The projects in Series I have their genesis in photographing the altered landscapes associated with the Murray River which began after completing a PhD. Both the particularity and the presentation of its sensuous form are characterized by fragmentation in contrast to the totality of the book.
The Series I projects are a fragmentary photography informed by the Jena Romantics‘ generic concept of art, which is the transdisciplinary idea of art in general, rather than specific genres of poetry/literature or the specific crafts and traditions of painting or sculpture. (Athenaeum Fragment 116). The transdisciplinary idea of art in general was understood to be freedom from the rigid purity of mediums (Critical Fragment number 60) and intrinsic to what art is to be modern. The modern artwork is self-determining, autopoietic, incorporates plasticity of materials, and is a form of reflection. It derives its newness and critical meaning from what is not art and it is constituted, historically, through its contamination by the historical conditions of capitalism and the ‘prose’ of the world. In a carefully constrained sense, art can go where theory cannot for the romantics, although the art that will go the farthest will be fairly self-consciously theoretical.
Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of the fragment is aesthetic/philosophical concept, rather than the pre-Romantic idea of the fragment as a broken-off bit of a whole (eg., a vase) that receives its very meaning from the whole or totality. The philosophical fragment is a constructed art work that is in itself complete qua form, while at the same time invoking an essential incompleteness; it is deliberately planned as a fragment as opposed to being an unfinished draft struck by incompletion due to the photographer’s death; and the fragmentary form is to be distinguished from the literary genre of the fragment, such as the tradition of the aperçue, the pensée and the aphorism.
Fragments are projects. In contrast to a project as a totality being an ensemble of unconnected pieces merely stitched together, philosophical fragmentation is a self-sufficient form with the partiality of its content and its reference to incompletion being a project that is forever becoming. Rather than the not-yet-achieved, it is a promise that points towards the heart of things and whose development is heavy with potentiality and possibilities. The project is an open. ended fragment. (Athenaeum Fragment 77)
