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Category: Art
Composition
Approach the page with no idea. No secondness of reality or facts.
See what the words will do. Like spontaneous sex with your lover.
What happens next. If you’re lucky.
What words will come?
Look closely. Draw the pen near the paper. Remember, you’ve no idea, like what I’m writing. Language finding synonyms making thoughts. Perception in the body.
Something already in the clear, or on it. Never clear. Do you see it?
Don’t let the first mark frighten you, it is already done, everything coming after you can edit: crossing out, crossing over.
See the line? To chase or avoid, either way, impossible to capture or erase.
Look again – do you see it? Hover but don’t inscribe, what is it waiting there?
I’m not being mischievous or rhetorical, facetious or mystical. I want you to see what is always already there, predividing your canvas, filtering the open before you engage. What you cast out around you, the shadow of your general ‘self.’
See it there gathered at point of pen, shading back toward your physical hand and pooling around it? The absence of your presence forming incorporeality.
You are visiting here. Your shadow is the record. What you make out you make up. But it’s never the first word or the beginning line. Reality comes before you and spreads out, interfering and refracting the light you wish to use.
At times a bulky blot, at others barely discerned, evidence nonetheless that you are, in fact, tracing. Operating in a kind of cloud of substance, adding lines and loops, particles, threads.
They say art (and representation) began in shadows, with shadows – recognition of other and presence and beyond. Likely a myth that is true.
For starters, notice the outline, letting it outline itself/yourself, the visible ghost informing your are…
Now, since you’ve already overshadowed what’s next, begun what’s begun, press down and press forward, press on…
Our Mysterious Callings, er, befuddling vocations
continuing qualia…
{eliminating parts of speech and tense(-ing)s}
Where we began, and when, was next-to-nothing. How must have been something, and the what bears repeating. Complex and variegated channels, ganglia alike to beans taking root, nutty and filigreed.
The event is conception and all its pertinent involve (where-when-events) – resultant growth of hairy little what-hows.
What is a theme-and-variations composition, melodies often scarce to trace, but certainly music! Thrumming drumming subtle, with irregulating tremors, shushing swinging bellowed strings, replete with punctuations. A human is a riffing thing, something of artist’s collage coupling biological systems and common laws relatively, referred to as patterns.
Person is an unstaid element, living requiring stimulation and acknowledgements, enough continuity to be. Elaborate contexts of nurturing structures and their vice-versas. Cells swimming fluids, objects in umwelts, mini-beasts scuttling a globe, as seen from various distances (perspectives not visibly limited).
Existences like screens full of mimeographed transparencies layered and colored by hands. Bewildering tangles of syrup and string. Odd combos when mirrored by mirrors, as mirroring means. Two-sided at least. Reflected subjectivities / subjective reflections, sort of spinning things set on a gyro turning tilting.
Nurturing structures of what-hows commons: language, culture, environment and arts. Structuring nurture of sustaining nourishment, awareness (attention) and semblance of security.
And there you have a person (a what-how) and a world (where-when-event); synonymously person-making-world, er, world-making-person toggling looping recursive spirals adjusting discontinuous connectivities…
Perhaps each and overall what-how’s where-when-events all beggar why (i.e. remain puzzling) at which point (or somesuch of the like) there probably arises a who. Who and why as yet unknown, being conjectured derivatives only from how-what in where-when-events.
All demanding further potentially endless inquiry and study and inventive erasures of conventional grammars and parts of speech.
Metamorphosis: 2013: Insect Intensity
Termite Art
Working the edges and angles. “Part of the woodwork,” they say, though not in a structural sense – rather more a destructural or deconstructional way, one should probably add. We’re usually fairly quiet, but work is constant, at times involving even groups or clans. What we create looks like a whole full of holes. Feeding on the solid, reducing it to doubtful tunnels, leaving some beautiful patterns. Rhythmic, at least. Once in a while you can hear the hum of our work, but more often than not our efforts are simply stumbled upon.
What you once thought sturdy enough to lean upon often crumbles out from under. Usually we’ve been there first and found the flaws. We scramble and burrow, many even fly. Keeping mostly to ourselves, gnawing and chawing away at the things we all believe in and trust, things assumed to hold fast and true, the shapes that give substance to lives.
Of course many consider us sinister nuisances, think we work to undermine, but we really don’t take much – just leave it considerably different than when we first come upon it and passage our way through. Left to ourselves we accomplish a lot, are industrious, but we’re more often pestered, hampered, sealed-off, even (and yes, I’m serious!) exterminated! Treated as pests or threats or dangers.
We might be admired, theoretically, but we’re never welcomed as guests. Not invited in houses where public or money are smelled. There we’re only talked about – as worming and wriggling our ways through the infrastructures – “fluttery, ephemeral critters” we’re called – parasitic to power and ultimately debilitating if left unconfronted.
Harmless enough as ourselves, simple units to squash, but we happen to be many. Think: ants. Think: pestilent plague.
We can be quite beautiful in the light (as a specimen!) – translucent and fine and opaque, exhibiting a powerful delicacy. But given free reign we undo the foundations, and therefore, it is feared, the whole edifice too. An elephant, for instance, might be trained – used for tricks or for jokes – is easy to keep an eye on, but not us “weasly and scuttling creatures,” no, no.
All I’m saying is that some of us are always eating away at the edges and bounds, plundering thresholds, slobbering the barriers and gates – they’ll acknowledge us if forced to – but with a mind to be rid of. If featured, we watch out for the shadows and sprays, closed quarters and boots. They’ll let us have slush piles and compost, a few trimmings or what’s already abandoned, but it’s always in hopes – always – of keeping us OUT. Mark my words, no one really loves a thriving insect but itself. Grind and tear with all you’ve got, our lives are short and there’s much to do.
Requiring so little, any medium will do, only to find access…and…wizzle inside…
“A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.
The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.”
-Manny Farber-
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! – Constellation Web Shoppe.
such fiercely intelligent music (sound)
thank goodness
Where we’ll be
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and don’t forget you can still catch Holly Suzanne’s work at Mead’s (through Saturday)
among the many other things happening this lovely eve in Kansas!
All my Words are Silent 