ALEX TURNER

NOTE: Though this essay speaks of Mutual Street Maple, a collage done at the very beginning of Alex’s career, it presciently summarizes his life-long working method.

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Alex Turner, continuous present

March 22, 1974

By John Bentley Mays

(alex turner‘s Mutual Street Maple, a 56“ x 56“ structure composed of 54 photographs, is the artist largest, and most complex experiment in the employment of gertrude stein‘s exegetical theories in the realization of photo-collage, &, as such, was clearly the central piece in his recent show at the education center in toronto. the meditations which follow began coming to me the day i first saw the work, which was also the day that i coincidentally read miss stein‘s “Composition As Explanation.“ all of miss stein‘s words cited below have been drawn from that essay.)

1

when we look at photographs, we can sense why primitive peoples uniformly fear the snapshot. we can sense the wrongness of photographs, how they are recognizable, but wrong, not real. they are like the ghost of things or persons. they look real, but are not, they are devoid of the process & the third dimension. & if we can empathize with savage fears, we can also understand what henri bergson meant when he spoke of “the lie of the snapshot” & what he saw as the snapshot’s offense against reality, its articulation of the flow of time into units, stops, measures, which do not exist for experience.

one way the artist can escape the guilt of the snapshot’s lie is to envision his photographic project as serial and processive, as a record of the same thing in several times, or several things in several times, & this is what alex turner has done.

he has said of the creation of Maple Street Maple, “i swung the camera up then down, catching the tree & the apartment buildings & the street & the sky, 9 times up & 9 times down, & i did this 3 times, once in winter, once in spring, once in summer, so the 3 parts of Maple are these 3 seasons, each made up of 18 photos, 18+18+18 = 54, & that’s the size of it.”

this procedure generates the piece, which emerges at last as a triptych of lists, “lists naturally for a while & by list i mean a series,“ lists, or series, take us beyond the freezing of time & the lie of the snapshot, & enable a vision of duration in simultaneity of instants, or what gertrude stein calls “a continuous present.”

2

“Each period of living differs from any other period of living, not in the way life is, but in the way life is concluded and that authentically speaking is composition.”

the life, which is conducted is a life which is chosen, not merely endured, & the techniques of alex turner embody his choices, which belong to the time & especially to the time he grew up in, in vancouver in the last decade, & are choices against technological expertise & in favor of the styles offered by the counter-cultural mechanical primitivism. (we think immediately of the steam-age quality of the photos in FILE MEGAZINE, of the videotapes shown from time to time at A Space (gallery), & of the home-movies of Warhol’s Factory or the Western Front (gallery).) turner’s photos are shot with an instamatic, they are developed under the simplest darkroom conditions, they are trimmed with kitchen scissors & mounted with woolworth’s glue.

the result of this primitive & primitivizing process is Maple Street Maple, the visual embodiment of a concept of time that is at once primitive & complex, that is the continuous present of both mystical experience &—if freud is to be believed—our deepest, primal sensuality, what we knew in that pleasant prenatal eternity, what we knew before the brutal drop into time. alex turner, like gertrude stein, is the senex puer of medieval romance, the paradoxical wise child, whom we observe cutting & pasting in the playroom. it is only when we look at what he is making that we see the end of his play, which is a vision at once complex & sublime.

3

in the winter panel of Maple Street Maple, the apartment building rises gracefully from a garden of cars & branches like an elm. in the summer panel, it is the building that is static, & the tree that rises & branches. summer & winter, the structures of organic & inorganic (or human) nature are brought together in turner’s work, & we see them alike though they were naturally simply different.

beyond opposition there is dialectic, & beyond dialectic lies unity, & the entire process of transubstantiation from lower to higher levels emerges as the meaning of turner’s piece. the tree & the building are different, yet the photograph discloses that they are the same, that they are both what heidegger calls “buildings,“ “dwelling places for the things that are.“ however different they may be in our ordinary view, they were both places within the time of the piece, which is the continuous present, & it is this alchemy of the time that transmutes their differentness into a unity.

gertrude stein has written: “i began doing natural phenomena what i call natural phenomena and natural phenomena naturally everything being alike natural phenomena are making things be naturally simply different.“

4

but the vision of reconciled opposites, the mystical coincidentia oppositorum, is a judgment on our everyday, profane perceptions. “Now there is still something else the time-sense in the composition. This is what is always a fear a doubt and a judgment and a conviction.“

all attempts to reach the sacred time of continuous present is a judgment on the profane time we live in, & there is finally no understanding of the one without the other. that is, we have the unity & the opposition in Maple Street Maple, & they are the mutual, co-terminal, & inevitable parameters of our lives. the seasons turn, we are caught in the great diastole/systole of the year, the struggle of life and death, of vital spirit against the fatal soil. all gertrude stein means when she speaks of that deeply troubling “distribution & equilibration“ in art & in time is present in turner’s work, in its structure as both simultaneity & list.

there is only one place to go from here, & that is beyond the turning wheel of seasons, the mandalic motion of alex turner‘s turning camera, & here beyond means into the work, into the still-point at the center of all this photography & making & cutting & gluing & hanging, even as we must move wholly into the centre of this time we live in & into its embodiments which, as miss stein tells us, are writing & painting & war.

5

“Composition is not there, it is going to be there & were are here.“

We cannot know the future, we can only know the hints & rumours of it emerging in our present as we move inexorably toward our ends. alex turner‘s project is only in its beginnings, but it is already alive with that sense of an ending, which always makes exciting the outset of any good adventure of the body or mind or imagination.