| Collages 2 |
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Untitled
Dimensions unrecorded, No date
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| In 1983, Frederick Sommer was invited to give a talk at Mills College in Oakland, CA. He was asked, "Could subject be something abstract, like a feeling?" to which he answered, "Yes, everything that fits into our heads is portable because it is abstract. It is the need for the portability of ideas that makes abstractions an attractive necessity. Animals already use abstraction and they are acquiring more linguistic logic. We don't necessarily have to think of linguistic logic as limited to speech because what language really stands for is the communication of thought. Not so many years ago people were insisting that animals did not have intelligence, they had only instinct. We really had things figured out in a strange way: we weren't able to do anything that needed instincts and the animals weren't able to do anything that needed thinking. We know that animals practice pictorial logic by their territorial marking; they tell one another where they are by this practice. The phenomenon of what something is and where it is represents important fundamentals in physics, art, and mathematics. Position and occupier function within the domain of pictorial and aesthetic logic; this is the domain of anyone who is interested in thought and configurations." Frederick Sommer, "The Two Logics, Mills College, Oakland, 1983" published in "Words / Images," Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona (1984). |
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