In this experiment, Diana Arterian attempts to define the undefinable.

I am a recording. I don’t age. Perhaps the recorded object ages. I don’t.

– David Grubbs, “I Am a Recording. I Don’t Age.”

“A desert wind rippled across Lake Mead and through the tamarisk on the shore. Dotted through the reedy grass, the ghostly foundations of the once buried Mormon town of St. Thomas now, with the water level falling, returned like a rude reminder of all the secrets this place kept.”

– Chris Abani, “A Path of Shells”

“Could be the Olympics. Jaime Rubin lifts his empty glass to torch-height, hoists what he thinks are his famously emphatic eyebrows and bawls toward Kenny the bartender, ‘Yo, Kelsoe! A round for the house! Davis is buying!’”

– Lou Mathews, “Hollywoodski”

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

There is a reason why ekphrasis is as an ancient practice that still thrives today; it is never easy to define the essence of things. It is also difficult to pinpoint what draws us to one work and not another. And this is no less true in defining the aesthetic of Black Clock and my appreciation of it.

Black Clock bears images that are often blurred and rarely show a person’s face, but rather their environment within a space; pieces of something larger, these images have an allure that makes us want to understand the greater picture. But there is something more to it that I am interested in investigating.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I started by looking through photographs that I have taken over the years that are my aesthetic and my style of photography, but also bear similar characteristics to the images in Black Clock, and so are akin to its eluding aesthetic. I then took these photographs and matched them with the first lines of stories printed in issue 11 of Black Clock.

I paired the first photograph, taken in Washington, DC near the Smithsonian Museum, with the first line of David Grubbs’ “I am a Recording. I Don’t Age.” because it’s such a strange image and without the children’s faces, it seems almost as if they are ageless themselves.

The second pairing is of a photograph taken in an abandoned home at the Rodeo Grounds commune in Topanga Canyon with the first sentence of Chris Abani’s “A Path of Shells.” I chose to put these two together because Abani describes an abandoned place and the photo is of an abandoned place being taken over by nature.

In perhaps the most literal pairing of the three, I combined the third photograph, taken in the Cha Cha Lounge in Silver Lake, with Lou Mathews’ “Hollywoodski” because the initial scene in the story takes place in a bar.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

I am still uncertain that I can articulate the aesthetic of Black Clock (or perhaps the aesthetic of anything); however, I believe I can at least “capture” it. Sometimes in understanding our connection to a work, it is useful to emulate it through a process that starts with ourselves.

by Diana Arterian
who is currently earning her MFA in Poetry at CalArts and assists California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes;
her self-published chapbook First Wind is available at Skylight Books