Michael Benson is a filmmaker whose spent hours parsing through the thousands of black & white and color images taken by NASA space probes and landers. In his book Beyond: Visions of Interplanetary Probes, he has painstakingly pieced images together to create a view of space that takes my breath away. Looking at the images […]
Ahmad Shamlu: This Crow
I Am Still Thinking About This Crow I am still thinking about this crow that with its pair of black scissors— by two brisk swishing sounds— cut an aslant arc on the matte paper of the sky over the toasted wheat farms of the Yush valley; I am still thinking about this crow that facing […]
Piraha, Language and Be Here Now
The article in the New Yorker by John Colapinto about the Amazonian Piraha tribe (also referenced in the April 17 posting below) is provoking thinking from a whole variety of viewpoints. A Google search produces a range of responses to the article from linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, generic bloggers, and even Taoists. What seems to have […]
Contexts: The Museum vs The Gallery
Howard Morphy is a leading authority on Aboriginal art and the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at The Australian National University. In his article, Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery, he explores a number of issues that I have been writing and thinking about. Here is one idea excerpt: The theory of a […]
Breaking Through Language and Visual Hegemonies
Jim Coleman (of Nightingale at Large fame) made the following comment to an earlier post on Ocularcentrism. His insights are too provocative to lay hidden in the folds of this blog: I wanted to be sure you noticed …the article in the April 16th New Yorker by John Calapinto on the language of the Piraha, […]
Mark Strand: A Suite of Appearances
A Suite of Appearances In another time, we will want to know how the earth looked Then, and were people the way we are now. In another time, The records they left will convince us that we are unchanged And could be at ease in the past, and not alone in the present. And we […]
Real Estate, and Context
In a sense art has been a space race at least since the onset of Cubism, which shattered the calm of one-point perspective and, with collage, punctured the barrier between art and reality. Art’s spaces really started multiplying in the 1960s, with the successive splinterings of Fluxus, Happenings, Pop, Minimalism, Arte Povera and Neo-Concrete and […]
Strange Writings and Star-Charts
Stone Go inside a stone. That would be my way. Let somebody else become a dove Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth. I am happy to be a stone. From the outside the stone is a riddle: No one knows how to answer it. Yet within, it must be cool and quiet Even though a […]
In the Tangents
I have often used the phrase, “somewhere between what is hidden and what is seen” as a way to describe what pulls me in and inspires. So I was enchanted when a young Irish student visiting a show of my work in West County Cork turned to me and said, “I think I know what […]
The Longing for Calm Repose
In this contemporary technological world, we have all become travelers. We struggle with teachings that have slipped into disarray, searching for guideposts that are no longer there, markers that have faded from disuse, signs that no longer fulfill their function. We desperately, secretly, or even unconsciously, long for the image of calm repose, wisdom, and […]