Tips (the ends of things)
A visual essay concerning objects that come to an end. A work-in-progress.
Introduction
(Rewritten Feb 20, Mar 3, 2004)
I have been thinking about tips, the end of things, the end of objects. I want to investigate the subject in depth and in the end to produce a visual essay. While blogs are meant to be personal diaries I use this blog to present and develop a work in progress. Much of "Tips - The End of Things" is devoted to photographic examples but this introduction dwells on the questions and confusions that shape my query. I would appreciate comments and suggestions for examples of tips.
From a certain point of view an object ends everywhere its surface meets the space around it. There are also some areas of a shape where we feel it ends more than others, for instance, the edge of a box where two planes meet. But I concentrate on the area of an object we call the tip. (Once you begin to talk about this in an abstract way "tip" becomes difficult to define. "Beginning" and "end" are truly abstract concepts when it comes to physical shapes. Do our bodies begin at our feet and end at our heads? Or do they begin at our heads and end at out feet? Or even do they begin at our skin and end at our skeleton.) When we say "tip", however, we know what we mean. If an object "ends" everywhere, still we feel that it ends at a specific locale, which is often called the tip... the very end. The end of fingers, toes, penis or nipple, the steeple of a church and the point of a knife are all tips.
(Added February 26, March 8 2004)
Frequently a tip tapers. There is a dramatic, noticeable transition from solid to void. Tips are pointed. Not to put too fine a point on it but that is the point. Or if not tapered, tips end in a bulge. Tips end in either a taper or a knob. A tip is "created" when a shape becomes either smaller or larger as it ends. A change in size at the end of a shape is one of the main things that makes a tip, a tip. A shape defined by parallel lines does not have a tip - consider a Mies skyscraper, as compared to a gothic church. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building have tips on top but not classic modern buildings.
And so I want to think about tips as a formal category. Got that! A formal category! And if tips constitute an aspect of form I want to think about what they might mean as form, not just as reference. What do tips mean? And not only what the mean but why do we notice them, why are we concerned about them, what is special about them and why the locus (?) of attention paid to them?
It is very common that there is some kind of extra work, some more refined, sustained elaboration that occurs at a tip. Newel posts, steeples, finials, pinnacles etc. And there also seems to be a peculiar lack of "tips" in things and art modern, maybe contemporary as well. Cars, for instance (think of a Corvette) were covered with tips. Now they aren't. Or think of Donald Judd. Tipless. Adamantly tipless. What form would be more tipless than a box, a rectilinear prism. And so the final form that I am imagining, the point of this exercise is to create a visual essay. Use the new forms/media that I now know Flash or Final Cut Pro to create a video. An essay that makes its argument as much by collecting, editing, arranging, composing images as by making an argument with words. And, as usual I have had a hard time getting started. This is an idea that has been in my head for a long time. At least four years (and I started this a year ago and let it ferment until now). This blog is a place to build and organize.
One of the points of this project is to find out what happens when you see all these pictures of tips. Tips from all these different walks of life. To see what happens for me - the conclusions that I make, that I discover, the meanings that I can unpack. But also what conclusions the audience makes. Though I want to make an argument with pictures (and text) but I also want the pictures to make their own "argument", to say things implicitly, to say things that I do not know or can figure out, to say things that I do not want to state outright.
An elaboration on "intermediate abstractions".
Comments
I also have spent some times thinking about tips and nips and ends and bends, protrusions and contusions. Tips are not only the "ends of things" but, in the natural world, tips are the beginnings: think of the tips of trees, the youngest leaf cells reaching toward light, while the root hairs seek nutrients. Crystals also grow tip first, as do molds, spores and scores of others. The satellites we send into orbit are also tips, as are the radio signals sent into space