 |
| Zhuangzi |
Making and repeating patterns to identify work as recognizable of a certain brand contradicts vacancy, but is a usual style of exhibition, at least after the effect.
Dropping a stone on glass, making by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy. But if I ask -- if firings are apocalypses what are reconciliations of the good -- no results are found. The pine will die in the fire!
Lee Ufan, in Mono-ha, the School of Things, says unknowing materials reveal knowledge. Against thought and forethought the breakage when stone hits glass conforms to gravity and glass, not the intention of the artist, otherwise the result is mere thought. Only the tension of artist, glass and stone and the freedom of each to act and crack unknowing reveals qualities inherent in, but not visible as object.
Yes this is a little simple. Crack the stone, conceal the stone, railroad ties reveal connotations of forced labor in Japanese colonies in World War II, Ireland's famine stone walls around the Burren are famine walls denoting starvation and slavery. Starkly burning wood makes charcoal. So we might study with creosote and yarrow, mugwort and water or look in the tortoise mirror where the Extremes of Biological Extinction preoccupy such beings.
Laminating Opposites
Listening for the spirit of knowing and not
knowing in a human mind, as if passage tombs were like wood kilns, and even pollution makes a use while laminating opposites to show ourselves with volcano, chalk hill, wood kiln. Infiltrating cone 5 clay into cone tens
laden with bark and organics, rock, volcanic ash, erosion deposition,
reburying feldspar of decomposed granite, shigaraki layering, cracks,
stressing with cedar berries, pine needles, sycamore bark, buckeye pods,
chicken bones, --what else-- fish streams of shino in the underclay where spines
are buried, pebbles, manure, vermiculite! beetles! road kill!, chollas,
spines, pads, all buried to dare? A split scarab
stretching geologics.Mercury
Mercury-like thrust faults and global contraction of the planet with lobate scarps from interior cooling. Mercury has a larger core than other inner planets. Cumulative compressional strain recorded in the lobate scarps suggests a decrease in Mercury's radius, which the kiln can easily top, at least 10%. So a reduction of the kiln, the anagama produces the lobate scarps [scalps] or cliffs of implosion, displacement thrust faults, compressional stresses, thermal contraction, lineated terrain. Preexisting crater rims disrupted into crude polygonal hills and fractures, mantled, blanketed by impact ejecta. Miners, dwarves, nibelungs explode the iron oxide earth clay coat, rutile wash, cobalt hole.
Core contractions
All these global aspects of Mercury lead to a loss of surface that secreting, planting contradiction into the clay makes. 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, with naught to say. Thought burns up. Intellect ceases. You stand struck, parietal lobes rewired.This destruct is art? Apocalypse, all these firings are apocalypses.
The Seals
Been touched? Once burned? Twice? Feel the fire? Fire is romanticized.When the sixth angel sounds it will loose the angels bound in the Euphrates but by the seventh angel it is all resolved. Why were they in the Euphrates (not the Gihon, Tigris, or Nile)? Why had they been bound, now loosed?! The 200 million horses breathe sulphur, fire and smoke. They are kilns wrenching scripture fromfrom the Tower of Babel to Kafka's Wall of China. China to Babel, horses to kilns, all prophets, Enoch, Noah, David, Isaiah, Jonah, Jesus, John -- traditional and iconoclastic. Consider a whip to cleanse the Temple. Kafka enforces scripture with the biblical. The Great Wall of China and the kiln opening are like a nephew who asks what the opening of the seventh seal means. I told him that I hate to spoil the ending. It's not art, this parageography to geology of the voyages of Odysseus, Virgil, St. Brenden or 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 save that difference between water and earth, air and fire, male and female.
Mining Minimals
 |
| Taurobolium |
Kiln opening.
The stressing of materials echoes Mono-ha, unaltered ephemera. 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 of 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, an archeological scrub 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 what maker, not to deny the work, merely to say nothing, certainly not thank you for saying, it is good. Judd died so rich he started the Judd foundation in Marfa. That's where poet Robert Creeley got sick at Lannan Foundation in order to die in Odessa. They later made I Love Dick there.
I got out a pit fired Papago pot from the old indian trader Kermit Lee. 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 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.
***
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 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 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.
First titled: Unloading the Last Reitz Wood Kiln, 20 Jan 2014
