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 |
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.
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.
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