Oct 13 13
I craft inquiries, and I am lucky with very generous creative professionals who share their perspectives with me as acts of co-creation. I am presently inquiring with author, artist, and microbiologist S.C.T, Phd, who is the Director of the X State University microscopy lab in gardening zone 8 of the United States. He is also an active, exhibiting glass artist. And, his photographic work is on display at the X Science Museum, also in zone 8. S focuses on microscopic fungi and the microscopy of sand. He serves on the Editorial Board for Microscopy Today. He and his wife, D, travel the world for art and science, and just this month are in Italy for glass working in Murano and Venice. Our eight-year correspondence continued when he recently sent me (with permission!) the following SEM images of charcoal sections taken from an archeological site in Belize.
I think of the square and rectangular shadows of my new night studio, and also of the near-exact replicas of the image made in charcoal or graphite, with watercolor and ink and pencil scrawls.
or oil paint
My point is, See see see the world. Not the nightmare. The world. Calder tried to re-direct our eyes, too, smattering the planet with big interrupting marks that ought to shake our vision out of its complacent, arbitrarily scaled sockets, his sculptures lovely grease pencil marks on our vision.
Calder: Triangles in the Sache studio: look and see him standing way down in the studio on the other side of the triangles…
Of course I have been provided with the perfect, ideal real paper book, Calder, an Autobiography with Pictures. It’s dictated! Bravo! Better than Winston Churchill for voicing the world he saw by what he tells, Calder brought me all the way down into the metal pours, and their heavy concerns, and rolled me through the ridiculous set of coincidences by which he came to show in a certain museum. It is an autobiography. I wonder like I’m uninvited to wonder so close, how Calder’s making of the autobiography fueled his work. I’m just saying. He has perfect-o shots of his works in progress, like he had to send guys up ropes to get the shots, so he’s thinking about these shots.
‘Calder?’ I call, into the empty behind the lights, and hear nothing.
Calder’s 1936 proposal for a signature CBS sculpture was rejected, and he shows it and of course CBS ought to be aSHAMED of themselves for the billionth time, this thing is the very soul of the lightning-bolt wielding 20th Century electro-future, jetting into the space age so long in the making and so fast in the passing, on account of the ever-increasing rpm’s of the Whutzit. The sculpture gets us off the ground, into space, and all the way out into fourth dimension before it has only to elude to aspects of itself it cannot show because it would burn up both your little eyes.
Naturally I’m not going to talk about my collaborations with alternative energies, time-free aspects of the living. I do not wish to confuse the world with other-worldy writing. I therefore do something true and dramatic with my other hand while I write with this one.
These sorts of inquiries, to be collaborations, they have to be open. The inquiries work like art, they have to be open at both ends, they have to generate creative energy. I sent S an iPhone image of a cobweb recently, which I had cropped to look like an interrupted segment of a much vaster region, like a microscopy image, and asked him to tell me what he saw. Biofilm! he replied. the installation I was working on at the time:
I must prepare for J to haul this stuff off to GSU in 4 hours, and maybe even 5. How’s that for other worldly? One foot in front of the other, ass off the chair, Apron written on my hand, the same arm that sports Be Love and watts=volts x amps dare I call it ohm’s law, as if I really knew backwards and forwards how to wrap the equation like electrical tape around the emitters, powering them just right because my mind is down with the equation, it’s like this* with the it. watts=volts x amps. Amps= watts maybe over volts? Look! An ostrich!
These works have hold of me, the illuminated objects, the lens works, the installation which has some or all but maybe none of these features because they arrive on their own. I am the waiter. And the studio move now, too, everything at once, Your Life Changes Completely Today. The move-in sets the rhetorical base for the use of the tools. I’ll paint in a painting studio, solder in an electronics studio ( and then hold the smoking iron up, wondering if I just did the work right, or wrong.) I will have the space or not have the space to project like so. I am making, therefore, a shadow studio, with clean walls in 3 places by my table, and the far side wired to be an experiment bar – wired for dc, with lights and lenses, here the sensors will be tried, a long work table in the center. But first installation must get the material out, and the studio moved in. this one is maybe no new tricks, there is graphite on the wall, a gargantuan non-electric trick, Machine, you will be amazed, you won’t know what you are looking at. Drawing painting movement on the wall, pulsing, winking, sliding in the fisheye sockets.
This is a profoundly beautiful studio, the city lights flat around the giant brick building like a fact, like the ocean, with a sloshing pier of too-bright security lights from the loading docks across Throop, and another set from the northwest wing of this very studio building. The light is divided in the most unusual, but completely legitimate symmetry. I think of it empty, without the interior walls built, floor and columns, in a storm, the future and the past of a big building. It will just keep standing, excepting Godzilla or apocalyptic tidal waves, and other things my liability insurance def does not cover.
None of my gods can draw a bead on me for having to be reminded to let the installation be what it is. They barely flinch, engrossed in a card game, money riding.
I would say, tell me about writing, but they aren’t listening. The machine’s Pandora response is Indie dance station; I should have known. I saw a snippet of crazed flashing screen before anything else, and I cocked my head like the RCA pup, what is that? I couldn’t read it at all, but I felt it scraping the drums of my eyes. I didn’t factor it out of the read, thank the very gods who taunt me, because that flashing screen created the possibility for unknown intensity. As usual, a pattern that repeats without scale, the least appealing aspect, the disturbing otherly aspect, is the germ. The ugliest part of the painting is the next painting, the overfired kiln, the holy creative ‘but then!’
Machine! I drifted around the thinnest outer layers of sleep last night while you played an array of dream-weaving songs, to which I wrote imaginary essays, including one about Jimmy Page’s hairstyles over the course of his career. But, as if you put a slumber party voodoo spell on me, I could not raise my hands to write.
I look at the photos of the whale eye, of the flesh around it, I feel my hands sculpting it with clay and small wooden sculpting tools, I know exactly how to make the folds, but I am with the glint, the movement of the eye, what it sees, the reflection of myself upside down on its shiny surface. All in service to the installation, I see the whale eyes on the gallery wall. I am to bring the smallest optics to the gallery. I feel the grip now.
I’ll be loading the materials into the truck later this afternoon, selecting them, and the method, the process, is about mind, about what’s in my mind while it is making decisions about the work. I craft it with inquiry, understanding also that where and how I inquire are creative. I decide I am led, because I can’t be bothered to press the authenticity of orders that no man or woman, no monk, not Joan of Arc, not Plato or Einstein or DaVinci, none of them could tell if the orders were real or imagined. Would that not suggest that the unknown is an integral part of creativity. Plato put some of his philosophy inside the fiction, just in case.