ON HOLD
Text and Images by DAN MEYLOR
Much of life is spent on hold, on waiting for. Births. Marriages. Deaths. And waiting, simple waiting in doctor’s offices, bank lines, DMV lines. Lines, long lines. And waiting, simply waiting for a call back or waiting for someone to respond after being put on hold.
The last-listed form of waiting was a time for me to do doodles: find a piece of scratch paper, take out a pencil or pen, and make circles, triangles, and wiggly lines into an image that wasn’t art, let alone great art.
(But I have seen art in galleries and art museums that resemble the doodle I recently made to keep in practice.)
I must admit that I loved the feel of pen scratching the paper, the slow process of adding geometric figures, and the wondering about what a doodle-reader might say the image revealed about me.
Time and tools move on. To doodle or not to doodle? That became the question, a question that was answered with the coming of the Smart Phone Age. An iPhone, a Slow Shutter app, and the Snapseed photo editing program seduced me. And while the new techy approach didn’t have the warm feel of “a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou,” it did have the feel of a quickie.
While waiting now, I find a colorful ad in a magazine or anything colorful, open my iPhone, select the Slow Shutter app, focus on the colorful object, slowly move my phone to make a image, edit the image in the app editing mode, re-edit the image in Snapseed, and transfer the image to Instagram and Photoshop, all in far less time than the time required to make an image with a camera or stretch a canvas for an abstract painting.
I share some of the results:
And now I find myself on hold, unable to proclaim that these images are art. Certainly I didn’t intend them to be examples of Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that “Art is anything you can get away with” (Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man.) Certainly, they illustrate creativity insofar as tools are used to assemble components into something new. But are they art? Can anything from technological tools rather than the human hand be art. Can images that are produced by algorithms or AI be human art with human purposes that reflect human values. I don’t know. Perhaps I am just on hold again, waiting for some Godot or deus ex technologist to do, to do what?
