solid comfort...

off to the mountains for a few days, back wednesday or thursday, until then a little silence...

when words materialize before ears and eyes...

in many ways my process of uncovering things for airforms is like being a shortwave listener. one sits in a small corner of the world waiting for some phantom to appear and inspire. i don't enter my tiny room of books, photos, etc. seeking something i already know as much as i wander through various things hoping a voice will find me.

like turning the dials and waiting patiently for something resonant to appear to my ears, my hands and eyes flip pages, search stacks, shuffle piles, in an attempt to happen upon something previously unnoticed that sings.

this morning i noticed that ananda k. coomaraswamy's transfomation of nature in art has a sanskrit glossary in the back. being a junkie for any kind of word list that might resemble poetry, i was of course smitten with my discovery. unlike a dictionary, which tells of all words, coomarawamy's words are all somehow related to the theme of the book, and thus, mostly related to nature and art (or nature in art) and transformation.

i began my morning, of course, reading these words out loud to myself, and imagined sitting at the little home made transmission center above... these words slowly streaming and washing over me.

here are some of the nicer ones:

a-loukika - not belonging to contingent worlds, supersensuous
bha - to shine forth, appear
bhakti - devotion, self abandonment in love
caru - lovely
chandas - rhythm
deva - angel
dhatu - color
dhvani - sound, sounding; overtone of meaning, resonance of sense
drs - to see, look, consider, see intuitively
hrd, hrdya - heart, the entire being
kailasa bhavana - made after the heavenly pattern
kanti - lovliness
kr - to do, make
kha - space
likh - do draw, paint
madhurya - sweetness, grace
netramrta - elixer of the eyes, that which delights the eye
prana - spiraton, life breath
ranga - color
sahaja - innate, connatural, spontaneous, spontaneity; "willingly but not from will, naturally but not from nature"
sat - true, real
sravaniya - worth listening to, good (of music, etc.)
unmil - to bloom (said of a painting while being colored)
utsaha - effort, the spiritual energy exerted in aesthetic producton
vac - voice
varna - color, sound, scale, palette
vyaharti - utterance, spoken word

the sound of writing...

sound from a blank white flexi disc housed in the back of a 1968 french concrete poetry magazine called approches. the disc is by jean-claude moineau. the description is in french, which i can't read, so i translated it based on how the words looked and sounded:

place the disc and listen in tranquility and attentiveness. you never stop kissing and understanding. faithful attention to only those sounds that are very different, like anxious skies seeking acoustic matter with their eyes. listen to the pleasures frozen in this disc. kisses, voices, birds - all are measured and reconstructed through certain passages of sound, constantly reinvented. an A note. these names and bruises are intended to be personal. a million tongues and lips now closed. essays don't have moisture.

remember aloud the disc's pronouncement of phrases. a haunted voice, the same temperature as a speaker, and one exercise sufficiently passes. begin again, with your own pronunciation soiled, yet correct. insist that essays are written in phrases that can be spoken. your position reduces the whiteness of your appearance reborn in the air surrounding this disc.

the disc is comprised of the sounds of various methods of making words with hands. click here to listen.

to serenade the fields...

here we have a young man with a victrola and a giant horn. perhaps he has come to serenade the fields. perhaps he has a gramophone record of francis ponge, and the horn speaks excerpts from ponge's faune et flore about plants, to plants:

"they have no voices. they are all but paralyzed. they can only attract attention by their postures.

they have no movement other than extension.their every gesture, thought, perhaps desire, intention, ends up a monstrous growth, an irremediable outgrowth, of their bodies.

no gestures; they simply multiply their arms, hands, fingers - like buddhas. this is how sedentary beings carry their thoughts to logical conclusion. they're no more than a will to expression.

their only means of attracting attention are postures, lines, now and then an exceptional signal, and extraordinary appeal to our eyes and sense of smell in the form of light bulbs and perfume atomizers that are called flowers and are probably wounds.

animals express themselves orally or with gestures that erase each other. vegetable expression is written down once and for all. there's no way of retracting it; second thoughts are ruled out: revision is only by addenda.

an infinite variety of feelings born of desire in a state of immobility gives rise to their infinite diversity of forms."quotes from francis ponge selected poems 1994

i could see silences...

"mallarme' finally showed me how the words were arranged on the page. it seemed to me that i was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. with my own eye, i could see silences that had assumed shapes. inappreciable instants became clearly visible; the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries - at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded by palpable emptiness...

we have a record in his own hand of what he planned to do; he was trying to employ thought nakedly and fix its pattern. he dreamed of a mental instrument designed to express the things of the intellect and the abstract imagination."

paul vale'ry, in reference to stephen mallarme's un coup de de's, in the book stripped bare, 1973.(image, 1904 self portrait by e. munch)

when pianos fall into trees...

it was sometime during the early summer of 1906 that a piano fell from the sky. at first everyone in the surrounding areas could hear only the distant strums of an aeolian harp, as gravity pressed wind through its strings. it seemed a subtle, but heavenly voice, calling, droning, like a few drops of pear scented syrup coating a cloud.

as it kept falling, still not yet within view, the locals began to notice a hum less heavenly. the speed of the fall increasing, and the wooden case ripening, tumbling forth, as the hums were slowly overwhelmed by frenetic taps and bursts.

it was then that a black dot appeared to be born through the whiteness of clouds... the sounds rapidly rising, the dot rapidly growing, the piano rapidly falling. it began to seek a place of landing.

eventually, the piano noticed a perfect tree, connecting its own case of wood (with such beautifully vibrating voices within) to the tree's beautiful wooden trunk, and longing for the harmonic potential of the sounding of its strings with the rustling of the leaves.

the piano dreamed of wood upon wood, strings upon leaves, and the music that only pianos and trees make together (indeed, the music that only this piano and this tree would make together), and all seemed right and purposeful.

the people who were standing and watching understood the imminent severity of the crash, and they hid themselves in their houses. they wished not to become broken. they placed their ears to their walls knowing that the sound would be softened, and much more beautiful this way, particularly if it was heard without sight.

and then, very quickly, and without any thought, piano and tree (and in essence, sky and earth) came together. it was not so much a crash, as a great sounding - a deafening burst of the resonance of two forms coming together in an instant. its magnitude was overwhelming for a few seconds and then suddenly, as if by magic, near silence. then the whole became a gentle resonance, surrounded by floating dust. a continual sounding as the scene was occasionally stroked by the wind. the sound was quite beautiful.

as for the piano and the tree, they remain intertwined as if stone. they are caught in the stillness of sleeping, and either found or lost together. the photo seen above is from 1907, and is the only remaining document of the event. if you look deeply and close your eyes, you can still hear the resonance of strings and leaves, their stillness still caressed occasionally by the wind...

synchronicity...

"music is the arithmetic of sounds
as optics is the geometry of light"

claude debussy

for the curved arc of the sky...

as we finish installation and move towards my opening on saturday, i get a chance to stand back and see what i've done in neutral territory (has anyone ever called a gallery neutral territory!). when the work leaves the studio it seems somehow different, less my own and perhaps i have a little more distance to see it not just as the maker - which is difficult of course when you make things that mean the world to you. for me it is always enough if they are honest, and i can feel a bit like i'm following my own path.

my dealer mentioned yesterday, that at art fairs, people tend to remark about the work relating to folk art, which is interesting because what they are really saying is they don't see its relationship to their own social culture... and they are right, i haven't made it for them. the fact that they can't connect these with the things they see in magazines, means on some level i am on my own path - and of course, has something to do with the fact that my own inspirations come from things similar to what i post here, as opposed to academic discourse and the contemporary culture of the artworld.

the difference between the idea of contemporary art and idea of folk art, is mainly about production (i'm not talking about the bogus contemporary folk art market either...). there are really two paths of production an artist can take. one, you work by yourself in your garage or studio; or two, you run your studio like a business, with assistants, fabricators, and a production schedule. i'm not interested in judging or discussing either approach, as much as i know what side of the fence i've wanted to stand on since i began... the thing i've striven to protect more than any other aspect of my work, is the way that i make things, and to insure that the making is wholly my own.

recently, someone unknowingly sent me to the poetry of pierre jean jouve (one more thing i am grateful for). i think this short poem says everything i want to say about production...

to himself

write now only for the sky
write for the curved arc of the sky
and to no black letter of lead
resort to wrap thy writing in
write for the odour and the breath
write for the sheet of silver leaf
let no unlovely human face

have glimpse or knowledge or rumor thereof
write for the god and for the fire
write for the sake of a beloved place
and may nothing to do with man intrude.

1950, translated by david gascoyne

makingbuildingartistcraftsman...

mak·ing /[mey-king]
1. the act of a person or thing that makes: The making of a violin requires great skill.
2. structure; constitution; makeup.
3. the means or cause of success or advancement: to be the making of someone.
4. Usually, makings. capacity or potential: He has the makings of a first-rate officer.
5. makings,
a. material of which something may be made: the makings for a tossed salad.
b. Older Slang. paper and tobacco with which to make a hand-rolled cigarette.
6. something made.
7. the quantity made: a making of butter.
—Idiom
8. in the making, in the process of being made; developing or evolving; growing: Our space scientists see history in the making.

build·ing /ˈ[bil-ding]
1. a relatively permanent enclosed construction over a plot of land, having a roof and usually windows and often more than one level, used for any of a wide variety of activities, as living, entertaining, or manufacturing.
2. anything built or constructed.
3. the act, business, or practice of constructing houses, office buildings, etc.

art·ist [ahr-tist]
1. a person who produces works in any of the arts that are primarily subject to aesthetic criteria.
2. a person who practices one of the fine arts, esp. a painter or sculptor.
3. a person whose trade or profession requires a knowledge of design, drawing, painting, etc.: a commercial artist.
4. a person who works in one of the performing arts, as an actor, musician, or singer; a public performer: a mime artist; an artist of the dance.
5. a person whose work exhibits exceptional skill.
6. a person who is expert at trickery or deceit: He's an artist with cards.
7. Obsolete. an artisan.

crafts·man/krafts-muhn, krahfts-
1. a person who practices or is highly skilled in a craft; artisan.
2. an artist.

here to there and back again...

flying today to san francisco to give a talk at yerba buena center for the arts, then home wed. morning to start installing my show. posting might be a little sporadic this week... meanwhile i won't be flying with my own pair of wings...

i've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand...

i've been thinking a lot about how certain images remain in your unconscious mind and kind of work on you over time unknowingly. the one thing blogging has done for me is that there is an automatic record of the date of discovery for every image i post.

i don't go back and look at older postings or images much, in fact revisiting things in cyberspace is almost never. i don't have the empty minded flipping of pages experiences in this space as i do with the bulging books in my studio filled with cut out findings, held in place with tape. with the books it's not so much a process of seeking as wandering through images that are familiar, but which i'm still struggling to understand why they attracted me in the first place. they contain images i've gathered over a longer period of time and on a less consistent basis. with the blog, i simply roll towards certain things in a just awakened state, where inspirational fodder for a morning gets replaced the next morning...

the blog as a set of images is much like my conscious brain, with each image fading a bit as i add a new one (strange that these digital photos now live as though they were actual photographs fading with age...).

last night i was working on finishing up a piece that i've been working on the past 6 months or so (it will be part of my show that opens saturday). during its making, things hover conversationally as i build: watts towers, tramp art, molecule models, bruno taut's alpine architecture, terragni's ideas towards the danteum, the paintings of kupka. these, and other things i've already forgotten, bubble to the surface out of the process of thinking and making; but as always, there are things that go into a work, that i really i hadn't thought about or consciously noticed as an inspirational presence. last night, i went into my studio to take a picture of all the parts lying on the floor. it actually wasn't until i looked at the window on my digital camera to take a picture, that i saw the space of my studio as a flattened image, and i remembered this snapshot of toy trains that i posted on airforms a year or so ago.

i had posted it in relation to the paintings of alfred jensen, and strangely enough suggested then that the arrangement could be or might be 'a score' (this entire work was birthed from a 12 page classical music score, and could still also be read as one). the interesting thing is not only might that the train photo have unconsciously suggested the structural form which is so clearly present in the piece, as much as i originally connected the train forms in the photo to images in a painting (jensen's). this responding to a sculptural work in a photograph and connecting it to images in a painting, suggests a deeper relationship between the painted and sculpted things i make.

it is rare when a single image or simple object can become a model of the connectedness of all things that one makes, as well suggesting a connectedness among all things one responds to in the world. the train photo and the photo of these objects on the studio floor reveal to me a kind of intuitive focus - being able to work while both knowing and unknowing at the same time - and in some ways the trains show me more because it's difficult to see one's own works in a light of such distance and clarity.

the other interesting thing is that the train photo is taken at an odd angle, where the images of things lying flat on a table, are read as cascading and related to pictorial rather than actual gravity. when i started these piles of wood i imagined they would be on the floor, a series of minor architectures for humble thoughts. eventually, i decided to string them together, suggesting more of their internal musical and narrative structure. to allow them to not only suggest architecture but to also construct architecture with them. the final work will not reflect the train images as they were in life, but as they are in the reading of a photograph.

inspiration is such a strange thing. an image or object tends to work hardest on me when i've seemingly forgotten all about it. conscious replication is of little interest, as it tends to deny a source the ability to reveal deeper truths beyond it. for me, it's about planting seeds and allowing them to grow within you unnoticed, until they bubble to the surface in these relatively surprising ways. i don't try to direct these things so much as i let them continually jab my insides in tiny and seemingly unimportant ways - never really noticing they've had their way with me until i finish a piece and realize it didn't exactly come from where i thought it did.

when benjamin wrote that for book collectors "ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects. not that they come alive in him, but it is he who lives in them.” i think he's both right and wrong, for there are many things we do enter and live inside of, but there are also certain things that enter us - and while they are sometimes slumbering inside us unnoticed, there are times that they do come alive. in many cases we might not remember they are in us, but they are continually working their quiet magic in wonderfully mysterious ways. once in awhile, a moment decides to let you in on this little secret, and you see what you have done, and you realize that you are not so much the guide, as much as the guided.

i'd give anything if only my life were an oxcart...

i'd give anything if only my life were an oxcart
squeaking down the road, early one morning
and later returning to where it started,
toward nightfall, down the same road.

i'd have no need of hopes - i'd need only wheels...
as i grew old i'd have no wrinkles or white hair...
when i'd be of no further use, they'd pull off my wheels
and i'd lie there overturned and broken, at the bottom of a pit.

the poem is from fernando pessoa's 'the keeper of sheep'. it somehow feels very much connected to the photo (a recent find). it's not just the fact that the man being enveloped by light might have a broken wheel or two of his own, and that maybe he too would rather live with no need of hopes. he might even, perhaps, at times, also, lie overturned and broken... but more so it feels that if you read the words and look at the picture you can imagine the poem gently falling out of his mouth in song, and you can hear it echoing about in the loneliness of his room...

when your spirit was projected...

on clouds you stood! earth were your feet and your
thought reached up to god!

you opened your eyes and every atom in your mind
was a creation.

you stretched out your hand and said: what are you?
and it was air.

and your spirit was projected and you saw stars and
suns passing like clouds.

and you cried out: the sky was standing under god's
feet.

and above there was darkness which none could reach and you
knew your mother's womb and you desired
a woman.

and a poplar stood green in the innermost of your eye
and your greatness vanished and you lay like a tear
on your own foot in your own splendor
and the clouds have vanished.

josef julius wecksell, 1860's (image: double exposure, snapshot circa 1910, probably accidental...)

vanishing points...

a sketch by robert delunay from 1924 expressing "the contradictory rules in the use of perspective: for example, in the representation of a table - 2 according to the eastern tradition and - 1, the western." he goes on to say that the representation of space through mechanical devices has "poisoned hundreds of years of painting" and condemns cubism for not creating a new language, but simply creating a "superficial" shift in one that already existed.

of course, the drawing, intended to simply be a diagram, is beautiful. there's something pure about the lack of labor or overthinking... it's just the simple laying down of a thought - just a guy with a pencil drawing tables from different angles.

last night i went to see billy bragg perform. to be honest, i bought his first record when it came out, and haven't listened to his music in over 20 years. i haven't gone to see a straight ahead music show in a long time (largely because the last few were terrible...). while his politics were heavy handed at times, there was something inspiring about the power of a guy with a guitar, on stage, trying his best to change the world.

preaching to a room of like minded thinkers also creates shifts that might be considered superficial, but even small shifts draw attention to something within us; and action is action no matter if it is the activist, perceptual, or poetic that guides us.

as pure as delunay's simple drawing is, it not only reflects his ideas and intentions, but contains the promise of transcending these things, suggesting numerous other places of wandering. looking and listening are also action. a guy on a stage with an electric guitar, singing his ass off doesn't necessarily send me to a protest march, as much as i marvel at how powerful and moving a human being can be when they mean it.

perhaps in both cases i'm discarding the message, and finding my own meaning, but inspiration is a shift in one's being... a small one perhaps, but a far cry from superficial...

when filmmakers write poems, make charts, and connect words and colors...

a theory of ocular music

words: sadly she wandered, loveliest of maidens...
music: the notes of a flute, plaintive.
color: olive, mixed with pink and white.

words: ... in flowery meadows -
music: gay, rising tones.
color: green, mixed with violet and daisy yellow.

words: singing a song, joyful as a lark.
music: soft notes, rising and gently falling in quick succession.
color: dark blue streaked with scarlet and yellowish green

words: and god, in the temple of creation, hears her.
music: majestic grand.
color: a mixture of the most splendid colors - blue, red, and green - glorified with the yellow of the dawn and purple - dissolving into soft green and pale yellow.

words: the sun rises over the mountains...
music: a majestic bass, from which middle tones rise imperceptibly!
color: bright yellows, mixed with the color of the dawn - dissolving into green and whitish yellow.

words: and shines upon the violet in the valley...
music: softly, descending tones.
color: violet, alternating with varied greens.

"a little poem, which i accompany with my color music" by sergei eisenstein from "the film sense". the poem is followed by "this should be sufficient to prove that colors also hold the power of expressing the emotions of the soul"; and comes from a wonderful chapter about the "synchronization of the senses", reflecting on the relationship of rimbaud's vowel colors to the phonetic color equivalents of rene ghil to goethe and lewis caroll. it's a great text on the collision of words and color.

"just as tones of music must harmonize with the playwright's words in a melodrama, so must colors likewise correspond with the words".

the image is from a large fold out at the back of the book, where eisenstein shows a kind of synaesthetic chart of activities of various frame sequences from alexander nevsky including music, motion, time, and image.

a most suggestive expression of silence...

"therefore in flower arrangement, the unfilled empty spaces are to be regarded as belonging to the total picture. they are just as important as the lines formed by the Principle of Three. they too manifest the inexpressible, irrepresentable, wordless silence. rhythmically included in the unsymmetrical harmony, these empty spaces can be given particularly eloquent and clear expression. a most suggestive expression of silence is created by the quite unpretentious flower or plant, chosen for that very reason, which occupies a very important place in the tea room, standing there with its mild colors and simple shape, as though it wanted to underline the significance of the tea ceremony and of the hour by its calm, self-contained silence."

gustie l. herrigel, zen and the art of flower arrangement, 1958 (image: unknown musicians or place, circa 1900, RPPC)

between moondog and exotica...

picked up this thurston knudson 7" - tropic drums - at the flea market last sunday, mainly because of the stellar cover. the scratchboard image with pre-psychedelic lettering has all the best qualities of early sun ra record covers. the dealer said he saved it from the garbage can and he was just happy someone wanted it, so it's nice to know that once again the archives are living proof that one man's trash is indeed another's treasure...

it seems a lot of folks online credit knudson's early drum records as pre-cursors to what became known exotica. according to the web, "Thurston Knudson brought African drums to the American album-buying public in the late 1940s, along with a crackpot theory relating rhythm to bondage and footstep speed."

the 7" clearly has ethnic music overtones, but fortunately it's also pretty awkward and a distant hillbilly cousin to the smooth sounds of exotica. although not nearly as amazing, the music here does sound a little like teiji ito's early music for maya deren films, as well as some of some of yusef lateef's earliest records with african instruments. there's a homespun feeling to the recording, which, along with all the drum repetitions, brings it right into the land of moondog. most of the tracks are just drums, a few have chanting, and the one i've posted has some kind of wind instruments and horns.

i believe the tempo record label was knudon's own, as it says "this is a custom-made record" on the cover, as well as the index number being 1100. i couldn't find a picture of it online, and it would seem from a space age bachelor pad music chat room, that it is quite a rarity.

the track here is called ju-ju. this from the back cover: "the reason why this african spirit call - which knudson brings to you precisely as it is performed today by the swahili of zanzibar island - is so oriental in its mood is because these are the natives who traveled - as bearers - with the indian slave traders on their raids - and their music still reflects this influence."

unfortunately there is no mention of the other instruments or who is playing them, because they are pretty amazing, especially the big chords near the end. i swear this red vinyl gem is not even slightly warped (in the physical sense). knudon went on to do some discs with augie goupil , and you can read about their collaborations here somewhere in this mess i have a couple of 78's of goupil doing tahitian drum duets, and i'm 99% sure they are with knudson...

click here to listen to juju .

baneeta west...

"this is a little girl with no arms but she plays the violin and guitar and can sew with hir feete and can wright nicley with hir feete and cut paper with a pair of shears as well as i can with my hands. she is prety and is a nice talke. she is about as tall as you ar and very slimm."
handwritten text on the back of the postcard...

field music...

"it's a place where you go along for awhile, and there seems to be nothing happening... it's all just flat desert, you know, no particular events, no mountains or trees or what have you. and then all of a sudden it just takes on this sort of - i mean it's hard to explain, but it takes on almost a magical quality. it just suddenly stands up and almost hums, it becomes so beautiful...incredibly, the presence is so strong. then in twenty minutes it will simply stop. and i began to try and wonder why - what those events were really about - because they were so close to my interest, the quality of the phenomena"

robert irwin, talking about the southwestern desert, in art in los angeles / seventeen artists in the sixties, los angeles county museum of art catalog, 1981.

becoming non-material..

image from an article by sculptor richard lippold in a 1951 issue of the magazine of art. the photo is placed next to an image of a 15th century painting of a funeral procession, under the heading 'where are they going'. lippold's article discusses the influence of modern technology and culture on the arts, specifically cars, telephones, and radios. the image is of a group of new designs for television antennae and what struck me was not only the connection of these things to lippold's own aesthetic, but also to both the aesthetic of charles eames as well as pennsylvania dutch and other folk arts - all presumably unintentional, as these things were really devised to pick up the best signal...

here's a bit of lippold's manifesto-like text:

"i'm delighted that i am sharing a marvelous transparent envelope with my living fellows, who enjoy with me this tentative existence between the material and its ever-imminent possibility of becoming non-material. therefore, i shall stretch you to your essence, fling you through space like the bridge, send you soaring like the tv tower, fill your insides with the tense contradictions of love and hate, anticipation and fulfillment, self-knowledge and self-doubt. you will exist for your moment and be unafraid of destruction, for you will be born from the very sacrifice of your present pure shapes. you will be no one, but you will be reduced to every one. you will be barely visible, as close to the dissolution of time and space as i am. and i hope you will share with me, the ecstasy of this condition."

sculpture is...

sculpture is
my year 4 moving forms, ice cream flower odors, fears
5 praise from a grandmother for a mud pie lion
7 the found book of nude marble women hidden by a
school-teaching methodist mother
diana of the ephesians
egyptian embalmers and the sepulchral barge
the fight between the monster tiamat personification of
chaos darkness disorder evil and marduk god of light
where water is the parent of all things - where universal
darkness reigns - where gods have been forgotten
face illuminated by sun and moon
the babylonian hero wrestling the lion
tossing a bull
standing on a gryphon
the carrying of mud bricks by yoke and by cord
the dialectic of survival
everything i sought, seek
what i will die not finding

david smith, in possibilities, 1947