Tag: Art

Apropos Jean Fautrier (1898-1964)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Traces6 Comments

I have filled my head with images, almost.  Substances evolving, fossilized.  Suggested.

“Everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all” –Jean Fautrier

                         Not difficult to find.  More difficult to gaze.

                         Remember, great pleasure builds.

                         Canvas – paper – plaster – oils.

                         Pen swoop, pencil curve, scattered dusts of inks.

                        Essential layering and beauty, simple mysterious complexities – the female form

                      To mix the media, the processing, to express and discover the sculpture of painting, the painting of clay, the drawing of oil and etchings in sketch.  To flurry the senses.

                       I hear with my eyes the wail of the hostage

                       I smell with my fingers the verdancy of fruit

                       I see with my mouth the movement of women

                             Conflation.  “Original reproductions” – pattern and design redone yet never the same

                            If ‘everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all,” I have tried.  His is substantial suggestion; though relatively small in size, like geometric theorems or graphing physics they structure abyssals and infinities.  The body wants to know what lies beneath, or through, out, or in.

                                  Capturing the vibratory stillness of monuments and remembered events – the meditativeness of gazing and time – with the erratics of movement and frenzy of action.  Stay stare; move make; know seek.

“Everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all”

What once was here

On By NW FilbertIn Art, PhotographyLeave a comment

What once was here.

Talk about “prompting” photos!  If there aren’t thousands of stories in photos like these…the eye, the mood and the technique combine to provide worlds to discover and invent.  Thankful for this work.

Writing: the Blocks

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing5 Comments

Writing: the Blocks

“and everything here like an incomprehensible explanation”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

 

There are those times of overwhelm.  Edit?  Create?  Organize?  Submit?  Wander about (for “inspiration”)? or sit and stare (“meditation”)?

There are those times.  So much written, nothing sold.  Years of working, thinking, learning, feeling…orphaned.  Turned away.  Left out.  Sent back.

Rejection.

Here’s the open field and some more ever-uncertain time.  Feels fragile.  I feel I should be making, arranging words toward unknown meanings or inferences, but I’m also drowning in them – so many of my own, millions of others as well.  Approved words, theirs, successful words, words now “bound,” where mine (I try the positive) are “free,” “independent,” “loose”… not owned by any other hands or minds.

But the words seem to want it.  They emit their own desires.  For partners, for dances, for strolls.  Attachment.  They even like to work!  Anything at all – they just want to be, active.

Mine aren’t.  They jimmied their way around my emotions and spleen; infested every nook, cranny and fold of my brain; strained my throat and cramped my hand…but once I’d rid myself of them – sealed them between the bars of blue lines, they began to wither and starve.  Atrophy.  My words – these voiceless victims.

They’ve got plenty of company all lined up and folded together – hell, they’re stacked on top of each other…but they need human parts for life.  Need eyes and mouths, lungs and ears, hands and minds, perceptors, receivers and nerves.  I look down on them all like leaves from last winter, or hidden away in mausoleum-like drawers.  I feel sorrow.

There are zillions of others – exactly the same as mine but for their order – speeding all over the world – through wires and lights – through voices, canals – held gently in hands – slick and shiny on mags – proclaimed on billboards and signs.  But not mine.  Not these innumerable identical versions but for my script, my experience, my faulty manipulation.

What gives?

What gives at these moments, these gulag-ish terms of withholding and stasis?

A letter or email perhaps.  A talk with my wife or my sons or my daughter.  A glance at a spine or a page.  Some music with lyrics.  A friend.  They are moving, alert.  Every-ready for use.  In use.  Wording their function.  My continued submissions might be jail-breaks for them.  My blogs and my posts and my readings.  The phone calls.  We could try it?  See how they still work?

Or even something like this.  This query of what do they want?  Working them into myself.  Materializing them.

I don’t know.  I don’t know if it helps.  I can’t tell at this moment.  They seem stuck.  And yet not.  Here they are, ever coming, ever becoming, nothing.

Like us.  Maybe I’m stuck.  Becoming nothing (inevitably) but becoming nonetheless, all the while.

I guess I’m suggesting that there’s really no such thing as stasis or block in living beings.  Regardless what or who or how, we’re becoming (the 5 Ws all taken care of).  Now & Here all five essential questions are active whether I write down answers or not.  As long as we breathe.  Work is going on.

And words, so eagerly activated.

N Filbert 2012

Places

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

The Essence of Place

“To record the essence of a place, so that it can be inhabited by something outside itself, is to start a story.  This means searching for a language, one that we know intuitively but cannot spell out.”

-Lukas Felzmann, Landfall–

“The time has come to talk of whatever we want”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia–

“the work drives beyond promise, craving and time”

-Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions–

            Sometimes there were birds there.  They passed through in groups, in swoops.

I’ve seen people there too, but not swooping or grouping.  It just isn’t that kind of place.

 

It felt large and open yet cloistered, contained.  There were large trees all around and throughout.  Somehow it seemed level.

I don’t recall there being water, but I believe it staid nearby.  As if it were ready for when it was needed.

I’ve no memory of critters or pets, cycles or frogs.  Only birds that might swarm like the leaves filling trees as they swayed.

Oh my, but the blur!  The soft focus in apprehending!  It rocks and it waves, it flows through you while sitting, I say!

I wonder the eyelids of storms.  I leap lying down.  I silently sing out the shrieking of birds.  I love in this place.  As wild or as calm as is needed, a respondent surround.

When I’m here I try to tell you, by searching for words or the making of pictures.  That don’t capture.

Have you wandered here before?  To the essence of a place?

Please do tell me or show me what’s yours…

 

N Filbert 2012

Writing Prompt

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing5 Comments

I have been attempting to take part in Madison Woods organized Friday Fictioneers which has been very enjoyable and a fantastic exercise – particularly to see the many figments of minds operating on a singular prompt – how various persons / how various world!  I came across this sentence standing on its own in the midst of a story by Lynne Tillman recently and it just will not leave my head.  I thought “a picture is worth a thousand words!?” – how about “these words are worth a billion pictures!?”  I’m sharing them here hoping they might also inspire in many of you reams of stories…And I’d love to receive links to the works that you create with/in/from them – any length, any time.  Here’s the sentence:

“In an embrace, something may be confirmed, avoided, or resolved.”

-Lynne Tillman from her story “Phantoms” in This is Not It–

Writing: the Characters

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

Writing: the Characters (1)

 

Not beginning from anywhere but here.

Here being where I am looking for a character, a someone, and specific, with a mind, a body, and particular knowledge and actions, whom I might observe and record.  On whom I might test out my language.  Whom I create.

Exercise in perception, then.  To see what I could see, perhaps, if I looked a certain way, at or into a certain person.  What I might hear, and how to say it.  What would be felt and its work of translation.  The smells and the tastes and the histories, for both of us.  Or perhaps even all.  No, that’s too far.

Right here, though, investigating perception, that preform vehicle, formed by our surroundings – imagination – the multiplex of learning structures allowing me to sense, to perceive.  That also, is here.

Imagination and perception – their invention we call world, and a character, a subject/object like my hand I might observe, hold aside of me while attached by nerves and cells, tissues and blood, by life, its embodiment.

Non-abstract abstracted – that conundrum – here.  The truthfulness of experiencing becoming honest lies.  The words, the print of hand, what tells (or who), and how.

Perhaps another thinks this way?  Well, not exactly, but shares concerns with idiomatic nuances?  Perhaps his education (or hers) was difficult, or pleasurably a breeze, they mastered information like a large and thirsty sponge?  Absorbed and were absorbed in such interstitial structures.  Or not.  Not at all.

An uneducated person with adaptive gifts for resonance.  A mimicking trickster riddling what is heard into naïve and complex wisdoms?  That would be fun.

Perhaps another world – country, continent, planet?  Someone observed for years suddenly inserted in a strange context, situation.  How do they behave, react, manage and survive?  I could use myself in a planet of clouds, or the tunnels of worms, what would characterize me?  How would I change?  What might I effect?  If I were made of clay or had a thousand lovers in a desert?

The only edge to possibility is what experience brings.

 

But pretending to begin right now, I see him clear.  There is a woman he is watching he finds beautiful.  When she works he sees the curve of her small breast which he desires.  He is ruddy yet refined, of middling age.  He’d like to court her but fears all pain that can’t be bandaged.  He’s afraid of words and their millions of ropes and anchors.  Reality feels like conflict, for him, a continual coming-against, and adjustment.  Adaptation he experiences as loss.  Of unrealized ideals.  And so he walks, spinning narratives in his head.

 

Here, that possible visitor handmade.  But who?  And how would I know him?  And where was he from?  How was he formed?  Who does he belive?  And so forth…

One way to be here.

One way to press your hand against the wall.

 

 

 

The Violation in Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

The Violation in Art

 

The trouble with artists, as I see it, is that they’re always breaking things.  Breaking out, breaking in.

As if their experience of the world (and in my opinion anyone might be an artist at any given time)…well, look at it like this…a human person develops perceptions and accumulates.  Artistry consists in these experiences transmuting, transforming and breaking out in alternate forms.

The world seeps, floods, sifts or bursts its way into the artist’s mechanisms of being, and their processing of said worlding breaks its way out, somewhere, somehow.  Often anywhere, anyhow!

Breaking in to us.

A person combined with their experience breaks out in a form through their hands or their vision, movements or mouth…the artifact then enters our perception, experience, breaking in to our own operations and proceedings…entering us.

Now you’ve a mingling of persons going on via artifact, motion or sound.

If you think about this, it’s threatening.  It’s criminal!  It’s viral.  And it can happen at great distances, even invisible, even in your sleep.  It may appear at first benign, even pleasurable, might mirror some part of ourselves (or so it seems) – because of its careless remove from identity toward object it feels safe and external…but how we take it in!

With anger or lusting or joy.  Voyeuristically, “privately,” or in a well-guarded institution.  Through literature, youtube, mp3s.  In deep thought or with staid attention, and passing glances or air-gathering ears.  No matter, there’s infusion, con-fusion, an intimate entwining going on.

And it is without-which-not on either side: construction/reception, speaker/hearer, writer/reader, dancer/audience.  We all become necessary and involved, creating ubiquitous perpetration.  And no one to accuse once it’s part of our experience, our (perhaps unwitting) invitation.

Like cancer or nutrients, an other-marked entity joins with our own joining to theirs in apprehension, a collusion of worlds and of persons.  An act in which all are responsible: reciprocal engagement of voyeuristic and combinatory intimacy, breaking open, breaking in,

breaking out

breaking through

a delicious and permissive crime.

Sunday Sustenance

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, UncategorizedLeave a comment

conversations with my wife (www.lifeinrelationtoart.wordpress.com & www.ekphrastixarts.com)

and all accompanied by:

Sigur Ros’ relatively new “Valtari” album

hope your day is great!

Such Great Heights

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing9 Comments

Such Great Heights: On Loving

“I wonder at vocalism’s ability to rephrase or reenact meaning and goodness even without the wished-for love.  Can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments? … The still eye reflects a neutral ‘you’ that is me; and yet secret.  Who can hold such mirroring cheap?  It’s a vital aspect of marriage and of deep friendship.”

-Susan Howe-

            These are things she told me:

She tells me she just needs to be held.  Held and heard.  And validated.  That I understand how she feels, that I empathize.  No need to agree with her or her feelings, no need to fix anything.  Just pay attention (“be with me” she calls it), say some things back kind of like echoes so she can hear that I’m listening, knows I’ve “got” it, and nod and affirm.  Saying things like “I hear how hard that is for you,” or “I can see this makes you angry” and the like.  A safe place, a sounding board, a kind of mirroring…a world-the-size-of-arms or bodies in which it’s okay to be in process, to have your stuff, to be inaccurate, and be.

I tell her I just want to be loved for who I am, not what I do or how I perform, whether I make someone feel better or not, whether I’m useful or succeed, get stronger, am sensitive, smart or good-looking.  I’m fine with being any of those things, but they will always feel like side-effects or attributes, things taken up from time to time, situation-contextually.  I really want to be loved for who I am also, or otherwise, the self I do not know, am unaware of, except that it’s always changing.  I’m wanting value as a being, I suppose, that it’s simply good enough, and matters, that I am.  That someone would choose that.

She’d like to be appreciated for all of her efforts.  All the pains she endures, compromises she makes, limitations she accepts in order to account for me, for my “neuroses” (read “personality”).  ‘d like to hear a heartfelt “thank you” now and then for her services and sensitivities, considerations and workings toward dialogue, care and attention.  She’d like to be recognized, feel wanted, feel loved and craved and adored.

I’d like to be loved with my spaces and misgivings.  From a distance, and the distance loved too – the whole globe of me – my fears, paranoias and worries.  My anxious body.  Jealous narratives, fantastic brain.  As an entity – yes – as a system or sphere, to be chosen, sought out and let be, even celebrated as this odd, unique and difficult human, just like all the others, but different too, in exactly the same ways we all of us are.  A curious realm of unknowns and effects.  Would like that cloud of debris I refer to as “me” to trigger charges in her, of desire, of respect, of wonder and intimate knowledge.  A paradox really.  To be known as unknown, loved dissimilarly, absolutely, and so on.  Misplaced desires, but there all the same.  I ask her to love indeterminacy and confusion.

She asks to be free of her past – not its effects but its definitions.  That we encounter it together – our childhoods and children, our spouses and griefs, our risks and our failures, fulfillments and joys – not compared with the present, competitively, but engaged, encouraged, absorbed.  That not everything “not-me” be a threat, not her job and its clients, her acquaintances, family and friends, past lovers our journeys, events – that they be welcomed and included as ours now – memories, sources, realities we bring to a NOW.  Not as distractions, escapes, private holdings.  That we invite each other whole and unprocessed.  That we be a process for each.  That I be here now with, see her moving toward me, being here, not fragment and dissect her into her pasts and the world.

I tell her I’d like to be ultimate, her be-all, end-all, preference and ideal.  Chaos and all, that this mass of me be some divinity-like, awe-inspiring wonder of an incomparable glory she adore and pursue.  I want to feel special, holy, set apart, unbelievably brilliant and beautiful – in short, spectacular – in all my grungy messy remedial ways and blundering battles.  That it truly stun her how amazing I am all muddied up and crazy, insecure and inconsistent, incompatible and at serious odds with myself – that I be wonderful to her.

She told me she’d like it to be real.  To be purposive and true.  That we be brave and open, vulnerable and strong.  Flexible and protective, guarded and unafraid.  That we feel life securely and take great risks, be certain and unsure.  That we trust and be trustworthy in every metamorphoses we move through.  Tenderly powerful, gently fierce, insistent and forgiving, patiently intense.  That we strive for balance, a balance I guess like nuclear fusion – unaccountable energies in a strangely held rest.

I said it all sounds good, sounds like love to me, and impossible.  Which is fine as I’ve started as a failure, but heroic, and she’s a god arose from ashes.  Hell, she’s died and lived again.  We latch on, strap in and unwind.  We are here.  Here we go.  These terrible chasms and such great heights.

These are things I tell myself.

N Filbert 2012

(couldn’t help but think of this – click for tunes)

Blurt

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

Blurt

 

We have to hold still.  To take care.  To look at each other.  To remember what we’ve never quite understood: the value of one another.  Which we’ve never really comprehended, nor, finally, are we quite able to.

I suggest the exercise:  Pretend-Everything-Depends-On-It, that is, on The Other, i.e. even within yourself.  See how far it goes, if it chances to keep you alive, or defends the rights of another, imaginary or not.

Luckily, the always perhaps.  Perhaps, to a point.  To the point – what is possible – tell me who might be the one deciding that?  (or the many?).  I’m listening.  This is where God lies.  The possible.  Irreducible without end, fortunately.  And how.

Go on then, practice, live, throw yourself into it – see what becomes.  At least you will.  Forget about it!  There’s always until.  What has that to do with us?  Very little, finally, it’s something we will never experience, we cannot process or reflect upon.  So get to it now, then.  That’s all I’m saying.  Pretend, provoke, prevent and process.  There’s nothing to it.

Defend the other with your life.