Until the maps are remade.
A skeptic challenged Picasso about his art, and the artist, in response, explained that while he did not understand a word of Chinese, he had no doubt that the language existed. So much of nuance resists translation. So much flavor is too perishable to survive transport, and the limits of an art are temporal. When someone ventures into an uncharted landscape, they will seem to others to be simply––gone.
Here is an invitation.
Here is no wall, but a congregation of forces in flux, and tree is a small word for the constellation of alchemies this body holds. Dense with time, here is a geometry to resist the easy abstractions of the surveilling class. It is possible, after all: to notice the grid imposed over perception and leave it; to train eyes on the invisible presence and laugh at the challenge to prove it. Here is a fluid power.
If you would be an observer, detached at some remove, it becomes possible to construct a polished opening shot with a wide angle lens to match the score, but when you are in it, all impressions immediate, the world is the sculpture you are making from the inside out, tunneling naked through each slab of clay, leaving impressions and sensing some emerging form while not knowing what it is.
Here is an invitation: come not to look, but to witness, and bear the weight of sight, the hot breath of a body in proximity. Try to extract from your life its history, but it will not be moved. Why remain, then? Why continue, and when? A heart insists by its own measure, this echo. Come out.
Trying, and trying again.
Some say that it is possible to dry a spirit from the cold damp if you bring it by the flame, urging here. Take hold. Offer a warm mug, an invitation to sit awhile.
When it comes to what it is really like, we are left with feeble words, and there are limits to what these may hold, even if you mean to build a cathedral.
Often it is no muse but frustration that spurs a body forward––trying once more, and again––to get warm.
Fresh eyes for old forms.
It began with an idea. Considering certain fundamental principles––of geometry, for example––what if we replaced points, lines, and planes with words, sentences, and paragraphs? If truths lend themselves well to interpretation where correct structures are used, why not apply some rules to the invention of new forms?
No one needed to make anything up, only to let the new rules serve as lenses trained on what already is. It was settled, then: a movement began. To join, one only needed to commit to certain practices. Once elected, no one could quit. No one wanted to; there was freedom in constraints, and practitioners learned that they might move easily between Hegel and comic strips, philosophies of mathematics and conversations overheard at flea market stands.
One of the leaders can be found among these every day, scouring the aisles and the remainder bins, the trash piles, and the antique shops with the same reverence he wears in the great libraries of the world. You will hear him muttering to himself as he picks up one after another item to add to his collection. “Hmmph,” he will say, “this might be useful.”
***
Inspired by the work of Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo movement, while consulting Warren Motte’s article “Raymond Queneau and the Early Oulipo” (French Forum, Winter 2006).
A body in motion.
There is a large megaphone. The artist has a question. Is it possible to turn every cell in a chosen direction and if so, what if? What if we all––did?
If the forest is an archive of breath, who keeps things in order? The trees are silent, but not the wind and not what flies and calls between the limbs.
Here is a study in the movement of these bodies answering a call. What does it mean to be here now, together? Meanwhile, trees listen.
***
Inspired by Sioban Burke’s article in the arts section of yesterday’s New York Times (“A Choreographer Who Merges Art, Activism, and the Natural World”) on the work of Emily Johnson. Italicized phrase appears in a recent performance.
In the garden of mirrored monsters.
In the end, it was the materials that killed her. But isn’t this always the case, these days? she might have said, taking aim at another plaster sculpture. In the beginning, her thing was to hide bags of paint inside, to bleed an aftermath.
When she was done with shooting, she became mother to the monsters. It was a dream vision. Why? someone asked. They locked her up. In lieu of an answer, she returned to her creatures.
See the sphinx, a flower blooming from one breast, her insides shards of mirror. But why? Inquiries persisted. The monsters grew. To heal, she said. A joyland, she named it, locus for a new kind of life.
What kind? someone wondered.
One where when your face breaks, it bursts into a tree.
Someone called it an apocalypse in paradise. She did not object.
***
Inspired by the work of Niki de Saint Phalle.
Bodies in moving clay.
When the artist tunnels naked through clay, one result is this: an elemental frame of bone-white force, stilled in the moment of its most violent eruption. She’s never sure what she’s made.
Not until I remove it from its casing, she says. Here, for example, are some heads. They are made of the impressions of hands. From these, a sculptor thinks. Most of her bodies are headless.
Here is an arm. It points toward a dense nebula, adjusting as the planet beneath it spins, its constant movement borne of an intention to remain still.
***
This post is assembled from phrases and images found in this recent BOMB article by Brecht Wright Gander profiling Juliana Cerqueira Leite, whose DECAPITAR is on view at New York City’s PROXYCO until October 29.
The reach of an image.
How do you find a painting?
There is a process. Look. Cut. Collect. Look. Repeat.
Does it always work?
Nothing does.
Whose dream is this world, and how did we get here?
How do you handle accumulation with care?
How does an image become a backbone,
and how much will it hold?
Consider some rites of passage.
What are the rites of the soul?
When the oracle shares a meal with the nurturer,
what do they discuss?
And who cleans after it’s done?
An architect and a protector meet at a well.
Who is the first to offer?
How do you paint with the materials of a given day?
If the soul is a translucent heart, beating, what is
the reach of its vessels?
***
Inspired by the mixed media art of Amber Robles-Gordon
Notes on the hero artist.
We who knew him called him friend, and we did this with relief, in celebration. Look, we were saying, there are still some who make their own rules. It is still possible to live a dream.
No, he would say, it is not possible. Only necessary. As he saw it, this was the point.
Why would he spend so long, some wondered, in certain conversations? We could not pull him away, and all he had to say for himself was, it was all so interesting.
***
Adapted from comments made by Betsy Sussler in celebration of the life of Michael Goldberg, appearing in BOMB’s Summer 2008 feature, In Memoriam: Michael Goldberg.
Overheard between dreamers.
You look cold. Here’s a bonfire. I’ve been carrying in around in my chest all this time.
You sure?
Take it. Really, I have no use for it but this.
Thanks. I keep falling into wells.
But you always climb out, yes?
Yes, but wet and cold.
I am trying to be more of a tree, really. But the fire keeps getting in the way.
Hmmm. How?
I mean to put down roots and draw some order from––everything, which is too much.
That is a lot.
But at the top, see, there’s the crown. The leaves. If I get it right, I could be a sort of mediator between the soil and the leaves.
Huh.
Here. Check this out. It’s my first clear vision of reality.
Um. It looks different. Not like any reality I’ve seen.
That’s kind of the point.
***
Inspired by this feature in Daedalus: Statements and Documents: Artists on Art and Reality, on Their Work, and on Values (Winter 1960).
