Tag: connections
Side Effects in the Center
Where to begin. One thing I do, as a kind of employment, is to interview and attempt to translate other artists and their work into inviting and hopefully instigative verbal or visual language in order to promote local projects. For example, here is some blog writing I did on artists for an exhibition in 2010 (River City Biennale). Sometimes this work is more tricky than others.
Over the past few weeks I have met with four artists for a new project / exhibition that will occur here in Wichita at the end of November. There is great variety in their work, as tends to be the case with genuine artists…I’m learning that is a significant element of what we call “art,” – that it is irreproducible. The same materials in any other individual’s hands or mind, situation or context, (even if the attempt was to copy) would be unique. But I mean, these works are UNIQUE! And that is thrilling.
So far so good.
So the project we’re involved in is like this. A building of modernist design that has served as home to Kansas Gas & Electric and Protection One is being reformed / remade into a community of living spaces.
- proposed Lux building
All good…
Now there are a LOT of strange materials being deconstructed and gutted out of this building in order to renew it. That’s where the artists come in. They are the minds and hands that can find ways to transform “stuff” – wood, wire, glass, insulation, bricks, panels, flooring, tiles, clocks, veneer, canisters, bulbs, etc… into artifacts… things preservative and creative that extend the life of the materials as well as extend into the community and the future as works of art to be interacted with, engaged, stimulated by, and so forth.
All this to say that today I reached a kind of threshold… a blessed one. Witnessing these artists eyes and minds, hands and work (as if it’s not enough living in a household of children with a wife whose a visual artist!) – pressed me toward a very interesting catharsis.
And it’s process.
Process.
Process.
Our lives, our surroundings, our relationships, ourselves… rings of trees that become lines and patterns in finished wood; wires that become sculptures; pipes and styrofoam that become living spaces and visual delights; things that may have been overlooked or thrown away, added to the world’s enormous waste piles or incorporated into something beautiful or riveting, reflective or enlightening…
Our lives are these interconnected webbings in which everything counts. We’re all processing quite more than our organismal spaces can handle…and we pass it around, as energy, as movement, as vision, as language. Cycles and recycles, my tree is your violin, your window is my canvas, as another artist I visited with said: “we’re immersed in resources,” there is much more available than we are able to do with…natural, fabricated, invented, virtual – we’re drowning in resources…and we’re all processing processing processing…Wordpress blogs give ample evidence of this – and I find it exciting and moving, hopeful and amazing that it is so, and that we’re ALL in it! From single-cells to planets…miniscule and enormous interactions…like wind, electricity, magnetism, fire…air exchanging molecules with our skin…
So this is a spillage of gratitude and hopefully encouragement – that by and large those of us with time to post blogs and devices to do it with – are freaking lucky and aswarm in resource and with brilliant loads of company…
something this project and the artists around me have sunk into my core.
and so on…
Writing: the Margins
Writing: the Margins
“All words run along the margins of their secrets”
– Susan Howe –
Now we are getting somewhere. Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told. If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.” If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…
there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets? Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.
That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets. I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.
And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.
Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.
So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating. That is, it is possible. Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?
If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.
Therefore
“it is not infinite. Even infinite is a term”
-Louis Zukofsky-
by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.
Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.
Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.
Perhaps and possibly.
N Filbert 2012
All my Words are Silent 