About The Scribbles
While I was making the “Scribble” photographs, capturing the images on film, I had no idea what they were about, no thoughts of meaning or mission. I was playing, intensely wrapped up in the experience of the moment as I arranged objects, exposed film and drew with light using my little flashlights. I was disengaged from the events of world and my life, wrapped up for a few hours in a cocoon of light and form. The photographs came about from a need to make something. Later, I called the group of work “Scribbles” because of what it felt like I was doing when I was waving around the lights in front of the camera.
It was May of 1987; my close friend Barry, a former boyfriend, was dying of AIDS in a far away suburb at his mother's house. He had gone there after becoming too sick to live on his own. By now he had suffered a brain hemorrhage and no longer had much control of his limbs; he couldn't speak or write, though he still communicated with his face and eyes. I would make the 50 minute train trip to visit him when I could, and in between visits would wait for a phone call. The reality of the plague had by now settled over us; there was still no treatment and no test to see if you were infected. One waited for symptoms to start; I felt fine but was waiting.
Feeling a strong need to start a new project, perhaps to keep my mind off of events, I had decided to make light drawings of vases of flowers, something I had done before in '82. I was woking nights, after things had quieted down and when I didn't have to teach a class or be somewhere the next morning. That first night, outlining tulips in a glass vase, the flashlight kept drifting away from the flowers, dancing around them instead. At the end of the session, pushing myself to do one more thing, I exposed a few frames where I dispensed altogether with the tulips, replacing them with only the line of light. That might have been the end of it, but the next time I had a night when I could work, a week later, I realized, after it was too late to do anything about it, that I had forgotten to buy flowers. Upset, I had nearly given up on working that night, when I remembered those last frames from the week before. That night everything seemed to fall into place; the ideas just kept coming. There followed more intense and very productive nights of work, two more that week, and four more, two weeks later, starting the night of the day Barry died. And that was it, I stopped. There was no thinking about it. Soon after, I made a few quick prints and pinned them to my studio wall. Right away I felt terrible about the pictures, and the more I looked the worse I felt. What was I doing! I thought: here I am in the middle of this plague that most of the world is ignoring. People are fighting in the streets to become visible and I can't even make relevant photographs – only these playful pictures that are nothing if not silly and frivolous. I took the prints down and stuck them in a box. One day, many months later, at loose ends, I pinned them up again to see if I could make any more sense of them; I couldn't. Then, by chance a woman who worked at my gallery stopped by. Her son, a 20 year old hemophiliac, had recently died of AIDS. She looked at the prints and exclaimed, Oh! funeral urns with spirits rising from them. And I though, yes, of course, that's right! Well, almost anyway. I really didn't see the vases as funeral urns but didn't mind that she did. I saw that the clear light filled vessels and the animated lines of light represented a kind of life energy detached from any solid body – spirits without bodies. A representation of the dead. And I knew then that the pictures were relevant; that they had come out of my experiences of the epidemic. I wasn't really very articulate about any of it then (maybe not even now) but I suddenly knew what the pictures were about, even if I couldn't exactly say. I felt good about them and set about, over the next two years, making prints.
IMAGE: Scribble #1, 1987