Against Floriography

(Words by Andalah Ali)

Floriography lets the flower speak to us in a way we can understand in easy terms. We affix meanings to flowers—the honeysuckle means devoted affection, the lilac, humility, the dog-strangling vine, a cure for heartache, the hydrangea, heartfelt emotion—and by so doing we fix its meaning as unambiguous. Art can become like a floriography. It can make its images and language and stories into signifiers, attach to each a specific meaning. It can let its signifiers grow together into a message that the reader won’t forego interpreting, or misinterpret. Like a bouquet or a garden when we remember our floriography, a film or a story or a picture can be as functional as a telegram, or an email.

I despise cut flowers and well-tended gardens. Leave the plants in the ground, and let the weeds grow. For me, art needs to be intuitive. I need to feel it, more than think it. The words and the images are signifiers, the way that all words and images are, but I want to leave open space between the idea on the screen and what it could mean to somebody reading it. The things I make mean many things to me, and usually nothing, and always nothing I can put into words other than the words I’ve already put to say what I’ve said. If someone is so kind as to look at my work, I hope they won’t worry too much that they’re not understanding something in it. I don’t have a certain message that needs to be unambiguous. I know I’m not a floriographer. I’m trying other ways to think about what I make. So far, I have:

I think I’m hiding myself. My work is one of the few places where I can control how I’m perceived, insofar as that’s possible anywhere. I’m choosing to minimize the amount I’m perceived in it. I’m trying to use a visual and written vocabulary that’s common enough that it doesn’t draw attention to itself, or make the reader pause on any image in particular, or make them think they know what kind of a person I am. I want a diction that’s plain, and doesn’t sound overwrought.

I think I’m trying to be political. People sometimes ask me why I don’t make political art—as a queer person and a racialized person and a leftist—and I get confused, because I think that I am. When I’m making art with unclear meanings, or seeming to gesture to things outside or further inside of the art, sometimes I’m writing about an experience of living in a cisheteronormative and colonial society, where we often just aren’t given words to talk about our troubles. And I’m a paranoid, cagey person. I don’t want to give my politics and myself so easily to an audience that seems often over-eager to consume cultural traumas, to the capitalist culture industry that reminds me of the Blob, from the movie, The Blob, in how it can absorb any attack on it and assimilate that attack’s weapons to make itself stronger.

I think I’m pulling pranks. That’s how I stop myself from getting eaten up by the idea that my writing is irredeemably self-indulgent. It would be inexcusable to make someone a five-minute film made entirely from still shots of hydrangea flowers, and expect them to have some kind of serious, enlightening aesthetic or scholarly experience. So it’s a joke I played on them, and I can’t believe they fell for it.

Contact

aali@nscad.ca