a blue butterfly and sad tuesday...

a postcard and envelope from a ham radio station operator from new zealand, posted to someone in chicago in 1938. these cards are called 'QSL' cards, and were sent as a confirmation that the two distant stations could hear each other's signal. most operators seemed to have posted the cards they received on their station walls, along with vast maps, as a way of visualizing the distant reach of their signals. you can see a nice collection of french ones online here. i don't collect these cards in general, although i have a few with real photos of amateur radio operators amidst all their gear in their tiny 'radio stations', usually a basement or corner of a bedroom.

anyone who frequents the blog will probably surmise my attraction to this one is related to the butterfly image (you can read a recent post on aby warburg's 'seelentierchen' a few weeks ago as a start...), and in particular i was attracted to the fact that this card not only contained a butterfly, but is also colored red and blue, a relationship to butterflies and color that i keep inside me.

i am guessing c.o. pepperell decided on the butterfly and birds motif as a metaphor for helping his radio signal fly through the air to distant lands, and indeed he seems to have gotten at least as far as chicago! i wonder what kind of sounds his birds and butterfly carried through the airwaves.

the interesting thing about collecting objects that for the most part were kept as part of a person's personal life, is the notations and details within which one begins to detect an intimate moment in another person's life. on the envelope that pepperell sent to chicago, he wrote the words "sad tuesday, august 2, 1938". i googled this date and other than the first experiment using a yellow baseball in a major league baseball game, i could find nothing else of note. unless pepperell was a fantatical baseball purist and hated the idea of a yellow ball instead of a white one, i would imagine something in pepperell's personal life must've happened around that time.

it's strange to relate all this back to warburg, who at times told his troubles to butterflies. i can imagine an amateur radio operator in chicago receiving this envelope with a butterfly inside, and the words "sad tuesday" written on the envelope being a bit confused. like warburg's seelentierchen, pepperell's butterfly and birds must've also been the recipients of shared sadness, and similarly then flew away. the image and the object are keepers of someone's pain and sadness; a butterfly and an envelope, both containing echoes yet unable to speak. they are only listeners, and unlike radio stations with strong signals, they broadcast only a small a bit of solace in their silence, as if the station has gone off the air, and it's weakened signal a tiny stream of quiet static.

because today is also tuesday, i send good thoughts to c.o.pepperell in the hopes that the sadness of that tuesday 70 years ago didn't last too long, and didn't hit too hard; and that a certain small happiness was found perhaps, on wednesday, or thursday morning the latest...

et il n'y a pan ... (and there was pan...)

... and there was Pan. the poor boy alone. making music. breath blowing through the pipes. breath in the sky. air. survey. as if what is inside of his body, at rest in the sky. air. search. but this breath, this probe, floating, not empty. and there was Pan. making music. alone. only. and he wondered if music was really music, if there was no ear to listen. and there was Pan. open your eyes, his heart beating fast, rapidly, have balanced his song on the wind. search of his ears. reception. and where the butterfly is, as individual into a beautiful shade of purple, whose wings are like ears. where is the butterfly which seeks the song with the same kind of magnetic attraction of the search for the song butterfly. and there was Pan. making music. his. hers. song. search. beginning and created a sort of snowball high quality. a beautiful and tender. with its wings as ears, bending gently in the wind, like a large ball, almost like a room, perhaps as a trap, and has churned, whirled. continuous movement of song. he rolled the world and the sky, behind Pan, silence. feet planted on the wrong side of the earth. Pan. silence. still. forever. his singing a kind of floating satellite. search. and LO and here at a time, by the time the right time, perhaps, wings of this beautiful butterfly, ears or float, with its pardon fluttering beautiful wings graciousness in the heart songs, and she returns as if the nucleus of a multitude of flowers and music. and participates. and Pan attend. it silently. in the song. and the wind starts to move at its softness for him. and he, his butterfly net fallen long ago, yet his breath singing, Pan is in the silence. open their eyes skyward in the nostalgia that ultimately it is so gently with the wind in his hand and is on his ear and whispers the words that we can not hear, but words expresses where he waited for a very long ....

image, anonymous snapshot circa 1930, of a young boy dressed as pan.
text, written in english, translated into french via google, back to english via yahoo, back to french via google, back to english via google...

when butterflies are...

composition 1960, #5

turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.

when the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside.

the composition may be of any length, but if an unlimited amount of time is available, the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.

la monte young, tulane drama review 1965.
image: childhood drawing (and premonition).

when butterflies grow wings...

here she stands on a rooftop, her costume complete, and surely red, as she climbs the stairs, her graceful pre-ascension, for at the top step, of course, she will fly. and like the great swallowtail butterfly, she will seek honey for sustenance, as well as music and words. on this day she has become. moving from one beautiful stage to another, looking as radiant against the sky as any star, the first of night, or the last before morning. and just after this photo was taken, she will fly, and her beautiful butterfly wings will carry her, across pages, landscapes, lakes, and perhaps even oceans. today she will find whatever it is that she wishes, and tomorrow whatever it is that she seeks, and this day, today, is certainly hers. one can't be certain of the direction she flies, nor her speed, or length of her flying... but just after this photo was taken, she majestically floated upwards in the soft hands of the wind, and a small piece of paper fell from her hands to land upon the surface of this rooftop. her fingerprints were found along its edges, and upon it was written a short text by the poet vesaas, in pencil... his words, a gift, perhaps contained a bit of magnetism, like a radio signal sending a beautiful song of longing, from far away... on the top of the paper it said simply "invitation" and these are the words that followed...

will you give me your hand in the moonlight,
you are leaves...
under open sky. over the yawning precipice.

like leaves,
you and i
trembling in the wind
and quickly gone.
come...

a 1920's photo of a butterfly.
poem: invitation, by tarjei vesaas,from land of hidden fires, 1953.

these aerial oars of magical colors...

"...we are no longer astonished at the activity shown by some butterflies, such as the sphinx, when they rifle the flowers of our gardens. they flit from one to the other with the speed of an arrow, and like the hummingbirds, they hang motionless before the corolla, plunging their long tongues to the bottom in order to sip the nectar, whilst their wings are agitated by movements which the eye cannot follow!

the delicacy of these aerial oars is no less remarkable than their movements.

however gently we take hold of the wing of a butterfly, our fingers never leave it without having some particles adhering, which seem only fine dust, the source of the magnificent coloring of the insect. but when this dust is submitted to microscopic examination, the observer is surprised to see that each of these grains represents a little flattened plate, lengthened out and of a delicate and complicated structure, which reflects the most magical colors. one of its extremities is generally toothed more or less deeply, whilst the other displays only a little pedicle, by which each imperceptible scale is attached to the transparent membrane of the wing."

image and text from the universe; or, the wonders of creation. the infinitely great and the infinitely little, by f.a. pouchet, 1883. the image is captioned: scales from the wings of different butterflies, seen with the microscope.

aby warburg's little soul animals...

"he practices a cult with the moths and butterflies that fly into his room at night. he speaks to them for hours. he calls them his little soul animals [seelentierchen] and tells them about his suffering..."

"the most beautiful butterfly i have ever pinned down suddenly bursts through the glass and dances mockingly upwards into the blue air... now i should catch it again, but i am not equipped for this kind of locomotion. or to be exact, i should like to, but my intellectual training does not permit me to do so... i should like, at the approach of our lightfooted girl, joyfully to whirl away with her, but such soaring movements are not for me."

two quotes from aby warburg and the image in motion, by phillipe-alain michaud, the first from aby's time in bellevue due to melancholic depresion circa 1920 and probably an account of a doctor; the second from a letter by warburg. photo of 'seelentierchen neuchatel' from my iphone.

when pickaxes are placed in bathtubs

yesterday evening, having after months of to-do listing bought a new handle for my big pickax, i fitted it to the pick head and set it to soak in the bathtub (the head was too large for any basin or pail i have.) the union of pickax and bathtub looked strange enough to suggest a “significance” of the umbrella/ironing board type, and i took a polaroid photograph of it. i had no flash, the film had stayed in the camera since last summer, recently in coldish (3 degrees C) condition - i’m trying to explain the results before describing them, which is a little like getting the dishes washed before dinner. what appeared on the three by three image bore no resemblance to the subject or to anything else. perhaps to a bent glowing tube, or a grooved, swerving edge of a saddle or a butterfly chair, but there clearly exists (as one looks) no tube, saddle, or chair, only shape, colors, shading, which nevertheless look like representations of real objects. it is hard for me to stop staring into this undecipherable image looking for a solution, knowing perfectly well that what i’m staring at can only be a chemical accident. i suggest that this image provides a model for the poem: an object that inspires desire while making clear from the start that it contains nothing to satisfy (only nourish) that desire. - later on, before going to bed, once again considering the pickax in the half filled tub, i found it most sympathetic, like a new pet just brought into the house and obliged to spend a night or two in these special conditions so as to be domesticated. the beast is curious but not utterly foreign. one must understand its shape as the product of epochs of genetic simplification, the body now smoothly elongated into pure, straight shaft, the head subsumed by what were formerly its appurtenances, the black, now asymmetrical horns.

lans 12/14/83

text from harry mathews 20 lines a day, this page written exactly 27 years ago today...
images from a 1998 series of polaroids taken by touching the lens of the camera to various surfaces...

when spirits are hiding between old records...

i discovered the above drawing in a box that arrived in the mail yesterday. it was stuffed between two 78's as packing material. i bought a lot of 10 discs off ebay, most of which were terrible, but the packing job was an amazing bit of folk art, homespun sculptural ingenuity. it looked as if this stack came right out of a time machine - from the 20's into a shipping box.

some of the other things found between discs: some 10" square remnants of a 1927 sunday comics section (unfortunately it was torn in a way that no strip was complete), some 10" square remnants of some kind of paper laundry bag - a nice shade of blue and definitely also 1920's, and finally a number of 10" squares cut from a box of some sort, with a few of the remnants written or drawn on - including the masterpiece pictured - the highlight of the free stuff; particularly as it was the only thing not torn apart and fragmented. i am guessing it was done after everything was torn apart, but before the records were stuffed into a closet for 80 years.

the drawing brings up all sorts of associations from dubuffet and picasso, to early american indian drawings. note also the strange hans arp sculpture (or butterfly) flying in the air... sadly, the drawing was the best part of the contents, as the records themselves were HAMMERED and stinky...

blinky on my mind...

during the last few weeks of blinky palermo's survey, i was invited by lacma to write a guest post on the show for their blog. i have loved palermo's work for a long while, but i had never really tried to write about it, particularly because it was always difficult to articulate my responses - always feeling that the work (especially the early pieces) approached an experience that felt stubbornly wordless. eventually, this inability to write with clarity about palermo's work suggested that i simply let the works speak for themselves, and so in a kind of ridiculous way, i ended up "documenting" a conversation between two works that were hung adjacent to each other: butterfly two and blue disc and staff (which you can read here).

as i exited the last gallery of lacma's palermo survey, i encountered a small vitrine featuring a 1969 edition that palermo did with gallerist rene block called "blaues dreieck" (blue triangle). the piece is deceptively simple: the box containing a stencil of a triangle shape, a blue tube of paint, a brush, and a print. more info on the print can be seen at greg.org (strangely posted on my birthday!), but the instructions in the box suggest one stencils a blue triangle above a door, and then "give away the original sheet"... suggesting the paper stencil can be used to place triangles over numerous doors and on numerous structures.

i was recently invited to participate in a group show at the sculpture center called "time again" curated by fionn meade. over our many conversations regarding the show and what i might include (we ended up with a new sound work for the courtyard, a painting, a recent film, and 16 drawings from a series of 50 that had never been shown). fionn had asked me if they could reprint my blinky text in the catalog, and i realized that more often than not, palermo's work has tended to make an appearance in most of our conversations... so it was no surprise that we were once again moving around with blinky as a kind of anchor point.

"time again" included a 1971 piece by palermo titled "projektion". the piece is basically a photographic document of a projection of a red and blue painting onto the front of what appears to be the facade of an apartment building. the final image (a still photograph) is quite uncanny, and like most of palermo's work as described above, the piece is rich in potential wanderings, yet unable to evoke within me anything that i could articulate in terms of how or why it managed to resonate so strongly. for the installation at the sculpture center, the palermo is hung on the right side of a T shaped wall and my painting hung on the left - with the "stem" wall separating them. basically, if you stood a foot or so from the bottom of the T's stem, you could see both works together, with the thin edge of the stem between them. thus, while a viewer could stand at a distance and see both together, the artworks themselves are always separated physically from each other.

obviously, i was ecstatic to be part of such a conversation (moving suddenly from an invented conversation between two of palermo's works, towards seeing a conversation occur in real time between a work of palermo's and my own.) on the surface, the painting is pretty close in scale, as well as even somewhat related in color, to palermo's photograph; but what is more interesting is their relationship to architecture and site.

palermo's "projektion" seems to shift certain conditions of an existing architecture through the addition of color and light, while my painting was the first that i have made that was directly influenced by the existing architectural conditions within which it was made (i.e. i could not have been made the painting anywhere else as its visual motif was built through my conversation with specific visual qualities of the space). in this way, palermo and i begin to talk about both painting and architecture in relation to ideas of site specificity, and in particular, i believe that as these works create a kind of conversational ouroboros around architecture and painting, where blinky imposes a painting upon an architecture, while in my own work an architecture is allowed to impose itself upon a painting.

as i started to think more and more about blinky's "projektion", i found myself coming back to "blue triangle" - and how both blue triangle and projektion change an architectural situation by adding color and skin. both are somewhat guerrilla actions - though not necessarily of desecration, but more a kind of "dress-up", with blue triangle becoming something of a fake moustache, and "projektion" a kind of evening gown.

while one can find many "folk" precedents for blue triangle - pennsylvania dutch hex symbols, hobo signs, etc.; "projektion" seems a precedent itself for the more public realm of recent projection, such as doug aitken's piece for moma, and the projections thrown onto the new museum which i could see from my hotel. the difference, of course, is that palermo's piece was static, and its "motion" could only occur through the user, through his or her movement around it (i.e. exploring the flat image as architecture, and proving once again that the term "interactive" does not always have to include various bells and whistles ).

in thinking about "projektion's" projection, i realize that blinky manages, once again, to approach a kind of intimacy through stillness and touch - as if the projected painting was gently laid over the facade like a blanket for a slightly cold night. it suggests that the work is not only about how the painting affects the building, but how the building affects the painting...

on the morning of my departure from ny, while walking to get some coffee, i passed a construction site contained by blue large painted walls with several small cut-out windows in the shape of triangles. of course, these openings felt like an inverted version of "blue triangle". as i looked through the openings towards the site (which felt like visiting a secret place), i felt as if i were holding palermo's stencil for blue triangle, and using his frame to see the world.

i then tried to stoop down as much as possible so as to look upwards and still be able to see through the triangle, hoping for a vantage point that would allow me to see the sky through a blue triangular frame - to potentially see blue within the blue, although knowing full well that these two blues would not blend into the full blown monochrome i was suddenly seeking...

perhaps in the end, it is this situation - where one finds a kind of inability to fit things together that gives palermo's work its richness... re-enforcing for me, that a condition of "resolve" or "stability" in an artwork is highly overrated.

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...

when walls are for reading and looking...

two images from my studio walls that surround me while i work. the list below should help you navigate a bit of my world...

from top to bottom, starting on the left...

image 1:
a drawing from a friend
a photograph of a castle made out of tin foil, supposedly made by the elephant man (i think it is fake but it's a beautiful object)
a small painting from me, very very old
a photo of alan lomax making a recording
a stick (i know not from where anymore)
piece of an installation i made for guru dutt,

a very old painting from me
a snapshot of my painting in an exhibition hanging next to a cy twombly painting!
a photo of harry bertoia making sound
david/marat

a card from a show of bruce conner.
a postcard from paul panhuysen
a polaroid of a garden in england
a card for an exhibition of oskar fischinger
an old painting of a buddha
a tiny picture of my dog
a card for a show of per kirkeby

a comparative map of all mountain ranges in the world from the 1880's.
a card of emma kunz, agnes martin, and hilna af klint
an old painting by me
the handle from my grandfather's saw
a quote from rilke about rodin
a map from the south seas made with sticks related to ocean currents
a photograph of fireworks
a small bit of red wire i found i don't remember where
an image from a book by jacques cousteau, the coral looks like a jackson pollock painting
a quote of cocteau ("i elaborate in the prairies of inner silence")
my own music note notations for a painting

part of a large wall chart of all the keys on a typewriter
a chart of making letters with colored dots from an old toy
a tiny collage made from pages of my mother's phone book from the early 1960's
a postcard of a sculpture by rodin of a woman with a greek temple on her
a very old macintosh floppy disc
a snapshot of a garden
a magazine photo of my favorite japanese actor

image 2:
an old disc from a music box, i don't know the song
a sculpture made of chewing gum wrappers, folk art, anonymous
some microscope photos
a score from the serpentine gallery performance
a sketch for a sculpture/sound project

an article about the space station mir and its demise
some music notation i found on the ground in paris
a string with lines for 26 inches that i can use to make drawings as a curved ruler to translate text into curves (a = 1, b=2, etc.)
some drawing by a friend.
an old watercolor by me
a postcard of a constructivist sculpture
an old postcard of a japanese temple
a prayer from an indian music concert

a postcard image of emma kunz drawing
a postcard image of a parachute
fireworks
a postcard from goethe's house in weimar
an old science image of stars
a quote from a kids book about the universe
a postcard of a sculpture by richard lippold

the bottom edge of a painting
a photograph of a japanese hotel i took in 1978
another postcard of goethe's house in weimar
a science drawing of the sounds of bird songs
a snapshot of an artwork by my friend
a photo of guru dutt
a drawing of sculpture of a landspeeder from star wars i remember making as a child

drawings made by children listening to my music with their eyes closed
a postcard of a drawing by emma kunz
a list of musical note and color equivalents, written by a cashier at a store for me
a postcard of a power tower
a postcard from corbusier's ronchamp
another drawing made by a child listening to my music with his eyes closed
an old edison record i cast to make the plaster disc for my recent sound installation
an envelope from brazil with a butterfly stamp on it, that is quite special.

a print made on a letterpress
an image of a work by joseph cornell that inspired my sound piece moon field
a drawing of a radio antenna
a list of the things joseph cornell saw out of his kitchen window (his "observatory")
a book cover about a large pipe organ found on the ground in paris
a drawing made with a stencil of a contact microphone being burned by the sun