phenomenal presence
Saturday, 4 June 2011
p h e n o m e n a l p r e s e n c e
"i began to recognize the difference between imagery and physicality, that everything had both an imagery and a physicality, and furthermore that for me, the moment a painting took on any kind of image, the minute i could recognize it as having any relationship to nature, of any kind, to me that painting went flat...
imagery for me constituted representation, "re-presentation," a second order of reality, whereas i was after a first order of presence... it's about presence, phenomenal presence."
images the mechanical film set of stanley kubrick's 2001: a space odyssey [sourced from wikipedia if i remember correctly]
text seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, by lawrence weschler. the words are spoken by artist robert irwin
Labels: collaboration, drawing, image, irwin, kubrick, mythology, quote, set design
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the city of oedipus
Thursday, 19 May 2011
the city of oedipus
[as published in matzine #08]
like clockwork, étienne + i would spend two long days a month in studio monoculeure. always, the first studio day was the first friday of the month; the second, the second saturday
in turns, one would fall asleep, or employ chloroform. meanwhile the other, thirty three minutes later, would shake his friend awake, whereupon the dreamer would take his dream and put them on a page; the dimensions of their studio wall.
friday, my turn, i inhaled fully and closed my eye. a moment passed before i opened again. absurdly, both étienne and the fresh, wall-sized page were nowhere to be seen.
eight days following, in studio monoculeure, étienne and i met again, rather upset with one another. an emphatic, erratic explosion of airborne blame ensued. étienne defended that the previous friday it had been his turn to capture his dream on the page. only, when he opened his eye the room was empty of both partner and page.
disturbed and irreconcilable, we could agree on only one thing; to meet again twenty days later.
friday, the first day of the month, with little trust or patience surviving, we hung the page along the centre beam of the studio, ready to take a dream on both surfaces. we entered our respective unconsciousnesses simultaneously.
i was in a heavily-dark place; a vast and dense chamber. there was a sense of minutes passing, then hours. i navigated every permutation of turn and stride [ if one could call indeterminate movements navigation; my residual self-image was unrestrained, yet unable to move to anywhere ]. a numb intuition said my partner shared this space with me, just as the excited thought skimmed across the void; we had found it!
although consciously imperceptible at the time, an afterimage of the dream persisted - whole and familiar - though strictly unknowable. a double, a mirror, the eye that can view itself directly.
now awake, days later, stylus and knife in hands, both sides of the page were black with lead scratchings. there was no page left unwarped, only two un-placable, unfathomable maps; uncanny in dissymmetries; the city of oedipus
[this is a fictional foray originally presented in matzine #08 in response to the idea 'domestic exotic'. i really enjoyed writing this - and exposing my retina's to the matzine readers was an added delight]
Labels: borges, dreams, light, matzine, mythology, shadow
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