me is this: Everything plays within the frame, and an authentic response to that play is how the “everything” hits and fits, images, sounds, movements, colors, textures, reflections, refractions, rhythms, all of it. All the components are characters, for me, all of them are text. So, if I pan across the grill of a truck, or a tailgate, or a sign, each is a character. The text each represents yield the aspects of midrash haggadah – simple meaning; hidden clues, interpretation, the hidden “mystical.”

In another sense, all of them carry the origins of the universe and the planet, the 18 billion and 4.5 billion year old elements that yet are forming and reforming into who we are and what we experience. Metaphorically, one can see this formation when one moves from a television channel that has no signal, the background noise of the “Big Bang,” to a channel that translates a signal. For me, the intuitive part of “hits-and-fits” makes this connection, and also plays in the traces that a video scene reveals.

Idea is to focus on the ordinary, in plain sight, to pose form in its midst, and if the four components of Midrash Haggadah emerge, to let them be in the play of movement and sound.

If interpretation is there, it comes in the juxtapositions, immediate and cumulative, enigma variations.

If you put an image of a soup can in one room and of Mont Sainte-Victoire in another, and look at the reflection of a vehicle passing by in between, hear its sound and the indistinguishable sound of a voice, perhaps a rhythmic pulse too, then there are texts that leave traces across frames, all ordinary, but also something else -- something akin to "offbeat," the lifting up of the offbeat.

I take it all personally, in the deeper sense that humans share a connection that is unbounded. The word “intuitive” is usually used to describe its ambiguity. It’s not scientifically measurable, though artists and scientists may refer to it as part of their creative process. It certainly is part of mine, in the notion that when something or someone comes into the eyes and ears of a camera I’m holding, when I feel it “hit and fit” in a way that seems to defy explanation, that that is the moment to interiorize it filmically.

It has to feel authentic. Regardless of current taste. Or even if, as it may be, the work may never be valued as art, despite my intention. I can’t fore-ordain a guarantee, just be true to the creative spirit within.