Showing posts with label RK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RK. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
04/04/2005 - Battle of the Trees
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Fiery Film
I see metaphor,
shimmers,
glorious music for communication,
An important opportunity.
Confront the ennui of my verbose experiment.
Must I weld through glass?
It's gone.
My astral co-dependent daughter knows a better, surreal harmony.
It's gone.
My astral co-dependent daughter knows a better, surreal harmony.
A psychotic scale, sanguine hence clever.
Make impressions, write observations, delve in every finest character.
Approach, through your original studio,
almost the question,
choose a sad torpid companion.
choose a sad torpid companion.
Doctor your aesthetic,
Sculpt passion, concrete Herculean leader!
Sculpt passion, concrete Herculean leader!
Munificent Friend, cunning Beauty!
Sound, no laughter!
Cruising Dude, discover the sweet guile of an opinion:
PM smokes - all you can think to create individual music.
Imagine there her absurd instrument,
Please share about electric strength.
Chant equality.
Observe a borderline society that forms the subject.
Check your differences,
Start inclusively, capture canvas.
Hate competition, give peace, model looms dead.
Child paints grand rhythm comes gives health.
I abuse a psychedelic joke, varied her grandeur.
Metal Mother, come sing!
Must muscled horny men.
Use praise, chisel some unity,
Since Memory trashes Life.
Laugh!, Languish, Scream!
Dormant pressure, my fresh love wants freedom.
Look no feeling enervates this body
Mom, stuck on junk, pain . . .
This serious purple sleep could make free diversity
A deep white smear is best for after nude work.
Sister choose when you're sure like a star.
We're never curious, or opaque.
Demand a break.
Beg, then walk with power above.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
04/27/2005 - Why I messed up the words
Thirty or so sessions into the project, I realized it was looking more and more like an unconscious ritual. I wasn't sure whether I was happy about this. Though confident I had discovered a way to unlock psychological content, I wondered 'to what end?' My models could dance their own concerns, or anyone's for that matter, psychological content was there. I wasn't sure what this meant, or if there were rules apart from being respectful, in conducting this work.Strive for symmetry, or not? Now that I had invited the world into the work, by using multiple models, did this mean that all were equal? What of the aesthetic demands of art? Should I be painting images of men? How important was Eros in achieving a result?
I became very unsure of what my role was. Was I an artist, a psychologist, or an apprentice shaman? Was I supposed to be healing, painting, or analyzing? Or all three? I struggled not to let the my ego inflate itself over my small successes so far. From the outside, the whole activity seemed to have a wild erotic component, which got kept sane via the ritualistic habit of work as performance.
The process was breaking down taboos about how strangers relate. The task of behaving as a gentleman was easy. What was difficult was not comprehending my own objectives and reasons for continuing the work.
Did this project have an objective? Or was I just doing the process? It came to a collision between 'doing' and 'result'. I was doing, but was unsure if I was seeking results. I hadn't yet read Stahl or other ritualists on the subject, and hadn't broken the work into its result-oriented vs. ritualistic components. If the work was based in art, then as an artist, I should be seeing signs that the works were improving, getting better. That whole notion of value judgements about process gave me the creeps. How could better mean anything at all in the context of a ritual performance carried out between two people who didn't know each other at all except in this context?
Whatever it was it exposed some kind of truth of the way people behave with each other. Evidentiary. It was impossible to feel precious, I only wanted to share it.
My models were being hired not for what their bodies brought me in curves, or volumes, or lines, to draw, and reproduce, but as vessels of psychic content. I longed to see what was in their psyche, and what their minds were channelling, as I painted. I also wanted to help them see this content. As such any artistic activity on my part was just a vehicle, a channel for recording. Later I might invent another way of catching such stuff, and abandon the brush altogether.
As a shamanic activity, it seemed grotesquely uneven. I was the one paying my models as models. If it were purely shamanic they would be paying me. Yes, there was some discussion first between us on what to expect. I was not being compensated to help them understand or see what their life's dance was, or could be. I reasoned that if that ever started to happen, or if I began selling works to my subjects, that I could logically conclude there was some healing or self-understanding being offered by the work.
I reflected on my father, who was at times, a portrait painter. He sat his subjects for long hours in his studio, and whenever I went in as a youngster to visit, I realized I was witnessing a dialogue. A conversation. An exchange. He was painting, but they were also talking, asking questions, exchanging, learning. Was all portrait painting in some way healing?
Were the Celtic and Ancient writers of Odes, healing their subjects or strengthening them, by dedicating lines of verse to their existence?
All portraiture, written, drawn, or painted, I decided, must have a shamanic component, simply by virtue of being interpretive.
What of Eros? Yes Eros was there. But Eros was not seeking a result.
If I had seen my questions during this period in light of this duality, result vs. ritual, I would have realized I was taking the work powerfully in the direction of ritual. It was lovely when the work brought me close to a beautiful human being. I felt blessed. It was like watching a sunset, when one had never expected too be watching one. I realized however, that 'expectation' would be the nemesis of the work progressing. It would kill it. But where was I supposed to be making my developments? As a painter-artist, or as a healer using art in a new way? Was this just a performance, a drama, that I was enacting. If so how should I be learning from it?
At times I had to just let this inner dialogue drop.
I was on a journey. . . and I had to admit, yes, I had chosen the scenic route!
This became a crucial turning point as I fumbled with my desire to introduce words into the work. I had a friend, a well known painter in New York, who paints various notes and words into his large abstract paintings. They all felt so 'composed'. Is Ego always there? I wanted to torch the word out of existence, and still do. I particularly didn't want to write my own compositions into these paintings. Maybe others, not these. The lines from my gals held content, as dances alone. I could look at a piece moments after completion and get a feeling of character, of psychic direction. It felt true. I didn't have to invent. I just went through the process. How might I find a poetic equivalent to tracing the Cosmic Dance, but with words?
How could I bring sounds into the project which could be interpreted as words?
Most of the project to date was monochromatic. Should I introduce color? If so, how to do it without imposing color choice? Perhaps I was looking for a contrivance so that I might be freed of the task of composing and instead would simply be required to record. I never dreamed that guidelines for doing the work would eventually be defined by poetry, or that poetry would step out of the maze of lines and silhouettes as a fully formed voice, and that it would very soon, be speaking to me directly.
The work at this time had the feeling of a psychic pregnancy. A sort of gestational waiting period. I was tracing, and tracing, but I had no idea where it was taking me. I felt adrift in a river, in a rudderless raft. . . flowing through bliss, yes . . but to what end?
Would photography have been allowed at Delphi? I doubt it. Recording equipment?
These are difficult questions to answer. Media has a way of intruding into ritual, partly because ritual is predictable, and media records ritual activities easily. You don't see TV crews stationed at the tops of volcanos waiting for an eruption, because it cannot, in any sound way, be predicted. But the Queen celebrating mass on Christmas can be. So media and ritual have a long affinity.
Yet any study of ritual quickly establishes that new practices have to be arrived at in a ritual manner. This can take a very long time. So while Brahmin priests drive cars, smoke, and watch TVs, the holy places in most temples contain no cigarettes, no cars, or no electronics of any kind.
A year later would I read Stahl's seminal work, and take note of his observations regarding fire in Brahmanic ritual. The wood has to be the right wood. The ghee the right ghee. The fire altar is painstakingly constructed. Yet when the priest wants to step outside for a cigarette, he does so, and uses an ordinary match to light it.
The words, or poems, if they were to be called poems, were never intended to become 'my' compositions, or belong to my models. At that time, my thought was to harness the collective unconscious, working through both of us, to achieve some kind of statement through a form of automatic writing, that could be put into the work. But my emphasis was all wrong. I wanted to hear something, but I had created a method of manufacture, rather than participation, that was inconsistent with my intent. Also, if the ritual had been successful in disarming Logos, and made us more receptive to other forces, then why was I using a mechanical method of binary sorting to come up with the sounds? Couldn't I trust my models more than that?
My notes from the day's work:
"R___ and I did the word sorting, and after pleading to do it she got quite tired . . . [it] has a bizarre soporific effect on a lot of the women. It makes them drowsy, and very bored. Touching the same words over and over again traffics certain nerves with mildly unpleasant energy. This means that it is taking them close to difficult content but in a way that numbs the nervous responses. "
R____'s impatience showed me I wasn't using her talents. She had applied for the job as a Muse. She sensed what I was onto, and wanted to be a part. She was a player, on my stage. I had directed a show, and then at the crucial moment I was not calling upon her talent.
Yet something told me that snapping a photo in the middle of the work was not pukka. It brought consciousness back into our process at a time when consciousness was not needed. I dumped the cardboard she had photographed back into the bucket.
R_____ departed. Depressed, I snapped some shots of the remaining cardboards in disarray, saving as best I could, the results from this bungled effort. Would she forgive me?
I lay down and fell into a deep sleep. An hour or so later I was awakened by voices of women outside in the courtyard.
They were talking about me. Several women.
But when I went down to look for them, no one was there.
I became very unsure of what my role was. Was I an artist, a psychologist, or an apprentice shaman? Was I supposed to be healing, painting, or analyzing? Or all three? I struggled not to let the my ego inflate itself over my small successes so far. From the outside, the whole activity seemed to have a wild erotic component, which got kept sane via the ritualistic habit of work as performance.
The process was breaking down taboos about how strangers relate. The task of behaving as a gentleman was easy. What was difficult was not comprehending my own objectives and reasons for continuing the work.
Did this project have an objective? Or was I just doing the process? It came to a collision between 'doing' and 'result'. I was doing, but was unsure if I was seeking results. I hadn't yet read Stahl or other ritualists on the subject, and hadn't broken the work into its result-oriented vs. ritualistic components. If the work was based in art, then as an artist, I should be seeing signs that the works were improving, getting better. That whole notion of value judgements about process gave me the creeps. How could better mean anything at all in the context of a ritual performance carried out between two people who didn't know each other at all except in this context?
Whatever it was it exposed some kind of truth of the way people behave with each other. Evidentiary. It was impossible to feel precious, I only wanted to share it.
My models were being hired not for what their bodies brought me in curves, or volumes, or lines, to draw, and reproduce, but as vessels of psychic content. I longed to see what was in their psyche, and what their minds were channelling, as I painted. I also wanted to help them see this content. As such any artistic activity on my part was just a vehicle, a channel for recording. Later I might invent another way of catching such stuff, and abandon the brush altogether.
As a shamanic activity, it seemed grotesquely uneven. I was the one paying my models as models. If it were purely shamanic they would be paying me. Yes, there was some discussion first between us on what to expect. I was not being compensated to help them understand or see what their life's dance was, or could be. I reasoned that if that ever started to happen, or if I began selling works to my subjects, that I could logically conclude there was some healing or self-understanding being offered by the work.
I reflected on my father, who was at times, a portrait painter. He sat his subjects for long hours in his studio, and whenever I went in as a youngster to visit, I realized I was witnessing a dialogue. A conversation. An exchange. He was painting, but they were also talking, asking questions, exchanging, learning. Was all portrait painting in some way healing?
Were the Celtic and Ancient writers of Odes, healing their subjects or strengthening them, by dedicating lines of verse to their existence?
All portraiture, written, drawn, or painted, I decided, must have a shamanic component, simply by virtue of being interpretive.
What of Eros? Yes Eros was there. But Eros was not seeking a result.
If I had seen my questions during this period in light of this duality, result vs. ritual, I would have realized I was taking the work powerfully in the direction of ritual. It was lovely when the work brought me close to a beautiful human being. I felt blessed. It was like watching a sunset, when one had never expected too be watching one. I realized however, that 'expectation' would be the nemesis of the work progressing. It would kill it. But where was I supposed to be making my developments? As a painter-artist, or as a healer using art in a new way? Was this just a performance, a drama, that I was enacting. If so how should I be learning from it?
At times I had to just let this inner dialogue drop.
I was on a journey. . . and I had to admit, yes, I had chosen the scenic route!
This became a crucial turning point as I fumbled with my desire to introduce words into the work. I had a friend, a well known painter in New York, who paints various notes and words into his large abstract paintings. They all felt so 'composed'. Is Ego always there? I wanted to torch the word out of existence, and still do. I particularly didn't want to write my own compositions into these paintings. Maybe others, not these. The lines from my gals held content, as dances alone. I could look at a piece moments after completion and get a feeling of character, of psychic direction. It felt true. I didn't have to invent. I just went through the process. How might I find a poetic equivalent to tracing the Cosmic Dance, but with words?
How could I bring sounds into the project which could be interpreted as words?
Most of the project to date was monochromatic. Should I introduce color? If so, how to do it without imposing color choice? Perhaps I was looking for a contrivance so that I might be freed of the task of composing and instead would simply be required to record. I never dreamed that guidelines for doing the work would eventually be defined by poetry, or that poetry would step out of the maze of lines and silhouettes as a fully formed voice, and that it would very soon, be speaking to me directly.
The work at this time had the feeling of a psychic pregnancy. A sort of gestational waiting period. I was tracing, and tracing, but I had no idea where it was taking me. I felt adrift in a river, in a rudderless raft. . . flowing through bliss, yes . . but to what end?
Would photography have been allowed at Delphi? I doubt it. Recording equipment?
These are difficult questions to answer. Media has a way of intruding into ritual, partly because ritual is predictable, and media records ritual activities easily. You don't see TV crews stationed at the tops of volcanos waiting for an eruption, because it cannot, in any sound way, be predicted. But the Queen celebrating mass on Christmas can be. So media and ritual have a long affinity.
Yet any study of ritual quickly establishes that new practices have to be arrived at in a ritual manner. This can take a very long time. So while Brahmin priests drive cars, smoke, and watch TVs, the holy places in most temples contain no cigarettes, no cars, or no electronics of any kind.
Unconscious behavior, needs to be characterized, or attributed, in order to be understood. We need to speak of 'it', 'its needs', or of 'Her' or 'Him'. Carl Jung named them the Other, the Anima, the Animus. The Archetypes, and the Collective Unconscious. The Greeks named them Hermes, Artemis, Zeus, Dionysus. They each had separate areas of work, that affected our lives. How to get along with wind and weather. . . Indra's your man if you from India. Starting a journey? Ganesh. Those that have sworn off the Gods, have truly 'worn' the Gods, for to swear off them is to swear by them. They cannot be ignored.
It still goes on. All of us deify. Physicists, skeptics, criminals, all of us, to some degree. Once recognized as a being, we are able to cultivate or modify that energy. We need it to understand and exert control in areas where Logos cannot reach.
A year later would I read Stahl's seminal work, and take note of his observations regarding fire in Brahmanic ritual. The wood has to be the right wood. The ghee the right ghee. The fire altar is painstakingly constructed. Yet when the priest wants to step outside for a cigarette, he does so, and uses an ordinary match to light it.
The words, or poems, if they were to be called poems, were never intended to become 'my' compositions, or belong to my models. At that time, my thought was to harness the collective unconscious, working through both of us, to achieve some kind of statement through a form of automatic writing, that could be put into the work. But my emphasis was all wrong. I wanted to hear something, but I had created a method of manufacture, rather than participation, that was inconsistent with my intent. Also, if the ritual had been successful in disarming Logos, and made us more receptive to other forces, then why was I using a mechanical method of binary sorting to come up with the sounds? Couldn't I trust my models more than that?
My notes from the day's work:
"R___ and I did the word sorting, and after pleading to do it she got quite tired . . . [it] has a bizarre soporific effect on a lot of the women. It makes them drowsy, and very bored. Touching the same words over and over again traffics certain nerves with mildly unpleasant energy. This means that it is taking them close to difficult content but in a way that numbs the nervous responses. "
R____'s impatience showed me I wasn't using her talents. She had applied for the job as a Muse. She sensed what I was onto, and wanted to be a part. She was a player, on my stage. I had directed a show, and then at the crucial moment I was not calling upon her talent.
Yet something told me that snapping a photo in the middle of the work was not pukka. It brought consciousness back into our process at a time when consciousness was not needed. I dumped the cardboard she had photographed back into the bucket.
Something was building. Another entity was involved. By messing up what we had done, I had paused to question the quality of our approach.
R_____ departed. Depressed, I snapped some shots of the remaining cardboards in disarray, saving as best I could, the results from this bungled effort. Would she forgive me?
I lay down and fell into a deep sleep. An hour or so later I was awakened by voices of women outside in the courtyard.
They were talking about me. Several women.
But when I went down to look for them, no one was there.
04/12/2005 - The Car
First Session with R___ K___.We talked a lot about myths. RK threw ideas back at me, adding her thoughts about the evolution of this project.
"Our first drawing seems crazy, and without a center."
Graphically it is not well organized. That does mean we're not centered, but that do we need practice.
"It takes time to learn a dance!"
We looked at this drawing and saw very clear images:
"A dog's head. A creature facing left with two horns.
"The head of a child.
"An old car sitting on the head of a man, who looks like a frog.
"Deep within, there is a princess caught in a thicket of alders."
Monday, November 22, 2010
05/19/2006 - Twins
[Note: If reading these posts out of order, you may be confused. Two of the gals that modelled for me during the period 2005-8 have since had twins. This post is about my work with R___ K___. S____ also worked for me starting about the same time. I wrote separately about her twins, and a dream I had while she was giving birth.]
I went to great lengths to work with R_____ one last time before she moved to California.
Pregnant, and recently married, she was all a tither with anxiety over the move, and I think remembered the deep relaxation often induced by this work. We chose a day, and I arranged to have a taxi bring her from the West Village, over to my studio in Brooklyn.
She and I worked just three hours. It was magical. Her gorgeous body was radiant, as the pregnancy was just beginning to show. We spoke frankly about our lives.
The ritual had gained a lot of momentum since we'd worked in 2005. I laid out a simple program. Poses, poetry, then more poses. This time the poem was fun. We were talking about other things as the words rattled out and I painted them into the work, horizontally across, then vertically.
I knew when R____ materialized out of nowhere, that it might be years before I saw her again. Sure enough the car arrived. She flew away, a gorgeous bird, to a happy life. I was choked. I sat at my computer and lifted the four cardboards of words carefully, and typed them in. With only the most obvious modifications, here they are, the voices that I heard in the courtyard that day, speaking of me, now speaking of R_____, of my project, . . . ways to think of it, . . . ways to work.
Fiery film like a symbolic metaphor shimmers,
yet investigates glorious music for communication.
Important opportunity,
Confront the ennui of my verbose experiment
Must I weld through glass? It's gone my asthma!
Co-dependent daughter knows a better surreal harmony.
Understands a psychotic scale, Sanguine hence clever.
Make impressions, write observations, delve every finest character.
Approach, through your original studio
almost understand question, choose a sad torpid companion.
Doctor aesthetic, Sculpt passion, concrete Herculean leader!
Munificent Friend, cunning Beauty
Sound not laughter!
Cruising Dude, discover the sweet guile to investigate an opinion.
PM smoke - you can all think to create individual music.
Imagine, understand there will always be her absurd instrument,
Please share about electric strength!
Chant Equality!
Observe her borderline society that forms the subject.
Check your differences,
Start inclusively, capture canvas
Hate competition, give peace, model looms dead
Child paints grand rhythm comes gives health
I abuse a psychedelic joke, very arid grandeur
Metal Mother, come sing!
Must muscle horny man
Use praise, chisel some unity
Since Memory trashes Life
Laugh!, Languish, Scream!
Dormant pressure, my fresh love, wants freedom.
Look no feeling enervates this body
Mom, stick junk, pain . . .
This serious purple sleep could make free diversity
A deep white smear's best for after nude work
Sister always eschew when sure like star,
We're never curious, as opaque.
Demand break.
Beg then walk with power above,
Dust you know, Nefarious, Obtuse One!
[This is the original. The raw sound. The words we chose and arranged and read, as sounds. Some analysis of this work, and my evolution of the piece now follow.]
Fiery film like
I'm having problems with this spelling. She doesn't like 'like'. Plain and simple.
Simile is not her method. Metaphor is.
Like is to Sign ,
As metaphor is to Symbol.
I liken Design,
As a Door to a Thimble.
So . . what do I do with it?
Fiery film like . . well yes R___ K___ had left to join her movie director husband. I had long since given up my film career, and was not thinking of restarting. Hmmm. What else could she mean? There must be a way to read this, Dylan-like, so that it makes sense.
The answer came to me:
Fiery film like
sounds like
Fire eye filled in light . .
This makes sense. My kiln, a gas kiln at my studio in West Haven, has two 'fire-eyes', devices that keep the burners on, and turn them off if there's a problem. Also, lately I've practiced looking into the sun, and also looking into my kiln even when filled with nearly white light. A simple meditation.
A symbolic metaphor shimmers!
Yes! She's glad I've cleared up the simili thing. Metaphor baby!
And so. . . it evolves. But stays true to the sound. Always. Always. Always.
If you falsify what I say,
I'll call and lie to you some day.
If you falsify what I said,
You'll gratify me when you're dead.
So I tread politely around this lady. Truly I do. Manners. Manners. Manners.
Note to R___ K___ curious, did you ever think this would keep speaking to us for so long? MP]
05/18/2005 - The Deer
"One pose, lie down, I'll write your words around you."
I think she knew things were happening, and that having her words 'wrapped' around her was transformative. She still felt some anger, I think. It's a powerful dose, all this. I have to be patient.
She laid down like a beautiful deer. I think she was wearing a gold thong. Her hair had a little tuft that came from her cowlick, the rest went in a wash to one side. I was writing and I was painting. Suddenly I realized it didn't matter what the words were. Just the sounds that came from them in that situation.
They were peaceful.
In this drawing she is composed and whole, whereas all of her other drawings show a lack of symmetry, a kind of madness, and rage. It always seemed to happen this way. When the drawings become calm and ordered, she stops, almost as if at that point she knows the work is done.
R____ went west, and married a film director.
We worked one year later, when she was pregnant, with twins.
04/27/2005 - Drama
R_____ came over and we spent most of our time on this one drawing. Finally her energy is becoming centered. There's a very potent Dionysian male figure at the center, penis and all. All the masks around the head have started to fall away.R_____ is a creature of drama. I always feel when working with her, that we're on stage, and that I have forgotten my part. She looks at me and questions in the way that an experienced player eyes down a junior who missed a line. I'm nervous. . .
After we finished this we spent some time on the word project, but I destroyed her work before she could get too concious of it - she had tried to take a picture of the words in their first state, so I messed it up and promised we'd start over next time.
I tried to explain. We had a long talk about this. She doubted whether she could ever get back on track. I said there were an infinite number of sortings she could do, and they would be perfectly consistent in that they would all be hers. The idea is not to see the particular as our identity, but rather as one of the events emanating from our identities. The Self is infinite. Drawings and poems are not, but they can, if we don't get precious about them, reflect that infinity, or portray it to some degree.
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