Tag: ways of seeing

To Carry You

With LJ Roberts.

Your grandmother showed you to knit. She learned from the mothers who fled the wars. You stopped and kept living until you got to where words were no longer enough. You found fabric again and made poetry.

You knit your beloveds into your world, an ever-expanding family. You knit the foreground with the background and layered the threads of one body among those of the next. Then the sky, the earth, a hand, a bench. You showed us all webbed together.

It’s one way, you said, to transcend human forms––or rather, our limitations in seeing what they might be. Here is a box of light, you say. And here is a space for the others.

I want to carry, you tell them––you with me.

***

Inspired by the work of of LJ Roberts.

Fielding Notes

The un-artist presents.

What are you doing now?

Not doing. Noticing. That silence, for example, between those trees.

What about it?

It appears to be speeding up.

Um. Is this an exercise in magical thinking?

With an emphasis on ritual. Here, drink this.

Now what?

Sometimes I notice the sounds of birds. And it feels like they are coming out of me.

I know what you mean!

Do you?

So, you’re an artist?

Un-artist. I teach in the free pop-up art school. It has no walls.

Hm. Do they have podiums, or is it more like round tables?

Hollow altars. With headphones.

What are you teaching now?

It’s like this. Here is an arm, and here is a map of Antilles. Now combine them.

How?

On a large-scale print, like this. Big as the front wall of a mansion. Then you drape it over the façade, in front of the door.

I’m not sure I follow.

You might say it doesn’t make any sense––

No, it’s just––

But you have to see it. 

Yeah, probably then it would.

Not exactly. It will make the kind of sense you can’t say.

***

Inspired by the playful seriousness of manuel arturo abreu, profiled in the Fall issue of BOMB. This conversation is an extension of that play, and while it borrows some phrases of abreu’s as featured in the article, it is not intended to be an accurate rendering of their sensibilities.

The Seer

For Willy Ronis.

You left the door open, called everyone familiar––and they were, after so long looking. You had born witness to their hope and heartbreak, their quiet, their children and the children they had once been, faces breaking open in a running laugh. They knew that you saw them and felt recognized, knew the shock of relief from their own anonymity in a world crowded with rushed strangers, too busy or beaten to look. Your lens could not resist a smile toward the lovers, and your heart swelled too full to make it stop.

***

Inspired by Willy Ronis, whose birthday was yesterday, and by this article about the photographer who saw Paris “with his heart in his eyes.”

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