The Unknown Unnamed scribble-sketches – just a minute
Category: Graphotos
Visual works I encounter that put me in mind of literary marks and gestures; writing-pictures
An aside, centered
constancy in compelling
tellings synonymous with what I envision
recommended, terrifically
Circular Ekphrasis
Dueling Jim Dine
“My mind was going and so was my hand,” he said, and so did I. There seemed to be some sort of automatic conduit, almost an unthinking or unconscious mechanics between what occurred in my brain and body and the gestures of my hand fisting a tool. He called his “drawing,” I, “writing”; “scribbling,” both.
He sketched a line.
I doodled a word.
We compared combinations of marks. I thought his propitious, he considered mine apropos. We continued. He smudged and scraped, texturing and smearing a darkened patch of his paper. I scrawled smudge, erasing the ink as I wrote, leaving a bleary term, as well as “melancholy knot.” He raised an eyebrow, squirting water on lines of ink, causing them to run and wriggle down the surface. I likewise thought “crow’s blood,” and wrote “mood of lightless cavern,” in carefully dropped water stains.
He squinted as if he’d been challenged. I, the I writing, watched, expectantly. The draftsman sat down.
I roped out over my page “the knife sliced deep through parchment, carrying fire.” He leapt to and slashed his surface staining the tear’s edges black with brilliant red and orange pastels rising off the seam. We chuckled, he winked.
Picking up a squat bottle of indigo blue, he dashed it against an open field on his paper, creating a blotch slowly swelling in miniscule fronds.
I reacted. Grabbing pens in both hands I charged my page and inscribed, as if in fury, fat-felt-tipped and intimately paralleled in circular lines (by turning the paper as I scrawled) “maniacal laughter sobs from grievous wound seeping rabidly throughout his grocery list, voicemail and every phrase and memo taken in, given out, as if he could not escape the inky squid-cloud, the night’s obsessed vortex, unable to feign or dart his pollution.”
Scenting blood, inveigled in duel, he savaged his canvas with cadmium shrieks, scratching and scabbing the pulp, then clouding it with sponges of charcoal and chalk, dementing the work to a state.
Scowling, he read the above.
We rested with coffee and smokes.
At this point, he challenged me to a mark-for-mark, side-by-side, making in tandem. He moved and struck; “drak” I jotted. He followed with a long downward arc of blue chalk while I scrivened a loosened cursive “loop of sky in gravity’d tears” also in chalk. Jagging yellow up and across, all caps I shouted “WITH THE HEAT OF THE WIND’S BLAZE THROUGH DESERT!”
He spiraled while I “circled round the mayhem of the mill, her lilting light goes out.” We darken and begin to fill the ground…as he shades and scumbles
I “in the apparatus of time the world dims and pops. Stumbling gesturally through policy and poem the language drains its line. Discovering its feeble feet it finds a lure and breaths crackle in plentiful song. The patching powers perhaps the frame, caressing its fitful desire, soon it swoons and whispers. The vapor twists its noise and cogitates in action worrying, tendering, arousing limpid lisps. We vibrate and hold, tendrilling thread to conjoin. Fastening now on swoop and dive, a sistered surround, a remoteness drawn near. We are woven, our minds are going and so are our hands….”
for instants!
The Scribbled Line Portraits of illustrator Ayaka Ito and programmer Randy Church began as a class assignment before the stunning digital photography innovation came to public attention at a Toronto FITC workshop.
The series showing shredded human bodies integrated 3D and programming for a project with a three-day deadline while the two were at the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Ito and Church “put their models through the shredder” using a custom Flash drawing tool, HDR lighting, Cinema4D and Photoshop.
The project began as a class assignment and grew into a fully realized series which won an Adobe Design Achievement Award and has been featured in 3D World Magazine and Communication Arts Magazine.
A post from DesignBoom with more technical detail on the process, here.
NOTE: This is from the Art Junkie archives, 2012.
Systems Theory
Regulating Relationships
From most points of view, life is a system. Enormous and elaborate interlacing activities keep it going on. Biology, physics, religion, mathematics and logic; semiotics, psychology, aesthetics and history; chemistry and health, poetry and politics, philosophy and fame – all intricate reverberant systems of night (and possibly?!) infinite interconnections – visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious.
I feel it all the time. I’m “affected.”
Hubbub over sports, havoc of war, hullabaloo of cosmology and genetics. Tentacles of memory, omens from the past, illnesses and love. My own aches and pains. Allergies, anxiety, pleasure and joy. Tastes, values. All of/in these indecipherably interlocking worlds of living things, views, theories, events and conundrums. Words, images, feelings. Wires, energy, matter. Signals, symbols.
I feel it. I’m “affected.” Always.
All ways.
An hypothetically infinite ganglia or swarm of influences and infections — a finite and mortal middle-aged male inhabiting a very small space made of receptors, pores, nerves, cells and liquids: constantly thrumming, sloshing, snap-crackling, emoting and perceiving a cosmos of effects/affects.
This is why I keep saying: I get it, I’m totally “a/effected.”
The situation is perhaps similar to a paramecium channeling a bolt of lightning. Most likely the little sucker survives in some fashion – but what the – ?
How do we manage?
No wonder we blitz out, dull, “veg,” “pass out,” sleep. Drugs, fantastical entertainments, thrills, spills and crack-ups…anything to direct/divert the universe-sized charges incessantly overwhelming us.
Something struck me today. In our growing history of surviving, perhaps even thriving, how have humans as a species often overcome overwhelming difficulties? Well sure, all of the ways mentioned above: escape, denial, “tuning out,” apathy, ignorance, fantasy, insanity or violence, danger and so on, but when we are perceived (perceive ourselves) to “advance” “progress” or “grow” – what is the method? (When we can interpret one apart from “accident” or “effect”?)
Have we not repeatedly immersed ourselves in our reality (“the way things are”) and used them to our benefit rather than detriment? Technology, science, arts and beliefs – the seeking of the facts, turning them to our interests or needs, finding fulfillment and challenge – furtherance – survival.
What snapped in me today (I’ve had years of “managing” my “e/affectedness” thorugh alcohol, isolation or the dependence of my children) is this: if our inquiries and theories by and large agree/propose that “life” is one phenomenal, inescapable and gargantuan set of layered and inter/intra-relational systems, then “relating/relationships,” their process(es) and effects are precisely where the work, the living, the surviving (perhaps thriving) emphases ought to be engaged.
That balancing, recharging, nourishing, coping, diversion and awareness might be best figured out right where it happens – in systems of relationships. That where we are “affected” and what “effected” by is precisely where our greatest opportunity to “effect” must be. Our process of relating, our relationships with/in the cosmos of possibilities, is our living. What we know or think seems to tell us – our attention, our “solutions,” our being belongs there: in relationship.
Thank you Holly (my wife), Scott (my dearest friend), children (all of you, my charges) – and others – you truly regulate me in this world.
Springing Forward? Let’s Say “He Jumps”
Robert Parke-Harrison
Springing Forward? – Let’s Say “He Jumps”
I breathe in. Drawn-long, held as if full of some essential substance, then let leak, some as a rush, some hardly – again signifying a value – a perhaps-last or at-long-last. I’ve breathed out.
I breathe in. My children, my wife, my house and its yard. Strange concoctions of scents – some floral, some stench; some earthy, some fume – through my fingers, my beard, my innermost emotions and mind, the surfaces of skin. I let them come through, I chase them, I hold…they pass…through cells, through nerves, through blood and muscle, snap of tendon and ache of bone. I’ve breathed out.
I breathe in. Sun-saturate and gleaming after the exceptional days of steady dark rain. The fans are whirring, windows propped. It is night. The wet has passed. The inside. Full with smoke of dry leaf and lung, I exhale. I’ve breathed out.
One day: 50sish chill and thick drizzle; the next: 82 degrees warm and nary a cloud. It is Kansas, not uncommon to span thirty degrees in either direction in its differences of highs and lows from day to day, multiple seasons endured every 36 hours, a place my wife (Oregon-bred) names “schizophrenic”…change, its speed and accrual.
I breathe in. We left him either building on what he already had or starting something new, something fresh (building on all he already had) in the Spring, a wet-now-dry, unimaginably rainy and verdant-now-bright and vibrating in the sun’s Spring rays of a year, a year that for reasons unsurmised seems to him enormous – open and glaring, great obstacles of blank. Without directions or directives, at an edge, a frontier, an expanse…like a blind man blindfolded (thus muffling the ears) and hog-tied in the trunk of a vehicle on a plane or placed in the hull of a rocket, drugged to dream, awakened and set forth…where he could not know, but only, if gutsy or desperate enough, might grope, or set out…or double over, hunker down, spin himself and see what he has, what he brings wherever he goes…
a fragile little egg on a continent-sized glacier, endlessness behind, indeterminate ahead and a recklessly rattling now…change, motion, flow,
no where (as a placedness)
no when (as a fixed moment)
no how (as a correct path, replete with map and supply)
no why (as a genuine reason)
no what (of comprehended identities, complete entities)
nothing but movement and emptiness, finitude and frontier. Stunned, deranged, nearly catatonic, nervous, breathless…I’ve breathed out.
I breathe in. Fosse, Wallace, Bernhard. Celan, Derrida, Bakhtin. Kafka, Montale and Blanchot. Languages – songs, poems and signs. Beckett, Jabes and Walser. Rilke, Roubaud and Gertrude Stein. Stevens, Thirlwell, Stafford. Cixous. Clement. Tillman. The sounds, textures, silent emphases and vocabularies, grammars and syntaxes whirl about in whispers…blurs and hues, a beauty; cacophony, melody, consonant percussion…shushing out the ears…I’ve breathed out.
I breathe in. Grains and grandparents, livestock and faith. Institutions and knowledge and parents, their arms. A sibling and a thousand loves. Culture and geography, politics and verbs, losses and gains, failure’s success: atoms making webs of sick knots and health, betters and worse and could-be-worser-stills…a fabric? a substance? some tissue?…it snaps…I’ve breathed out.
Facing an unseeable void, we left him. In shock, exultant, with unimagined possibility. Either I build on what I already have or I start something new, something fresh (building on all that’s passing through), I think to myself, on this clear near-summer’s night, at this edge, this vast expanse, this outer space, just breathing first, first breathing. I’ve breathed in. I’ve breathed out.
Let’s say “He jumps.”
by Ottomar Anschutz 1884
Blogging Reality
Blogging Reality
“we should start from the notion of actuality as in its essence a process”
-A.N. Whitehead-
“there is only one thing you can do about the kinetic, reenact it…which..is why art is the only twin life has – its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact.”
-Charles Olson-
“life is preoccupation with itself”
-Robert Creeley-
If indeed “reality is continuous, not separable, and cannot be objectified [read “stopped” or “paused”]. We cannot stand aside to see it” (Robert Creeley), as our sciences and philosophies have come to speak of it. If language is an enormous fluid complex of systems, of ideologies and referents, socio-physico-psychological sounds and gestures always forming their contents and functioning their forms, as it is currently prevalently demonstrated to be.
In other words: if life is a process we are unable to abstract ourselves from without thereby ceasing to live. And “the reality of life is organized around the ‘here’ of my body and the ‘now’ of my present” (Peter Berger) our organizational notions of space and time, or mass and motion…and therefore all existing things are moving about, around, against, in or through one another (“Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations and interactions” – Wallace Stevens).
“If” these faith-based-in-observational-perceptive-categories are anything like “on the right” (correlative, coherent fluctuating track) “path,” saying something functional or “meaningful” (say here “true”) about humans and the world – how might we be conscious of it? How align ourselves mind and body with an unceasing flow we are unable to “step aside” or “back” from in order to observe or reflect, remember, recount or experiment “on,” but can only, in reality/actuality act “in”?
Another version: how might we have some idea or “knowledge,” apprehension of what we “do” living? (“we do what we know before we know what we do” – Charles Olson).
One possibility is to enact our own forming processes in/into the motion of all things.
i.e. “everything, always, in life just as much as art, is precarious – since it is mutable, everything is a disappearing act. Things only survive if given an artistic form. Art is, therefore, in a way, more real than life. It is only art which is not mutable, which does not disappear: everything else is transient. Only art, with its passion for form, makes up a permanent version from the made-up things of this world” (Nabokov as termed through Adam Thirlwell).
But art does disappear. It is mutated by translation and new readings in different times and languages and contexts, different versions/pictures of the world held by each and every member of its audience. Is worn away, stolen, lost, damaged. Art is also part of the fluid precarious flow of actuality/reality.
And yet, perhaps, the work of art, the making process itself, provides us with something like a “knowing” or apprehending process within the process life is? Adding rivulets to the river in the river, additional possible processes in process. If the artist seeks to make from the full experiencing of its present motion, the many layers and currents a human touches, senses, perceives (and imagines to themselves – a “putting-together,” “drawing,” “enacting presentation”) converting them through one’s self into text, paint, clay, dance, song and so forth…
…no “product,” like no “event” is immutable, spaceless, timeless or immobile, any more than a stone or the earth or sun or moon is, and yet…
“electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds” (Carole Maso)
“What I seek is an active seriality…I write because it is there to be written…it keeps happening and the way the world then enters, or how I’m also then known to myself, is a deeply fascinating circumstance…a deeper fact of revelation I feel very actual in writing, a realization, reification, of what is” (Robert Creeley)
In other words, art-making, enacting in paint, in text, in images, sound and movement, is activity, not a “subject.” We cannot complete a story or poem or song about what is, because what is always keeps occurring, to blog, to write in such an unstable, ephemeral and mutable medium as light and electricity is, perhaps, an extremely mimetic, representational forming of life itself.
It’s there, it’s gone, it’s always in process, revision, adjustment, open to alteration, deletion, disappearance. Arising and passing, like thoughts, emotions, utterances and sensations. Like beliefs and love, wars and peace. Nothing is stable…blog it so! The medium chosen, like film, like music, like the fluids of paint and possibilities of stone, paper, clay – themselves are our activity and process of being.
Precarious, mutable and disappearing…and important (to us) and beautiful (at moments)…instants processed in the flow, circumstances in the ongoing situation, new contents and obstructions in the river.
Flow on bloggers! Flow on!
“You’re simply stuck with the original visionary experience of having been you, which is a hell of a thing…
that which exists through itself is what is called meaning”
-Charles Olson-
and facts are just points of departure
The Join
“The Join”
Ms. Mann had made a landscape I simply could not decipher. I had a picture like that. Charcoal and paint and wax on a large canvas made by a woman I assuredly knew but no matter how, I never knew well. Modotti’s stairwell, but this was doors, steps leading upwards or down, thresholds to or away. The openings were thick in their darkness, but whether that black was within or without, I could not say. A kind of vertigo. An incapacity to gain my bearings. An experience that art and women have always supplied me with in large measure.
I approached a room at the St. Louis Art Museum that completely gave credence to its acronym. On one giant wall hung three enormous panels by Gerhard Richter, the three months most Winter. Opposite to it across the spacious room – a gargantuan assemblage by Anselm Kiefer was hanging. Between the two I foundered, awestruck and thoroughly a-mazed (assuming that means “to be jettisoned into an unsolvable maze or labyrinth”). Lost. Immersed. Afloat. A parallel to loving my wife.
Like cattle in a feedlot among females, I graze, stare dumbly and bellow, then stunned, flayed and strung up all of a sudden. Before I know what’s happened. Art is like that. You wander in, something strikes you in your senses, you move in – kazowy! – you’re rearranged, undone, overloaded.
I must say I don’t really mind the dystopia, aporia, conundrum’d state of being this implies, but to sense a ground for being in it (to secure one’s being at all!) is tricky. Usually it emerges after the stupor – you become cognizant of pain. Your throat is slit, your blood is gone, you’re an artifact, a meal.
Humans are not that helpless.
This was intended to be a consideration (astute, reasonable, hopefully enjoyable) of ambiguity and liminality – their presence in our apprehension of the world – of art and persons and things. Persons, places and things, how about, the designations “art” and “spouse,” “painter,” “friend,” “S.L.A.M” or “self” are afterbirths of our relations.
So the stairs, the leaky lake-y landscape, the architectures of doorways, the ladies and the painted times…
where I enter, where I leave, seems entirely up for grabs. Depends on the day, my mood or company, my body’s presence with my mind (and vice-versa), the music or chatter or silence in my head, and so on.
There’s a thrill to it, an ecstasis – as if sometimes I become phantom, fleeing and spreading into the surface of things; at others a long contemplation, as if merging with jelly at the bottom of the sea. Usually, amid much stammering, I end up stuttering: “I don’t know. I can’t describe it,” whether to partner or journal,
and begin again.
And sometimes I just breathe (think about breathing) and gaze. Something like a ubiquity of assimilation occurs, a vanishing and presence – to dis-appear. Not to cease, but, apparently, to occur “in,” diffuse, non-identically and undifferentiatedly.
Where am I?
Or might I be aptly participant? As if the similarities of cells and atoms (the family resemblance of objects) and the woven unity of wind have been accepted, acknowledged, awared in the confusion (“fusion-with”).
I don’t know. I can’t describe it.
But I like it and fear it at once – secure and unsettling – like “home,” as it were, or my “self.”
A sort of cognition of the ever-unknown lexeme “I” in its ever-unknowing surround…of people, places and things…that primal chaos and truth. Ambiguous, liminal, present.
The join.
How perfect is that?
Good ol’ Franz
“The variety of views that one may have, say, of an apple: the view of the small boy who has to crane his neck for a glimpse of the apple on the table, and the view of the master of the house who picks up the apple and hands it to a guest.”
-Kafka, Zurau Aphorisms
All my Words are Silent 