-Possible additions to Kiln Visions
-History of Forms
Much of this work is improvisational, begun with a fragment of idea recognized as the work progresses. First solid, stable, but taken to where it begins to fall, just intervening in the collapse, the clay is shifted and pulled, but it is a hollow or solid cylinder when all is said and done, that from from the various strength and weakness in the stretching, pulled back from the brink, it is a rescue. It has to be remembered that these are three dimensional, have sides and backs to the front side viewed in the photographs which have to be as good as organic as the front in advancing the impression.
Sculptures and murals appear here. The sculptures are laminated layers of different clays, stressed and sculpted into figures which must stop short of falling to remain upright. Parables of redemption, just intervening in the collapse, for they are hollow cylinders when all is said and done, the tallest about 27" and can fall from the imprecise pressure of stretching the various strength and weakness of the clays, which have no armature, and need to be pulled back from the brink. The murals haven't circulated to shows because they need to be hung but are put in glass cases.
The idea generally is to give form to the formless, the invisible, the unknowable, meaning the spiritual world. Many of the ceramic murals explore this by bringing but not quite bringing a picture of what really exists that cannot be seen by posing linked identities, one in one world one in the other, that have similar names but are unknowable to each other except from some third narrative view.This teasing the brain tries to make sense of unknown patterns by making them into the known even though the two worlds exist untranslatable to each other.
Captions—All high fire reduction atmosphere.
Looking for Work. 2012. 20x9x6 First place Standing Sculpture, AZ State Fair, 2012.
Tortoise 2013. 11x9x10
Holding the Lamb 2014. 21x11x1/4 published as cover at https://issuu.com/buffaloalmanack/docs/issue9
Orchidaceae. 2018. 16x14x11 Best of Show, AZ State Fair 2018
Weimar 2014. 21x10x8 Basis for article, “Oracle,” Red Fez Magazine 71. 13 Sept 2014
First there were small mural figures, bears floating in a cloud, children playing with lollipops, but after an early version of Bruegel’s Opening of the Fifth Seal, the Early Captives of Egypt, portals of the divine gates and seraphim. Figures became processions of immigrant families and in-depth looks of one or two. There are a number of horses, and stand alone figures like medieval woodcuts, finished in glass, and whole heads mounted on backgrounds of plexiglass.
--Notes
BALZAC to appear @ AZ Clay Annual Exhibition 29 March at Shemer Art Center. This Balzac is in his younger day. He later became Rodin’s crag of corpulence in age and La Comédie Humaine. Diurnal Balzac wore his “willful nature,” on his back, but had not that smirk when Rodin sculpted him. I met the marbles at the Rodin Museum outside Paris where I sketched days in succession before being expelled for sketching Orpheus.
Gazundite - When the Body Touched Elisha's Bones
Don't
know the name yet. Loaded a fan brush w cobalt wash and blew over edges
of the gown. This will show in bisque and final fire. Then easy to
clear glaze.
An Aleutian Pegasusian. First in a series of flying horses I imagine circling the city of Troy.
Faint image above the altar, side door basement of the Lady Chapel, Glastonbury Cathedral. Another time zone. The Tor, IRA, Glastonbury. Blessing and danger.
Pegasus, Fox: David said it was an astronaut. He could see the helmet and the capsule! Mom said it was a horse. I had no idea. It won't photograph because the wings, winds (?) extend around the sides and back of the vessel; there is also a foot back there. When it fires the cobalt traces blue. Sometime maybe a better pic.
Egyptian zodiac: You may say to the elders of Egypt,
that's what the life of a father's about,
act on foresight with face singed
if the top is exploded and the bottom goes out.
If the head at the top and the people at bottom
are both lost to exposing,
It leaves us worse off than we thought,
walls still standing but the vessel won't hold,
Do not turn up the fire too high we're told,
Foresight get out of the way!
Sometimes too hot, sometimes not believed,
self doubt is the last thing it needs.
With all the crowds going it's easy to doubt,
The prophets seem sure, but not sure enough.
Go back to protect family. Require foresight to act,
Constellations on all sides of this vessel come out
and the worm Ouroboros eats itself,
What new top and bottom to historic walls?
Forces are opposed, and like tyrannies.
Death, creation continue. Top and bottom create.
This is a reading of fate.
Pile of Bowls. These bowls are transparent held to the light. He wants a permeable membrane between the clay and light.In his last years Cezanne was so blind his landscapes abstracted until they were only colors.
'A divine tortoise', said Confucius, 'can appear to prince Yüan in a dream, yet it cannot escape the net of Yü Ch'ieh. Its wisdom can yield seventy-two faultless omens, yet it cannot escape the misery of being cut to pieces. Truly wisdom has its limits; spirituality, that which it cannot reach.'In spite of the highest wisdom, there are countless snares to be avoided. If a fish has not to fear nets, there are always pelicans. Get rid of small wisdom, and great wisdom will shine upon you. Put away goodness and you will be naturally good. A child does not learn to speak because taught by professors of the art, but because it lives among people who can themselves speak.'
--Crumpled, Dented, Crshed
Unless it is too philosophical to be of interest these stressed and broken attempts to fall and stand at the same time see pots as people and to which do we like most, the cheerful ones who go against all odds and heroically oppose, or those who bow the head, the knee, and excite sympathy? Indeed many did fall, imploded, collapsed in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. Why were they pushed to such extremes? Some can't raise their hands because they don't have arms. These are many. Or sometimes they just have stumps for arms in these days. Of those who raise hands not all get them all the way up either, from the weight or maybe they are prevented. There are all kinds of postures in hands raised, just like there are all kinds of reasons for raising them. Surrender is always implied, and praise. Also sacrifice. Those without hands are the most poignant if we imagine them. We can see the heads and the bodies, as if the arms and hands were wrapped inside a serape maybe. Hands raised, heads raised, bodies raised. If we are armed militarized security forces it gets ambiguous, as they are concealing something under their cloaks. Beating hearts. Some of these may be considered Protest Jars, others Quechua ladies silently witnessing.
--Kiln-Spit
I went to pick up pieces at the kiln, one had cracked on refire. I
threw it in the can after the master complained that he likes what I do, wants to teach me,
but that if I don't learn then the P C for the Arts is no place for me.
The master says, he's your teacher then (Mason). I reply no, I'm just glad he's in the world and I admire and identify his work, but I am seeking to split form into pieces. I don't bother saying what work is banal and commonplace because tyrants who throw their voice around have favorites and the rest can skate. Their teaching, so called, is mainly opinions and jokes. They cannot teach what they don't know, that being that the essence of form is the nothingness of design and the liquid of color that flows around it.
All the righteous are offended. I have offended print teachers, ceramic teachers, Mennonite teachers, English teachers, poets and tennis bigshots. I might be onto something. The outcome is that I want to tear the top off with the bottom so the form can represent the detasseled torsos of our time. So people are like corn stalks. This is meant to stir compassion for the pain of extinction and malformation introduced everywhere in the world. These oppositions are much in the air. I sent a beautiful piece of writing, Reset Blue Superstitution Farewell Blue Superposition in dialect and dialectic to a place and the editor wanted to know, in the rejection, if it was a Markov chain-- a random process that undergoes transitions from one state to another. I replied, thinking to make some headway, that it was a Mono-ha, another thing to be ignorant of, and the editor on the other end said I could have said all that in three sentences. There are rule givers in power everywhere. I have planned to get ten of this Flower Guys, the one shown above here is #2, two more are made, but it may be prevented (but wasn't). I'm coming to believe that if a piece can be photographed it is inferior, for color is everywhere and always changing.
This is a good time to repeat the quote from Kierkegaard at the head of Forms of the Formless: As soon as a man appears who brings something of the primitive along with him, who says “let the world be what it likes, I take my stand on a primitiveness which I have no intention of changing to meet with the approval of the world,” at that moment a metamorphosis takes place in the whole of nature, the castle that has been lying under a spell for a hundred years opens and the angels have something to do, and watch curiously to see what will come of it, because that is their business.
--magister vacancy
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],
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.
 |
| John Mason |
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.
--flower Guys
I
would like to think the Flower Guys, as my grand daughter calls them,
are reintegrative, joining, rejoining the natural and the human into one
fabric, human bodies with flower tops. This theme seeks me out from the
initial "way into the flowering heart" of Sir Walter's loss of his son
to thirty years later in all the Pennsylvania Dutch mythology of the
flowering heart and now to these vessels. For
as Ken says the Wabenaki believed that inviting the lost, fragmented,
rejected and rejecting spirit into the family, honoring him, her or it
with family titles, father, father-in-law, implicitly comforting them,
clothing and reclothing them, and feeding them real food, which means
the food of the soul so they do not have to eat the hearts of the
enemies in ritual cannibalism or famine, giving them children to play
with, brings them back from their cold into the warmth of the hearth and
home and kin. from Pursing Gluskap. https://www.goodreads.com/
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.
--Faces
Last in a summer series called EMOTICONS to confront tongue tied idiots who Disnify everything about their relationships, if these images don't recognizable you that's because they are the real misshapen twisted faces initiate elites have produced for consumption in the commoner terrorist media. Khizar Khan. These Emoticons are two faced, three faced to show their users. Its back story, illustrative of the make or break demo and rebuild philosophy controlling our time is ceramic puppet.
 |
| Rid'em Dinosaur |
You
are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not "seen." It is
what CANNOT BECOME A CONTENT, WHICH YOUR THOUGHT WOULD EMBRACE; it is
uncontainable, it leads you beyond.
Their unvarying intensity of facial expression, impossible for living actors, keeps the imagination of the spectators continuously stimulated. When one of them is speaking or tumbling and the rest left aside, these, though in full view, are invisible, as they should be. Living actors have to learn that they too must be invisible while the protagonists are conversing, and therefore must not move a muscle nor change their expression, instead of, as beginners mostly do, playing to them and robbing them of the audience's undivided attention.
Puppets have also a fascination of their own, because there is nothing wonderful in a living actor moving and speaking, but that wooden headed dolls should do so is a marvel that never palls.
And they can survive treatment that would kill live actors. When I first saw them in my boyhood nothing delighted me more than when all the puppets went up in a balloon and presently dropped from the skies with an appalling crash on the floor. GB Shaw. Complete Plays: With Prefaces - Vol. 5
But the relation to the face is STRAIGHTAWAY ETHICAL. The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: "though shalt not kill."
Murder, it is true, is a banal fact: one can kill the Other; the ethical exigency is not an ontological necessity. The prohibition against killing does not render murder impossible, even if the authority of the prohibition is maintained in the bad conscience about the accomplished evil - the malignancy of evil. It also appears in the Scriptures, to which the humanity of man is exposed inasmuch as it is engaged in the world. But to speak truly, the appearance of being of these ethical peculiarities - the humanity of man - is a rupture of being. It is significant, even if being resumes and recovers itself.
"The last piece of summer fell, but not off the table. It landed on its side improving the whole nicely after it was retrieved. The inner stakes helped. The plastic around it helped. That BMix paper is brittle. Had to remove the top story. Then it toppled to the floor. Which has not happened exactly before. So the whole 30 lbs was reconstituted, wedged, rolled, thrown into the present state of this clay."
--2017 Murals: Immigrants, Captives, Horses
Stylized indian horses, Beatien Yazz, Iberian and Andalusian bloodlines. The
Iberian is the source of the Spanish Barb. Spain's long occupation of northern
Africa resulted in the agile desert-bred African Barb horse being crossed with
these existing stocks--conformation is often short-backed and deep bodied. They
appear narrower in the chest so that the fore legs join the chest in an A-shape.
 |
| Immigrants |
I saw the Immigrants and Philistine Captives At Medinet as Bruegel, Goya behind ongoing compositions. It is a kind of exhaustion but work anyway when last nite I lay out a field of red and brown with porcelain lights and cut strips of thick porcelain, throwing them down so they came out a kind of fleur de lis that I slashed with a yardstick and assaulted with a rolling pin, which made it worse till
I cut sections of it away with a knife and got this below. Most often I work on these a couple days. This one I have to leave as is after the fight. It is not my brain but my eyes that tell me what is right, so this one which could be viewed in any direction demands to be upside down.
   |
| Captives |
Broken texts relied upon as a method almost. Clay falls off the table,
pushed too far. Any number of disasters befall so it can become an
active means of composition, which at least brings unexpected
spontaneity to the work. Is intuition in the nature of clay like the
hyper grammatical, each jot and tittle mathematical? No, to me language
is sound and sounds skewed, consonant assonant meanings misspelled with
punlike context, corporate collective meanings with image yes, but of
the sound itself, therefore flowing and changing as the clay that falls
forms the pot. There are other of these tapestries to be fired, cut and
formed as such.
I accept them after i have forgiven them for what they are because there were previous stages in the making, as the past in an individual life, the amorphous forethought, the making of the clay, its lamination, the molding into form on the wheel, the separate parts waiting assembly, the stretching of the clay, the assembly and its bracing, the bending, molding, breaking, the covering and hoping it won't fall, the finishing of the head, adjustments, the signing, the flattening the base so it will stand: all this precedes the bisquing and glazing when whites blend and intensities fade. Then the final firing and it cannot look like what it did before. Then I may accept them after I have forgiven them for what they are.
Two Birds
-Cover Art & Praise Jars
Of the cover art and four sculptures shown on p. 53-55 (83-86) it says "AE Reiff is a scribe of the social-medicinal
history of native southwest plants who operates a bakery near Marfa, TX.
These plants are not confined to the Utah canyons and deserts, but
range south to Marfa and Big Bend, which impacts the sightings of those
mythogmas, the cartoon shadows of the world indexed at encouragementsforsuch.blogspot.com, light and shadow of society and world by day, intercessor by night.
Comment accompanying Praise Jars, that appeared at Buffalo Almanack 9:: “the eye tries to understand what it sees when lamination arches from form, bowed in the firing, so daylight appears between the cracks. It is as if the eye recasts folds and curves to create familiarity to look like something it recognizes. Many of these did fall, implode, collapse in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. Why were they pushed to such extremes? Some can’t raise their hands because they don’t have arms or just stumps for arms in these days. Those who raise hands may not all get them all the way up from the weight or maybe they are prevented. There are all kinds of postures in hands raised, just like there are all kinds of reasons for raising them. Surrender is implied, and praise. Also sacrifice. Those without hands are the most poignant if we imagine we can see the heads and the bodies, as if the arms and hands were wrapped so that armed and militarized security forces thought them ambiguous, concealing something under their cloaks. Beating hearts. Some of these may be considered Protest Jars. These ideas arise in conversation like legends of the unconscious, not yet written exactly, with many sources of vacancy and presence, vacancy of the design and designer. Making by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy. The world is before us, but the pot remains after. Ask what he will do tomorrow if he had success today. The answer is there is no time and what is done before is during and after.”
 |
| Flower Guy |
Asking who my teachers are is a good time to repeat the quote from Kierkegaard at the head
of Forms of the Formless: "As soon as a man appears who brings something
of the primitive
along with him, who says “let the world be what it likes, I take my
stand on a primitiveness which I have no intention of changing to meet
with the approval of the world,” at that moment a metamorphosis takes
place in the whole of nature,
the castle that has been lying under a spell for a
hundred years opens and the angels have something to do, and watch
curiously to see what will come of it, because that is their business.
The quote of the Day on 6 July 2015 occurred when I went to pick up
pieces at the kiln. One had cracked on refire which I
threw it in the can after being told that the master likes what I do,
wants to teach me,
but that if I don't learn then the P C for the Arts is no place for me.
As it repeated I much to
learn about handbuilding, that voice urged again and again, who are
your teachers? adding helpfully that there are many at the P C of the
Arts who
could "help" me.
Teachers teach only their own
viruses and prejudices and the ones they have been taught. I said, I
learn from my work but I admire
Gareth Mason and wood fire effects and could have the many notables of
that,
especially any non punitive attitude. "He's your
teacher then (Mason)." --"No, I identify his effort, but I am seeking
to bring the formless into form and there's nobody who can teach that. I
should get a card that reads, Gravity is my muse.
The essence of form is
the nothingness of design and the liquid that flows it. A piece that can be photographed is
inferior. The form and the color are everywhere and always changing.Not that I really believe this, but I want to tear the top from the bottom and make the form represent the detasseled torso spirits of our time. This is meant to stir compassion for the pain of extinction and malformation in the corn field of the world.
Oppositions are much in the air. I sent a beautiful piece of writing, Reset Blue Superstition Farewell Blue Superposition in dialect and dialectic to a place and the editor wanted to know in the rejection if it was a Markov chain-- a random process that undergoes transitions from one state to another. I replied, thinking to make some headway, that it was a Mono-ha, another thing to be ignorant of, and the editor on the other end said I could have said all that in three sentences, a version of which appeared here. Turning that into three sentences is like finding disemodied feet inside boots all along the Washington coast. These resemble accounts of the disembodied heads on the Beltway found here.
-- Precarious, I, II, III
The precarious balances the edge. First it was solid, stable, but taken
to where it began to fall, just intervening in its collapse, it was
shifted and pulled, for remember it is a hollow cylinder when all is
said and done, and while the photograph may not show it, because it is
not a photograph, the cylinder, some 27" tall in origin, can collapse
from the various strength of its sides, the imprecise pressure of its
stretching, and most from the need for it to totter there and be pulled
back. Reduced from its origin by even a third, which will be further
reduced by the fire another tenth at least, it is a rescue. She
is precarious and he is too, but what other reason do they have to be?
We have long since fallen away from the norm and the paranorm. They
become the same.
Cuckoos cluck to finches: they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and abandon the care of their young to the hosts. Like wheat and tares. The first act of most brood parasite species’ chicks after hatching is to do away with the host’s own brood. Different species do this by ejecting their nest mates from the nest, by using their sharp beaks to fatally injure them, or by physically dominating them. One of the most common strategies for brood parasites to manipulate their hosts into raising their offspring is known as “aggressive mimicry”. This is a way for the birds to dupe a host by looking harmless, for example by resembling a species that is not parasitic. The strategy is already well-documented in a variety of brood parasite species: some lay eggs that resemble those of their hosts, while the chicks and fledglings of others look (and sound) like the host’s own chicks and fledglings. This is necessary, as hosts will reject parasitic eggs, chicks and fledglings, if they can detect them.
-- Raissonne
There are human figures of all sorts. 
These ideas,
called minimalist and abstract expressionist, arise in conversation like
Legends of the Unconscious, not yet written exactly, with many sources of vacancy
and presence, vacancy of the design and designer, presence of the flows of the
natural. Making and repeating patterns to identify work as recognizable of
a certain style is a betrayal of vacancy. Making
by
erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy.
There are many stressed vessels deconstructing which the eye tries to make look like
something it recognizes, broken attempts to fall and stand at the
same time, pots like people who go against the odds and heroically oppose, or bow the
head and the knee and excite sympathy. Many of these did fall, implode, collapse
in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. Peasant Work
This is a Raisonné of folk work. Clay befits peasant work unlike marble sculpture or stone. Clay wants to lift the human spirit from forms that hold it in. All the examples here have that intent.
They
are Raptures in Progress that ask how can I reconcile myself to what
has made me.To get the kings of marble and high art you have to
get the attitude. Faisal here is undergoing his beauty treatment in pride and
power. The British have so warmed their royals. The word king
hardly appears. It's babies and beauties, stability they are selling, all masked. Other
potentates suffer their pride of manhood. There's nothing behind a Saudi
prince. Abdulla, Farouk, Faisal, especially Farouk lands the fat cats in
trouble. Outlaws in bandanas with the top down will pull up next to him and his
cousins at stoplights and taunt: King Farouk! King Farouk!
ChuangTzu resolves this with this with a joke about horse (Legge,183). The disputant wants to stand "in the center where he can respond without end to the changing views" of the affirming and denying . "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). Let us give up devotion to our views and adopt the "ordinary.""By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse to illustrate that (what another calls) a horse is not so, is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not a horse, by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a horse. ( All things in) heaven and earth may be (dealt with as) a finger; (each of) their myriads may be (dealt with as) a horse. Does a thing seem so to me? (I say that) it is so. Does it seem not so to me? (I say that) it is not so. We used to argue these things on long tennis trips, like the say that said, "Dust Storms May Exist," and austere elements of the periodic table. But it was a joke! The ordinary can't be found among the immortals.What is a horse? His son will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. The sons point that out, affirm and deny, horse around. My kingdom horse! All unhorsed. Another horse quote from the age of sound bites.
Chihuahua went
in the oven to heat, to take a reglaze then sat on the shelf without firing. I got bored and took him
home and took the reglaze off. Talk about skin! A brush wouldn't do. It needed
a scraping tool and the skin came off a piece at a time. Oh skin, what changes
more blue would have been? This chihuahua is life size.
Lien Among Pots is
either a mortgage against pottery or a bed from Psalm 68. Two Button is thin.
He survived biscuit and got clear-glazed.
Tortoise Carrying Pot
The tortoise carrying a pot is raw clay. There are three blues, cobalt carbonate and oxide, rutile, a green, nickel carbonate and yellow iron oxide. None of them will be then as now. The pink and blacks will be blue.
A rhinoceros runs across the piano.
This must be another in the era of horse and rider
(cast into the sea), the second time in this kiln opening when the best piece
fell before or after it got to bisque. I was bored with events before this but
not now, and seek to recapture them, for once you see the wild boar you load
your gun. At least in the first one, a vase with extensive tears in the middle
and bottom, narrow and 20in tall which then had the trumpet figures added to
the open top and compressed and there it stood, the most beautiful thing I have
seen, so all was well when I covered it, but then the report came 20 min later
of its fall, which I reconstituted but it could not be like. This one here is
in the raw after undergoing the same kind of devolution, but this much
remained, a kind of cannon off the Triangle at the Fort Pitt blockhouse, its
trumpet extending as you see far into the ether. It did bisque, and held, but
in the glazing to solidify its meager consttuction the trumpet fell off. Here
in this pic it looks like another horse and rider, which images keep appearing
periodically as a kind of Egyptian retrospective.3. had a block of black mt a little dry so cut into slices rolled out, joined into 4 figures and put on a ground of jamaca, but without paper this time, left the cylinder in all night, in morn pushed the top together, put in the 4 cylinders little ones, and it was beautiful. Some miniutes later heard a noise, it spooked the dog, it all fell down!
4. Let us say that this zodiac reveals its prehistoric constellations as it progresses, that the promise of the horn blown against the serpent Ouroboros is fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer. What this promise is we know when the top is removed from the vessel that bears these truths.
--AURAS
Since they are portable, but could be set into an exterior wall, these were hung indoors, which needed to support that weight. An early one entered in a show wasn't hung but put it in a glass case, so they haven't circulated to shows since. They need to be hung. They had to be fired in sections which means the larger were cut into threes or fours or two parts depending, so the design bears these lines through it. The themes were discerned as the process developed. First there were small figures, bears floating in a cloud, children playing with lollipops, but after an early version of Breugels Opening of the Fifth Seal, but without any effort to continue that theme, the fluid composition produced figures in procession, like the Early Captives of Egypt. These further became portals of the divine gates and then seraphim. There are many processions which become figures or families of up to four that cover compositions. Some become in-depth looks of one or two. There are a number of horses, and stand alone figures like medieval woodcuts, finished in glass, and whole heads mounted on a background of plexiglass. The horses were unintentional, produced by the fluid motion and after recognized. There are more of these that I realized, 30 or 40 perhaps.
-- An Aesthetic of Rescue
Telling the truth has saved me but I know there are several varieties of
truth about the same act. This particular site was intended to tell the
truth while other sites I manage argue different kinds. All play to
their own music within me, turning fiction into poetry and poetry into
fiction. Riddles native to the telling of renaissance poetry drew me
early and distilled with personal experience. The distance is great
between thought and words, trying not to think, but thinking. I took a
green pumpkin to the shop to remake it ceramically, but after preparing
the skin and molding it to the pumpkin the clay tore in several
places. The final effect of the tears was appealing, and after several
layers of impasto and lamination fabricated with oxides and patterns
implanted by tools, palm fronds, it turned int
o
not a pumpkin at all, but a bag tied at the top with a piece of clay
string. On a second try it was an open bag of torn, weathered carpet,
which in extension became a series of "bags". The broad strokes have some kind of general image but no plan, like the best fiction writing on this site
constructed in hearing the music, which came little by little in aural
accidents and continual seeking of the ear, or with a visual. image.Another flowing context is the submergent heart you are born to, if you are, and then find in the linens retrieved from
the attic, as clear an image as needed, but what it means has to felt
in the life, in the body, in physiological changes in the psyche that when
triggered go all on on their own to completion. Like the clay. Internalized these become what they will, but
the image in all the linens and frakturs make the fact plain.
Some explanation for the method can be given. The idea generally is to give form to the formless, the invisible, the unknowable, meaning the spiritual world. Many of the ceramic murals explore this by bringing but not quite bringing a picture of what really exists that cannot be seen. The writing does it by posing linked identities, one in one world one in the other, that have similar names but are unknowable to each other except from some third narrative view.This teasing the brain tries to make sense of unknown patterns by making them into the known even though the two worlds exist untranslatable to each other.
The digital substitute of a screen for the face is like the perfect pot on the wheel made symmetrical without tears, idealized, for the wheel destroys imperfection before the fact of its existence, or means to, the way the digital substitutes the individual with the crowd. The wheel, the perfect balance is untrue to ourselves. We are disproportion and torn and this is our glory-- it is our redemption in more than symmetry.
All of the ceramic on this site presupposes the precariousness of life, the parable of being human, the highest created being, once realized. Writing seeks the same, as empathetically as clay. That's because thought is the highest art and poetry its best expression. Reflections that occurred in the course of this year lag behind the works, but in the Duties of the Heart of Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda of Spain, c. 1080, the last and tenth gate on The Love of God has many instances of precognition, serendipity and synchronism with the Preparation of the Heart that the "gates” constitute human spiritual life.
-- If a piece is not precarious why should it exist? She is precarious and he is too, but what other reason do they have to be? We have long since fallen away from the norm and even the paranorm. They have become the same. The precarious balances the edge. First it was solid, stable, but taken to where it began to fall, just intervening in its collapse, it was shifted and pulled, for remember it is a hollow cylinder when all is said and done, and while the photograph may not show it, because the work is not a photograph, the cylinder, some 27" tall in origin, can collapse from the various strength and weakness of its sides in the imprecise pressure of its stretching, and most from the need for it to totter there and be pulled back from the brink. Reduced from its origin by even a third, which will be further reduced by the fire another tenth at least, it is a rescue.
Look at the stars to bring them to the earth, this is that knowledge of the worlds, a kind of medieval quantum, all stories told with Breugel, Giotto, spiritual beings everywhere which would not identify until looked with the thought, the figures are seraphim.
Archie Johnson and The Las Vegas Seraphim Collection
Archie Johnson stopped by and produced pics from the Las Vegas Seraphim Collection. He came to the apartments below where the paintings were but then said he should tour the upper three stories, unfinished, rickety, dangerous with catwalks but traversable. The house had never been properly finished off, just enough so it wouldn’t get too wet in the rain. Visited many times in these venues, it had been acquired but never improved much, so to view The Seraphim Collection in situ is a challenge. I Had been up there myself so it was more or less possible. There are so many more parts and pieces he didn't photograph. It's a little like the old Barnes, the only other place I saw pieces crammed and crocked together, crowds milling shoulder to shoulder to pass them. Obviously they they can’t do that in Vegas. Without apology the name tags are also missing. As for the photography, if was a variable cloudy day when Archie passed through.
This approach to life and art is experimental. One book I took out three times before I understood its importance and found the part that mattered to me, Vanuccie Biringuaccio, Pyrotechnia, where the roots of mines were compared with the roots of trees and the golden age a material form of them. This document is unbelievably now online in a PDF, although the translation I used was Richard Eden's of 1540. With the serendipity applied to hundreds of instances that inform these searches, always remembering the search term is most important.My search terms are supplied by continual reference to the first moment of my being when I was formed by Messiah.
This site is unadvertised. It is sometimes like a journal. Perhaps the writings form a loose assembled inquiry. Since I have just been reading Either/Or, liking the Preface and the very first part, this could be an assemblage of some ideas about faith and the self. Kierkegaard's takes on Don Juan and Tragedy strike me as pedantic and dull, but he has a lot to say about the poet in that first section before he abandons him. Of the ceramic creations that have occurred in the last decade, some at Forms of the Formless, one piece at a time for critique, these show a part of myself not otherwise seen.
--Raisonne 2018 The Aesthetic of Rescue. Parables of Human Life. Artistic statement and catalog raisonne
Some texts don't translate. They are only symbolic, as with--Anselem Kiefer, Remembering the Future, borrowing stalks of wheat and grasses, tall sunflowers on single stems above with patches of paint as rock or mud patched brown and greens and blue swirls, all grained rhythms of the natural in motion, collage pieces of foil, silver, gold, glued, painted, stuck on, peeled off recurrent color notes are black, white, gray, and rust; and their surfaces are rough and slathered with paint, plaster, mud and clay.
Old and new clay with porcelain interiors, but exteriors of lava, gravel and cobalt specks pressed into the new, that stretch above two feet, stretch into cylinders with shoulders and mouths, cut, then compressed, the shoulders lowered into the body, the base informed for the climacteric event (Robert Lowell) of its vulnerability, the weak spot we see, shows its mortality, prevented as much as possible, but inevitable in all, hence the tear, the slump, the complete collapse of the shell. In composition the shaping hands are full, and need braces, later extracted, remnants of two by fours, sponges and props to support the landing. If the tower lands hard it needs to be put back up on its base, made double and triple to support the weight which now in diameter can be as wide as the tower was high, but it has to touch the ground too, so an edge tilts down, otherwise it will fall in the heat of the fire.
There is a measure of scale. If big they are a measure of ourselves. If we were big they would be small, so big or small are a slight measure. If we photograph the small close up we make it big. These works are the scale they are from the point of view of what will carry wrapped from the studio to a car to drive to where the real work is done in a garage, not by machines, but by stretching, for if, or when it falls, it can’t be moved until it drys. The scale is the car and the weight carried to the car. Exiting the building they extend above the head. There are no associates or helpers, hoists or lifts or pulleys or rollers. The work is not a part of any social situation.They are speed dried though after 48 hours and are ready to go. The skin skein, the onion simultaneous all happening at the same time comes many into one, one into many, expands and contracts separately and together.
The
compositions being performed at a studio some miles from their
finishing point at another studio, where they are finished and bisqued,
are limited to what will fit in the back of a car after composition,,
Another limit on size is the weight. One, Boxcar, molded around a 35
lb. cement block 8-inch
by 8-inch by 16, was double that in weight. At end however it sagged and broke and and had to
be put back Humpty Dumpty style and made a good Boxcar.
No comments:
Post a Comment