AFH UPDATE (Spring 2020)

In Astoria, Spring has sprung! Nature is still natural, which is not so much a contradiction for the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is a prompt to see the moment through a surreal lens. In Venice the fish, swans, jellyfish and dolphins are visible in the clear canals, and the news spreads across global media like, well, a virus. Similar stories of wildlife re-occupying anthropocentric, artificial space juxtapose the grim news cycle for Corona World. The subtext is not very comforting in some respects. Thinking through the restorative function of the planet can generate some troubling visions of mankind’s place in the world future. The admonitions of scientists, climate change advocates and science fiction writers that we might reform or face consequences become more convincing. The viability of alternatives in human organization and the underpinning ideologies appear to gain traction. Because reality. Then the Realists will do everything they can to crush any nascent scheme with promise. Because they are evil.

PJM

The quarantines imposed top-down across Earth have revealed a lot about the potential for adaptation. Framing the scenario is a serious matter. The formation of protocols (objectives) in response to a crisis involves the establishment of distribution hierarchies. The operation is like triage, supposedly. Woe be to the non-essential among us in the event of cataclysm. Given that the myths supporting our shared fiction for inequality regimes advocate winners possessing boundless reserves of exceptionalism, narcissistic qualities, selfishness in the extreme, it should be unsurprising when the Übermensch frantically intervenes on his own behalf and appropriates or confiscates whatever can be taken from pooled stores of his pathetic underlings. Especially at the worst of times. The Superman demands the best of times for himself and his super-family and essential minions. So, it’s off to the New Zealand bunker, the half-billion dollar yacht, the castle, the Hamptons… So what if the locals are upset!

Quarantine reading. (PJM)

Addressing the upheaval(s) today could fill all waking hours. I will add a few lines, hopefully to the point. The situation is disappointing. Bernie Sanders would be a great President right this minute. The country missed an opportunity to change its outcome. Those who intervened to thwart Bernie’s election to the highest office in the land will get theirs, and they think they already have. The problem, though is bigger than dirty politics. Really, the immediacy of the problem itself is problematic. The conceptual sequence is accelerating, and management is confused. The program shows signs of running of its own accord, off script. The inherent danger present in directional systems is a coordinate collapse. A shift in parameters is sometimes enough to cause dimensional spiraling. Few are even somewhat prepared for the latent eventuality materializing. The key wovenforms are loosing and self-correcting to establish unexpected corridors in the fabrics of time and space. The concrete modality is assuming a less stable configuration. The derivative composition factors for chaos. Agency within it is unrecognizable, does not resemble the precursor. The fabric of memory is unraveling.

“Creeper” [Ca. 2012 (PJM)]

[novad] Verse

19: in numerology, starter
and finisher, self-focused,
self-defined, blind to influence,
a kind of world-shattering Kali
of numeric primes, black womb
of life and death, hope and grief.
In a system of Chinese characters,
its Kangxi radical is power, or two
strokes combined in a spiked tripod:
lungs, heart, and gut…Corona,
bright ring around a black sun,
sign of insight and blight, harbinger
of rapid change, rabid change,
and death—Christ on the cross,
time in pause, breath of
the world now caught in the un-
spoken hope that the virus
will take one of them, not
me. Corona-19,

brought to light on the wings
of bats, carried across borders
on the unwashed hands of
business and economy class.
Alternative currency exchanged
with a word, yawn or sneeze,
breathed into life from swamps
of our being, shed as easily
as any social media promise
of intimacy, constellations
churning mindlessly, more making
more making more transmissions,
hospitalizations, and fatalities,
enumerated and updated on
our screens, breeding strange
precision in our grief, feeding
the unspoken relief that not
one of them dying is me.

We were radiant once, just
recently, floating in a blind
serene of endless expansion,
and infinite growth. Our futures
vested, our pleasures tracked
and sequenced in operational
code, our worth projected
in increments of red and black,
a lien put on our souls from
time of conception until our last
heart attack, so many bright
ephemeral things wrapped
about our acquisitive skin
we need never encounter
the meat within until the weight
of our accumulated nothing
finally brings us to our knees.
Such a price to pay, when
the virus delivers death for free….

Maybe the slow drip of time
from the honeycomb summer
months will bring relief. Maybe
the high sun will sear those viral
constellations, bring them down.
Spring astringencies, dry
oceans of unwanted space
may yet open, for heaven’s sake,
sweet disorder in routine,
a place for touch and taste
down those crazy-making
empty streets. Maybe,
great change is coming at last,
we’ll slash our privilege, crawl
back to simplicity on tender
hands and knees, pan a human
commonality from Arctic fragments,
Greenland floods. If we is possible,
common number, sacred prime.

(Konstant)

Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #113
4D Nodes Series #38 ["Blue Node Series #1"]
Flashe (Vinyl) on Museum Board
40" x 31"
$2850

A measure of comfort can be attained in the midst of chaos by engaging in an assessment of reactions. The quantification of things displaces the normal procedural review. Counting cases becomes a means to distract one from the danger that is present, but invisible. Suspicion can be thrown at all factual assertion. The projection of outrage at structural disarray creates its own formal conjunctions. All explanations fail to address the unsettling realization that no one possesses a valid answer. The permutations of flatly false solutions and weak resolutions amount to nothing being done. All indications point to the lack of will in the leadership to ameliorate the mass suffering and desperation. As the anointment of blame escalates, the sport of the luxurious survivalist assumes the guise of temperamental critic. Buffoonery is redefined as courage within the limits of expediency. The mortal seriousness of the data is spread thin over unrelated channels, and thereby diffused, and made incomprehensible.

[April 30, 2020] > “Yesterday, I received a wonderful gift in the mail! David Pagel, who was my MFA faculty advisor at Claremont Graduate University is co-author of the book Talking Beauty. He sent a copy with a lovely note. David is a terrific instructor, mentor, art writer and admin. His perspectives on beauty are passionate and poetic. I can't wait to dive in. More great quarantine reading!”

Memory is abandoned; history erased. The faculty of interpretation is confiscated by merchants of mayhem. Epstein committed suicide, of course. To think otherwise is bananas. Governor Cuomo is a new darling of the content-driven news cycle, but then he cancels the New York state primary, in order to prevent Bernie Sanders from accumulating delegates. Such blatant disdain for democracy! The formerly unimaginable abuse of power is normalized. “Everything is permitted.” To pretend that this is not the product of patterns of injustice met with cowardly appeasement is beyond disingenuous. Disenfranchisement is overtly practiced by the protected brokers occupying positions of authority. Congressmen and -women are caught insider trading and nothing is done. So what? Ethics are trivial and philosophy in the service of wisdom, fairness is obsolete. Novelty is the “Guess What?” revelation that Apple and Google happened to have an app for contact tracing available to deploy widely. Can any abomination be surprising?

Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #109
4D Nodes Series #36
Graphite, colored pencil on Canson paper
8.5" x 5.5"
$95

Consideration of potential consequences is not necessary. The cost-benefit analysis proceeds from the personal to the principle. No lie is too small or big. “Mr. Smith, what you see is not at all what is there. You do not, cannot, will not see what it is you see, and that is that!” If the Deep State chimera has surpassed any competitor in the areas of surveillance, subversion, violence, imprisonment, torture, waste and so on, what is to prevent the capture of the Shallow State by its shadow. It has happened. The machinery of extraction/exploitation and command/control behaves as though its operator is itself. The personhood of compulsion is practically divorced from flesh and blood embodiment, even as the robot consumes human form, and more, all form. The experiment of democracy is finally embraced by its negation. No one is sure what the coupling will yield. The exact estimate is of no further use. The War Against Terror is not lost or won. That war has yielded to a War on Code, which no sane person would argue for. Therefore, no one will be asked to vote for it, to ratify it or justify it in any meaningful way. War itself has been lost, and generals commanding vast engines of destruction understand that the hand on the trigger of vast arsenals is the invisible hand of greed. An apocalyptic accident is at hand, and only Nature is unafraid.

Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #101
4D Flow Series #31
Graphite, colored pencil
On Rhodia Dotpad No. 16 paper
5.5" x 5.5"
$75

What is the future of fantasy? What of imagination? The menace of Pandemia is visceral, the virus given visual anunciation through the magic of microscopy. Graphic enhancement of the image of disease promotes plague aesthetics. COVID-19 is a meme, a digital phenomenon. In the new speculative environment, the Corona is ubiquitous. Who among us will not wonder what infection would feel like? We have thousands of stories by survivors (and some claimed by the pandemic) who provide content for the fever dream. The descriptions are broadcast on all mass media. Yet the doubters arm themselves and protest at the capitals of states. Are these the realists? The instruments of rebellion on the march, the square conquered, and to what end? Against this threat a bullet is absurd. The fantasy is not a container of powerlessness. The image is not the thing, a thing that isolates, kills.

“Spores” > Digital processing by PJM; Source microscopy by Susan Tinney (2001). This series was integrated into “Heartless01,” an 01 collective production that included presentations at the Tennessee Arts Commission, J&J’s market & cafe. The set of images emerging from the PJM/ST collab was output on adhesive vinyl and exhibited in SEAM01 at the Attic Gallery, and used as layers or textures in subsequent bodies of work.

At last a consciouslessness appears that is immune to psychology’s sexualizing proclivities. It is inversely profound. The abstraction of imaginary death is compounded by the manner by which modern medicine remediates illness. We are getting the disease we deserve, to paraphrase Lascussagne, once more. The fact that the drastic reformation of America’s medical system is not being strenuously platformed in mass media illustrates the compromise and corruption of the press, journalism and all major news outlets. Bernie and Liz Warren are the only 2020 candiates who brought the case to the American people pre-COVID-19, and one would hardly know this, based on the preponderance of coverage. What else is this but professional malpractice, the chronic failure of the press to perform its most basic, essential democratic function?! Medicare for All is less a policy proposal than it is the visionary pragmatist’s plea for reason in an era of induced madness. Only half a century later, and five years after his death, Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems less humorous and more sensible, more convincing. It is ironic that the current GGM exhibit at Austin’s Harry Ranson Center would be closed due to pandemic. Should One Hundred Years of Solitude be reclassified as science fiction, time-based media or allegorical prophecy, which is to say, Encoded Fiction? I propose the replacement of “magical/magic/marvelous realism” or “fabulism” with a more contemporary misnomer. And one mulls where in yesteryear’s bookstore will we find Love in the Time of Cholera?

Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #112
4D Flow Series #35 ["Jouissance"]
Flashe (Vinyl) on Canvas
24" x 24"
$3800

The field of exploration is predetermined, aimed at the discovery of a remedy for mankind’s latest ailment. We have conflicting reports on the origin of the disease. The concern is that COVID-19 could be a lab-produced weapon. Science could be responsible for the plague. The tech robber baron Bill Gates has pushed himself into the public discourse to make pronouncements that are questionable. Are his philanthropies and their attached networks jeopardized? The proposition of saving the world is so muddled. It is an arduous task to ascertain who is the villain and who is the savior. The pressure on the definition is mounting. The role of hero is diversified, because the complexity of the systemic damage is all-directional. The inventor is exasperated, and resorts to cursing the incompetence of the bit players and their managers (see Elon Musk). The conditions seem ripe for an eruption that further upsets conditional homeostasis. Badiou must be watching developments with immense curiosity, scanning for revolutionary insight, emergence in emergencies, proofs by immanence, and verification through science, and math - and it turns out he has! His analysis is as one might guess - at turns savage, brilliant, hilarious, but not dull. I will share a fragment here, but the statement is best consumed in totality.

But I am reading and hearing too many things, including in my immediate circles, that disconcert me both by the confusion they manifest and by their utter inadequacy to the – ultimately simple – situation in which we find ourselves.

These peremptory declarations, pathetic appeals and emphatic accusations take different forms, but they all share a curious contempt for the formidable simplicity, and the absence of novelty, of the current epidemic situation. Some are unnecessarily servile in the face of the powers that be, who are in fact simply doing what they are compelled to by the nature of the phenomenon. Others invoke the Planet and its mystique, which doesn’t do any good. Some blame everything on the unfortunate Macron, who is simply doing, and no worse than another, his job as head of state in times of war or epidemic. Others make a hue and cry about the founding event of an unprecedented revolution, whose relation to the extermination of a virus remains opaque – something for which our ‘revolutionaries’ are not proposing any new means whatsoever. Some sink into apocalyptic pessimism. Others are frustrated that ‘me first’, the golden rule of contemporary ideology, is in this case devoid of interest, provides no succour, and can even appear as the accomplice of an indefinite prolongation of the evil.

It seems that the challenge of the epidemic is everywhere dissipating the intrinsic activity of Reason, obliging subjects to return to those sad effects – mysticism, fabulation, prayer, prophecy and malediction – that were customary in the Middle Ages when plague swept the land.

“The piece: an immersive archive of this past six weeks finger crocheted with black paracord”

Maker: LIZA

The celebration of defiance is only rock’n’roll. One man’s denial is another’s intention. The suspension of form is applied dimenionism. Under the burdens of social duress, the artist-as-interventionist rebels against marginalization by shifting perception from focal immaterial to the localized material(s). In so doing the Maker’s game is - in the COVID-19 practicum - turning or bending an epistemic (epidemiological) rupture into or toward techne. The switch makes available formal circulation, the abundance of the cyclic, of rotation, including inversion, and an aperture to infinity, in spherical thinking. The sculptor’s instinct is channeled into the sequential photographic image (chance + click) that exists in the digital space. The whole artwork, if we dare to assume the validity of unity, echoes the impressionism conveyed by dance, through its choreography. Conclusions are recessed and supplanted by documentation. Suddenly, the subject is love. A new catalog can be commenced, or better, released. Assuredly, this neo-catalog is no book, no list, no inventory of products. This prospective catalog is the kernel of a combinative art, a non-script composed of posture and gesture, instead of letters. Any notion of attaching feeling to a static frame or fixed architecture must answer to the tantalizing appeal of skin, fabrics of sensuality, cords of intuition. Pain and stress are advanced as expertise. Delight hovers as constraint binds the parts in ecstatic union. The performing of what is forbidden approaches a glorious climax, a crescendo of will in tandem with surrender. The sublime and abject, old binary foes, are synthesized. Rapture finds a sturdy vessel, supported by proficiency. Alternation, a cultural force or dynamic perhaps, is a restorative function, if not a therapy as such. In the utility of movements, asylum is hidden but present, and therefore an infusion of gratitude. The Giving Machine is another idea for art as an open source model for making, which obviates the art market. Is May Day 2020, beyond the punishing iso-regimes of quarantine life, sickness and death, a chance at redemption for art. Will the world’s artists go on STRIKE, without knowing what it means? The future is unwritten.

Upcoming works from The Oracle, House Ghost Series, and Extinction for One.

Created by Jacobi Alvarez

Music: "Wetware" by Kevin Carey

The provisional bonds connecting crafts tend to blur the meaningful distinctions of radical authenticity. The subsumption of convention with action requires a witness to produce efficacy in the commons. The protections afforded by the social contract wither when the witness is muted, or worse, silenced. The worst scenario consists of the voice of the people being allocated to a social fraction. Propaganda is the lethal opposite of poetry. Art is victimized by its incorporation into the readymade formats of mass mobilization, which is prima facie the contradiction of journalism, deployed as acceptable speech. Art has no analog. The digitality of craft has no inherent bias against itself. The media for performance synthesizes both axioms through its concept of Time. Yes, it is linear. The network version, nonetheless is endlessly programmable. The tension of the serial image in relation to its source and the subsequent edit is conducted through every stage of camera-contingent reality. The original event unfolding does not abandon convolution. The camera operator is at best a translator, the editor an interpreter, the artist or performer a creative consultant, after the fact. The mysterious quality of projection stipulates a contract among the collaborators on the objective of illusion. The subtext has to do with the destructive and creative factors inevitable with the frame and coursing through their sequencing. The computer simply transfers the tension into the mega-space of infinite choice. Finitude is relegated to the iteration selected for sharing.

“The desperately insane wooden boat builder.” (Photo: Tom Hilton)

Outlined shadows, hazy memories hide
Riley waters rippling, pirouette around pilings
Synchronized choreographed elegance
Beauty in every heart beat
In every
Breath

Timing is everything, watch the ebbing tide
Moon set
Sunshine
Throwing ourselves into a trusting state of mind
We glance at each other, belaboring our alibis

Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #119
Blue Series #6 [Hybrids (Meta-Elements) #4]
Flashe (Vinyl) on Canvas
12" x 12"
$1050

The convergence of Beltane 2020 and the May Day direct actions invoked a peculiar hue. The red-draped hordes and the bonfires, the coupling of Green Man and Goddess created cognitive dissonance in Google results with the scenes of armed protest in American state capitals. What color is that? This artist interpreted the mob in blue, azure, azul in a range of shades and tone. The chemistry in the mix requires mastery to deconstruct and convey with clarity. Better that any story of the process be flavored within a dream context, rather than straight explication. The tendrils of causation loose from their concrete moorings and instead wave like old tree branches in high winds. The noise is thunderous. One can hear songs from time to time winding their way through the storm, though the source is hard to place. This year, the Celtic inclinations for Spring crash against the iron prohibitions, masks, fear of touch, threats of war and reprisal, political intrigue, rampant pillaging of the commonwealth, despair and nightmare horror enacted unritualistically everywhere. Longing spreads with the infection. Nostalgia is palpable, and all it entails. As with an injury that alters the course of life in an instant, the injured attempts to trace backwards to find the points that might have made the hurt not happen. The will to avert pain has no dominion in the medium of hindsight, except in sorcery or in the mind of the writer. Consider HG Wells, who also manifested the relevant phenomenon in collaboration with Orson Welles (no relation), 1933’s radio broadcast “War of the Worlds,” which is clearly pertinent still.

Currents, Flow and Reproduction (Studio Documentation) [April 28, 2020]
∞
"Relatives"
12" x 12"
Acrylic and ink on canvas
Circa 1996 >
This painting hung in parent's home until both passed away and the manse was sold. The figures are MacLeans from poet Sorley's lineage, from Skye, from an archive photograph. The standing stone behind them a reference to both the grave-covering slabs and the monumental ones I visited at the Callanish site. The mountains are the Cuillins. "Relatives" was painted in Nashville for the Scotland show "Where My Feet Stick to the Ground" at Peanut Gallery.

Huge portions of the “art world” have been incinerated. The data is shocking. What is not shocking is that outside art communities, hardly anyone mentions it. Essentialism has its downsides. This is nothing new. So much of the world is against art and has been for at least centuries. Protestants and their severe utilities, Plato and his Republican expulsions for the artists he feared, Muslims and their Jihads, and on and on. Anyway, in the throes of affliction, certain cultures and civilizations reflexively jettison their creative folk, like sailors tossing cartage from a ship taking on water fast. Yet the virtual art world is a-bloom! These are boom times, boys! The number of COVID-19 compelled online projects is vast. Those who have monitored the integration of digital technology and network processes into the art and culture web(s) over the past three decades will recognize 2020 to be a historical turning point. The infrastructure (hardware, software, fast internet, expertise, etc.) is available on a sliding scale. The usual contingencies apply of course. The cost and commitment to a virtual arts platform entails considerations beyond economy of means. Videoconferencing to discuss domestic art praxis, the finer points of Canonical prejudice or how to improve one’s Artist Relief application or whatever exposes the user to a host of exploitation cons and co-optation mechanisms. More problematic potentially is the practical conflation of the simulacra with the Real Thing. A MoMA-produced streaming chat with Flavin Judd and curator Ann Temkin on the topic of “Judd” is no replacement for attending the exhibit, which is closed and may or may not be extended. Yet some of best Coronart projects take advantage of tech that has been around and improving since the early days. Virtual galleries are getting good. l came across a new VR gallery-building toy-game startup via come-along scrolling behind a touching study of the collecting couple, the Vogels. It was the “Occupy” in Occupy White Walls that caught my attention, but the blurb content included a crazy video evidently produced for the company’s KS campaign. I usually don’t repost stuff like this, but here goes.

The lovely remembrance of the Vogels illuminates so much about art that the pandemic impacts. The diminutive pair who are the subject of the MentalFloss article were obsessed with art. Their love and life were intertwined with the contemporary art world for decades, and fortunately for all Americans, their commingling of art/love/life realized one of the most important public collections of the 20th Century. Richard Tuttle introduced them to me in Santa Fe in the mid90s, during his retrospective at the Santa Fe Museum of Art. I interviewed them on Art Talk, my goofy radio show. They looked at some work I brought at Richard’s suggestion, and they recommended I find representation (LoL). It is a critical thought experiment to visualize how COVID-19 would have affected pretty much all that makes the Vogel’s chronicle special. On one hand artists at all levels are struggling, so it might follow that the Vogels could have advanced their operation apace. Dorothy’s library job might have been cut, while Herb’s might not. Their fabled 86th Street apartment is at the epicenter of the viral outbreak in NYC. How would they navigate their stops at Cedar Tavern, various artist studios/homes, museums, galleries, their own Union Square studio, the Brooklyn Public Library, Manhattan post office, the Statler Hilton Hotel where they met…? Uber, Lyft, Subway (Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio might have something to say about that), taxi, walking? As any art world player knows, showing up/showing one’s face out & about in the scene is key. Or maybe that is a myth, but anyway, trying to do the same kind of networking virtually ain’t nearly the same thing. ZOOM and FaceTime etc. are insufficient to the task and mission. Social distancing is murder on art tribalism. No more air kisses!

Currents, Flow and Reproduction (Studio Documentation) [April 19, 2020]
∞
"Social Distancing." This painting will all get the cover-up treatment shortly.

The thing I'm thinking of now involves: a register of self; the creation of a particular history; the compression process in digitization; the continual reorientation of one to a social network that may or may not be an adequate representation of community, family relations, personal evolution; + more. Technically, the series emphasizes: color in 4D practice, which presents itself in sequence; the nature of the symbolic in non-nominal, non-linguistic patterns; the illusion of territoriality in the pictorial plane; the optimizing of the framing device for 4D painting; the infinite possibility in physical lineage; the semblance of stacking for immaterial form, and other expressions of native 4D+ actions; the keys of parallax optics; + more. A consideration of the New Studio format, methods and theory. The commencement of a dissertation text (Book 5) on 4D love.

"Social Distancing" is one of the "I Love You, Monster" series, featuring Dim Tim. The title is a temporary update, obviously. You can see other ILUM examples HERE. The set is connected to my Masters Thesis, which addresses media culture, digital process, 4D systems, including Management > & Dim Tim/Notes of Dimensional Time project(s).

The materials used to create "Social Distancing" include Guerra fluorescent colors, Golden acrylics, other dry and wet pigments, ink,... more

The Pedlar from Holbein's Simolachri, Historie, e Figure de la Morte (In Lyone Appresso Giovan Frellone, 1549) [h/t Wikipedia (public domain)]

Understatement: social media, like Amazon shopping, has benefited materially from the onset of Corona Virus; Tech barons Zuckerberg and Bezos, among others, dance like skeletons (a la Danse Macabre) over the grave and carcass of normal, actual socializing - except in Sweden, one hears. The daily coverage of Bezos’ fortunes recalls the fetishization of oligarchical wealth in the Gilded Age, but truly this is an ancient pastime for the unfortunate mob and competitive elite alike. During the COVID-19 pandemic, though, the exercise of tracking the billionaire’s losses and gains (with 50 million Americans out of work, and Amazon’s heinous labor practices in the news) is abhorrent, IMHO. In all fairness, we ought to acknowledge the significant disparity between the awfulness of the Black Plague and others, and our own. Our poor ancestors did not have tweet, meme or selfie to ameliorate their suffering. My friend Joseph Nechvatal invited me to join the Viral Days group he co-launched with Matthew Rose. On some days, having such an outlet can be a relief. I posted Gasmask Guys. In all I made over 40 in the first two sets. The production emerged from a mini-online retrospective for Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown. Many artists similarly seem to be using the virus-forced holiday or sabbatical (paid or not) to review past production and reframing the documentation for Instagram and other sites that invite community engagement. Those who were doing so as part of their virtual practice (Joseph, for example) have found fresh or more attentive viewers/audiences for their work. Some artistic work in progress, commenced prior to the appearance of COVID-19, suggests that the creator was somehow seeing ahead of us, or reading the tea leaves correctly, as it were. The sensation is native to 4D arts in my own experience, and becomes keener with time and repetition. The powerful domestic dance projects of my relative Jacobi Alvarez (see video above) have the flavor of practice-as-prophecy.

Gasmask Guy #42 (PJM)

View from the Hourglass

by Cetan wa’ableza Copeland

A door flung through space, its hinges thudding as it bounces in places. I sprawled my legs and head further, peeking up from my massive claimed space. My suitemate held a fury I had never seen. His voice cried not salted tears, but fiery unjustifiable anger. We had carved from our long gone roommates a paradise, in quarantined mazes of empty halls. Our resettling, truly glamorous, our rooms more us than our homes. The corona pandemic we understood. All four of us, in jokes and quips. “Till they kicked us out… ” “Over my dead body… ” His anger took the space, more than my own. I could only watch, his groans and yells befell our happy now hell. They gave an ultimatum. And I think they work. We had to leave the dorms by April 13. And then we did.

I didn’t pack. Not the day of, nor the day before. Swaddled in lethargy, I leaned further into the depths of my chair. The COVID-19 problem. A disease so impossibly effective. I am under almost no risk. Maybe a bad day or two. At worst a week. And so tumbling backwards in unresolved sadness, those most at threat… my family. My mother, well over 50, the family all into their years. It was a selfless feeling. And despite that, uncomfortable in altruism, a rebellious isolation. Three trips and my stuff now settled in the rented car, began the fifteen hour drive to Austin. The desert was as empty as the roads. My suitemate’s loathing anger spread its feathery wings, and settled acrest my head. Forced from comfort, I voluntarily threatened my family's life, on the undetectable chance I had Corona. Why, why could I do nothing but comply? Was it for the $1500 back? Would I even get the relief $1200? Would I get anything back? My classes were already shambling. The teachers transitioned like it was their job. While a jobless parent, and an unemployed America take me down the dust bitten roads.

Archie Scott Gobber (American, born in 1965) - American Motel, 2020
Enamel & latex on canvas
84 x 60 in (213.4 x 152.4 cm)
http://www.hawcontemporary.com/artist/archie-scott-gobber

My friend Jerry Dale McFadden is engaged in an ongoing project title “The Curator’s Cure,” sited in his Facebook photo album archive. Jerry Dale shares regularly with his large group of social media followers works of art that he selects. He writes as preface: “The Curator's Cure is more art! A little art each day is just what the doctor ordered. I've been gathering images of works that I find fascinating, intriguing & inspiring. Hope you enjoy.” During the pandemic, this kind of project (for music, poetry, movies, art, etc.) has become something of a genre.

I noticed this one, a painting by Archie Scott Gobber that depicts a motel I passed and photographed, driving from New Mexico to Texas in 2006 (below). The images seem especially resonant, now.

My lethargy was the only thing I carried, because my luggage rode in white and black plastic trash bags, soaked in two spritzes of bleach. Their red tags like a bad sale, one on forlorn seas like an odyssey returning home. And so my queried mind stumbles. America, the powerhouse of the 21st century. The leader of our age, mocking itself in the media, as New York reaches complete shutdown. My brother stuck on the east coast, hoping for reimbursement from the moving company he works for. Just to pay another month of rent, for the home he can’t live in. My sister, like many others, planless. Despite our massive economy, and endless power, we are powerless to prevent the COVID-19 spreading danger. She planned to check New York, but now she can only see genius in her popcorn ceiling. My other sister is working less, as a member of the event service. America has lost its events. They move online, sure, but like classes it can only go so far. Both parties require equal engagement, to a screen, of bits and bytes. The work by a thousand behind-the-scene toilers, that smile knowing what they do is unseen but appreciated, is impossible. No gigs, no birthday parties. America has lost its party.

And sure, people take to the streets. A protest, almost ironically historical. A sign, almost historically ironic, claims “Social distancing = communism.” They stand as if the people require a self-started-fire-fighter. As if we are wronged by hiding in our hobbit holes. Wholly ignorant, or purposefully bliss to the media they gather. Swaggering like a martyr, the rich agree that we can all make it through these “unprecedented times”. Like America in these un-presidented times. When can we call the shot? Who killed Franz Ferdinand? Do we turn the dial on our hate for China? All the way to 11? Do we blame the unclosed stores? The necessary jobs? The hapless helpless workers? As corporations cut them off like skin tags for their losses? We can’t choose. I can’t choose. We shall not choose. For no reason, more so than this is America. We do not pin the tail of hate, not again. The donkey is the ass we made of ourselves, and the prick will hurt worse than our crippling depression. So many of us do the thing: right or wrong. We buckle up as times continue, change, and overcome. America is not the next problem we make for ourselves. But the infrastructure and history to never mistake what makes this country worth fighting for. Something we fight for everyday, every dollar we spend, and every life we save--by staying in doors.

I am more shut in now than ever. A change I am never surprised enough by. And so we are isolated, smiling at the idiots, those that oppose science, those that threaten us all. We smile, because in our new and old cubbies of life, it's all America can do. While other nations mobilize protection, we horde who knows what, we profiteer on paranoia, of what might happen, and again who to blame. The government and the people make a nation. One nation indivisible, or so the anthem says. I hold fast to the reality before me. The COVID-19 has impacted my life, but not as hard as others. Not as fierce, or deadly. As horribly or cruelly, and yet in isolation I question why we need a criminal for the crime of dis-ease.

PJM, 2005

Ableza is 18, and his America is markedly unlike the one I knew, when I was 18. Then, Ronald Reagan was in ascendancy, and would soon assume the Presidency. In my youth I watched the end of the Vietnam War on television. I remember unions battling with owners, gas shortages and very bad (polyester/psychedelic lite) fashion. Music, sports and movies were visceral, community-rooted and -rooting. Community itself was palpable, refreshed daily, past-conscious and future-minded. NASA was a source of pride. Buy American was the message campaign that stuck in my mind. The mix of advertisements, information and entertainment swayed from glitz to grit to gosh, but rarely would the material sway too far from centered. “God, country, family” was the mantra, but also an aspiration. {The chipping away at my naivete is one of the external constants of my inner world. As is, on the contrary, my stubbornness.} Simultaneously, the cultural revolution was in full swing, and the reactionaries were standing their ground. I remember born-again preachers howling on the radio from the hollers. Marshall Tucker blasted from a house at the bottom of our hill. The junior high and high school football games at the stadium up the street. Basketball at the Armory. Baseball by the armory. The Olympics every four years. Walter Cronkite. I believed the schoolteachers, even when I drove them nuts. Hard work. Persistence. Fights. Blood and sweat. I don’t know. Astoria, Oregon and Beckley, West Virginia and all points in between. The distance is unhinging from the duration, and I’m not the only American who feels that way. “We’re all in this together,” that pandemic-pop affirmation, is not comprehensible, anymore, and that in itself is heartbreaking. Our Exceptionalists have managed to effect the creative destruction of applied patriotism. The best they can muster is temporary soft martial law for the plebs, as cover for their getaway. The war between Self and Us is a bloody conceptual contraption, hypocritical political convention and exhausted social invention, whose casualties are eight billion truths and counting. As Donald Judd said in 1965:

Of course, finally, I only believe my own work.

Donald Judd, Marfa (Photo: PJM/2006)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Donald Judd. During my CGU MFA course I did a deep dive into his work, visiting Marfa (Judd & Chinati Foundations), DIA Beacon and other museums/galleries with Judd installations and pieces on display. While at LA Packing Crating & Transport I moved and helped install several Judds. I read his collected texts, interviews, catalogs, etc. The current (interrupted) MoMA show is on my post-COVID-19 to-do list, if ever that time/opportunity comes to pass. I have been reflecting on how obvious it is that my research is finally expressing explicitly in the 4D VyNIL series, more obviously as the series develops. I am continually reminded that artistic influences and inspiration can take a long time to germinate before becoming visible in the art. & even then the way in which the inspiration/influence appears can surprise or even shock. I expect to write about this soon. The photo above is of a Judd sculpture installed permanently at Chinati Foundation in Marfa I shot in 2006. The ones below were shot later that year. One is a shot of a Judd wall piece at MoMA, and the other a snapshot of busker working on the steps of (a then-closed) Judd Studio at 101 Spring Street.

In the process of searching various image archives and blogs for Judd-related material, I drifted afield, into a separate dimension if you will, and found myself assembling a mid-00s autobiography - a compilation of emotions, memories, episodes, scenarios. This wayward attempt at profiling my life then through the psychic investigative apparatus I possess currently proved too emotionally burdensome, and I set it aside after a few hours. I’ll renew both studies (Judd & me, circa 2006-10) after a refreshing night’s sleep, perhaps. It is my observation that the Corona Virus quarantine practicum intensifies the survey of experience, probably because one’s ability to diffuse the concentrated content of the past in a communal present is limited. Technological solutions one can apply to this bug or glitch are insufficient, as of now. The troubling general data on despair related to enforced isolation in the gen-pop support this theory. But we as a society should understand the shape of the phenomenon, given the routine use of isolation in the nation’s penal system, and in other sectors, as well, as a punishment or result of neglect or lack of compassion.

Photo by Will McLean

What will become of enterprise art of 20-teens? Will the Museum of Ice Cream have a post-Covid-19 future? What is the fate of Meow Wolf? Can Burning Man fashion a mode for no-touch/no-breath ecstasy? Will there ever again be a sprawling outdoor rock festival like Coachella? What about the Arena, the Square, the Theatre, the Stadium? “Future-tripping” is an effect of interventions. It expresses a very human urge to have some power-over-, some control over the unknown or unknowable. The future builds itself, whatever we contrive or conspire to do to manifest it according to our wishes or desires. So much of the prognostication is wasteful, a distraction from what is immediately, vitally necessary. To concentrate on the future provides false relief in emergency. The futurist is like the medic assuring the soldier blown to pieces and close to expiration that those wounds are superficial. “Ain’t no thang.” In such a terrible moment, the mantra “you will be fine” is a lie and and act of mercy on the liar’s part. Art is only endangered existentially to the extent that humanity is verging on extinction. Art and man have survived many plagues. What many suspect is that the malaise of 2020 is being utilized to, for example, trample or destroy civil liberties, cancel free and fair elections, incite the populace to war, hide rapaciousness in the financial sector, and so on. More unreasonable fears abound and spread through the population like a virus. Artists and art entrepreneurs might ought to be more concerned about immediate-term field diagnostics for free speech, rather than economic and social forecasts. For example: What are we to make of various private entities and government officials judging which narrative for public consumption is permitted, and which is not? YouTube?

Artist: J. Todd Greene
Title: "Boat"
Dimensions: 29" x 20”
Medium: Acrylic and foam core

Artist Notes > “This is part of the ‘In the Future, Everything is Free’ series. It is a totem calling into question our [America] dedication to religion [Capitalism], while simultaneously celebrating individuals who have dedicated their lives to creativity.”

Now I’m beginning to understand what you meant when you first brought up death. I had thought of death as something ahead of me, off in the future, an end point, a kind of checking out. Something that let me know that the clock was ticking and that every instant was a precious gift. But now I’m just beginning to think of death as a letting go of what we know, our way of being, our clutching to the familiar. To even see beauty, we have to be startled out of business as usual. Sometimes surprised. Often shocked. Unsettled to the core. And then that self of ours, which we are pretty attached to, has to die for the new and unexpected and unplanned and undiscovered to be born, to come into existence, to shape a self, which itself is mortal. -

David Pagel, from Talking Beauty (p.44)

The uncertainty brought on by the pandemic and responses to it compels a re-imagining of our arts and creative topology. The opportunity exists within this moment to radically re-design the vehicles of presentation and exchange. Otherwise, the world of art will cease to function in its public capacity, as a key to democracy, a service for enlightened humanity. Significant changes in the role art plays in today’s world were happening before the winter of 2019 and spring of 2020. What happens next will in large measure depend on whether artists and those who love art insist on it being essential, moving forward. Make no mistake, the most important feature of the choice we make about the art we will create in the future is love. Enlisted in love’s continuous preoccupation, art is capable of creating a vessel by which we move on and are along the way moved. Art is the sign of presence awareness, the thread binding the logic of life to itself. We do not survive in a universe absent vision. Art is how the universe creates man in the universe. It is a form of love suspended, a song in space in chords drawn from the Void.

I'm working on some CD cover art for my dear old friend Gerry Carthy, an Irish folk musician who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico... This is a hybrid process sketch (color pencils/P-shop from a screen grab/source material).

It is paradoxical that in the so-called age of big data, public data on inequality are so woefully inadequate. Yet that is the reality, as is clear from the extreme difficulty of measuring the distribution of wealth. I alluded earlier to the inadequacy of the data on income distribution. The situation is even worse with respect to wealth, especially financial asset. To put it in a nutshell, statistical agencies, tax authorities, and, above all, political leaders have failed to recognize the degree to which financial portfolios have been internationalized and have not developed the tools needed to assess the distribution of wealth and to follow its evolution over time. To be clear, there is no technical obstacle to developing such tools; it is purely a political and ideological choice, the reasons for which we will try to unravel…

The big picture is relatively clear. In the Western countries, the concentration of wealth diminished sharply after World War I and remained low until the 1970s, then turned upwards in the 1980s. Wealth inequality rose more the United States and India than in France or the United Kingdom, as did income inequality. The increase in the concentration of wealth was particularly large in China and Russia in the wake of privatization. While this overall pattern is well established, it is important to keep in mind that there are many aspects of recent developments that remain unclear. Paradoxically, the data in Figs. 13.8-13.9 for the last three decades (1990-2020) are undoubtedly less accurate than the data from the entire period (1900-2020). This is partly because the authorities have not developed the tools needed to follow the internationalization of wealth. - Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (p.670-2)

Will in Albuquerque in 2006 (PJM)

The schismatic character of modern interrelation is a vestigial convention. It is in its core an ideological imaginary. The cultural roots are deep, a consequence of ana-historical 20th Century upheaval on all levels. The ghostly triumvirate of Freud, Peter Drucker and Hitler haunt the dreams of humanity, and turn us upon ourselves in a cyclic continuum of insoluble tensions. The fiduciary management of violent and psycho-sexual impulses is inevitably a lost cause. The inherent problems of awareness under duress in the contemporary fester in total programs for misdiagnosis. The instability of the environment is viewed through the Austrian Fin de siècle lens. Urbanity, decadence, betrayal are reflected in the secret madness generated by strictly and artificially normal exterior procedures. Punishment is an extension of sublimated religious fervor. Barbarism boils just below the surface of neatly adjustable things. The Great COVID-19 Quarantine of 2020 offers mankind a rare opportunity to open an investigation into the strange connectors of the Globalism of the past half-century. Supposedly Nazism, Fascism and Communism have been vanquished. The promises that a Free Market could conjoin all peoples in production + consumption have proven false, or, rather, a cover-up for extreme re-distributions of power and wealth vertically. Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the false prophet-propagandist of a Globalist Enterprise movement, deserves a place in the discussion. Who else belongs on our inventory list? Certainly the neo-robber barons of the financial and technology sectors do. The artificial personhoods, the corporations and their syndicates must be analyzed, along with their mostly mercenary and forgettable-by-design executive class. Perhaps we should consider elite Fixers, those who, like the Koch brothers and George Soros, who amassed incomprehensibly vast fortunes or business empires and used their power and money to alter the political and social world order with the aid and complicity of armies of minions and hacks. Better camouflaged players, some of them old veterans of the Game, through blood inheritance and more opaque devices, survived World Wars and other terrible calamities to effect their own stylized, calamitous visions upon the Land and People. Traffickers in the machinery of destruction probably should be noted. …The List would not be a short one, nor would it be impractibly long. Compiling a list is only a first phase. Next come the implementation steps.

Will in Albuquerque in 2006 (PJM)

Ought we not interrogate the Global Perspective which the Common Person is exhorted to foster and refine through greatly expanded new media channels and the frantically adapting (old) anchor media, too? The post-War emergence of New Russia, New China, New Europe, New India, New Japan, New Middle East and so on is as fictional as any historical narrative. The distributions of power and wealth and reproduction are only fractionally nominal and numerical. What exactly does New mean in this context? The extent to which these trends reveal the actual mechanics, the components of world-change remains opaque, hence the mythic quality of descriptions of empirical rise - and fall. In dimensional analysis the element of time has heightened emphasis. The inflections of growth and diminishing fortunes must be regarded as symptomatic of forces and dynamics that are invisible. Appearing and disappearing are optical phenomena, but as Baudrillard suggested, also aesthetic and more, metaphysical. Effect is naturally either/or/both creative and destructive. Experience is a consequence of proximity, and much more. Interpretation is immaterial, but integral in processing the data extracted from existence. One of most alarming features of the pandemic response is the pervasive absence of consensus among leadership. No trustworthy emergency response exists. It has been dismantled. The transition from analog to digital systems over the past few decades does not explain the failure. Frustration, to the point of exasperation (played out in the protests), results from the lack of authoritative, consistent, reliable information forthcoming from the authorities. Government is not governing, to paraphrase Drucker, which is due substantially to bad/false/fake ideology. Government small enough “to drown it in a bathtub” cannot effectively administrate during a catastrophe. Governments overly concerned with debilitating and destroying other governments or internal threats to their power will not be sufficient to provide cogent relief for their people in times like these. Distractions can have mortal consequence at certain critical moments, and this is one such moment. At some point no amount of spin can obfuscate the stench of death and disease, which on an animal level incites panic in the populace.

Fish tank, 2006 (PJM)

In matters of a mortal nature, how can the political world be compartmentalized from the religious? The (conceptualized) Middle East, with its incessant very real and desperate conflagrations, is for example a hybridized form for religiopolitics. Its complexity is a woven form of belligerent religious factions (Jewish, Muslim, but also Christian and more), advanced militarism, global commodity-driven economics, a bizarre mutant strain of ancient and New Secular tribalism, demographic conflict and more. Almost any facet or perception of the scenario can be supported by argument. An objective dimensional analyst can deconstruct some forms of civilization structurally into sub-forms or variations. The inducted, the occupied, the members and agents of civilization mostly consider such analysis irrelevant, if not dangerous to the status quo. In Europe the apparent recession of Church and Monarchy/Aristocracy is (inversely) proportionally related to the expansion of global systems for secular governance, commerce and social exchange over time. Is the narrative for this change-arc valid, except as an academic abstraction? Speaking to current events: Are we actually to believe less in the vestigial hubs of power than the more recent ones, in the very fresh COVID-19 Era, when all power, New and Old, is challenged by the tiniest of creations, a virus? For the time being, macro- and micro-human affairs have been interrupted, upended, re-directed, postponed, altered or destroyed by a creature we can only visualize through the assistance of a high-powered microscope, aided for cognition purposes further by image-enhancement tools. The signs, symbols and representations of Corona Virus, once captured via magnification, are endlessly reproduced and remediated for our informatic and associative consumption. To talk about COVID-19 [insert representative graphic here] is to discuss protocols, masks, Randian statistics, implications. Of course corporate media monopolies reduce everything to their set of dogmatic fables: the cost; the winners; the losers; the deals… sprinkled with human interest.

My friend Jan and his family were the subject of an Finnish-language story on MTV Ututiset, chronicling their break-out move from New York City to rural Texas. Link HERE.

In art it is through the suspension of form that new forms are revealed. The abrupt divestiture of formal constraints proposes a sense like seduction. A complete release for the Thing beyond or outside the convoluted patterns of Mind. The pause incorporated into language is fundamentally unlike the space that contains an object that specifically expresses itself, in the way art can. Art in its spatial arrangement becomes more than presentation object. A unique dependency exists between the sculpture or painting and the space within which the art is located. That special space is vitalized by a viewer, becoming via the witness the distance through which meaning is invisibly transmitted from Thing to observer, and by extension from Thing to maker. Under the influence of Corona Virus, it is difficult or impossible not to confuse the spread of contagion and the mysterious method by which people experience art. These phenomena occupy the same dimension or domain that spiritual transmission occupies, and perhaps romance. It is the dimension for conversion. The sublime is centered on a pause, a suspension of time’s linkage to experience, a space within which awe commingles with emptiness, if not inaction. The pace of the ritual usually will allow for contemplation. The biophysical aspect of this conjectural configuration of spatially—affected relations can be reasonably stipulated. Our consciousness seems designed, evolved and/or trainable to accept the invitation to reflection. We seem inclined to enter a sustainable state for the unity of the body-mind-spirit-emotion aspects of being. That union harmonizes potentially into correct and effective action. The energetics for this sequence can, in my thinking, be characterized as Grace, balanced between transmission and receptivity.

Untitled (PJM)

I was walking on the track yesterday (counterclockwise), when a bald eagle flew across my field of vision, from West to East, disappearing into a beautiful white cloud that seemed to rise from the horizon like steam halfway to the sun. A short time later, I saw the female of the pair, set upon by four or five crows, who harassed her as she rode the invisible currents of the wind, North to South. The crows took turns aggressively swooping in, diving at her, singly and in pairs, or altogether from different angles. The eagle resolutely found an updraft and began to circle higher, as her attackers gave up and drifted away. I watched her until I could see her no more. She, too, disappeared in a cloud.

I am happy to respond to this prompt and the words alone “suspension of form / intervention of grace” give me a lot to play with.

It feels appropriate to acknowledge the inception for this piece began when I came into quarantine from the pandemic almost eight weeks ago. By design, I packed 5,000 feet of black paracord to take with me to my self imposed “residency” tasking myself with using the material to be a kind of calendar for this time. (I’ve worked with this kind of process before when I completed another woven environment 200 hours back in 2017)

I find comfort in the simplicity of parameters. This quarantine, this self-contained time and space was nothing if not a new set of parameters to abide by. I had a limited amount of a single kind /color of material (5,000 feet of black paracord. It would come in 500 feet bundles, so would be the only point of interruption when one ended and another began, not unlike the end of a week or a month, also arbitrary and agreed upon.

My method would be the most rote and repetitive gesture I could think of, a finger crochet hook bypassing an external tool for the direct immediate contact of my hand to create a continuous line. No hardware, no glue, nothing but my own body, unmediated. I realize now there was a desire to have that because so many of our forms of communique during this time were mediated and I desperately craved something direct.

Through the gesture of the finger crochet, I loved watching the single line become a plane and then a three dimensional form over time, accruing and becoming more dense, as well as heavier. It became an ongoing process, but also a process I entered as a ritual not unlike the dot making of the batik in Indonesia.

One slip knot wove into the next, one day flowed into the next, in this container of quarantine, all pre existing parameters (what is a Monday? What do I wear to be “social”) fell away.

So this was one way I was examining time and process.

Simultaneously to working on this piece, I spent the last six weeks returning to the pivotal for me text Syncope; The Philosphy of Rapture by Catherine Clement. It was a kind of directed study, where I would read parts of the text aloud and record an audio of my voice reading. I was thinking a lot about how oral tradition has such potency because of the resonance, the sound waves that are transmitting the information. So saying, hearing, and reading the words aloud became this other way of accessing the wisdom of the Syncope text.

The premise of the text Syncope is all about the off beat, the interruption or the suspension of time. Clement investigates both Western philosophical tradition, (Plato, Descarte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bataille) and Eastern asceticism (Tantra, Bharatanatyam) just to name a few influences. She looks at both mysticism and sexuality as spaces where syncope emerges. The term ‘syncope’ fundamentally belongs to the realm of music as the rhythm between the rhythm, the off beat. So after reading Clement’s text each day, I would spend time playing my harmonium, an Indian pump organ that creates a series of drones we understand as binaural, (where the notes played are of a slightly differing frequency tone that the brain perceives them as one.) Interestingly enough, the harmonium is already a synthesis of Western and Eastern traditions, to parallel Clement’s thinking. The harmonium used for bhajan or Indian devotional chanting was originally a Western European instrument that was adapted by Indian musicians in the 19th century.

I find this story particularly compelling because we so often focus on the affects of colonialism as a one-sided exploitation by the colonizer but here we see that there was truly a kind of cultural exchange through the universal magic that is music. I have been playing the harmonium for a couple of years now after some mostly unsuccessful childhood training in classical piano. It brings me a tremendous amount of joy and invites me into a deeply meditative state.

I began overlaying harmonium drone over my recording of Clement’s text thinking about that moment of suspension, interruption, jouissance. Clements frames jouissance, the French word for orgasm as a kind of syncope. Just like the drone gives all the tones equal weight, eventually merging into a single note, Clement introduces the idea that all rapture, all ecstasy, sexual and spiritual is a form of syncope, of egoic death.

Returning to the finger crocheting ☺

Just like with any meditative practice, the moments of boredom eventually settled in. With an absence of climax, of goal, of finale, everything began to melt into a hazy dissolution of center. This mirrored so much of what I was experiencing in my understanding of pandemic. When would it end? What was the it? Nobody really knew. The egoic death here was to dismantle the idea that there would be an end, and even if the end came, that it would be distinctly pinpointed to a single moment, a catharsis of any recognizable variety.

In this way, I found my experience of orgasm, especially a feminine orgasm to be so accurate in her waves of mounting pleasure that never ended because it never began. The traveling around and around on a leminiscate shape. It was always never there.

I kept looping one slip knot after the next, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly making my way through 5,000 feet of black paracord, one day at a time.

Then came this unexpected moment when the thing I was holding in my hands suddenly became bigger than my own body. Like a true hiccup, an unexpected surprise of a moment, I was thrown into a different kind of space where I was no longer supporting this shape I was making. It would now support me. I knew it was time to enter into a wholly other kind of embodiment. Voila!

In Patanjali’s system of yoga, the third of the eight limbs is called asana – the body’s posture, expression of various corresponding shapes as a form of self-discipline, austerity and devotion. I have always experienced such ecstasy practicing these postures, especially when the knowledgeable hands of a teacher could adjust my body even more deeply into the shape. It is the same kind of surrender I have found in being in deep rope bondage and suspension. In so much of what I do, I am seeking the opportunity to surrender.

So this became the final point of departure for this piece. It also continued to be an ontological study, in that not only was I examining my own way of being in the world, I have become increasingly more curious about an object’s way of being in the world and the role of hyper objects. (and that whole branch object oriented ontology which has a fun acronym OOO)

The more I was lead to inquire what this object wanted to be in time, in space, the more was revealed to me.

When I was finally able to surrender to it, I allowed for it to suspend my body in space, inviting the intervention of such grace with each nanosecond that I inverted my perspective. For me, that is the truest form of ecstasy, a veritable syncope.

DEDICATION by Diane Avice du Buisson

Joan Suval

Joanji

1932 -2020

My dear friend Joan Suval passed away last Friday, April 24th, in New York.   I affectionately called her my Goddess Mother.   Yesterday,  I remembered that I wrote a poem about Joan many years ago and retrieved it from my journals.   I would like to honor her by sharing this poem with you.

Joan Suval

A touch,

so soft,

yet deep,

penetrating the shielded heart.

Then you,

you walk right through,

into the corridors of my mystery.

Unraveling the tale,

gently,

with deliberate words,

motherly care.

Eyes,

burning into the pages of my past,

spending tender moments on the hard parts,

the sorrowful and the abandoned.

Time goes,

as you do,

and I am here,

still,

holding the book of I was,

moving slowly,

cautiously,

into I AM.  

^ Durga Devi / Diane Avice du Buisson

Joan Suval was a founding member of Ananda Ashram in New York.  She was a senior disciple of Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati, who called her “Mother of the Ashram.” Since 1964, Joan was authorized by Shri Brahmananda to offer meditations and Yoga-Vedanta programs for the Yoga Society of New York, both at Ananda Ashram and in New York City.    Shri Brahmananda also directed Joan Suval in the recording of his “Blue Sky Meditations.” Over the years, she has accepted invitations to present her program, “Readings from the Masters,” in San Diego, Los Angeles, Nashville, Ireland and Switzerland. Joan was also on the staff of the Post Graduate Center for Mental Health in New York City, where she developed the Center's first meditation and stress reduction program.

Artist: Diane Avice du Buisson
Title: “Life is a dream. Dream is a dream. Birth is a dream. Death is a dream.”
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Medium: Mixed media
Date: 2002