cage on books...

"books one picked up and put down over a period, say, of ten years, picking them up on the eleventh to discover the impossibility of putting them down. what's the arithmetic of this?"

john cage, in "numerals", exhibition catalog, 1978, yale university gallery.

when books are like butterflies...

some images of one of the sound installations i presented in kortrijk belgium for the happy new ears festival, which opened a few days ago. the piece was installed in the old beguinage in the center of town on the second floor of the st. anne's hall, and is titled 'when books are like butterflies'. it was loosely inspired by georges rodenbach's book bruges-la-morte, not so much the story, as the atmosphere of the text. i began by notating every sound in the book as well as every color in sequence, and then used the lists to generate a sound work, a text work, and a set of images. the text and images appear in the form of dust jackets, which frame the speakers playing a 13 minute audio piece through 15 speakers (and the images are mostly from the backgrounds of some of the old music photos i typically run on airforms). rather than create an illustration of the text or a work that conceptually fits cleanly into a single resolve related to the text, the piece presents numerous paths through the same information, allowing the sounds in the book to manifest themselves in different forms (i.e. as sound, text, and image). my main interest is in creating a space of intimate wandering, where one has to get close to the books not only to read and see, but to begin to approach the activity of listening with the same intimate response to reading and looking at small things. even though they are birthed from the same source, the text sound and images do not inform each other as much as they offer different paths of experience.

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)

pattern simpler / patterns complex

"the nurses insisted
it is a clean white sheet
i admitted that it might be...
colors brighter by midnight
pattern simpler
once i almost saw
an unknown color"

jess, four intervals passing in a ward

yesterday, i finally managed to see the exhibition - jess/to and from the printed page at the pasadena museum of california art. the show focused mainly on jess's works that were created for print, and consisted mainly of collage works, printed books, broadsides, a few paintings, drawings, ephemera, etc.

i've been a fan of his work for a long time, initally discovering the collages, and eventually being floored over by his incredibly underrated paintings. two standouts (and surprises) in the show, were a 1969/70 recording of jess reading some of his own texts, and a short experimental film he made with filmmaker lawrence jordan in 1962.

the film, entitled 'the 40 and 1 nights, or jess's didactic nickelodeon', featured still images of collages, each accompanied by a snippet of sound from an LP, film soundtrack, and even a bit of james joyce's voice. the connect and disconnect between the images and the sound bits (which appear for only a few seconds), seem connected to the merce cunningham quote below in terms of sound and visual relationship potentials. i only wish the film were projected in a dark room rather than playing on a crappy small monitor with a pair of headphone dangling...

(and speaking of lawrence jordan, you should not miss this beautiful film of his i found on youtube)

the recording of jess speaking his own texts was also pretty darn wonderful. while the barrage of words made it difficult at times to to focus on the printed works in the exhibition, it gave all of the works in the show another level of vision. the animated sound of his deep voice was a butterfly-like spiderweb filling every empty corner and whitewall gap in the space; and very much presiding over the entire experience.

a footnote in the catalog mentions that a compiling of jess's text works is in the works, which will be a welcome addition to an artist's oeuvre that is already quite faceted - one can only hope the book will include a cd of these recordings of the artist reading...

some things behind glass...

items recently seen in glass cases in the small museum at mission san juan batista.

an old bible with faded color ribbon place holders, a book with some kind of number/alphabet coding, a book with gosh darned beautiful graphic design, an object one could seemingly hold in one's hand while singing and praying, and one of the largest roller organ cobbs i've ever seen (an absolutely beautiful object to behold!).

the museum, with its peeling walls and dusty contents reminded me a lot of the joseph cornell show (also seen over the weekend), a stunner, which was impossible to get one's mind around in one visit...

books formed by thoughts...

charles litttlefield felt that mineral salts were the physical basis of life, and that with the proper psychic/spiritual training, these minerals "charged with the vital force, become susceptible to mind control so that any picture the mind accepts as true in principle, may be fixed in them". littlefield called these forms "faith-pictures" and as early as 1902 he was able to create such images by imposing his spiritual thoughts on mineral salts while looking at them through a microscope. speaking the "magic words" he learned as a child (from a man who healed his bleeding wound by speaking the spell), he'd imagine a mental picture and eventually see it form.

his 1937 book "man, minerals, and masters" discusses the training necessary to begin such a venture - by studying ancient numerology, kaballah, the veda, yoga, and the bible - which all together forms a kind of "mystery science". he also wrote a book called "the beginning and way of life", and much of his writing talks about god, christianity, the pyramids, and "the universal plane of consciousness".

of course, i have no idea if any of his words are true, but i would hate to doubt him; because the images his little book is filled with are quite amazing... hoaxes or not, they are stunningly beautiful, and seem the kind of things joseph cornell would've coveted and kept in a small cigar box.

the two images above are both of books formed in minerals. the top one is titled "the book opened", the bottom one "the inside of the book: map of united states of america". there's so much visual goodness here i'll probably post a few more tomorrow.

philadelphia stories...

by elemental forces...

this is what happens when you use a coffee table book as a blotter. i was trying to save a drawing on thin paper with too much ink. luckily i not only saved the drawing, which was kept flat and intact by the heavy book; but the situation left some marks on the book's back cover, which really enhanced the mystical qualities of the landscape of black mountain college...it reminded me of one of my favorite books...

The intention of this book is to examine natural forms occurring in ACCIDENTAL EFFECTS that are produced not by the artist, but by elemental forces at work on the pigments - very much like the accidental effects produced at the seashore by the action of gravity, heat, cold, waves, and the action of wind on water, sand, mud, and rocks. (...) In the act of making the various designs and shapes shown in this book, the artist cannot but be impressed by their universal, all-permeating character, how they occur throughout the natural world in completely unrelated living organisms, as well as in inanimate things.
James F. O'Brian, design by accident, 1968

time and the universe...

"our time on earth is only a small part of the workings of the universe. in a minute or so we forget our sorrows, even the most painful, as in minutes the ocean forgets its storms, and for the universe, days and weeks are only seconds"
hans christian andersen, travels

the third bank of the river...

jose guimaraes rosa's third bank of the river is a wonderful tale suggesting that there is generally more to a space than meets a logical eye. in the story, a father leaves his family to inhabit the center of a river - choosing not to live on the left bank or the right, but creating his own life space in between. i love the implications that a kind of directed perception can create a third space where once there were two (reminding me of the calvino story 'the baron in the trees' where the treetops become a new landscape to navigate above the old..).

the images above are from the end flaps of the dust jacket of an early edition of rosa's stories titled "the third bank of the river and other stories". i've been reading it slowly for the last few months, and every time i open the book, i tend to spend time with these little images - savoring them both before and after i read each one of the stories they are connected to. the jacket says "flaps adapted from the brazilian edition", so no idea who drew them.

for me, these two panels of little pictures have become another kind of third bank - a small space between the the cover and the text that continually demands attention even though it speaks in whispers. the images are not really telling stories as much as they are suggesting them - creating trajectories of wandering through how they connect and disconnect with the text before and after reading. they have become another space of the book that demands attention over and over again...

the fulcrum & the haystack...

a few more from ropp's... two more riddles solved through math and visual poetry... how a lever works, and how to gage the contents of a hay stack. click to see them larger...

in case you were wondering...

this is the first of several journeys the archive will make into ropp's calculator for the pocket, published in 1912, and rescued from obscurity a few sundays ago at the long beach flea market.

you'll have to click on the image to be able to read it, but it's a beautiful chart of "the specific gravity of well known substances" (including aluminum, gum arabic, castor oil and human blood).

ropp's little book features an insane amount of information including "time and labor saving tables, also the rules, principles, and short cuts for arithmatic, mechanics, and mensuration; concisely and clearly stated for practical use, handy review, and ready reference for the use of farmers, mechanics, business men, bankers, miners, laborers, and dealers in grain, stock, cotton, hay, feed, coal, lumber, etc."

weird-like...

a nice surprise to find this fragile little letterpressed advertisement bound inside of an 1869 edition of bjornstjerne bjornson's "arne: a sketch of norwegian country life".

this most powerful and weird-like story is famous in modern literature, as well as for the elegance of its style as for the graphic reality with which its terrible incidents are forced upon the reader.

potentials...

of course, the obvious first impression to the scrawled 'note to self' in this book, is to laugh a little at the dead end this poor sap seemingly ran up against while reading some seriously stunning stories by joao guimaraes rosa; but maybe ino really loved them.

ino confirms for me that it would be impossible to read these stories and not find poetry in them (as it is with borges, calvino, robert walser, pessoa, etc.). i think there is an attempt to suggest that poetry and fiction claim different territories; but to define one of those territories in a simple phrase creates misunderstandings (or perhaps ino wasn't a great writer). ino seems to suggest that poetry is disconnected from fiction because it doesn't always make sense; but can making sense be exclusive to fiction, or not making sense exclusive to poetry?

found texts are often like a private message scrawled on a note and stuffed inside of a drifting glass bottle. their meanings are determined by their connection to the objects they are written on or hidden inside of. ino's text could not have been inscribed on a more perfect object; for guimaraes rosa's third bank story clearly reveals that there are new potentials to be found in the pre-defined; and that one can see a new presence in something already completely familiar.

if you ask someone looking at a river, which bank they like better, they would more than likely choose the left or the right assuming there are only two choices. guimaraes rosa chooses a third bank - creating a third space where others see only two. this previously ignored pre-existing space becomes a new space simply because it has been activated with a new potential of seeing or experincing it differently (similar to the landscape of treetops in calvino's baron in the trees, or the subscape of george nelson's furniture). this new space is born out of the connected space of two pre-existing others; perhaps like the space between fiction and poetry that guimaraes rosa's writing lives (for to place it exclusively in either would not do it justice).

certainly, great poetry and great fiction can contain an incredible depth of experience for a reader left with questions, unfinished business, and a picture that still needs some of the dots connected. this can reveal the experience of reading as a potential... as something that can keep growing inside of you long after the period of reading (and long after the limited time it takes for the questions in a text to be answered within the same text).

i go back to ino's short text thinking that 'too much like poetry...' was written because his, or her, heart was overwhelmed with guimaraes rosa's words; and that he, or she, simply couldn't get them out of his, or her, head. i am hoping, perhaps, that ino really loved this book tremendously and specifically because it absolutely is 'too much like poetry (and); doesn't always make sense'.