cellular cosmogony, shows in london, related topics

My life seems to be a series of delayed approaches lately. We shall see whether I attain any of my intended goals.

At least this deferral of writing about the Glenfiddich artist in residence programme and why Romeo Alaeff's work in it this year is worthy of reflection (which it most assuredly is) will get the first draft of a much more delayed assessment into search-engine-findable condition.

Evan Levy and his wife Benita Carr are Atlanta artists whose double-noose infinity symbol, as I wrote earlier, has the potential of showing up all over London as a bumper sticker from the "Recognise" exhibition. Whether it does or not is another matter; it could happen, just as a piece of writing posted on the web has the potential of being read by any number of world-famous individuals, though the likelihood of it is infinitesimal. But as with single lottery tickets, having the object on site at least increases the odds from zero to very, very small.

Levy's Cellular Cosmogony is a site sculpture currently (I think) still on view in the planned environmentally-friendly community of Serenbe, a west-Georgia variation on the New Urbanism that is worthy of investigation on its own terms. But on a morning when I am supposed to board Czech Airlines for Istanbul via Prague, I am barely fit to offer this quick-fix reflection on the sculpture.

The piece is inspired by the hollow-earth theories explored in the nineteenth century by a visionary who founded his own Koreshan community in south Florida, but there's nothing about it except the globular form that would suggest this. The sphere contains obsidian chimes that are activated by a motion sensor when visitors approach the viewing bench. The screens amplify sound so that ordinary conversation echoes as in some immense stadium. The combination of perceptual disorientation and gently evocative random music produces an effect that is more easily felt than described. The polished metal of the globular sculpture reflects the scene rather like the circular mirrors in seventeenth century Dutch paintings.

And the whole piece, like the double-noose infinity symbol, reflects the difficulty of writing about contemporary art; so much is dependent on immediate experience, of having perceptual faculties stimulated that you didn't even know you had, that unless one falls back on pretentious artspeak it would require the skills of a novelist to communicate with any degree of adequacy what is going on.

This is one reason you will find far more reflection on anything and everything other than art in this particular journal (counterforces.blogspot being the primary vehicle for my artwriting these days); there is too much that requires experiments in prose of which I am sometimes capable and sometimes not.




Contrast this with the multiple visual and psychological and historical links provided by the symbolist-and-decadent art from which Peter Milton's oeuvre ultimately derives, by way of the Belgian surrealists and such (the images of Milton's work on the poster for the 25th anniversary edition of John Crowley's Little, Big are the stimulus for this observation).

Consider, if you will, Max Svabinsky's 1896 painting from the Czech decadence, which I recently encountered on a poster in the chapel of Hillingdon Hospital here in northwest London. Svabinsky had a long career (he was in his twenties when he painted this) and I would like to know more about how he navigated the changing currents of history. But Otto Urban's book on Czech symbolist painting costs $125 and I am unaware of any books in English about Svabinsky.

The point, however, is that I suspect there are far more admirers of contemporary transformations of symbolist-and-decadent art than of the perception-altering art of contemporary site sculptors. Of course, the wider the appeal to an assortment of personality types, the greater the popularity, though at the farther end of the continuum you've lost some of the ones you started out with; I love both Levy's sculpture and much of the representational oeuvre I've been discussing, but I've expressed my dismay at most of the kitsch that passes for fantasy art. The work of Peter Milton, by contrast, has an edge of unfashionable authenticity.

Mon empereur...yo! word up! over here!

In the old folktales, the Stone, the Cup, the Rose, the Key, the whatever it is in that particular story, turns up in the gutter or under the bed or anyplace except the chapel royal where the official folks have been looking for it.

And whatever it is, it is often not what people expected it to be. (Well, okay, a lot of times it is in the chapel royal or whatever, and a lot of times it is exactly what people expected it to be, but those are more often in the epics, not the folktales. We are talking shifting archetypal themes here, which of course is what this journal, and currently this journey, is all about.)



Just in case, I have been looking for a copy of Charles Williams' War in Heaven to compare notes. This is from a (physical) site that has changed hands among multinational corporations a lot lately.

This is also so much of an in-joke that I ask one of my regular readers to explicate for the benefit of latecomers. I promise (deo volente et si fluvium non surgit, that is), that serious notes will resume when I am less in the midst of revelatations (I meant to write "revelations," but I like that typo a lot) and initiations and flights of real planes laden with purely imaginary resonances.

For now, forgiveness and forbearance, please.