Today I was driving around the East Side of San Jose with Sylvia. And I took these pictures. Did I mention that last week in SF I saw a great show “Beyond Real” of Surrealist photos with, my favorite, a book of text and street photos called Banality, by Leon-Paul Fargue and Roger Parry. Any combination of words and images fits. (And, no, I'm not saying that any of these photographed objects are “banal.”)

Here’s my Borgesian (I’d like to imagine) imagining of a book of the same name, that is, Gerry Gurken's Banality appearing in today’s draft chunk of Postsingular

Gerry’s metanovel Banality was a vast combine of images all drawn from one and the same instant on a certain day. No time elapsed in this work, only space, and any hint of a story you might find was only in your imagination. Not to say this was a random data dump: the images were juxtaposed in a somewhat arbitrary order, each block or combine accompanied by written text or a spoken voice-over delivered by a virtual Gerry Gurken — who wandered this time-slice at the user’s side.

Gerry had taken his metanovel’s title, Banality, from a 1930 Surrealist book of juxtaposed text and street-photos, and the name had a particularly heavy resonance because the particular instant chosen was the moment known as Orphidnet Time-Zero, 12:00:00 noon PST on the first day after Orphid Night, this being the instant when the beezies had implemented their protocol of having the orphidnet save, once per second, the precise positions and velocities of every orphid on Earth. At this instant history had truly changed forever, and what did Gerry find there? Banality, although do remember that, being a Surrealist, he wasn't necessarily using the word in a negative sense … think, e.g., of Andy Warhol's love of the ordinary.

[Something rather surpising and unbanal: the Sikh temple in East San Jose. We went in, and three holymen were praying upstairs in little booths. Back to the novel excerpt…]

By the way, Gerry, who was a convivial and gregarious sort, preferred to find the images for Banality not by browsing in the old data base, but rather by roaming the streets. He had a good eye; he saw odd things everywhen and everywhere. Often as not, the beezies were able to scroll back from current sightings to find nearly the same image in that database record of Orphidnet Time-Zero, and when they weren’t, that was fine with Gerry too. For a confirmed Metadadaist, a cauliflower was as good as a catfish.

Banality was hundreds of hours long, and it grew longer every day; Gerry had no intention of every finishing it. Despite the dismissive remarks that Darlene sometimes made about the work, it was some kind of cockeyed masterpiece, for Gerry Gurken was a craftsman to the core. Any ten-minute block of Banality was fascinating, disorienting, revelatory, leaving the user’s mind off-center and agog — unfortunately, after that ten minutes, the work very quickly got to be too much.

Banality was like some bizarre, aggressively challenging sushi bar that the average person would desert forever once having tasted a single item: horse-clam siphon, manta-ray liver, live nudibranch, starfish spawn — “Thanks, very interesting, I have to go.” Slam.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 7th, 2006 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.