A Mound of Space
Kipple is a word invented by the science fiction author Philip K. Dick for a concept similar to entropy. It has inspired many of the photographs seen in the Kippleverse, discussed below and sprinkled into this post. But first let’s dive into the concept itself. (more…)
Einstein: Wikimedia Commons | Swan: Robert Woeger
I have been searching online for years for this story that’s been half-submerged in my memory, with no luck. The story concerns one Albert Einstein, a blind man, and a swan. I finally found it in an old journal entry dated June 8, 1985. The story is but a fragment that I cut out of a newspaper and saved. However, I have no idea which newspaper it came from, and I can’t find this exact version of the story anywhere: (more…)
The Danish “Dogme 95” directors created some amazing films, and their famous Manifesto, below, still resonates with with me as a way of getting outside of myself, my work, and aesthetic preconceptions. (more…)
A wonderful thought from Boris Vian, quoted in A half-century homage to France’s master-prankster, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the author / jazz musician / artist’s death: (more…)
Leave it to science to transform dada into data. A new study suggests that the experience of nonsense, “may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large,” according to a recent article in the New York Times, How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect.
The article continues: (more…)
Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City.
This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.
I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.
He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In “The Chatter of the Soul,” he elaborates: (more…)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan (p. 204), relates this anecdote about Apelles of Kos, a renowned ancient Greek painter from the 4th century BC:
Sextus Empiricus retold the story of Apelles the Painter, who, while doing a portrait of a horse, was attempting to depict the foam from the horse’s mouth. After trying very hard and making a mess, he gave up and, in irritation, took the sponge he used for cleaning his brush and threw it at the picture. Where the sponge hit, it left a perfect representation of the foam.
A beautiful case study in support of Taleb’s advice to “maximize the serendipity around you,” something I am always trying to tap into both in the visualization process (painting, drawing, making stains) and in the conceptualization process (making words, stringing words along, weaving and unweaving narrative threads).
Thanks Michael for sending me the book — it’s very interesting and, as you suspected, right up my alley.
Thinking more about the work of linguist Simon Kirby, featured in the New York Times book review that I wrote about a couple days ago, so I Googled him. That led me to the rich vein of glorious word ore that is Linguistic Typology, an academic journal about, well, linguistic typology, stupid.
The LT website features an index of all the articles and book reviews published in the journal’s ten-year history. Here is a mashup list of titles from this page — beginning with good old Simon Kirby, who leads off this list with a jaw-dropping title from 1997: (more…)
Interesting review in the New York times today of a new book that attempts to unravel the mystery of how language came to be: THE FIRST WORD — The Search for the Origins of Language, by Christine Kenneally.
This it what turned me on the most (italics mine): (more…)
I was lucky enough to meet and chat with the art critic Dave Hickey back when I was in grad school at UCLA. He was just visiting for the day with another artist, but I admired his enthusiasm.
Here is a great Dave Hickey interview in zingmagazine #14 (text version). A snippet:
The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the ’50s and the ’60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made — from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late ’60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy — you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the ’60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society — the society of contemporaries.
And more a little later:
The main thing is Americans don’t like art, they won’t pay for art, they don’t deserve art. That’s just a fact. This is a Puritan republic in which nobody gives a shit about art. When I came to the art world, there were maybe 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they got payed or not. Today there are about 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they get paid or not. That’s fine, those 2000 people created Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism in its early days. There have been now for 30 years people working for salaries administering the art world, and what have they done? Art can have public consequences, but it’s not very educational.
I keep challenging people, “Tell me one thing that you’ve learned from art.” It is not an educational activity. But we like education, and we like things that go away. You don’t need to know anything to understand good art.
OK, one last quote before I go / one last cup of words ‘fore I go / to the valley below:
I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning. If we still had to think about a Pollock the way he thought about it, we would hate it. He was crazy, he was an asshole. He thought he was doing Jungian Expression or something. Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that’s very difficult. Works of art don’t have messages. They don’t have determinate meanings. They’re not just formal objects.
Deleuze has a book about Lewis Carroll, The Logic of Sense, which is exactly about the way we perceive and sense things. Lewis Carroll has lines that don’t mean anything, but they have meaning. And that’s how art works. A Pollock doesn’t mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It’s totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don’t know what it meant, I know that the story doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. Artists don’t know what they’re doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.
I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That’s not meant to discount the artist. It’s meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don’t know anyway.