More Bags Full, Fall 2012

10. Flight

1. Bag Tied with String

9. Night Dress

2. Open Bag

6. Shopping Bag Eleusis

 This series started with the gift of a greenish white Australian my son gave me last October. I began to model the pumpkin, #1 above, which became a Bag Tied With String. I continued to haul this pumpkin to the studio a half dozen times, but the bag opened in 2., skewed in 3., started becoming a purse in 4., completely fell apart in 5., got mythed up in 6., (7. is omitted), became a species of night gown in 8. and 9., started flying around in 10. as a quail and 11. a turkey, which and took a dive in 12.

 3. More Bag For Sale. carpet bag, valise with pockets, some wear, part of a side missing, but you can see inside. Ash has sifted over the lip, a skin of paper clay and porcelain, homemade impasto impaled with desiccated prickly pear, agave and skeleton bone with cobalt, iron, chrome and tin oxide.
4. Tool Bag. With handles and at first nichrome wire, but took the wire out. The shell pap plus porcelain  plus mix worked cholla, pp pear, palm. Sifted chrome oxide, over it titanium ox, tin ox, more chrome, plus black iron, cobalt, rutile. A little thicker skin than 1.

5. Colossi. Was to have been a tall work bag with handles at the top but became Colossi, four legs, handles of the old bag implicit heads. Prickly pear skin prints fired out in bisque. Rutile, titanium, chrome, cobalt, no irons. Porcelain again rolled over paper, handles glazed clear, some white satin, the whole gently sprayed with Phx shino to maybe cause blistering like the original prickly pear skin.
  6. Shopping Bag.  Paper rolled with porcelain rolled with Dave's kneaded with blue and green mason stains plus composite light/dark clays mix impastoed with chrome oxide, titanium, cobalt and some burnt umber. Dessicated prickly pear spines applied for texture and with cholla skeleton. Death valley red added to strengthen lip at end before formation.  Glaze with blue green mat + lily pad + drift of clear inside, blue green mat + green poison patina + clear outside.

7. Well Bucket. Sprayed White shino heavy, light, also with bulb syringe, then syringe turquoise oribe over such, ash on shino.
8. Night Gown. Moldy Porcelain paper, top and bottom edges strengthened with paper, usual impastos. Wax over turquoise oribe, top lip, bottom, angel spit and TO over paper porcelain, spray clear, white satin, Shaner inside.
9. Bag with little bow on handle. Death Valley edges, handle, paper porcelain, Gault mix with hint of mason stain. Wax death valley, shaner inbetween, Angel spit over prickly pear fibers, lily pad, clear over rest, hoping to get red hints in borders.
10. Gault paper w/ porcelain waves, covered with paper porcelain w/ green mason stains, Rod's Bod top and bottom borders. Stains rolled into wings pressed w/prickly pear skeleton. Had handles, taken off, bottom of porcelain. Carbon Trap Rod's Bod, Angel spit, clear
11. The Gates of Heaven, after Rodin's of the opposite, angels in declension, figure arms waving, all in pastel mason stains, over coleman porcelain, over gault paper. Wrapped around form, eyelets for handles added, the whole full body hugged, too big for hands, collapsed, more handles added.

Apologia II

Eagle in Birdbath

A full grown golden eagle landed in the birdbath in the back yard.

Katonah Animal Shelter

When I was an arborist for Crockett Tree Service we sometimes dumped the day's wood chips at the dump, backed up the big truck to the edge, raised the back and it all slid out down the hill. Sometime it seems I had been warned not to look around the site, home of the Katonah Animal Shelter. The road to the dump wound around a little and then the truck had to backed up and in, so I didn't look on the way in. This day was a Friday. On the way out I glanced to the right and saw maybe the most disturbing image ever, but there are others, a pile of dog and cat bodies that had just been gassed, eight feet high. The thing grows over time. It is gargantuan. It was about three pm. They had just cleaned out their ovens for the week. I'd never spoken this before this morning when I was telling my spouse, in order to explain what I am doing with all the ceramic bodies in my mind, piling them up. These will actually be photographed some time, with blanket shreds in between to prevent them from chipping. There is fox, bear, seal, hawk, coyote, horse. What animal has not been annihilated? From the start, for  years, quadrupeds, glued back together, that either came apart in the making or in the glazing or firing, torn skins, beaded shino ridges, marred as it they were none, nameless. One called Boxcar Named Desire, to be exhibited this fall, hard to look at the faces; one called Apologia below. Some so large as to diminish their own perspective. All creation groans together toward its redemption. I don't think there is or ever has been one scientist who felt or grasped this pain.

Shroud

The Blue Man

Boots IV

Boots I

Making the FEMA le Boxcar

FEMA Boxcar, exhibited as Boxcar Named Desire in Memory Play @
Herberger Theater Gallery

I don't know what I was thinking. This boxcar was formed around concrete blocks.  After making it at the studio it went by truck to its finish near the bisque. It was two cement blocks long end to end, plus the weight of the clay. I guess it got rubbed with iron oxides then textured with whatever was at hand, which you can see traces of on the legs. Parts were waxed first for accent. I remember the whole back fell in which then had to be propped up and repaired. There are sliding doors on the sides, or marks where sliding doors and windows used to be.The whole thing looks grumpy. Everybody knows the Gundersons are nearly hermetically sealed.  Part animal, part train, part derelict, part wreck, it only adds to the effect that after final firing part of one side and a leg detached. It came back in these pieces but a team assembled it with clamps and gorilla glue over several days and put Humpty back.This defect, because I then thought it one, bothered me until I saw there is a whole genre of broken glue backs at the Ceramics Research Center, to show the patchwork I guess of a Le Corbusier of pots. Reconstitute, that's the going parlance. We need to get some better pics of this BoxCar up, but till then reference the pic at Current Exhibitions and personal report of sightings at Some Events on the Jersey Turnpike.
BOXCAR is another of those fables at our sister state we'd rather not believe. Demythologists don't plan to. But still the excess populations threaten our superiors' earth. Something must be done. But no matter.

In some sections of our downtown the falun gong  meet surreptitiously and sing songs like this:

 It’s like I’m a midwife and I’m
 catching the heads as they’re falling,
Goin to the boxcar and I'm

wielding my prison shackles,

Shackled in a boxcar and its 
 higher than nor-r-rmal,

 three tier torture transporters,

Shackled in a boxcar and I’m 
startin' to get wor-r-r-ied,

 Chinese prisoner boxcars

Fitted with a guil-lo-tine and I'm

waiting for a martial law
 that makes me want to be a Christian,

 get me a seat in the boxcar
of the new world or-or-der.

 Experience firsthand

From an unpublished document:  
The Mythical Horrors of Carol Novak

Is it too good to be true that more of this appears at Thee Mystical Mirror Carole Novalis. Should not an omnibus be ensuing?

Star Boots

This is the bisque version.

Lamb

La Chiara

Image from sculptural fresco on covered jar, 9/28/11, 10x11x5

[This speech given for the Trieste Newmontes among the garden statues of La Chiara near Siena  that year.]

They thought it man, center of the universe before Copernicus, (that once called all in doubt), but  a transmodern returns him to the center. New philosophy displaces evolution with gene experiments, god with immorality (oops, immortality), dignity of  rights with alien precedence and worse. To that new world where golden Shiners would come, each  article would new correspond with its byproduct, to coin it urinary speech and should philosophy excrete, and perspiration art, science a gall stone, government blood, new drugs too will roll, new gods with mescaline and DMT, and sex, how many brand names you got? This Ordo odoratum, rolls out obesity to wheel the patient off, still eating of course, since "if they don't eat they will die." We rely on consumption for national growth and jobs. Fast food makes them addicts with the food. The new woman of this New Order's ambition will weigh 1800 pounds. The fetish of obesity porn, diet, drugs and art we know, but not education, which is upcoming in brain implants, and literature. We hoped to set lit right with Ooks and Orks, but who knew you would read this.  The text changes from day to day. To quote Shakespeare, there's mud in your eye at the bottom of the frontispage here .

There is a  hazard to the new World Order greater  than the medieval corresponds where every planetary hair  has human dress. Profound the sun its heart, kohlrabi  its vegetable, gold its mineral, Brussels its city, Guam its country. When not the man, a woman lay on her side as Europe, her head Logres Britain,  a breast in France, a hand in Italy, Byzantium her navel, the Caucasus her buttocks, Jerusalem below, then "her Chin / Ore past; and the straight Hellespont between / the Sestos and Abydos of her breasts (Donne, "Love's Progress"), bogs, barrens, white cliffs, lowlands: buttocks, hands and chin. The symbolic world maps of (Andrea Bianco, 1436) put Jerusalem at the center of this globe.  Faithful to  geography, "we love the Centrique part,"  says Donne (Elegy xviii). "Spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her" (Comedy of Errors).

Self Portrait

Making my mark on the raw clay and not having it perceived as contrived is a major anxiety of mine...I make every attempt to rise above 'technique only'...it is much more important to reveal your passion and character, not just your dexterity. Peter Callas, "Conversations," Claytimes, May/June 2009.

Teaching is a kind of sculpting. Being on both sides is instructive. If the ends are the same the means are opposite. Much learning as a student comes from the impact of the teacher’s spirit, Jim Fallon’s enthusiasm, Rhodes Dunlap’s punctiliousness, Donald Justice’ perfectionism, Tom Cranfill’s savior faire. As a teacher though the specific events mean more. 

I used to take heavy impasto portraits to composition classes to teach descriptive writing. Not only were they impastos they were sculptural, coming off the canvas, portraits where one part of the face was especially exaggerated, the eyes, the ears, the lips, the forehead. One of these, Cowboy, an eager appearing at the putative door of his girl, had hair slicked, bandanna around neck and prominent extended lips, to picture his naivete of himself. After class a young woman in this all black student body came up to the picture as it hung on the wall. She said, I guess he’s a black man, and went up to the portrait and kissed him! 

Somewhat before this at UT Austin, saddled with teaching technical writing for engineers because I had a degree from a technical school, and after that saddled with technical writing for foreign students, both of which would be like teaching trees in a wood, I wanted some imagination to get the trees thinking. In one assignment for process writing the student was to describe the process of picking up a loaded .45 from the desk, putting it to their head and pulling the trigger. A number of them died in the exercise, a couple fired into the air. Nobody put in earplugs. Too extreme and offensive today, the point was to engage more than reason in the writing.

Describing these events  in a studio recently,  citing Peter Callas as someone whose work transcended form, the local expert (who is genuine) said he knew Callas and didn’t like some of his work, even though Callas is a world beyond this speaker. My response was, and it applies to teaching and learning,  beauty must be judged with generosity not severity and that the best thing of a poet or artist is this measure, not something less. Eliot makes the point about poet and translator of Kafka, Edwin Muir. In the Preface to Muir’s Collected Poems Eliot singles out “The Horses” as an outstanding poem summarizing the conditions of Glasglow, London, Prague, industrialism and war all in one great poem.  If only for that poem alone Muir must be admired and respected. This spirit of generosity, not criticism, brings close understanding in embracing beauty and wisdom.

Woman

Language is prima facie in all human affairs.  We do not say language has been seduced, or that woman has been expropriated, but were we not speaking we would hardly know we were thinking.  From the child to civilization, woman is  as primary as language, for everything we are and have of life is of and from the woman who has come under extreme assault. Greek myth and the corruption of the human genome by hybrid creation is an instance of this. Agamben below begins to tell how language is overturned against itself. Even though specialists might skew language into one pen or another and even though language is the only subject any of us are talking about (that is a pun, but barely), its uses in all things from Genesis, Socrates, Dada overwhelm. That language and woman are turned against themselves proves their first position in human life. From the moment the male is differentiated from the female zygote after conception, to childbirth and the nurture of life beyond, to the grave, the assailant knew that to defeat human life it was necessary to subvert woman and overturn the word. How these assaults occur, what they are, what measures of defense, is the subject to these statutes.

Guess What Happened When the Body Touched the Bones of Elisha

 

Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man's body into Elisha's tomb. When the body touched Elisha's bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet. 2 Kings 13.21

Char!

Footprints

Secret Writing Everywhere

Basket

* Pray it not strange birds fall from the sky

and crabs wash up on the shore

if people poisoned with bisphenol-A

pop a molecule.

Water bottles, weight gain.

Xenoestrogens,  fat,

provoke an addiction in everything called food.

Civilization needed a cure,

a dysentery purge

to remove Bubble Civ

 while life still exists.

More than black carp,

oil disappeared*  from the Gulf

was the  mystery of "no good cause,"

believe that and move. 

Unprepared for the topmost brief

 money that builds better beef,

disrespect elders, do away with belief,  

deep forces began to roar. 

 Not space aliens science thought would save,

or government that wants a better life for kids,

 money was resisted with changed lives and prayer.

Caveman

 

 A version of this went up at Camel Saloon Gallery.

Pilot

Aeyrie's Little Guy

Faisal and Farouk

To get these kings you have to get the attitude. Here Faisal is undergoing his beauty treatment in pride and power. It is noteworthy the British have so warmed their royals. The word king hardly appears. It's all babies and beauties. Stability you know, masks. 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!

Tea Party Hobbitts

Towers

Speculations of ziggurats on Babylon’s plain, excavations of Troy VIIA and the Fall of Babel, a “story possibly… inspired by the fall of the famous temple-tower of Etemenanki.” The towers then will symbolize Ilium. New York, Troy-Babel will show the limit of reason.

Geronimo and Chuang Tzu at the Herberger Theater Center Art Gallery - 9 July to 29 Aug

Apologia, Animal Spirits

"You never know, I said, the ones you give some semblence of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness."  Barry Lopez

For Barry Lopez the wolverine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. One of four mammals will become extinct. Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows, armed men, dogs, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated  puritan fear of the spirit. It has a name in Leviticus that Barry Lopez does not mention because the names of the gods depend on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make a literature out of it. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. There is a dominant group of new pietists, newscasters and reporters who proclaim this morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, an English puritan living off smallpox, el exterminador and amonetizer of home mortgages living off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed, but it is for themselves. Surely no one expects to end this discussion with a conclusion.

Animal Spirits

Poets wrote of the coming biological extinction, prophetic celebrations of the natural before the industrial revolution. We find ourselves determining extinction’s cause.  Beasts first go extinct. The pain of the bestiaries is they compare the animal to the human to the detriment of both. Humans adopt some negative animal trait. Yale professor Robert Shiller says Animal Spirits are a forecasting tool, that the business world has discovered irrationality as a means to wealth. But he did not learn that animal spirits involve the reality of hunger and laying low, to love the sun and love night. When Bunyan says "poor silly Mole, that thou shouldst love to be, / Where thou, nor Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars can see," Bunyan can't see.

Physiologus heaps all occult myth and fancy on animals. Science heaps our health hazards.The asps founded fast food. Prester is the asp that  anybody who gets “struck by this animal swells to a prodigious size and is destroyed by corpulence” (T. H.White. The Book of Beasts. 175). Media heaps on our loss of identity and confusion of soul. The sirens founded media, television  (Conversation IV), “entice poor chaps by a wonderful sweetness of rhythm, and put them to sleep…pounce upon them and tear them to bits” (White, 134). In this Coercion of the Senses Odysseus is tied to the mast, tie open the eyes gates to violence as in Clockwork Orange. If they will not see they will not sleep.

If Mr. Blake were the first to celebrate the toll of industrialization in his chimney sweep, and if he were the prophet of the week, we’d resort to him to explain the man's fear of animals, fear of the tree, fear of the woman which sums the fear of himself.  Blake's portrayal of animals is like the bestiaries, a picture of the negative states as an gnostic creation, a heresy compared with Psalms and Job. Don't be like the tiger. Do be like the ant (Proverbs). Each species becomes a morality play, not a thing in itself of wonder, which attitude translates to science. What use is the thing, what experiments can be run, will it make a good paper, improve human lot? This morality play will be running when polar ice extincts. Thus in the cliched pattern of English folklore songbirds are good, hawks are bad.

In this divided state  every threat perceived in the outer world from animals, which includes all nature, is a human fear caused by division and mirrored back. That is, the savagery of the tiger, or cruelty in any exterior form is a human internal state, a spiritual despondency.  In Mysterium Magnum Boehme calls the primal "Image" corrupted, which became "a Beast of all Beasts" manifesting outwardly the inward negative properties of the man. Thus medieval bestiaries were moralities of man, you name them: "Fox, Wolf, Ear, Lion, Dog, Bull, Cat." Go around the zodiac and to every cave art to see the divided image projected upon the animal. It's not the outward form the man assumes, but the inward projected by him upon the beast. A supposed ravening, or sloth in the seven deadly sins at least is that "the Man must bear such a Beast in the Body."  This is the motive of reabsorbing these projected fears.

Reabsorb

A theory of correspondence says the inside is the out: "for as the Essence is in the Body, so the Spirit figures and forms itself internally”  (Boehme),  but if the beasts are a picture of the human their removal does not redeem him. He is redeemed by the reabsorption of projected fears. Imagine a winch of the spirit where first lust and greed, then fear and hate are pulled back! That all external nature reflects the in cast out, bestiaries unmasked.

It sounds like  fantasy to hold that all forms of life were originally part of the human, then projected out, like Plato says the woman was taken from the man. In Jerusalem, Blake says "You have a tradition, that Man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth" (To the Jews). In the Four Zoas he says:

"So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body"

... where ever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt
And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss"(Four Zoas, 110)

"As man falls from vision, he objectifies into separate existence more and more aspects of himself. He stands in awe and horror, wondering where a beast like the tiger comes from, for he does not see in it a portion of his own fallen, divided self" (The Scattered Portions, Baine, 7).

This rehumanization of all that was separated out back into the man becomes beatific. The tygers and lions "sing they seize the instruments of harmony" (FZ 124.17). As the animals shed their skins of the human projection, "they enter upon a new life; as all forms of life rejoin Albion they reject the Selfhood which has separated man from man and man from nature"  (Baine, 8).

Firefly

THE FIREFLY

CONCENTRATING

All its resources in light

Is never better able to see

Than when near itself.

March 2011

            Gazuntite 3-11-1                                                                                        Swan  3-11-2

           



             Hermes 3-11-3                                                                                      Ballet 3-11-4

Blues 3-11-5

Indian in the Cosmos

Hermes / Messenger Final Firing

16x11x6