Assignment #27 Take a picture of the sun

I chose, as my Miranda July assignment, to take a picture of the sun. It was difficult to capture the sun on camera due to some principal of physics I will not attempt to understand but it is not the same as when viewed with one’s own eyes. It was the end of a hectic day when the picture was taken and by the time I retrieved my camera and ran to the park to get a shot of the glowing red ball, half of it had sunk below the horizon. I then took other pictures on different days, each shot more clever than the last but I decided to stick with my first photo. That was my physical experience of taking the picture but I figured there had to be more to it than that. I thought about the sun. It’s a given. It hangs over us everyday from dawn to dusk. It’s where plants seek their energy to grow and survive and we use the plant’s energy to do the same. But the sun sustains life in other ways. Some trends show suicide rates to be higher in periods of the year where daylight is diminished and so it may be true that the sun plays a role in our emotional well-being as well. The sun is beautiful and enhances our own beauty. People look calmer when the sun is in their face (mildly annoyed at having to squint but calmer nonetheless). It’s the same sun that rose on our first day of life that shines on us today and will be there tomorrow, too. The sun allows us to tell time but is itself timeless. We all have the sun in common but each person shares a unique bond with it.
Miranda July reconceptualizes art by showing that art exists in our everyday lives and does not always have to be created for the specific or sole purpose of being art. The idea that only some few gifted individuals have the vision or propensity to create art has been discarded (Lyotard’s incredulity towards metanarratives). Her assignments cause the ‘artist’ to pause and read whatever they will into the meaning of the task as one would struggle to find meaning in other established, yet equally obscure forms of art.