mechanisms of transformation...

“if we understand the landscape at the outcome of an action or a chain of actions, applied simultaneously or at different times, we can posit the designing of the landscape by deciding on the actions that will bring about the transformation of the existing landscape and generate a new one.

...

the designing of the landscape is converted into a designing of actions: we decide upon the mechanisms of transformation in contrast to an aesthetic and static final image. the resulting form is in part a surprise, inasmuch as it depends on the response of the environment, ever complex, and to some extent unpredictable. and the landscape thus generated goes on behaving, as did the pre-existing one, dynamically; interacting in time with all kinds of actions, to which it remains permanently exposed.”

manuel ruisanchez, from: landscape +, GG, 2007

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.

the fields full of wonder...

"...now he made no attempt to distinguish the different species of birds or recognize the bushes by their buds. all he saw was the general activity, the colors bursting forth everywhere; he breathed in the smell of the young leaves, felt how much softer and intoxicating the air was and walked through the fields full of wonder... he constantly saw other objects than those that actually surrounded him. what they were he did not really know himself and he did not give it much thought. they were bright, delicate, unusual dreams which surrounded him like paintings... pure paintings only to be contemplated, but this contemplation was a kind of experience too... it was breathing a strange air... full of lightness and delicate dream-like pungency..."

hermann hesse, beneath the wheel, 1906
(1920 watercolor also by hesse)

from cones of light to sticks with stripes...

"Line Describing a Cone is what I term a solid light film. It deals with the projector beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface. The viewer watches the film by standing with his or her back toward what would normally be the screen, and looking along the beam toward the projector itself. The film begins as a coherent pencil of light, like a laser beam, and develops through thirty minutes into a complete, hollow cone."
anthonly mccall, 1974

last november, i was finally able to see anthony mccall's piece in person at the hamburger banhoff in berlin. six months later, in the midst of an incredibly dark, cold, and windy night in april, i sat alone on a remote island in norway feebly attempting to take video footage of a lighthouse beam.

"i imagine that the beam of the lighthouse sweeping over the rooftops of aran's westernmost village gives night a pulse so familiar that its cessation in dense fog must wake the households, as one is woken by a ticking clock's falling silent. and i can also feel how that cone of light, or as much of it as has failed to contact rock or ship or human eye, sails on over the horizon to drown itself in infinite space."
tim robinson, the view from the horizon.

i never would've connected these two moments until i rediscovered tim robinson's "the view from the horizon" on my very disorganized bookshelves a month or so ago. when the book was first published in 1997, it was my first encounter with both robinson's exquisite writings about landscape, and his earlier workings as a visual artist under the name of timothy drever.

i remember initially picking robinson's book up in a bookstore because the images of his drever sculpture reminded me of the beautiful "barres de bois" sculpture of andre cadere, whose work i have always loved and for some reason is never brought up... then yesterday, i gave a talk on my own work at usc, and was asked about cadere in relation to the posts on my larger work from brazil...

someone also asked me about my process of research in relation to my work, and it is this kind of linking of things for various intuitive reasons that sets me upon a path. it's not research as much as finding dots of inspiration and then finding the right line patterns that connect them. when the posts for "when stars become words" were almost finished, of course, cadere's work came to mind, as i realized that his work had finally found a way to bubble to the surface of my own (my initial inspiration for the stripe patterns were the color vowel equivalents of rimbaud)... looking at robinson's book cover this morning, i wonder is his sticks with stripes were also hovering unconsciously.

mccall's cone of light would seem to make little sense as an influence, although standing inside the larger sculpture, one is faced with a cavity that is basically a cone. of course it is a cone of wood and sound, rather than light; but one stands in exactly the same orientation of experience as with mccall's film - and listening to sound, just like watching a film, is a time based experience... and in both cases one is staring at the source.

it is through all of these things that my work begins as points on various maps of inspiration, process, making, and meaning. it's not a particularly straight line from a lighthouse on a remote norwegian island to anthony mccall's cone of light to tim robinson's writing (and the landscape of aran) to his alter ego timothy drever to andre cadere's striped wooden poles to my own work... but it is a line with room for straying and wandering, as well as line of much potential.

three landscapes...

a nice hotel in bergen norway with good internet connection and unable to sleep tonight... so a post of images from the national gallery of art in oslo ... the top by edvard munch, the middle by august strindberg, and the bottom by peder balke. all three were mind bending, mystical, and sublime....

the munch has this wonderful test tube shape of the moon reflected in the sea that he used in a lot of works. i also visited the munch museum, and it really seems that if you want to get a sense of how lonely it is at times to be an artist munch's work really reveals so much of this. the paintings are tinged with psychedelic colors, and seem so much about an interior life. in many of the works, the outside of things is almost dead cold and dark, while the inside is living breathing luminous mystical activity...

the stringberg painting was an unbelievable surprise. i've obsessed over his paintings for years and never was able to see one in person until i turned the corner in the museum and there was the sea marn, which has always been one of my absolute favorites. a perfect compliment to munch's interior work; strindberg painted a bit like a mainiac and the interior frenetic activity of munch is all over the surface of strindberg's seascapes - the large cliff/rock is a ton of built up slapped on paint. it's completely haunting to see these dense grays and blacks created with a kind of manic energy. having recently visited a small island at the westernmost tip of norway, it seems to be related to the incredible force of the wind, which was, in reality, completely insane.

peder balke was an artist i'd never heard of and two of his works were up in the museum, including the bottom image, which was absolutely stunning. the entire mountain area in the sky was simply loose paint applied with a pallet knife and then rubbed over with a patina. you can feel the shift of his wrist in it, and much of the imagery at the bottom is also done with what appear to be quick scrapes of paint. amongst his contemporaries, the technique and results are completely amazing and forward thinking. and, again, these landscapes feel somewhat more about the inside of things (interior movement, history, being alive....)

it was a really wonderful experience to start my trip experiencing the landscape through these paintings, and then going out into the reality of it, seeing traces of all of these in many of the places i visited...

field recordings...

a text from lawrence halprin's notebooks, called elements of a natural landscape on a walk up camp tucker canyon 1961:

1. unpredictable rhythms - as arrangements through scatteration of trees.

2. relatedness of things - colors all related... brown range: fallen leaves, tree bark, earth etc., shapes etc.

3. small counter rhythms - leaves falling, branches moving.

4. sounds are quiet and persistent / unpredictable within a configurative pattern - as in the stream moving over rocks.

5. all edges are soft. they feel as though they become by being worn - not created into a fixed edge.

6. evolvement by either addition or subtraction of shapes - i.e erosion shapes or the additive shapes of growth (trees, leaves, falling, etc.).

7. non completion of spaces.. the spaces all move into other spaces and are non-configured.

8. variability of light - non-fixed and glowing.

9. the environment is pervassive - it enables you to come in and participate on your own level in any way you see fit. it does not impose many restrictions. limitations but not restrictions.