A More Perfect Diagram That Is Not Even A Diagram
-on Untitled, by Holly Suzanne
mixed media on canvas, 2012-
I have the enormous pleasure and extravagant gift (one that I come to understand, delinquently as is my way, ever more profoundly each day and night) of living with, being married to, and working creatively alongside a tremendously talented artist, Holly Suzanne.
We work purposefully together in the rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis – that is, the representation of representation in various media. Usually I work in the medium of language and she in the visual arts. Sometimes we share or swap media in order to grow closer to one another, work to comprehend, and to challenge and progress our own capacities of creation and expression.
Not a Case in Point that is Perhaps a Case in Point:
Recently my wife invented this piece. It incorporates painting, collage and probably encaustic, containing metal “S” hooks, wire mesh, perhaps chain or other fabrics, perhaps wax, paints and probably unknown substances beyond. I can only say “who knows!” what makes its way through her avaricious mind and body onto these surfaces!
This particular work strikes me so, as I pass it daily to enter my verbal den, having been stewing this new year on conceptualizing for myself an attempt at an accounting (to/with/for/in myself) or presentation of how I consider artistic production as a human activity.
This morning I completed a re-reading of Wallace Stevens’ essay “Imagination as Value” from his book The Necessary Angel. A book I wholeheartedly recommend to any and everyone with creative bones in their bodies. I happened to copy out the following onto my 3”x5” notecards with which I fertilize my working-space:
“the operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art and letters…the chief problems of any artist, as of anyone, are the problems of the normal (daily realities – my insertion) and that he (or she) needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give.”
Which put me in mind of my recent assays and theories re: “Art & Appearances” and A+A=AA.
which are kin to:
“the intellect gobbles up everything around it, and as soon as it lays hold of feelings, it becomes spirit. Taking this step is the task of writers.” (Robert Musil)
and:
“In life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is the truth as we see it.” (Wallace Stevens)
Or that we humans are some bodymind processing plant ever infusing the unreal into the real, normalizing (for ourselves) the abnormal (each future moment and all of its inherent change) even by introducing abnormalities, concocting, fabricating ever onward…
grabbing “S”-hooks and netting and fabrics and wax, and paint cans and brushes and emotion and vision, hope and suffering, wounds and joy, and making…
and there are so many ways to see this
but I digress. As I was saying,
passing by this recent artifact of my wife’s making, it felt replete with myself – as if my strapping bandaged finitude were bound in the caging rectangle of chain, layered under the dark-hole gobbling gunshot wounds of my core fears and imagined (or real) belabored habits of mind and perception with innocent life-light, all filtered continuously through net-webbings of intellect, imagination and feeling which sometimes tear open or bursts or wing-themselves…resulting… producing…making objects, words, behaviors, actions or ideas into the elaborately variegated open of world…
as if, unbeknownst to me, or perhaps stimulating in me, or maybe inspired by me (likely all of the above) – a most accurate image of all I’ve been attempting to express these past days,
a kind of intuitive ekphrasis?
an appearance of art for damn sure
a more perfect diagram that is not even a diagram
And that is what I’m talking about.
Thank you, my love.
Thank you thinkers and makers of art.
Thank you appearances and life.
N Filbert 2012
All my Words are Silent 