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Studio Jimbeaux Mobile

...being a labyrinth

constructed from photographic notebooks and writings as

imagined by Lenara Verle and James Graham

Wake Up Virgil: Ready When You Are

You need a sound mind and shd. love deviation to enter this site. Being a misfit to at least some degree wouldn't hurt. Didn't Dante have a secret jones for getting lost?

I Agree I Want To Go Home

What follows is a discrete series of texts and images, each of them excerpts from longer photo essays. The reader shd. understand that each photo comes out of a larger photo story or group of portraits.

My intent in making this site was not to reproduce a single sensation over and over indefinitely but to allow the reader to experience as many different sensations as possible. I'm not trying to sell you anything, except perhaps the chance to get lost in an experience. Invention matters more than reproduction.

We escaped from the labyrinth of the galleries and the academic world with a few scratches but still alive, moving. No one sponsored this site, we didn't receive grants or stipends, and we're not looking for an academic position to justify and explain what we made. Perhaps that makes us anti-art, who can tell?

The King was drunk. He'd danced with all the courtesans without asking his wives' permission, he'd sung as loudly as he liked, he'd crashed a table and gone back to singing. He lay back on his pillows and demanded entertainment. A young poet was brought in.

Outside the castle crouched silently on the plain. Behind it stood the mountains and in between the labyrinth, the King's pleasure maze. It was a bit run down; the King's enthusiasm had waned. It was, he told himself, an illusion of his youth, the kind of trickery which creates a maze of images where every idea leads to another and another to another. It was a disorder of the mind, he decided. He was into straight arrangements now.

The poet was nervous. He knew what the King wanted, but he had other things on his mind. He'd heard of the ruler's kindness but in fact had only experienced his cruelty: the men of his village had been slaughtered. He was a child and had escaped. He could recite the old epics but instead preferred to begin with folk songs from his region, as he interpreted him.

The King sat through two songs before interjecting, "As you wish," which was the signal to have the poet tossed out. The King knew Commentary when he heard it. Enough of that. I do as I like. No one knows if the poet was sent to the gallows or simply shown the palace gates. In any case, he was never heard from again.

During the King's revelry, which continued til at least 3 a.m., a humble-looking artisan slipped into the labyrinth, under the pretext of fixing a leaky pipe. After he was checked for weapons of the obvious sort no one paid any attention to him. He'd brought his tools along. The night was very clear. It was spring, there were scents riding on the air - acacia and fig flowers. The worker went in and rearranged the entire labyrinth and for good measure, carried a few of the pictures out in his big canvas bag, back to the mountains, where they would be bartered so the villagers could buy arms.

There is no definitive entrance or exit to the labyrinth, nor is there one path to the center. Built out of memory and desire, changes may occur even after completion, shifting the route and the exhibits, opening new passages. Some people just can't sit still.

The labyrinth's dialectical twin is the river, the tide-bearing stream of images, changing constantly, constantly mutating. (The labyrinth is, by contrast, a finished piece which never moves.) No one picture of the river is true - the current shifts, the waters rise or fall at the same time that new sections of the bottom are uncovered. (All of this is important.) How to get across? There are two possible routes. Some plan meticulously, study tides, currents, shoals. They plot a triangle (point of departure, angle of projection, approximate arrival) and then walk in. Others take off their shoes, get mud between their toes, feel the current and the wind on their thighs, check to see if there are other swimmers about, look for the fish they know inhabit the river. When their peculiar science tells them, they go.

As in a bull fight or a love affair, first gestures are both fateful and revealing.

Anyone wishing to pursue a further discussion of issues raised by the labyrinth can read the essay Where to Go When You Want to Get Lost at the end of this site. The first stage of the labyrinth should be completed by mid-April 2003. In the meantime you are invited to wander around the pre-ruins.

Sleepless Wanderers by the Thousands