Kite

Yesterday I encountered this work called 'Kite' by Robin Rhodes in Kunsthal Rotterdam and found it fascinating.
The work includes a video component (which is hard to identify in the photograph) that displays the sky behind the imaginary kite. In this case the sky of New Orleans. Rhodes takes us back to the carefree times that preceded the flooding caused by hurricane Katrina.

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer

Excerpt of 'A kite is a victim' by Leonard Cohen

Multiple versions of reality

Not an easy read, but very inspiring and in line with the direction I'm heading in.



As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is written in multiple first-person narratives. Every new section is a new version of reality, particularly noticeable when the narratives overlap and cover the same event two different ways. The novel reminds us of the inherent subjectivity in any story, memory, or narrative. There are no "facts" in this novel, only opinions. Narratives toward the end of the story push the envelope even further, asking if terms like "sane" or "crazy" can ever be objectively defined, or if actions can ever be categorized clearly as one or the other.

Faulkner's text clearly manifests various cubist techniques -- collage, flattening, multiple perspectives, fragmentation, and passage of planes. Structurally, As I Lay Dying is a literary collage of fifty-nine fragmented chapters.

Further reading

Vacance anthropique

Made by Chloé Poizat.

"Ancient" nature combined with modern man.
The anthropic principle is the philosophical argument that observations of the physical universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Anthropism is the doctrine or opinion that man is essentially different from, and contrasted with, everything else in nature, and the end for which the natural world was made. The series makes us look funny and out of place.

Preservation of nature

Ubiquitous by Naoko Ito. Jar and tree.

The magic of bringing two unrelated things together to create something new.

A closer look at art & collage

I would like to emphasis the role of art in changing social consciousness since it is directed outwards. "Only through art can we get outside ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours." Proust again. Getting to know this view of the universe is like learning a new language. When you think outside yourself you get to know yourself better, you get a different perspective. As Goethe put it: "Those who know nothing of foreign languages, know nothing of their own."

"The artist is at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery or happy events, to which he responds in every way. How would it be possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach yourself from the life which they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy." p 141 Picasso to state that he is not apolitical. He wanted to move on from trompe l'oeil to trompe l'esprit: art has to capture the spirit of the artist. But the artist cannot sidestep the symbolic meaning of objects, nor can his audience, or can he?



Joseph Cornell - Untitled (Hotel Eden) c.1945

As for collage, the identity of an object is suspended between it’s practical reality, the thing itself and the conceptual whole in which it is set. Collage invites the spectator to respond with a multiple consciousness in which forms, objects and images are interchangeable. The hierarchy of categories is disrupted, like a mixture of realities belonging to different orders. It is about reordering the universe. Collage is like a visual rhapsody, a collection of pieces that have one spirit and one scope, but which are not directly related to each other. Marked materials gain connotations which unmarked materials lack. P 82
Collage is the visual vocabulary in the age of mechanical reproduction by Walter Benjamin. Works of art can become works of art when reordered in collage and especially in digital collage.
You can see that collage has become a metaphysical principle beyond mere technique.

Tristan Tzara called collage "the most poetic and most revolutionary moment in the history of painting." In which he tries to explain that physical matter becomes poetry, haptic poetry.

Collage reflects the absurdity of representing things and images in a universe of forces and energies. It is an illusion producing process, you cannot get to the origin, the pieces have lost their identities. A collage is like practicing the aesthetics of mystification by creating a myth and a hyperreality. It ultimately becomes a simulacrum: "a simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." Beaudrillard.

Collage is a way of changing social consciousness by reordering realities. It is quite a postmodern technique as it advocates that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. Collage represents or is such a construct and it is anything but a narrative constructed in a sequential fashion.

"Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes on the moon... Instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many world as there are original artists-more different from each other than those which revolve in space."

Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 1923-27) p. 491; translated by Justin O'Brien in tThe Maxims of Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), p. 176.

This seems to call out for participation in art. To be continued.

Expanding consciousness

So I watched Mulholland Drive the other night, a movie directed by David Lynch, well known for his mindboggling structured narratives. This movie is no exception. The story itself is interesting enough to keep you watching, and in the end keep you analyzing. The thing that is most interesting about it is that it provokes a superb tension Hitchcock would be proud of and what causes this tension is the provocation of curiosity. Curiosity causes a certain tension. What feeds the curiosity is the mystery. Now this curiosity is directed by Lynch in a fine balanced manner: mainly it is stretched out over a period of time without stretching it for too long. The mystery is at a certain distance, not too close and not completely out of reach. Lynch gives hints here and there but never truly unfolds the story or the mystery, and this is what makes his work so strong. Even after you finish watching you are still curious and this keeps you thinking.



Today I watched some of his interviews and he really is an inspirational person. He even talks about this bowl or sphere of consciousness while using the right hand gestures. The same sphere I wrote about in my last post. Lynch is saying that everyone has a certain size of a sphere and by making it grow it will lead you to reaching your full potential. One of the advantages is that you are able to catch ideas that lie at a deeper level. The way he goes about expanding his sphere is by Transcendental Meditation (TM), by turning and diving inwards, not outwards. He truly experiences it as a way that leads to bliss, enlightment, unity and oneness, as a connection with the ether, and believes it is a way that can lead to world peace. He even set up the David Lynch foundation for consciousness-based education and world peace with the message "change begins within".

I believe there must be other ways of by expanding your consciousness. We experience new things in our waking life every day, while some are more life changing than the other, they sure can have an impact on ourselves. Exchanging ideas for example. When two spheres touch upon eachother don't they leave their traces? I suspect it is a matter of preference between directing your consciousness inward or outward, although both are valuable. I think it is a matter of finding a balance between the two. Now art is a way of getting something out in the world. It is directed outwards, not inwards like TM is. TM seems antithetical to the outward social activism and the social movements in trying to establish peace. But as Lynch says TM is going for the root of the problem, not the level of the problem itself. I'd say they both do their part in a different way, they are all about spreading awareness. At least we now have something to think about, same goes for Mulholland Drive...

New eyes

The real voyage of discovery...
consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes,
in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others,
in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.

Marcel Proust

I heartily agree with the quote and would like to expend my research question on it. Big question comes forward: how? It has a rather broad subject, there are lots of ways to actually change your views on something. But for me it comes down to symbolic ways of leaving something behind and starting anew, by changing your past you control your future, a transformation of some sort. There are abstract ways to do so as well as figurative ways. The most abstract way of doing so has to be the black square by Malevich: "In my desperate struggle to liberate art from the ballast of the world of objects, I took refuge in the form of the square." The square being the symbol of earthbound matter, of the body and physical reality.



M.L. von Franz explains that the circle (or sphere) is the symbol of the self representing the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the relationship between man and the whole of nature. A sphere points to its ultimate wholeness. Even Plato described the psyche as a sphere. Reflecting upon your own sphere didn't exist for the primitive man, they just got along with the things they used to do. Now we are in an age of rationalism and we tend to try to understand the things we do. Reflecting upon you own- or someone elses sphere leads to understanding, and ultimately, your own sphere starts to grow. This is the real voyage of discovery.

Paul Klee made a drawing called "limits of understanding" where he places the sphere or circle above a complex structure of ladders and lines. C. Jung pointed out that a symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt. This is the purpose of the drawing.



Since symbols are universally recognisable, they loose their personal meaning when they're outside a personal context. Symbols are in the public domain and a means of connecting people, not setting me apart from you.

So we have the symbol itself, a heavy loaded sign. This sign is a means of symbolizing transformation, I might call this a ritual of bridging differences, in "seeing the universe with the eyes of another", leading to universal understanding and becoming the sphere that is the world, being part of a new whole.