member of:Observers of the Interdependence of Domestic Objects and Their Influence on Everyday Life


This group has been active for a long time and has already made some remarkable assertions which render life simpler from the practical point of view. For example, I move a pot of green color five centimeters to the right, I push in the thumbtack beside the comb and if Mr. A (another adherent like me) at this moment puts his volume about bee-keeping beside a pattern for cutting out vests, I am sure to meet on the sidewalk of the avenida Madero a woman who intrigues me and whose origin and address I never could have known...
--Remedios Varo


(Slideshow is of Artwork by Remedios Varo)
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
--Franz Kafka

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Call For Writers...

Vesna and I are trying an experiment.We are opening a group on the site RedBubble (you join that site just like you join any other, with a name and a password. There is no extra commitment there, but it has a "group" facility.) The group is called Cafe Le Chat Bleu. This little cafe is the beginning of an idea based on the French cabaret Le Chat Noir, which you can read about here. The experiment has two parts; one is a pretty big commitment, but only for a short period of time, whereas the other is quick and fun.



PART ONE: This group will be “open” only on a rotating basis. Each rotation will be 3 weeks long. To join, you submit 50 pages of a body of work and commit to actively reading (meaning with notes, suggestions,questions, useful comments) 10 pages per day of someone else’s work for five days, two days off, then 10 pages per day of a second person’s work, then two days off, then a third round. This arrangement does two things: each person gets three committed readers to their 50 pages, and also two days in between readers to make adjustments based on the previous reading. There is no group activity except during these rotations; whenever there are 9 participants, there will be a three-week round.

 PART TWO: We would like to try an experiment, if anyone is interested. This activity would be general admission: on Saturdays and/or Sundays, at a specific time, there could be a group skype open mic. On the one day, it would be poetry readings, on the other day, it would be comic monologues. You do not have to have 50 pages of any kind of material for this! I will post a sign-up sheet. When there are 9 (why not?) interested parties, the date will be set! Again, to participate, you do not have to be a member of this group.
I am curious how this part will change interactions over the internet :)

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Now Showing: Clive Hicks-Jenkins and the Miraculous



“The Rapture,” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
The story of the Archangel Raphael includes many adventures and extends to the sounding of the trumpet at the end of times and the beginnings of the day of Final Judgment. He is the Angel of Healing Waters, blowing along their surface to remove whatever suffering is within them. He is also the companion of Tobias, a young man betrothed to a woman so cursed her seven previous engagements ended in the death of the fiancé on the night of the wedding. He instructs Tobias to catch a fish from those waters over which he holds such sway, and he burns the heart and liver to drive away the demon that defeats her so, then uses the gallbladder to heal his father’s blindness.
This is an angel that sees all; you can see that much from the expression on his face. He sees the beginnings of our world in the chaos of the waters and the ends of them are carried in his breath, part of which is always held in waiting for God’s command to blow the final trumpet. In Clive’s above portrayal of Raphael, you can see the foliage embroidered on his jacket; the wings hold the waters of the earth and the waters of chaos, the feathers of birds, and the constellations of the night sky. He carries the universe and all its stories and maps—imagined, fantasized, and followed--on his back.
And from all that, he can give to us the gift of a second sight of sorts, and here he does. We are presented with a dizzying aerial view, a very full view of the earth. To Tobias, who is turned away from us, he gives some other, secret knowledge not imparted to us. And yet another view is present: the dog’s. Clive’s Jack, carried along in the fray, sees *us*.

The above painting was the result of a collaboration with the poet Damien Walford Davis.
The Rapture 

Earlier that day,
sensing something archangelic in the air, they cordoned off .

the cool piazza, locked the domed
basilica, closed the crossing .

to the island charnel house and church.
When the quattrocento stage was set, .

they sent the scapegoat out, the lure –
fishing-rod in hand, patched terrier .

to heel – and drew the blackout curtains
close. When he walked in later, .

brilliant as the fish he held, they gathered
round to touch his suit and sun-bleached .

hair: So did it speak? they asked, afraid;
What colour were its wings? And did it .

burn? No words, he said, or fire;
but from that height I saw beyond .

the valley to an exit road where drones
then jetplanes strafed a speeding column .

black, and men crept into holes, their
pounded flesh the many colours of his wings. .

Damian Walford Davis 2011

“Nest” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins I have written about Clive’s portrayals of St. Kevin and the Blackbird and St. Herve and the wolf before [here] http://zoe-in-wonderland.blogspot.com/2009/10/creatures-of-earth-art-of-clive-hicks.html, but for his new show at the Martin Tinney Gallery in Wales beginning November 24, 2011, the evolution of his portrayal of these saints has been amazing, unfolding their stories in new directions and reigniting the potency of their meaning in our lives. This new collection of works seems to emphasize the idea of the entire world being present in the form of a Guardian, in this case a saint. In the story of St. Kevin, a bird comes to rest in his outstretched hand and stays to build its nest and lay its eggs and raise its young to first flight. The saint carries the life and safety of the forest in himself for the bird, and that incarnates as foliage on his flesh. After studying these works, you could enter the forest and see the larger shape of St. Kevin embracing you; as you peer up at the night sky, you could see, outside the smaller forms of the tales of Gemini, Cygnus, and Ursa Major, outside the patterns we use to map out our histories and our futures, the overarching story of Raphael and his healing waters. His wings alone carry all our stories of suffering and its defeat; they are larger than any of those stories—larger than all of them, even. He is himself giant and Romanesque, and the weight of all he carries and all he sees is present on his face. And it is therefore not ours to carry. That’s important. And it is the purpose, isn’t it, of those stories?
“Held,” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins This all-encompassing form is even more interesting when we think of the boxed-in sensation of the story of St. Kevin: he is trapped, in one spot, for the entire building of the nest, the gestation of the egg, and the birth and total dependence of the chick until it is able to leave on its own. The shape of Clive’s drawings underlines that sensation: St. Kevin barely fits the frame, his muscular torso contorts painfully. Yet he becomes the tree, the foliage sprouting across his chest, an impossible patience taking root within him—he creates the world the bird needs; he becomes it. Of tattoos, Clive notes: “…the irreversible is always alarming. But then life is irreversible, and that’s what makes it poignant, exciting, tragic…indeed just about anything you care to call it.” And in fact, the bird has already flown off in these new images, underlining the permanent, irreversible aspect of his decision: he is still rooted to the spot, growing into the landscape that chose him.

“Tobias and the Angel,” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins Clive writes: “The large chiaroscuro study of Tobias and the Angel (the detail above repays clicking on to see a magnified version) is progressing in rather unexpected ways. I’ve been exploring tone and texture to conjure angelic wings and garments that are a step onward from what I’ve attempted in the past. Something happened with the mark-making, transforming what I’d intended to be a tweed-textured jacket into a weave far stranger, almost suggesting a matador’s glittering ‘suit of lights’ oddly combined with the spotted markings of a big cat. This wasn’t at all the direction I’d planned, but now I’m hooked.” These marks then developed further, through a hearty back-and-forth with the readers of his artlog (a lively and energetically collaborative space in itself), to show constellations, smoke, plumage, and water. All this would later have to be translated to the color “version:” “Just the base colours of phthalocyanine blue and cobalt turquoise being worked in at the moment, after which I’ll start laying in the patterning. It’s a long job as the markings suggest turbulent waves, flow patterns, constellations and overlapping pinions, so there’s nothing for it but to keep my concentration fixed and to work work work…” [then] “Back to wings again today, and the task of suggesting colour, iridescence and texture. Water-flow, pinions, ruffles, scales and constellations of stars are a few of the ideas worked into these. Paint has been brushed, smeared, sanded back and scratched through with engraving needles. It’s a slow process but I’m getting there.” Though many of the works for this show are done in black conte over white Arches paper, the acrylic works that he has created show an amazing development of color. A palette already phenomenal—truly, the first thing to draw me into his works in the beginning—has become miraculous. The glowing honey color of Raphael’s jacket, the astonishing shimmer he has created in the wings, and the blues of St. Herve’s face are the openings to a new world in themselves. See the peace in Herve’s face tucked up trustingly against the wild snarl of the wolf. See again, that eye: the central eye of the piece, the wild wolf that sees you watching him, and is not moved.
“Hold,” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Monday, November 14, 2011

Artnap IV: Selenomancy or Selenography

Selenomancy 


Acrylic on Panel
24in x 18in 
Selenography: Moon mapping. Selenomancy: Divination through study of the patterns and motions of the moon. See Ars Memoria for an exploration of the idea of recording (memory) and imagining (mapping the future) as two sides of the same coin…



In Embracing the Wide Sky, Daniel Tammet writes,
“As a child, I learned and remembered many things using my imagination. Role-playing is a very effective way to encode new information, because it requires careful thought that derives from self-reflection: ‘How do I do this?’ and ‘How would others do this?” are useful questions to ask yourself when learning something new.”
Click for larger view




Imagination and memory are always intertwined. By using this method, you are also saying: ‘if my life were this way/if I were this person, then x would affect me in that way.’ ‘If I had grown up this way, and become this person, I would behave this way in this situation.’ You act it out. And if you use that persona regularly in your memory-making and actions, then you effectively re-code your personal story, your personal memory, and become that person, thus also effectively changing your future. This is “magic:” you’ve changed the future by changing the past. This is the practice of Ars Memoria.
In Artnap, the story, the woman has an inner conflict that disturbs her sleep and interferes with her waking life, as well. Here, by the light of the moon, her dreaming mind grapples with the problem, drawing together images and associations until it creates a possible solution, in the form of the detective (who has been hired in the waking world), giving him his tools and his doorway (the time-space clock which dissolves into a ‘tunnel’ between worlds) and his task.
In Selenography/ Selenomancy (Part of the Artnap Series), she is ‘mapping’ the moon by drawing forms its craters and textured surface appear similar to—much like people “learned” the interrelations of the stars for directional purposes in the past by connecting the lines to form figures from their mythology, by giving the stars patterns and meanings already familiar to them. This is a form of memory, but also, there is some inexplicable synchronicity in her way of seeing at this moment and the world around her. Is she foreseeing his approach? Or is she drawing him to her?

Click for larger view