Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 47))

291—
The Philosophy—if any—of “291” is vivisectional. The psychology
perfectly clinical.
“291” A huge full blooded tolerator. A live challenger of preconceived
notions. From art to potatoes: a very great generator of passion: a stern
creator of an unconscious scheme that permits of organic diagnosing extremes
in equally full measured spiritual terms or code: a very great squanderer of
consciousness; the livest conservator of the living thing; the biography
famous, a great confessional—.
There is a certain, call it positivism, spirit of the little place, a certain, very
definite yet, most difficult to put to words, mere words as such. It is probably,
just where the intellect crosses, with the imaginations. From time to time,
I question the license to substitute, as it were, these imaginations for intel-
lectual somersaulting. Naturally under such spiritual “pressure” one
fancies an avalanche of “objections;” still one feels the stigma, the blow of
which is rather far fetching; kind of suicide; practically hastening to utter
oblivion, seemingly; that, which we already have absorbed, consciously or
unconsciously, which hourly constitutes higher criticism—by higher criticism
I mean the “word” passed thru freer and fuller contact between the creators
or painters themselves. “291 ” is the little rendezvous for such Confessions.
So to me, complete perfect ventilation, spiritual, is the dominant note;
the one most positive after all; a sort of spiritual mart, where souls, where
the individual with anything in the form of a real message, truly finds a
chance to develop, to grow, to make good or sink, absolutely. “291” is a
growth—.
To me—symbolically—“291” is the little craft, the lone speck on the
high seas, braving, bleeding, battling and weathering hurricane upon hurricane,
single; sailing, creeping and navigating at snail pace; perpetually piloting,
crossing, re-crossing, broader channels, to enter, and re-enter anew upon still
far greater seas, of far greater importance; eventually destined to arrive
at some very positive port; of character, absolute. When the history, the
true history of great living art will be written, the “log” of the little craft
ought to make inspiring reading. The above thoughts constitute the meanest
preamble on the subject in question, that of the little place dubbed “291.”
There, one breathes freer, fuller indeed, where obituary notices are read
aloud—that is why I go there.
I repeat, “291 ” is equally as conscious as it is unconscious. Its mission—
if any—is rather to intellectualize the course “sailed,” to pacify to the end
that permits of a pure concrete summing up, as it were, of the livest purest
constituent of that which organically constitutes great living art, which
basically is more or less communistic, which in turn, in reality, is life itself:
“291” is not a pacifist.
“291,” itself, is more the essences of first contact. Its existence is natural,
and therefore a violent objector; a sane and “unsafe” tolerator of the bigger
value; a huge deductor; a sterilizer of—abstractions.