Friday, November 27, 2009

New York, New Yolk. METROPOLITANO


as some of you know I spent a month getting to know New York and a significant amount of time getting to know the Metropolitan Museum of Art and within that a good amount of time ( 4 days to be exact ) drawing a sculpture of Ugolino and His Sons originally completed in plaster by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in 1860-61. The version at the Met was executed by the practitioner Bernard under Carpeaux's supervision just in time for the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1867. The sculpture derives from the passage in Dante's Divine Comedy where Ugolino is faced with the decision of either starving to death, or devouring his own children and grandchildren who have just offered themselves to him. On several occasions I found myself sitting next to some outstanding craftsmen with practically completed drawings who were just there to put some finishing touches so I felt compelled to do a fairly accurate job at translating this masterpiece to graphite on paper. I was there all that time and didn't even bother to write down the name of the artist so all I knew was gathered from overhearing teachers talk to their students and museum tour guides. So before uploading the drawing I found some images of the sculpture located in an area of the museum I didn't recognize so I looked into it. Apparently at some point this sculpture had been placed next to a snack bar in which people could buy overpriced snacks while Ugolino is right there contemplating eating his offspring. Maybe they thought people wouldn't "get it" but some certainly did. Either way, starvation is no joke.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Saturday, November 7, 2009

ONCE upon all times


The most rational of minds cannot perceive the experience of total identification with substance. As many have pointed out before, we are running on outdated software. It was said "here is the key, have fun". Beginning with an orange and black astral projection of the goddess. The interaction of different modes. Traffic through portals, passages, veins, dissolving, appearing on the opposite spectrum and complementing the black outlines of Buddha arrangements coordinated with an infinite number of stars. The realm of the sages, all gathered in different realms too many to conceive. Each with a multiplicity of forces synthesized, always still yet always moving. A FLASH! for a brief moment rupture/rapture allowed a point of consciousness to be present in that world. ONE. Giants made out of what seemed like Jade, floating over niches carved on the sides of mountains, like the Pueblo, like the Buddha. The point could only stay in this green realm for a flash and then it was off to fight or rather experience the fluctuating states of energy. A crunching sound which words fail to describe. The body sank, leaving body parts behind as consciousness descended which is to say it ascended at once. The unfathomable mystery that IS. Back to the waves, washed up on a beach, nothing but a grain of sand amongst billions. Communication attempt from local receptor/taste bud to main power line. Day to day experience in a mechanistic virtual reality seems too much like we're being looked down upon like insects. Blessings to the travelers of the mind, the great mind which is all minds. Watching body parts go as the point in space extends at incredible speeds into the macro and microcosms. An engaging dialogue with cells and neighbors. Having the constitution of a brick, a blip, a BOMB. The explosions are unbearable. Mankind's best nuclear weapons, dwarfed by the SUN, our SUN dwarfed by billions of others. Being as a brick, brittle, gritty-like, clay solid-space in between the snake in us, part sperm, as we were transcending our physical limitations. The snake-like double helix is updating its wardrobe. Silhouettes of giants morphing down in size. The beautiful embrace of a ray of light softened by the micro explosions of a thousand songs. Scale is diverted, scale is corrected and becomes as irrelevant as time. Digital time as glyphs. The 4s spoke in unison each with open arms in the gathering, offering and celebration of an event outside of time in which they came forth as cloud messengers. Fire horses of paint. The point comes back to realize the state of the body, the sound of mother coughing as the air conditioner rumbles, as we inside the robot lung shield ourselves from the stars... the same stars we can't see during daylight showers. The point must forgive her and learn to detach itself from the invisible umbilical chord no longer needed to sustain life which after its initial purpose of nourishment only serves as decaying obstacle reminiscent of all the other concept prisons many points find themselves in. Only unbounded, creative imagination can set us free. Getting up to reach the bathroom meant confronting the silly body stumble, naked on a sphere allowing all humans to accommodate their inherent frailty without reach of human-made accessories. A cold, harsh, brutal reality we constantly dress to deceive ourselves as others pass down the torch of deception and hypocrisy. Naked in geometry, roughness pressed against our soft skin/ formula bargain the traveler has seen. Different motions of state, North Korea, us, family, George and Jose those who have been here before. The waste, the sacrifice, the transference, merely transference, not completely wasteful, not righteous, merely a continuation Nothing Left. Left at T Left at the end which the monkey robot perceives as the cross on which Christ breathed his last breath before TRANSFERENCE. The joy in continuity but one that is unidentifiable, nothing less but a mystery. A know not, beginner's mind, no mind, all mind. The life-giving powers will rearrange the spectrum without regard to human concerns, the evolving master play. Moving from one family to another, we read on the cliffs of Norway, the drop of our hills. The meeting of archetypes, the shape of the wind on our body-flag surface. The continuous traveling spiral acting upon heavy solids, murky/opaque across luminous/translucent. The diamond reflecting itself showing the eye/I reflections of all the scattered fragments. The clear jellyfish transformation as the eye unclouded by cat malnutrition. The food taken does not belong to anyone the same as our bodies do not belong to us, the idea of who we think we are. Our bodies and minds changing as the Earth itself does and will continue to do so. Why this meeting of minds to displace stored ideas, checks and balances, building structures that keep busy neural construction workers. Moral judgement is just that. Buffers and facilitators. Limitations and rupture/rapture grand at all scales of interaction. The blink of the eyes that prevent dehydration is the tip of the black iceberg just as saccadic masking splices the stream of visual input. If we can only see the surface then it is up to our imagination and intuition, the inner eye, to create a more accurate take on reality. Circuit-bending ways for custom enjoyment.