inspiration & images
October 26, 2004
October 03, 2004
October 01, 2004
Reduction of the image to abstraction forces the viewer to find an objectively inapparent meaning in subjective experience
Pixel A-Team:
On the occasion of George Peppard's birthday. From here.
August 24, 2004
A Few of the 24 x 18's
Chris, here are a few of the 24 x 18 size canvases that I have been working on.
Everyday Complete
Well, here is a preview of the drawing. I have been working on. It is 10'6" and is on its way to GR. It folds up nicely, just like a newspaper.
August 12, 2004
choices
i always ask for stamp choices at the post office
today, buying stamps for the show announcement,
i got these black & red wilma rudolph stamps
they look quite good with the card
August 10, 2004
isfahan
the interesting thing about this mosque is that the interior courtyard space has taken precedence over the exterior facade, which really ceases to exist. it is like a building turned inside-out, and is only seen from the inside. the building has grown in every direction and blends seamlessly with the surrounding city streets and buildings. empty space gives significant presence to a building that is otherwise imperceptible and seemingly nonexistant.
August 02, 2004
July 30, 2004
kirk
I thought I had the proper disk to upload some new images, but I goofed... all I had on this is Kirk Cameron passionately talking about Christ.
Barb and I are going to the beach tomorrow. I'll get some new pics up soon.
July 19, 2004
Shattered Lives
A very difficult image to deal with. I have been carrying it around in my sketchbook for several years now. Of course it evokes a myriad of political views and emotions from individuals. Again it is a harsh image, but because it has affected me so, I thought I would bring it to the conversation.
grunewald
Here is a new painting entitled "grunewald". It is 76 inches tall and 42 inches wide. It's scale is similar to that of a door. "Grunewald" being a reference to a somewhat shrouded painter who painted the Isenheim altarpiece.
Everyday Project
This is the newspaper project I mentioned. All images are clipped from the daily newspapers, then taped together with scotch tape. After this is done the images are then erased with a vinyl eraser. It is nearly 10 feet in diameter. About one more week worth of work to complete it. Images stretch from the triumphal to catastrophic to the mundane.
Eclipse
Here is one of the 24 x 18 paintings. Chris, many more are on the way.
July 17, 2004
July 16, 2004
aura in process
Here's an early tech demo for the pieces that will appear in the show; dynamically generated text. I'm curious how, or whether, they fit into our recent conversations. Got aura?
This one uses a single, limited text (actually the title of a Yo La Tengo album, which is the first thing that popped into my head). This one draws on a database, which for the moment consists only of seven quotes, each of which is something that was posted to this blog at some point. I kind of think the first one works better, seeing the same text reinvented over and over, but I'm not sure. I think, following on our recent conversations, that the effectiveness depends on how well you recognize the source text. The second version, database version, occasionally works well when recognizable bits of scripture jumble together; but the first one, using a single phrase, invents its own context; due to the limited amount of text being used, the viewer is immediately aware both of the re-invention and of the source text. That's my impression, anyway.
Now for the disclaimers; this isn't really how the final work will look. The idea is that these text blocks will more closely resemble large city regions, within an outline map; they'll be appearing and disappearing, re-filling the same space; and also "cutaways" will appear showing the supposed contents of those regions. Also, right now I'm imagining four different templates for dynamic maps, representing four different future cities: modular, monumental, expansive, pluralist. Here's a static mockup of the modular city; changing regions, made of text, with cutaways also appearing at random on top. In this mockup, the idea I'm working with is that the "regions" are made of text, and the "explanatory" labels write themselves in in that spirit writing stuff I did earlier.
July 13, 2004
for flying
this is just silly. but I'm tickled and inspired by the combination of adam's and seth's comments. and i'm not even on the phone with the phone company...also eager for some humor here perhaps.
July 12, 2004
dry bones
i just sent some horror movie images to ct for drawings
this one interests me, thought i'd post it
aura test
Some of you may have seen this work before - it's by Jon Haddock, from a series of web-porn images in which he quickly photoshopped out the figures.
Does this image have aura?
I'm still interested in finding ways of finding limits to how we've been using this word.
aura test 2
Another one for the mix here - 'erased de kooning' by jasper johns.
In what ways does this have aura?
aura test (sound)
here's another one.
a theme here developing - I'm curious after rowley's repsonse to the book cover (and after our choice of card image) about the relationship of "pictured absences" to aura.
this one's a sonic example, an mp3 I posted here.
It's a short work by a guy named John Dreyer. Don't know much about him. He set up a microphone in rural England somewhere next to a cattle grate - the recording starts with one car going over the grate, and ends with a second car going over the grate.
aura test (sound 2)
the dreyer piece doesn't relate to the "abence through erasure" of the images, so maybe this is better:
Does this work by Matt Rogalsky have aura?
It's a recording of W's television speech to the world in which he gave saddam 24 hrs to get out of dodge before the bombing started. Rogalsky edited out all the words, leaving only the silences.
aura test (monument)
I gave a little talk at a conference here last week about the privileging of absence in recent memorials - here's an image of the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, which seems to have influenced many of the WTC memorial proposals.
Aura detection?
aura test (remote)
I met Elliott Malkin in NY last May - this project got some press by new media art types.
Again, where and when does picturing absence evoke the kind of aura we're talking about?
July 08, 2004
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye
Vertov, from "From Radio Eye to Kino Eye:"
Kino-eye = kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I write on film with the camera + kino-organization (I edit).The kino-eye method is the scientifically experimental method of exploring the visible world --
a. based on the systematic recording on film of facts from life;
b. based on the systematic organization of the documentary material recorded on film....
Kino-eye is the documentary cinematic decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye.
Kino-eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact, of film-documents as opposed to the exchange of cinematic or theatrical presentations.
Kino-eye means the conquest of time (the visual linkage of phenomena separated in time). Kino-eye is the possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order or at any speed inaccessible to the human eye.
...
Kino-eye plunges into the seeming chaos of life to find in itself the response to an assigned theme. To find the resultant force amongst the million phenomena related to the given theme. To edit; to wrest, through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful, from life; to organize the film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a meaningful visual phrase, an essence of "I see."
What strikes me about Man With a Movie Camera, relative to this show, is Vertov's insistence on losing the spectator in the experience of seeing, and on moving through ordinary life in such a way as to extract its real essence, to which our ordinary human senses may be deadened. He was a very quixotic filmmaker in that way; he sees the movie camera as transformative, even, in a communist way, redemptive of normal human experience and behavior.
McSweeny's
good morning
just yesterday the creative capital application was completed and sent off
so right away i am thinking about our OA textbook
this morning i have posted a series of scans from books that i feel are relevant to our text. the form of these books speak to the aesthetic vision i have for OA.
so first is the cover of mcsweenys no.12
embossed gold leaf, which they have used again in no.13
the amazing comics issue
i have just subscribed to mcsweenys for one year
and also cabinet magazine, which is amazing
both of these periodicals should be looked at
could you all post book forms or images relevant to the OA textbook
let's start thinking about this project, as it will inform in a different way the upcoming exhibition
also post more recent work and sketchbook pages- i think this will help in gearing up for our installation. i am stockpiling cardboard.
sprecher, welcome back.
richter's atlas
i love this book, i'm sure you've all seen it
source material
cataloguing and collecting
lists
the grid
banality
aura
sears roebuck 1932
i use these catalogues a lot for collage source
i love how there are sometimes multiple pages of variations of an item
like shoes or hot water bottles
cataloguing and collecting are of great interest to me
i assign to my visual culture class a semester-long collection
at the end of the term they must catalogue their collection somehow
we plan on including envelopes for collecting in the OA text
Found Magazine is based on a form of collecting
i also think about lewis and clark, adam in genesis, audobon, and crazy people
lifestyle
this is from bruce mau's lifestyle
a must have
in thinking about our text, i can't help but think of lifestyle
gorgeous design
this is a page of transcribed sketchbook
see the dr4 comments
can we post some pages from our current sketchbooks?
spine
cross-section of the art of looking sideways
chris and i have talked about this surface of a book before
beautiful
choose your own
multiple possibilities
interactive
totally absorbing
rereadable
a childhood favorite
this is the cave of time
July 05, 2004
one more marey
this is what his photos eventually looked like. here's a guy walking - he's got lines painted on his black leotard so that all you see is the lines. multiple exposures on one plate was marey's preference to muybridge's cut-up (and often faked) sequences of single positions. you can see the futurist painting here...they dug this stuff of course.
wow.
this is for real - marey would tie up birds like this to measure their wing movements, eventually creating a mechanical bird that could imitate the same movements...without flying, I think. (oh, man.)
marey drawing
this is a drawing made of some kind of insect's wings - he put charcoal on the wingtips and measured the frequency/motion of the insect by letting it fly against the paper.
more marey
"Graphs showing the frequency of wing beats"
this looks like sprecher to me.
writing time
SPHYGMOGRAPHIE
Some thoughts and images about writing, presence, drawing, (acrylics vs. oils?), and animals.
it's great to rely on walking to get around, but the problem is that it gives you time to think of more things to say...i don't mean to dominate the posts here this weekend but this seems to be the way i work.
in the interest of pursuing some of our topic more specifically, I'd like to leap off of Seth's interest in spirit writing and tie it to the presence question and repetition.
the image here is a drawing of an instrument by etienne-jules marey, a guy I've been real interested in lately. He's commonly known as the french rival/counterpart to California's more famous and lusty hero, Edward Muybridge.
The instrument is for measuring and recording pulse - a little watch motor moves the tiny vertical tablet while the pulse moves a little needle/lever which draws on the tablet.
It's indicative of Marey's approach to recording temporal events, and relates to a large debate about time and the recording of time that existed in the late19th/early 20th century between scientists, artists, and philosophers.
The question was - can time be divided into tiny increments, or does that negate time? Everything else at that time was getting divided into little increments, grids and units laid all over God's earth in the process of atomization called for by Enlightenment science.
Marey's quest was to know movement - all movement - intimately, so intimately that dividing it into little bits was never accurate enough. though he made great advancements in the use of photography toward this end, and is credited by some with aiding in the invention of cinema, drawing/writing was always his most ideal form. He would build these machines that attached to things that move - every single part of movement would drive a stylus that resulted in a drawing. The lines that remained were absolute and truthful records of a physical gestures, unlike Muybridge's famous photos that divided a smooth horse gallop into discrete moments.
Marey attached these amazing devices to everything - birds, wasps, heartbeats, horses, feet. He felt that these drawings gave him such a true picture of movement that he could actually BECOME the movement - he actually never felt satisfied until he had enough measurable drawings to recreate the movement in a machine! He would build these little mechanical birds and bugs and legs that didn't just imitate the real thing - they were tied to the real thing through these drawings.
Think here of the electronic musician Seth and Chris visited. All digital approaches to sound are atomized - they divide the sound into discrete elements (samples) that are autonomous and indiscriminate, not only able to be rearranged bu pre-disposed to it! Many (not all) analog sound recording methods are closer to maray's - every part of the sound pushes some physical object to draw/inscribe a record of the event.
Some interesting things about all this for our topic - (keywords in CAPS!)
1 - Analog methods of recorded time are less given to REPETITION, because of their aversion to division/atomization.
2 - Digital methods are pre-disposed to REPETITION.
3 - Analog methods are more difficult to replicate. Every analog copy you make of an analog record of movement loses resolution (think of a trace of a trace of a trace, or a taping of a tapingof a bootleg of a taping.) The closer your copy is to the original record, the more AURA it has.
4 - Digital methods of REPRODUCTION of movement are easily replicated, perfectly, rendering the copies indistinguishable from the original record. Less AURA.
5 - Analog methods of recording movement often require more physical contact between the moving thing and the record/drawing. Marey was always concerned that his wires were interfering with his subjects, and thus his later reluctant move to photography.
6 - Digital methods of recording/analyzing movement allow DISTANCE between the subject and the record. I can measure the contours of a rock on Mars through digital means, but I can't push my hand against it to see the impression it makes.
7 - In the end this comes down to a question of PRESENCE in illusion - should a record/drawing be seen as evidence of a past action, something now ABSENT, or as an attempt to recreate the past as a PRESENT event, a SPOOKY unseen PRESENCE? ("Is it live or is it Memorex?")
This is also the stuff of debate about recording musical performances - should we aim to understand recordings as records of specific moments/events, or as attempts at re-creating the event over and over?
July 03, 2004
StudioResource sample
From a book that flavored the Ruins exhibit... here, the book provided certain material for the exhibition. In Ordinary Aura, the exhibition fuels the book.
ruins '02
As Adam posts tangential work(daisy days), I wanted to put this image of an older exhibition which he and I installed at Penn State using many artists' work...
We still need to keep in touch about what type of work is being made so that we can attempt to conceive of the exhibition as a whole. A while back, Kevin and Seth talked about Ordinary Aura not necessarily being a collaboration and I would disagree. This isn't like a typical show where we all show up and drop off work and it gets arranged so it looks nice...
I would hope that we make a try to link common themes and visuals to help convey what we have spent all this time discussing on the blog and working on in our respective studios.
The time is getting short and maybe we can turn our conversations directly onto the work being produced... ask questions of one another. Make points... there is only so much linkage and other things we can look at and criticize or refer to. What do WE have to show? And, importantly, how will we create a clear, visual experience (statement?) for our audience?
Jered, how about posting some works in progress? I am so curious.
daisy days cover
here are a few samples from the chris thomas/adam wolpa collaboration
perhaps relevant to the Ordianry Aura textbook-
an example of collaborative bookmaking
an assignment?
this one about nostalgia
to see almost the whole book go to
daisydays
July 02, 2004
card
possible card combination? We'll send these off in the next day or two so please comment if you've got one.
super mario clouds
It's been quiet on the blog lately, so I thought I'd kick off July with a link to a programmer who hacked into Super Mario Bros. to remove everything but the clouds.
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/21c/21c.html
June 28, 2004
goof off
Alan and I did a alot of goofing off this weekend. For those of you interested in Xerox transfers... we highly recommend this stuff.
trio
Alan and I worked on these this past weekend... half way done.
Based on the "flaming skull" and its similarity to the above image and the way spiritual auras are represented... these panels also contain cut elements, depth and filling with transparent substances...
hole
if the oval gets repeated as a frame or as a "peep hole"... are their recurring shapes other than this that we can focus on? My borders are like this, Adam's "City" will perhaps have the wall to look through, Alan has work in progress that utilizes blank shapes... BLANK, OPEN, PENETRATING< DEEP
tree pattern
Alan and I talked about the prospect of printing wallpaper... professionally or screenprinted when we arrive in G.R... or, stencils/stamps for clean wall pattern application. Any ideas or starts to this, please post.
uthman genealogy
Genealogies, I think in our artisitc context could easily extend beyond familial relations and be more about linkages among people and ideas.
June 24, 2004
more fra
another painting by fra angelico
thinking about horror still
and repitition
and decoration
and my sunday lunch-
unexpected tripe in the soup
rock over london
rock over greensboro
June 17, 2004
Postcard?
this is the image from chris
it reminds me of the palace record, days in the wake
victim 1
Thinking of that aspect of touching in order to "find". Here, the image is seemingly specific, but un-named, isn't that the way Barb?
{Painted like how I imagine Seth's "appearing text"/Spirit writing}
I would like there to be a few of these kinds of abstractions dispersed among the 18 x 24 paintings... in repetition and reference to other pieces and imagery throughout the show. A reinforcer perhaps.
June 14, 2004
current paintings
Jered-
These are a few of the 24" x 18"... I hope to see some of yours soon.
June 09, 2004
June 01, 2004
spirit letter
Another experiment, this one based on Shaker "spirit letters," composed of writing in an unknown alphabet -- the alphabet of angels, maybe.
I wanted to get at an idea of a text writing itself in real time; I also wanted the text to be almost recognizable, which it isn't here. If I continue with this, I'd need to make it more nearly Roman alphabet-like. Right now each letter is a random collection of individual strokes.
I also thought of combining this with other shapes, so that the spirit writing is filling in particular patterns. At some point I'll try to scan in the source images I'm using.
May 28, 2004
harmon photos, etc
hey people, i am in the mix. believe it or not. i have enjoyed reading your entries and checking out the images and sites you've posted since the site went up. i can't begin to respond to it all right now, but will try to maintain regular contact from now on.
i'd like to label the photos that wolpa posted for me on the 25th (thanks). these photos alude to the "aura" nerve that i use to track my world, in addition to understanding or observing how others experience and express themselves. from a spiritual perspective, that is. here are the working titles for those shots (most taken in turkey and a few in uganda).
harmon1 evil eye
harmon2 there
harmon3 perfect
harmon4 night flight
harmon5 prostration (the rocks will cry out)
harmon6 blue mosque dross
harmon7 baraka
harmon8 your paradise
these photos are from a show that i'm currently scrounging to finish for the eleventh of june. this project primarily overlaps with ordinary aura...
...in regards to my recent studies on folk islam, and particularly the spiritual significance of specific places and objects within this worldview. for me, the aura concept is simply the common link between what we can see and what we can't. but not just the "otherworldliness" of things, but also the "truth behind the matter" (ok, that's bad) or in other words, how our beliefs affect daily life. here are is a blip from the statement for the show:
"the focus of my current project rests precariously on the boundary of two ancient paths, that of christianity and islam. i am not seeking political commentary, but simply tracking a margin shared by men and women of faith. together, these modern pilgrims listen to prophets, seek the transcendent, and receive the unseen. words of revelation, dreams of paradise, places of power, and prayers of influence all mark their course and my investigation. the relationships between sacred text, cultural symbol, illustrative vision, human mystery, and personal destiny provide the foundation for my work. nevertheless, the ultimate impact of these factors on daily life secures my lasting interest and should beckon our response as we seek to understand and reconcile the relationship between these people of God."
alan
interactive painting
Here's an interactive painting" project I just saw today. Nothing much to say about it so far. It's called Nocturne, and it requires the Shockwave plugin.
May 27, 2004
trying something new
conversations here spurred me to try something new this week - I've been working on putting together some ideas into a form I'm not so sure about -
I'm drawn to structural analyses, so much so that I have often forgotten to address content, and ended up with content i didn't want. So I've been trying to get more directly to content lately.
don't know if this will make sense at all. it's somewhere in the same world as tufte and stephanie brooks. i'm no designer, but i love information.
check it out here, if you're not sick of me yet.
May 25, 2004
immediacy captured
Speaking of presence, sort of. This was done on the wall of a cave in Argentina sometime between 9000 and 7000 BC. I find this image incredibly moving; the most immediate traces of the physical. Also, a lot of the handprints are actually negative images.
yet another tree
This one is the Tree of the Virtues and the Vices, from a 12th-century manuscript. Virtues on the left (arbor bona).
May 24, 2004
shaker tree in text
Here's a lateish-night experiment I just did in the last half-hour, building the image of the Shaker Tree of Life out of randomly generated text. It rapidly gets illegible, and is perhaps not so impressive in itself, but this is an idea that I've been thinking a lot about the last couple of days, mashing text and symbols into a sort of robo-stencil.
The text is all taken from Job 38:19-21.
sketchbook 1
A Shaker tree. I like the "eyes" that form in this very simple, systematic pattern.
Also, a "touch drawing" thinking about Robert Morris' blind drawings. Preliminary.
Shaker/CS Lewis
‘Tis the gift to be simple
‘tis the gift to be free,
‘tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d.
To bow and to bend we shan’t be sham’d
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning we come round right
“Simple Gifts”
““You have art; we have prayer.” His observation expresses the Shaker point of view that although there are myriad forms of spiritual expression in the world, all are ultimately manifestations of the same gift from God.”
“Life itself, and each of the activities that comprise it, whether it be working, singing, eating, dancing, or sleeping, is regarded as a gift from the Spirit- not a duty to be accomplished, but an offering to God tantamount to prayer.”
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I do not want you to be uninformed… Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another the gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
The Divorce of Heaven and Hell by C.S. Lewis
Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like tor etain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the center: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles forks into two, and each of those two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
diter rot
in relation to Everyday as Dieter is and whirling as the Shakers
current work
in the category of current interests/work:
here's a thing i made that's not a piece yet but I can't stop looking at it:
you might need to resize your browser window to get better resolution - i don't mind it pixellated, but it might displease you. i have plans to build this into another piece or two soon.
May 20, 2004
paul celan poems
WHITEGRAY of
shafted, steep
feeling.
Landinwards, hither
drifted sea-oats blow
sand patterns over
the smoke of wellchants.
An ear, severed, listens.
An eye, cut in strips,
does justice to all this.
THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
BRIGHTNESSHUNGER-- with it
I walked up the bread-
step, under
the blindness-
bell:
it, water-
clear,
claps itself over
the freedom that climbed with
me, that with me climbed
too high, on which
one of the heavens gorged itself,
that I let vault above
the worddrenched
image orbit, blood orbit.
HALF-GNAWED, mask-
miened corbel stone,
deep
in the eyeslit-crypt:
Inward, upward
into skull's inside,
where you break up heaven, again and again,
into furrow and convolution
he plants his image,
which outgrows and outgrows itself.
another shaker tree
I've been doing a little more research into Shaker tree designs. There's one particular drawing that is apparently the Ur-shaker-tree, called the Tree of Life:
It was drawn in 1854 by Hannah Cohoon. You can't make out the writing underneath the drawing, but it says in part: "I received a draft of a beautiful Tree pencil’d on a sheet of white paper bearing ripe fruit ... I have since learned that this tree grows in the Spirit Land... I entreated Mother Ann to tell me the name of this tree: which she did by moving the hand of a medium to write twice over, Your Tree is the Tree of Life."
The Tree of Life has since become the symbol of Shaker unity.
Verses and thoughts
I had intended to post the verses from Luke under chris's blazing tree, but I had some difficulty--my computer's fault. So just consider these verses in light of the discussion about tree imagery...
Then Jesus asked, what is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree and the birds of the air perched in its branches. Luke 13:18-19
Secondly, I read the following note in a Coleman Barks introduction to the organization of a book of Rumi poems. I think this says better what I attempted to pinpoint yesterday about the triking qualities of Shaker and Ethiopian drawings...in the conversation Seth and Chris initiated surrounding the Shaker trumpet drawing.
"...these poems are not monumental in the Western sense of memorializing moments; they are not discrete entities but a fluid, continuiously self-revising, self-interrupting MEDIUM. They are not so much ABOUT anything as spoken from WITHIN something."
Of course now that I write this I think of Seth's project.
May 19, 2004
ethiopian healing scrolls
I posted this earlier today, but it vanished, so I'll try again.
These are healing scrolls from Ethiopia, a combination of Christian religious artefact and magical invocation. Ethiopia has been Christian since the 4th century AD, longer than much of Europe, but it's a very different mode of Christianity than we're used to seeing. These scrolls are made to heall someone who's gravely ill. They're made out of parchment from a single goat or lamb, cut to be exactly as tall as the sick person. Ideally the sick person is also bathed in the blood of the goat or lamb from which the parchment is taken; thus the parchment scroll is standing in for the person themselves. The scroll is then covered with religious iconography and texts.
These images are from the catalogue of a show at the Museum for African Art in New York several years ago.
This is a detail of one scroll. The figures top left are a monk and a demon; the abstract faces with eyes are cherubim.
Another cherubim:
And either an angel or a saint:
May 17, 2004
another poem
Opening Words
I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream.
Dust of the earth,
help thou my
unbelief. Drift
gray become gold, in the beam of
vision. I believe with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
beloved, threatened world.
Each minim
mote.
Not the poisonous
luminescence forced
out of its privacy,
The sacred lock of its cell
broken. No,
the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.
Be, that I may believe. Amen.
- Denise Levertov
3 Poems by Hafiz
THE SCENT OF LIGHT
Like a great starving beast
My body is quivering
Fixed
On the scent
Of
Light
WHY AREN'T WE SCREAMING DRUNKS
The sun once glimpsed God's true nature
And has never been the same.
Thus that radiant sphere
Constantly pours its energy
Upon this earth
As does He from behind
The veil.
With a wonderful God like that
Why isn't everyone a screaming drunk?
Hafiz's guess is this:
Any though that you are better or less
Than another man
Quickly
Breaks the wine
Glass.
UNTIL
I think we are frightened every
Moment of our lives
Until we
Know
Him.
May 16, 2004
May 14, 2004
book in process
Adam sent me an excellent pair of selections from his current sketchbook... ordinary aura work. Please remember, we hope to accumulate our thoughts and ideas, imagery and texts into an on-going book/catalog. Most likely this material will be levelled by scanning so, if it suits your working methods, keep a folder or book for your relevant work.
I am also making a book of portraits as well and ask that if you want to voluntter any people or "bodies" for inclusion, post them on this site or email them directly to me. I would especially like to get each of the participants up on the wall...
Thanks, gang.
May 08, 2004
May 04, 2004
circle experiment
This is a thing I did more or less by accident while starting to work on my larger text-based idea. Since making it, I've become more interested in it that it's possibly worth, but as Chris pointed out the other day, it's an endless supply of cool T-shirt designs. Just keep rolling over circles.
And here's another one, adjustable:
I like the first one better.
job 38
I'm about to go back and comment on everybody else, but I'm going to post this link to Job 38 first. I second Chris' idea for a reading list, that is to say, and this is an interesting selection.
My favorite bit, 19-21:
"What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
I read this not just as God being snarky, but as a real description of human existence.
May 03, 2004
April 28, 2004
some quotes
Here are some quotes I've found lately, and also a couple of links to some interesting projects. The quotes are all reactions to Newton's vision of a mechanical universe, and our own place in it.
Engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened. - Blaise Pascal
I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye, any more than I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it. - William Blake
Thinking is more interesting than knowing but less interesting than looking. - Goethe
Access - an installation mimicking surveillance
Communimage - a collaborative image-building project, in process since 1999
