Category: art

Migration Patterns

Tracing lines of exile and return, from and to ourselves.

When we first moved into nature, we called it only looking, as with mirrors, but it’s one thing to know this and another to decide to be some deviation from the atmosphere. Ancient builders, considering the return of certain dreams, had sense enough to use the shadows cast by upright poles as tracing lines for temple architecture.

What made the created world less natural than, say, the beehive? On the one hand, maybe it was hubris, but it might have also been the practice of hoarding, to a degree not unlike the mythical cave dragons, those other anomalies.

The question lives in oscillation, tracing celestial lines of sight and we stand, sometimes still as solstices and just as briefly, before pulling back the orbital bodies of our dominion just when they seem to be slipping forever beyond our grasp, and the offerings that follow tend to synchronize with the rise and declination of the countless hidden orbs of shattered once-whole light that some say broke on arrival, leaving a legacy of singular purpose: find it––and this is shrouded, too.

Birdsong Variations

The collaborative process of creative evolution.

I need a new form for this thing I am making. I haven’t found it yet, so here I am watching birds.

The songs of sparrows, apparently, vary broadly in the structure of their final notes, and some will introduce subtle variations with each performance. The songs evolve.

But researchers are quick to point out: it’s not like these bird-composers are free to evolve their songs willy-nilly, in any direction at any time. There are certain constraints, and the evolution of song works within these.

Consider how fledgling birds learn what song is, through imitation. Drift happens primarily during the initial stages of dialect formation, and during the colonization of an island. As songs evolve, so do birds’ preferences when it comes to how they perceive and learn.

I probably don’t need a new form. There is an array of viable traditions. There are possibilities for learning through imitation. But the early birds, before the songs are known and integrated, can’t help themselves. They throw their notes around in every direction. This is how they learn they have voices, and how they might use them. But a voice is not a song. Song is voice in motion, in choreographed patterns, learned in community. We are never as alone as we think we are in what we are making.  

So maybe I don’t need a new form, just more practice in call and response.

Old Man at the Twilight Hour

For the artist.

Listen. The invisible harp plays

on the west side of the Isle of

the Dead. 

Eat. Here is a fried egg on a 

plate without the plate, served

at a coffee house scene in Madrid.

Wait. I knew I knew you when 

you cared to emphasize that 

honey is sweeter than blood.

Rest. Soft monster, rest.

***

On this day in 1989, Salvador Dali died. He was eighty-four. 

Snows

Blooming in ice.

Ice crystal showers and no exact matches between them, foot after foot, later to water, then vapor. I love the story of Wilson Alwyn Bentley, dubbed Snowflake Bentley, who caught them on camera, against black velvet before they melted. He did it so well that no one else bothered for most of the next century. Ice flowers, he called them.

I remember making igloos big enough for one child to crawl in, belly-flat, and crouching, once inside, in the center room, looking out like a mole, surrounded by the display of the most recent storm, kneeling. How I would wait, taking it in, cupping tiny piles to my mouth, sneaking bites of pure winter, the quickening of my chest as it melted through me. I would repeat this ritual over and again, trying to hold it, holding still in the igloo, knowing it wouldn’t last.

I wanted to fall to my knees, Bentley said, of his first witness to what he called those tiny miracles, through his lens. Instead, he kept at it. He wanted others to be able to see, too.

Lyric Suite

Room for discovery.

Sometime during the initial COVID lockdown, I came across The Artist Project series of videos by The Met, in which artists reflect on a work that inspires them. Each one I’ve watched has moved me to look at a work in a new way. It’s been a while since I visited, and this morning, a series of clicks beginning with an error brought me serendipitously back to Wenda Gu’s reflection on Robert Motherwell’s Lyric Suite, a series of one-thousand works of ink on rice paper, compositions that Wenda Gu describes as “lyric, bleeding ink” hauntingly suggestive of living forms: here a branch, here a horizon, here a suggestion of a person in silhouette, here a protozoa. The idea to use ink on rice paper happened when the artist was stopping by a Japanese store in search of a birthday gift. The paper he saw was called “Dragons and Clouds.” He bought a thousand sheets and decided to try painting without conscious thought. This was April 1965 and by the end of May, Motherwell had done six-hundred of these small paintings on the floor of his studio, all while listening to Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925). Then he lost his best friend, artist David Smith. Motherwell was devastated. He boxed up the rice paper paintings and they stayed in the box for over twenty years. In 1986, Motherwell resumed the series, explaining “I half painted them and they half painted themselves.” Speaking of the harmony of seemingly accidental discovery moving through these paintings, Wenda Gu is quick to observe, “that’s the daily practice.” Here’s to keeping the door open.

Inspiration

Wenda Gu on Robert Motherwell’s Lyric Suite

For All Times

Considering the movement in these moments.

You’ve been a cane-wielding cartoon old man, white beard down to your knees; a bloody tyrant, horned and masked, coming to ravage every beloved. Then, in the next scene, a healer: white linen, salves, and herbs, sometimes in the costume of a nurse of the first influenza, the first world war. The bard posed you with a scythe, the dark reaper poised, and had his lovers profess refusal to be your fool.

Then you’re a river. We build our settlements near you, travel over washing, reviving, bathing, and blessing one another by your body. Then, when the great storms come, you rinse us away––and yet, when we come to, there we are, still within and among your waters, carrying their currents in our cells. Someone suggests you are an illusion, maybe they meant elusive, but the idea adds much to our sense of the scope and reach of what we touch and then create, our tools one part memory and another part dream, and the last must be need. But for what? Is this nourishment you bring, or is it more like shelter against what we are not ready for––yet?

If you are long like a ribbon or a road, why can’t we know this about you in a moment? There’s no duration in the present, but we’ll measure rest as well as motion, our now both a beginning and an end, and in your holy geography we continue to meet, dancing in the second line with the saints, and we the once and future ancients, spinning the rhythms of your forever reception. 

What Inspires Awe?

From Joseph Addison’s “On the Sublime.”

I want to consider what is great, uncommon, or beautiful––frightening, too; how some phenomena have a rude kind of magnificence which flings us so urgently into astonishment that the sensibilities are temporarily and utterly stilled. The mind naturally hates what looks like a denial of this capacity of expansion, hence our revulsion at tight, cramped spaces. The eye, like the mind, is fond of losing itself in space. What is new can refresh, sharpening the appetite which grows dull in satiety with the familiar. A meadow is one thing, but the river, the fountain, and the falls are something else because the perpetual motion affords no place to rest except by absorbing the motion itself, denying the viewer a habitual vantage of setting. What is ever in motion is ever sliding away from the eye of the beholder.

***

As idea which strongly motivated the English poet, dramatist, and essayist Joseph Addison (1672-1719), was (as described in Norton’s) to bring philosophy out of the closet of libraries and into coffeehouses and taverns.  To this end, Addison wrote numerous essays for The Tatler and The Spectator. The above is inspired by one from The Spectator, No. 412 [On the Sublime]. It includes phrases from Addison’s essay.

Related Post: Name it Anyway, a sampling of Loginus’ first-century treatise “On Sublimity.”

Celebration of Emptiness

Ad Reinhardt on art as its own end.

Any friend of Thomas Merton is a friend of mine, and when I learned that artist Ad Reinhardt was one (they studied together and became close friends at Colombia College of Colombia University), I paid attention. This morning, I learned that it was Reinhardt’s birthday (1913-1967). I spent my coffee hour over Reinhardt’s Art as Art, and today’s post is a collection of notes from reading. It includes many phrases from Reinhardt’s text.

Art as art is nothing but art, and art is not what is not art.

More and more, what is becomes more pure, more empty, more absolute.

More exclusive? Yes, that too, but not in the way art people imagine. Think

camel through the eye of a needle, the way. This “anything goes”

degradation is contemptible, trifling, a suicide-vaudeville. 

The point is to reveal, to make the one thing no secret. This one thing

changes everything. They want to separate fine from intellectual, manual

from craft, but all that matters is art as art. The fine art museum is the

place for this, so long as it doesn’t imagine itself a church or a museum

of history or geology, ethnology, or archaeology. It can’t be a club or

a success school, either; it can’t be a rest home or “foster love of life.”

It can’t “promote understanding . . . among men” or any such thing.

This is crazy talk. Art is art; life is life. Art is not life, nor is life art. No

one should burden one with the other, and above all, don’t make 

it a means to some other end, some so-called higher value. There is

none. There is one fight only, between art and non-art, true and false.

Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

The one struggle in art is the struggle of artists against artists. Save

your “mirrors of the soul,” your “reflections of condition,” your “new 

image of man” delusions, your diatribes about being a “creature of

circumstance.” No one ever forces an artist to be pure. Art comes from

art working, and the more an artist works, the more there is to do. It’s

a long, lonely routine: preparation, attention, repetition.

The end? No end but this. From a variety of ideas, to one. From many

styles, to none. Pure evanescence. From hot air to breathlessness, 

neither life nor death; outside content, outside form; outside space, 

beyond time. Nothing to grasp, nothing to use, and nothing to sell.

Beyond Optical Vision

Happy birthday, Paul Klee.

On this day in 1879, Paul Klee was born. This morning’s post is adapted from Klee’s “Ways of Studying Nature,” and uses found phrases from Klee’s writing.

How can an artist not study nature when they are part of it? The method is going to vary with changing perceptions of one’s position in space, time, and the cosmos. I don’t mean to disparage the delight of novelty, but a clear view of history should save us from seeking it at the cost of an honest view of nature. For yesterday’s naturalists, the focus was on the precision of optical appearance, but the art of seeing on other planes was neglected. Today’s artist is a creature on a star among other stars, with a sense of totality of space. To witness the appearance is to meditate on what is beneath it. Anatomy becomes physiology, but there are other ways to behold, as with contact through a cosmic bond. All ways meet in the eye to synthesize an inward vision vastly different from the original image, yet without contradiction. Those blind to nature will label such depictions degenerate, but here is a new naturalness, the image of divine work in translation. 

***

Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye. The Notebooks of Paul Klee, Vol.I, ed. Jurg Spiller, London and New York, 1961, pp.63-67.

Also featuring Paul Klee: What They Said While They Were Leaving

Matters of Transformation

Wisdom from the dung beetle.

If you are going to transform dung into treasure, it is best to act quickly and move in a straight line, away from the hordes. None of us move easily in straight lines unless we can see where we are going, but the beetles move backwards, each propelling a relatively massive ball with their hind legs, reading the shadows and the light. When the sun is directly overhead and there are no shadows, they read the wind. Nocturnal foragers take cues from the polarized light of the moon, and when the moon is not visible, they follow the Milky Way. These agents of transformation and rebirth tend to ignore cues from the ground, keeping their focus far above their grounded bodies. For their size, they are among the strongest creatures on the planet. Up here, we don’t like to touch what they treasure. We prefer to draw hopes for rebirth in soft pastel hues, and this may have something to do with the puzzlement of the researchers. Brain the size of a poppy seed, they say, but we still don’t understand.  

***

Inspired by “How Dung Beetles Steer Straight” in the Annual Review of Entomology