Earlier this week, an artist I know made an off-hand comment referring instead of
Alfred, to
Albert Stieglitz. Why, oh why did this infuriate me so? An excusably simple error, a personal annoyance, yet something continues to nag at my sense of stability. Proceed indulgence...
It's not that I feel as though the legend of Stieglitz was somehow besmirched, quite the contrary: as if this minor flub solidified his master's status in my unconscious. Why, in my most knee-jerk reactions am I still so wedded to authenticity & the facts I've been fed? What do I care if he goes down in one person's subjectivity as
Albert? Isn't this sort of convolution something I've come to view as important: those moments that draw awareness to a form (even if that form is as banal & esoteric as the History of Photography), making us question why it is we think the things we do?
Ahh, yes so it is personal but with generational, aesthetic & polemical self-consciousness. I was angered because in my unconscious I responded: "how could one possibly mispronounce The Master's name!" While my conscious immediately re:responded to that with: "Ah jeez, Leopold! Come off it already - who gives an F? There are far more important issues to get riled about than a fleeting moment of 'disrespect' & shame on you for interpreting it as 'disrespect' to begin with, what are you a Modernist? Just gross."
And so ends another episode of: don't dish it if you can't take it.
Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems. The Pocket Poets Series: Number 19. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964. p. 58. (6 3/16 x 4 3/4")
