Foam Blog: We Make Lists Because We Don't Want To Die

Quipu

Umberto Eco says we make lists because we don't want to die, because it is what we do to bring order and comprehension to a world that touches on the infinite. Eco says he likes lists "for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia."

Akkadian cuneiform

To describe something is to make a list. Most early forms of writing-even from a diversity of unrelated cultures-are devoted to lists (see Inca rope records "Quipu," or clay tablets inscribed with Early Greek Linear B, as well as the earliest Proto-Cuneiform: they were, nearly exclusively, lists). Libraries are lists of books that reflect the mind(s) of the compiler(s). Art and culture are derived from lists and are generative of lists. The Internet is a list itself further refined through searches and "sub" lists that define things to us like Facebook 'friends' or oil spills.

Gas Tanks © Berndt and Hilla Becher

Water Towers © Berndt and Hilla Becher

Anonyme Skulpturen © Berndt and Hilla Becher

Photography certainly is a form of list making. It says I was here, here and here. It gathers ideas and delimits those things from the surrounding infinite and it makes groupings through the order of things, which point us to ideas about something specific or ineffable. Series of images reinvest the singular list by repetition, further defining aspects of the list. Artists are known for series of topologies, which are basically just lists: the Bechers and their water towers; August Sander's farmers; Blossfeldt's flowers; photographs as arranged in Gerhard Richter's Atlas -these are, perhaps, the most obvious examples. But every photographer lays claim to lists.

from the series Wundergarten der Natur © Karl Blossfeldt

Wundergarten der Natur © Karl Blossfeldt

Photographers can be defined either by genres or obsessions-from portraiture to landscape to fixations with genitalia or the sky at night. Diane Arbus had her outsiders and Garry Winogrand had his women and his streets, Robert Frank had America and its icons. Commercial photographers get hired because they can be trusted to make images that are extensions of lists they've already made: food; cars; lingerie; celebrities; corporate CEO's; etc.-until they become defined by the lists they've made.

from the series Atlas © Gerard Richter

Atlas © Gerard Richter

We define ourselves by the kinds of images we keep or identify with. We use lists to recognize and differentiate things from an infinite number of possibilities that something is not. Until there are so many infinite possible lists and things to put on those lists that the lists themselves compete with the infinite. Until the list itself becomes so large and undifferentiated that the culture that the list originated in and depends upon drowns in it.