For those of us who WILL NOT make it to New York by mid October, Roberta Smith of The New York Times brings us to the Whitney to see the Rudolf Stingel exhibit. It is very rare that I CRAVE to go someplace, and this is one of those times.
I want to put my gesture in the foil of this instillation. See the small video yourself by pressing the link below.
PRESS HERE >> Rudolf Stingel at the Whitney Museum
or for other info go the Whitney at http://www.whitney.org/
Today, six years after America saw so much destruction, this post is dedicated to Constructive Genius. Peace to all of us in our love and creativity. Here’s one man’s creative use of a good mind and talented hands towards pure creation in mansuetude!
Kinetic Sculpture (CLICK HERE) !!
Theo Jansen is amazing, brave, willing to take risks, to dare. I am amazed by the grace and abstract beauty of these works of art. When you’re done checking this out, watch it again. Then go here http://del.icio.us/gravestmor/robots for other cool and intelligent visual robotics available for us to wonder at.
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Theo Jansen, artist, studied science at the University of Delft Holland. The first seven years being a artist he just made paintings. Then he starts a project with a big flying saucer, which could really fly. It flew over the town of Delft in 1980 and brought the people in the street and the police in commotion. Since about ten years he is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.
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Listen Here Listen Here Listen Here
This is an audio clip of the poet Elizabeth Bishop reading her poem ”One Art.” I’ve always loved the simplicity of this poem, and because it celebrates the art of losing! Yes, losing. I stumbled upon this recording accidently, and it woke in me a few ideas—about recorded sounds, the internet and how the fingerprint of a voice can stay on this earth long after the person, (body and voice and eye contact) dies.
http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/video/bishop.html
I had never heard Elizabeth Bishop read, so I appreciate the quality of her voice, the living woman’s tone and inflection as she speaks the art she authored. So I listened for that, to hear how she puts the poem into a rhythmic meter; I found myself taking her voice and laying it like tracks beside the inner inflection my own mind used to read her poems before I ever heard her voice. We all read with a voice we use as sort of a loud-speaker in our heads… if we’re lucky enough to know the real author’s voice, the gesture of its inflections, its tenor and tremble, we reproduce that while we read—otherwise we make up our own, and some of us have many imagined sounds/voices to the different things we read. Have you noticed this?
This poetry clip also has other sounds enter while the poem is read. This is what fascinated me. This recording wasn’t done in a modern studio, but in a live setting; it wasn’t sterilized. The random sounds brought a depth of texture for me, imagination stepped in–images appeared in my mind, then a painting came to mind while listening. It was my own version of the light in an Edward Hopper painting Rooms by the Sea, of slanted illumination bouncing off the ocean; then a train moved across the distant sands, then a bird added music to the background, then a chair scraped and humanity existed, audience. All sorts of inner textual sensual things appeared to waken inside me, carrying emotion. A scroll unrolled of poetry readings I’ve been to and some I imagine I might enter into. I was also imaginatively in Cape Cod, witness to the sea and the sand and the salted air and the hope of butter dredging lobster and cold beer with friends at an outside table… after the reading. But there was no reading. I had linked to this recording and listened to a famous poet read a poem from a time and place I didn’t exist in.
Presence existed, the fingerprint of her voice left a smudge on me, and more—all of the other sounds in the recording, they entangled. They became authors too, and wrote, sound scratched into the future that I am, from the (is it dead) past!
None of this is spoken of in this poem, none of it, just a woman poet reading one poem and a few other random sounds. Listen to it yourself, if I haven’t ruined it for you. For me, in that instant of hearing it, a painting appeared, a room of people breathed, art awoke to sketch life, all without a hand, without materials, because the inner artist is always available and profoundly willing to create.
ONE ART
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
