Vacancy is a fallen state, not the
destiny of the redeemed man. What is his destiny? He has to find it out.
If firings are apocalypses what are
"reconciliations of the good?" No results found. The pine that fires the
apocalypse of the kiln will die in
the fire, but it is the same pine that made the
purest water in the world.
That water that comes from the aquifer of the pine barren is like water
that comes from the rock in the desert, and like the orchid that comes
from the rock in the broken, erupted, eroded world, its flower is a
symbol of the destiny of the man.
Fire is romanticized. Think the
sculptors and the piscine
shapes of women know that we go in this fire? Been touched? Once
burned? Twice? Why were they in the Euphrates (not the Gihon, Tigris,
or Nile)? Why had they been bound, now loosed?! You know why. The
200 million horses breathe fire, smoke and brimstone. They are kilns
some critic would say, wrenching scripture as does Kafka's analogy of
the Wall
of China for the Tower of Babel. China
to Babel, horses to kilns, all prophets, Enoch, Noah, David,
Isaiah, Jonah, Jesus, John are traditional and iconoclastic. Consider
making a whip to cleanse the Temple. Kafka enforces scripture with the
best
Biblicals. Believe that and read the Great Wall of China and the kiln
opening like my nephew asking what the opening of the seventh seal
means. I told him that I hate to spoil the ending. I subscribe
parageography to geology with the voyages of
Odysseus, Virgil, St. Brenden.
As Beowulf stands beside the burning mere
Of plumb immensity before he’ll go
Into the vast abysm without fear,
And wonders if that watery bed’s his bier
Before he draws a breath of earth’s sweet air,
And dives into the darkness of the mere:
Poetry? You say there's a difference between water and earth, air and fire, male and female? More pollution of intellect?
The wood kiln is about blushes girls make when they come
out and open their faces. The
Unloading makes the color ranges known. In
the catacombs Don Reitz is rumored to mix his clays from a WSO base,
with a pinch of the secret (oxide). Others are trucking raw clay from the East as
Reitz draws
From The Heart.
Implicit reduction of oxygen
or oxidation forced with ash and smoke from chemicals
saturated in the clay makes them blush. Iron and copper clay
compositions set up blushes with the wood, depending whether pecan,
walnut,
pine. Some place they fire with cinnamon, persimmon, madrone. Lee Ufan
(Japan), Claudi Casanovas (Spain) and Donald Judd (W Tex (Marfa!)),
range to and fro over takes of this natural, cuts of stone
hills and scrub growth, sun and sky.
Mining
Minimals
Truth Business:
How can the
intellect pollute the natural and its art when it
thinks it is mining the heart? All mining produces
contamination of surface and subsurface, slag heaps, gob piles,
subsidence, runoff increase. Chemicals concentrate in water that the
Reitz
Ranch is well situated to recall, chemicals concentrated in the Verde
River run right by. Consider the Verde river
polluted with mine tailings and arsenic runoff just down from here where
Cottonwoods fish the river. Maybe they don't drink the water, but
abandoned smelter stacks and slag piles wash down leftover mines also in
Globe, Bisbee, Jerome and a hundred others. Compare these with the
intellectual pollution of the natural in the human. Like it or not,
seeking depth, mines are the depth of art mirroring life that
cannot take the pristine uprights of Reitz' sculptural recall, with its
crosses and grave artifacts, other than as if they were the
River Shannon graveyards of
Clonmacnoise. The last thing I remember is
Jonathan Cross saying something like, "the fire of the volcano," who insisted that
deliberation of ceramic takes of the world were intellectual, after a
taking of the natural. The argument was that had they the colors
we have they'd certainly used them. So the sea would not remain the
wine-dark of Homer. But what is art if not pollution, considering our
surroundings, the hills barren, the river poisoned, the sky filled with
chemtrails all the sun filled day?
Intellect to intellect? I didn't say this. I am listening as if knowing
is finding the spirit of knowing and not knowing simultaneously, as in a
human mind.The red, black and white clay colors of ancient
statuary are like the three classical colors, the only colors, inferred from Arabic.
Kiln opening.
Don't you love art talk? Don
Reitz is famous for it.
Claudi Casanovas, in
Twenty Blocks, says "each piece is a silence. If I
were a poet, I would inscribe words there." Here Casanovas too, but such impossibility!
The silence is complete. Only his stressing of materials is
exciting, The problem all these boys have is why should I buy their pieces when I can go to Winslow and buy petrified wood
as
big or bigger than I can lift, already stressed? The stressing of
materials echoes Mono-ha. The impression these give on the GalerieBesson
site is of a depersonalization attractive because the viewer doesn't
have to figure out the message, recognize the face, interpret the image.
It's a rock its own self collecting, but there were no human figures in
the kiln.
Donald Judd collaborated with his father, but had extreme distaste for
galleries and art biz. Artist as "designer," not "maker" might not
obscure that design. Whether preceding the made, made in the making, or
found after, in breaking, this is a mere time constraint, for should there be time no
longer, to further the Biblical, if then, then now, time is a
convenience for those who talk. If no time, then no human maker either,
not to deny the work, merely to say nothing, certainly not thank you for
saying it is good. What's your problem anyway? He died rich. He was so
rich he started a foundation in Marfa. That's where Robert Creeley got
sick in order to die in Odessa.
Afterward I got out a pit fired Papago pot from the
old trader
Kermit Lee acquired when he liquidated. You can see the burn
marks and
its softness: “Eight miles from the Pisinemo
Road is the Quijotoa Trading Post. Quijotoa is a
Spanish corruption of KiaHoaToak, Papago for “carrying basket mountain.”
The Quijotoa Mountains were mined in 1774 and again
with more importance in the 1880s. At the trading post, Mr. and Mrs.
Kermit Lee
have a wonderful selection of Papago baskets and pottery. Baskets range
from
thumb-nail miniatures made of horsehair to waste basket size of yucca,
beargrass,
and martynia…Almost directly across from the Trading Post is a road
north to Santa Rosa Village. Just west of it is Ventana Cave;
and here lies some of the most ancient history in North
America.”
Desert
Magazine,
May1969.
2014 and after --"Firing in wood burning kilns gave him new surfaces to explore along with
new clay bodies that he discovered while in Japan, clay
from
Shigaraki. Sandy clay from the bed of
Lake Biwa
has a warm orange color which
characterizes Shigaraki ware [?] of irregular contours and archaic flavor.
Firing technique shifted from reduction to oxidation firing, which
allows free admission of air during the firing rather than limited air
admission into the kiln. This allows iron oxides to be used as part of
the coloring process. The allowance of free air is due to the type of
ancient kiln, called an anagama kiln, which is used to fire Shigaraki ware...achieves the mineral glaze surface.
Depending on the placement of the piece, the resulting coat of ash and
minerals will vary with a
greyish to a reddish-brown colorizing, small impurities
protrude, caused by embedded quartz [feldspar?] partially fired. Covered
with a thin
layer of overrun yellowish-brown to a peach blossom red color glaze
that crackles when fired is also characteristic."
Voulkos
"Invented each time as if for the first time then reinvented as part
of the history of invention."...geology of art, archeology, layer by
layer...primeval geology, gap, crack, smash, sludge, break...beauty of
the crack, the burned crack, the torn edge, plasticity, viscosity,
drying, slashed, embedded, incised, scratched, scored, incised wax
resist stacks, plates, STACKS! contours, recesses, fit for caves,
spelunkers, "destroy itself at the same time it creates," ...original
wary attitude toward applied glaze solidified to total
avoidance...cylinder, dome, sphere, disk, plate, slab. Leather hard
wheel forms joined in various combinations in stacks or ice buckets (?)
muscular, irreverent, anti-academic [primitef] (From the introduction of
Clay's Tectonic Shift: John Mason
ceramic
walls]. Mason began to
make massive rough-hewn walls... huge cross forms and solid, geometric
shape...imprinting the finished form with the gestural force of its
making-ceramic walls]. Walls, vertical totems, crosses, reaching for the
primitive.
We are going to have to forgive Voulkos for being an influence on so
many ceramic artists. That's their fault. Also forgive the force of his
personality, here's a
good pic. The solitude, rejection, anger, energy, dislocation:
“The minute you begin to understand what you’re doing it loses that
searching quality. Your emotions
take over and what happens just happens. Usually you don’t know it’s
happened until after it’s done.http://franklloydgallery.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/peter-voulkos-on-improvisation/Of the influence of Franz Kline:
Of the influence of Franz Kline: "Bridges, tunnels, buildings, engines, railroads, and other architectural and
industrial icons are imagery informing Kline's work; lines, planes, facets,
coal, "Kline’s memories of his native Pennsylvania’s coal-mining region, with its
stark scenery, locomotives and similar massive mechanical shapes to which the
titles of his later abstract images sometimes referred." Reading that
Franz Kline's black and white paintings with tunnels and
roads stems from his childhood in Wilkes Barre and the coal mines makes
me wonder at the influence of that house along the railroad where we
lived from 5-16. Especially the early years, starting 1947 the trains
smoke was not scrubbed. What was later white was black as soot,
especially where the freights had to go up a gentle rise we live in the
middle of. There were two tracks, only freight trains, that went to and
way from the Pennsylvania Railroad
train yard a few miles down. This was a big operation hillsides undermined by coal extraction prevented development.When I look at
these rectilineal constructs, crosses etc I see grave stone ceremonials. Much
of Voulkos, Callas, Reitz is suited to memorials. De Kooning also enters these
associations, who I have long loved, block and slices. I love everything he
says about art non art.
These ideas of the primitive need to be distinguished from false
Legends of the Unconscious that abide in all psychiatry. On the one hand, in ruined artifacts of vacancy and
presence, vacancy of design and designer, the presence of
the natural flows. Repeating patterns to identify work
betrays the natural, vacancy. Artists
in need of PR exhibition make and imitate their own style, which is
neither primitive nor unconscious. Making design by erosion, breakage,
eruption, gravity, is vacancy.
Lee Ufan, in Mono-ha, the
School of Things,
says
unknowingly
materials reveal knowledge. Against thought and forethought when
stone
hits glass the breakage conforms to gravity and glass, not the intention
of the artist. Glass is resistant to breaking, explosive, but clay
adapts, molds to the maker in its making, gradually perfected into its
form that when fired becomes the form to be accepted or cast off.
Comparing glass and clay, the freedom of each to act and crack or mold
unknowingly reveals qualities
inherent in, but not visible as object. Destruction an aesthetic smacks
of social disorder. Earth is being destroyed all around us by earthquake
and volcano, fire, and flood and hurricane, water. If you crack the
stone, you conceal the stone the way
railroad ties reveal connotations of forced labor in
Japanese colonies in World War II or Ireland's
famine stone walls around the Burren are famine walls denoting starvation and slavery. After the same notion of changed form, burning
wood makes charcoal.
Laminating Opposites. Mercury
Take
passage tombs, where the sun shines into the passage at a significant
point in the year, as wood kilns and both as the spirit of knowing and
not
knowing of a human mind. Pollution is a symbol if it fuels the
laminating opposites of volcano and and kiln, infiltrating impurities
into clay, cone 5 into cone ten, bark and organics that incinerate and
leave a trace, rocks, volcanic ash, erosion deposition,
reburied feldspar as shigaraki layering, cracking,
stressing with cedar berries, pine needles, sycamore bark, buckeye pods,
chicken bones under streams of shino, impurities that swim in the
underclay where spines
are buried, pebbles, manure, vermiculite! beetles! road kill!, chollas,
spines, pads, all buried. Who dares be born on this earth? Hope to hatch
out a split scarab,
stretch geologics, Mercury-like thrust faults and global contraction
of the planet, with lobate scarps from interior cooling? As Mercury has a
larger core than
other inner planets creating cumulative compressional strain recorded in
the se
lobate scarps that decrease Mercury's radius which the kiln
can easily top, shrinking up to 15%. So a reduction kiln imitates an
anagama and both a planet. A planet is a pot. Core contractions produce
lobate scarps [scalps],
cliffs of implosion,
displacement thrust
faults,
compressional stresses,
thermal contraction,
lineated terrain.
All
these are part of the man in the wilderness. Preexisting crater rims
disrupt crude polygonal hills. Impact ejecta blanket fractured mantles.
Miners,
dwarves, nibelungs mine coal out of the earth clay coat, rutile wash,
cobalt hole. This art is
katalole. It reminds of the electrical scouring of Mars.
All the global aspects of Mercury lead
to a loss of surface planting contradiction into the clay body. Slumping,
cutting earthquakes seek the volcano in the kiln. The pollution in
saying so calls fire out of the medieval
Cloud of Unknowing
with the spirit. Fathom that after the
volcano, like the shell of a man shrunk, heart sack creased like a pot
expelled from itself, when you don't have naught to say. Thought
burns up. Intellect ceases tasks. You stand struck, parietal lobes
rewired.This destruct is art?
Apocalypse.is art. All these firings are apocalypses. I
read that when the sixth angel sounds it will loose the angels bound in
the Euphrates.
***
Malcolm Davis
Their glazes were basically feldspar with a little ash.
The secret of carbon-trapping is in one ingredient: soda ash. My particular glaze has
about 18% soda ash. Many shinos have no soda ash at all and are glazes used by potters
who do not want carbon-trapping and are searching for a more traditional Japanese sur-
face. I love those pots, but I am obsessed with carbon and soot.
reduction pulls the oxy out of the glaze that was grown in, sulfide to sufate
Note on celadon: a little tin oxide and/or barium carbonate will help with the blue color.
 |
| John Mason |
The common reduction fired Shino glazes in North America are mostly
gloss or semigloss, fat, white crackle glazes with some orange to red
and dark red from iron in the clay body or iron slips under the glaze.
Shinos were born in Japan as almost pure high fired feldspar glazes.
Shino on porcelain requires underglaze iron bearing slips, or in-glaze
iron (i.e. from an iron-containing kaolin). Shinos are fluxed with soda
spars and nepheline syenite and do not contain calcium because it
dissolves the iron and inhibits the red color. Shinos usually do not
have added silica, the silica being contributed by the feldspars and the
clays in the glaze. Some Shinos contain Spodumene, which may be added
to balance the high expansion soda spars. A simple Shino recipe is 70%
Nepheline Syenite and 30% Kaolin.
Shino
Iron Glazes
After:
I have done less of this in clay than I did in glass and words. The
world is before us, but the pot remains after. Ask what he will do
tomorrow if he had success today-what are you working on, as they do all
novelists. The answer is there is no time and what is done is done
before, during and after.
A Planet is a Pot.
Crumpled, Dented and Crushed, the ceramic here and the writing there is a primitive, naive, unfinished stress and distress of
feldspar crystals from pumice clasts within a
tuff.
Not I don't know why I talk that way, I can't help it. Maybe it's because "the creation of a perfect illusion depends
not (only
upon a vertiginous degree of) technical ability, but ultimately upon the
intuitive channeling of a breathless state in which the painter himself
no longer knows whether his eye still sees or his hand still moves." W.
G. Sebald,
A Place in the Country. On the Paintings of Jan Peter Tripp, 175.
Stressing materials away from the smooth and the fine to the
lobate scarps
is the illusion of planetary implosion. It makes cliffs of displacement thrust
faults that grow orchids, compressional stresses, thermal contraction, lineated terrains of earth stars as a means of dramatizing the primitive to display the
universal human, not the beauty fantasy of it, but the pain in the global aspects of
a planet like Mercury that leads
to a loss of surface, except it is a man,
secreting and planting contradiction into the clay body. Slumping,
cutting
earthquakes adjoin the volcano in the kiln. It is also part of the solar minimum. The pollution in
saying so calls fire out of the medieval
Cloud. Fathom that after the
volcano, the shell of a man shrunk, heart sack creased when you don't have naught to say, like a pot
expelled from itself. That thought
burns up. Intellect ceases tasks. You stand struck, parietal lobes
rewired. That is primitive.
As in Kierkegaard's idea of the primitive in Johan Tael's
Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard's Thought, 57F:
Primitive existence always contains a reexamination of the universally human. The primitive thinker reflects on what everyone knows, or should know. What these things are must be shown not told to that self consciousness that is so self assured. If it recognizes it recognizes itself. The concept of human being is normative; The ethical task of each
singular human being consists in transforming the psychic qualification
of his existence in a pneumatic one; The bedrock normative practice
that determines the human being as "pneumatic" is the existential
speech-act.
Writing is pneumatic if it breathes these primitive universal dramas. Primitive ceramic feeds on forethought not the intention of the artist when stone
hits glass and the breakage conforms to gravity. If not, the
result is mere thought.
But more, and better, let the flower guys see that whenever two
people look into each other's faces the eyes of others are present, for there
is a trace of a third person present in every face we encounter. We exist
for each other as the start of breath starts speech in our throats and must
know that we are either in the process of damaging or protecting the
world. He who has conferred upon us the power to open or close
thousands of myriads of forces and worlds, has made us responsible for the
maintenance of this universe. He gave to man dominion of his hands.
This is the intimate trace of consciousness we awake in the public
nature of our words and language itself, turning every meeting between one
person and another into a meeting that must include the whole of humanity,
living and dead. It goes without saying that not one detail from any
moment at all is lost of our deeds, words and thoughts. Each one goes back to its
root to carry on in the height of heights, in the worlds and among the pure
superior lights.
