The Fugue of Wog: Excerpt from a letter of Wog to Brenda

(Imagined as Wog's way to try to entertain  the object of his (ultimately failed) wooing, a series of letters to be received well (Brenda eventually says "you are a great writer, but unfortunately, that is the only good thing about you")

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This is nice: an icicle bicycle. (just as) Lice love lumps of hairy. Sweet as melted popsicle, our kidvoice Kevin and kidvoice Kim kill time in a hatshop, where the hats are all magic, and produce characters when you turn them up over empty air. These special hats, as is well known, these must be stored carefully, as the characters must be watched, and watched by the watchful eyes of children’s only- one little girl will prevent what happened last Sunday. Last Sunday was Easter.   

You can ride an icicle bicycle one time, maybe, unless you ride it in winter. But this isn’t winter. And the wheels. And the spokes. Tinkle part. Tinky a part. Tinker. The icicle tinker was a lady’s first name. Sasquatch rubberized the special yellow snow for wheels. Sasquatch was a rubbery form of hatred, he wasn’t even a he, or a she, exactly- Sasquatch was of an unborn mutt-hood. But handy- handiness was Sasquatch’s use. The icicle bicycle was just one example, and the way it tinkled lovely was just one purpose, and its flowers of gaping snow-lace were doubled use- they looked and acted lovely- but they also were horns; literal. These snowlace flowerhorns had to be blown, not with bulbs or bellows, bladders- no air-bladders here. The rider of the tinkling-apart icicle bicycle was required to apply lips to the laceflower snow horn’s stem, and literally blow into it to produce one toot, and as the toot was born the snowflower burst apart to a white dust, which had flat iridescent white flakelets to it, many hundreds of dozens. Didn’t the flakelets pause? Or was it the eyes that watched? Didn’t they also find themselves, a cloud, or in a could- a cloud I meant- in a clod of steamy misted vapor- find themselves accompanied by their own sound? A creamy kind of undulating percussive many-toned reverberation? And isn’t this just the trouble in itself?. Questionville was not for nothing named as such, and the (twenty three) tribes of the Questionfolk scratch themselves to this day, whatever the season, I imagine- but who knows who reads and when? Last Sunday was Easter.

The characters when produced unwatched by kids are dangerous, to say the least. Sasquatch dispatched one last Sunday, confusing the Catholic contingency by crucifying him on Easter. There’s nothing to be made of this of course, unless you are a politician, in which case, there’s to be made of any event, some reason to push the music in a direction that most folks otherwise wouldn’t countenance. Was this crucifixon a literal act of an unborn form of hatred? Who’s birthday was on the horizon when the undulations paused on a breath of a Jane’s exhalation, and the steeple drew a shawl of snow tight to shoulders, and muffled its own swinging bell’s clangs? A tongue? Ululating for the steeple’s bell’s a hammer-swinging situation, where you have a cast brass tulip turned over swinging in one frequency; and a great, cast, solid bronze hammer that gets to swinging in its own opposed such. And this is just a walk we took- she and I. Hilda. Pooly. Perfume.

These things that advantage air for its willingness to carry infections; or auras of different sorts (types, varieties, forms, categories, species)- people, characters- they bleed into their own atmospheres- they take these into themselves, and the atmosphere turns them inside out as well, and grabs at their substance- have you noted the hands of air’s particles? All have had air’s fingers pluck water molecules from the outer membrane of very wet lung cells.

Now it must be said: To continue in certain directions is to become oneself a priest- has this occurred to you my dear? Have you ever found a certain starched collar with its intensely dessicating whiteness throttling your windpipe? This has happened many times to the person currently speaking.

Well, it’s a prime number of times. A prime number of times I kissed the feet of our Lord, adding and subtracting from and to the layers of lugubrious saliva that centuries of chanting clergymen shared in a spirit of great and humble daring. These feet that rest below my face as I speak. He is a prime number of inches tall- thirteen- well- the whole carved wood affair of his depiction I mean, including the cross itself, which extends somewhat beyond the part nailed on to it, His body- is thirteen inches total. Don’t say “really?”. Its hard enough to continue, and with gravity on the rise (how many comets have pooped out lately? With the sound of wounded after-thoughts, of wounded missiles, missiles sent from the slingshots of kids, I mean, whistling missiles, the ones that sadly speak when sent against the air’s feathers, against what must be rustled, or raised- the hackles of air being air’s form of Sasquatch’s essential nature, the barbs- that eventually, collaborating with gravity- brings things down. How many comets that used to zip by here without a thought- that would whisk along in their stretched-out oval orbits- how many have piled into us? Adding to the mass? And this building material is foreshortening our legs- it always starts with the legs. Not that any of this is anything to make anything of- something eventually will start tipping things back the other way- just like the tulip-bell pivots, and open’s its mouth, and open’s its throat, and what comes out are more seen than heard events just now- jagged hard-edged shadows. We are grateful for this rain of dark geometry: triangles, purposes, porpoises, pupils- the pupils of the eyes of cows, neatly pressed from the purest and shiniest blacks, the depths of which have been checked carefully by children, and confirmed, as of last Sunday (which was Easter) to be infinite. (In Questionville- assuming the impossible- which a writer must always assume[1]- that you, reading- are not from here- everything is either infinite, or a prime number).

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[1] these rules, where did they come from? I assume there are a prime number of rules. Can there be an infinitude?

Marilyn Gold

See details here of Marilyn's opening, and her latest wonderful paintings:

http://www.marilyngold.com/

artist's choice at MoMA

There is an amazing carved pear table by Hector Guimard standing on a low white pedestal, in a small room, buried somewhere in the bowels of MoMA. It would be worth your while, I mean to say, just to get there, and find that table, and take in its elegant tripartite forms, its rather organic manner of flowing in lovely tapers to its contours, and its subtle; intense and sexy presence- the precise and labial; graceful petals of the flowery front triangle. 

I don’t know that you want or need an orientation either, in a situation like the one you will find yourself in, in that particular room. Leave your orientation in the coatcheck, and wander, its free on Friday night, this cavernous Las Vegas of culture; this disorienting and vast (dis)connection of rooms; atriums; vertigo inducing glass-walled drops of what feels like a hundred feet. And so you may, as we did, find yourself enjoying more physical contact than is normal in a “museum”, because there is no elbow room, so to speak- in fact one hot young couple I noticed at one point inches away in peripheral vision were sharing a mutable, two chambered mouth energetically. In the future, it won’t just be the nude couple in Yvonne Ranier’s black and white video undressing in these rooms? When they ask me to do artist’s choice…..

The room’s dominant theme is set by a group of intensely colored; intensely patterned and structured images, on onionskin, brite white paper, in thin polished aluminum frames, and hung somewhat away from the wall, at an angle, with their bottoms some six inches out, and tops maybe two. These are frightening- terrible- (terrablita, recognized by the Pope was it? in Michaelangelo, is here in quantity), they are also gorgeous, sumptuous, fascinating, compelling, incomprehensible to most of us, utterly so- you feel the intense and tyrannical footprint here of a relentlessly utilitarian language, a terrible precision of logic dictating the surprisingly varied forms.

The fact that they tell so much in relation to the central theme show currently running in the same building, Inventing Abstraction, that they encompass decorative patterning and other ways of confirming the forms that many painters distilled long before these diagrams were dreamed up in arroyos in the ad-hoc chunks of continent that were jammed together recently at the western end of Nevada, adds to the impetous you may feel to visit the room soon.

And learning that they were diagrams necessary to the process of manufacturing computer chips, and that these rather large diagrams were created in advance of etching the same patterns onto microscopic bits of silicone, after using photography to reduce them? They aren’t as titillating as the Guimard table, but they are something to see. This only leaves out about ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the exhibition in which these items are currently on display- and its an exhibition that easily lives up to its author’s claim and apology, which says in other words: sorry its so dense, but there is no non-epic item here, and none that feel to me less than necessary.

Trisha Donnelly then is an artist who I look forward to following, an artist who’s work I am entirely unfamiliar with, apart from this exhibition- in itself truly an artwork that rocks.

Paul's Post 1: Cora Cohen

http://guidedbyinvoices.us/artists/Cora_Cohen/Cora_Cohen_work.html



http://www.coracohen.com/



I wanted to insert an image of the painting you will see if you follow the link to Cora's exhibition invitation, or the link to her website above. The painting is called Curtain 7.
But Google must have seen me trying to copy it here- I'll have to figure out how to get permission, or to make portals. 

So, take a look- follow the link.

I was struck by the layering of experiences in this painting, and I'm just responding for now to the image on my screen, sadly- although of course what I remember from many experiences of her work, and conversations also inform these thoughts.  I find it full of evening light, just prior to dusk. Cora talks about the difference between the depicted light which can infuse a painting (Turner comes to mind), and the literal light by which we see the painting, and how the painting can play with that. There already are two simultaneously and consciously deployed layers.

By creating a surface with its own texture, and painting over that, Cora isn't trying to short circuit a process of the coming about of a surface. 

In the past, I remember Cora telling me that in her work, things that happen of their own accord would be as important- maybe more important- than things that happened by her intervention. (It sounded to me then as though she almost wanted to get intervention as close to zero as possible.) Chemical reactions were a very good example of processes that happen autonomously. At that time, she was using some in her process. I believe the oxidation of copper was one- and that gorgeous pale green, almost celadon hue that results from it.

I think of her prepared surface of texture in a sense as an eminently useful distraction- a sort of stand-in for a found object- in fact, it becomes a found object. Its independence from what happens later is as important as its collaboration in that. Nothing in Cora's painting involves subterfuge. Everything invites the viewer's projections; dreaming- everything is suggestive- everything also is just what it is.

This will make a fine start for our blog- because for me there are two centers of gravity, or three, say, that are often on my mind, and they apply to what's on my mind now, thinking about my experiences of Cora's work, and listening to her talk. One would be Leonardo da Vinci's advice to painters, that if they find themselves stuck; lacking subject matter- the thing to do is to find an old crumbling plaster wall, and gaze into that- you can find any number of subjects there, he said. 

Another would be the painter Francis Bacon's assertion about Rembrandt. He said that if you study the surface of a Rembrandt painting closely, you won't find "a single illustrational mark", but a concatenation of accidental events appreciated by the profound sensibility of the artist. Bacon made a distinction between an experience that "comes off directly onto the nervous system"; and a less useful one that first is diverted "through the cataract of the brain". Bill Jensen made it very efficient simply saying "the painting is the experience." 

What happens here is something that only happens here- it can only happen between the viewer and the painting- not between the viewer and the pictures, or the viewer and someone's words, as wonderful as they might be. 


So, its good that the show just opened yesterday. 


The third thing I alluded to is the music of Bach. 

Bach is considered all around the epitome of achievement as far as polyphony is concerned.

Bach maximizes the possibilities in the idea of having many things happen at once that are all equally worthy of attention. Each voice has its own trajectory and integrity, its own "narrative" (I use this word to describe a particular type of attention). There is a process the listener goes through. The listener is highly active- choosing what to take for foreground, and what as background- choosing how to take the forms of structures that emerge as larger patterns within the overall texture. The options are many, and the choices vary from performance to performance, and from listening to listening. There is an overall structure and a final resolution. But what's  remarkable is the extent of the extendability of diversion- an elasticity; a stretching out of anticipation- that rupture is where Bach wants to take us. 

(To my mind, Bach's music is and will always be quite radical. 
I have heard people say that Bach should be thought of as the producer of mechanical contraptions that depict a Newtonian, deterministic world. To me, nothing could be further from the truth.) 

The aspect that applies here is the aspect of polyphony- a multi-valent experience. An "irreducible plural", (which could only actually relate to an indeterminate realm). 

Cora 's paintings invite a similar experience. In Bach, its the stretching of anticipation in the adventures of modulations, and the delaying of resolution. In Cora's work its the slowing of attention; the possibility that, for one example out of many offered- materials have a soul,say, (which is how Jim Clark describes this). 

Something allowed to be what  it is can  take on a special corporeality under these circumstances (Guston)- and then, the materials are endowed with the same (ontological) status as the flesh of our bodies- maybe more to the point- the flesh of our loved ones. However surreal, or geological, or astronomical, the "language" at hand may be, the material has a life. 

Irreducible- unreconcilable; unresolvable- a flowering of questions; provocations-  a vital, and ever-blooming process of interactions between what the artist left and the viewer.

In Bach, this can be, for me anyway, uncomfortable at times, in a way that I cherish, but is beside the point here- in Cora's work its generally more inviting than confrontational, although some of the works that  involve collage have plenty of jarring transitions and discontinuities to them.

The paintings lately have become  slow burning balms, as supple as the breath of the happiest monk in Tibet (say, a hundred years ago to be safe). Gently sturdy, unaccountably patient. And as different from one another as the kids in a kindergarten class at any Manhattan grade school. Each painting finds itself within terms that are particular to that painting. 

I haven't seen the show that opened yesterday as yet, I'm in bed with the latest virus for now, but I expect that there is nothing here that seeing the show would prompt me to reconsider much. 

We'll see.

2/16/13
Paul