Art – Page 12 – Via Negativa

February 21, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Book Arts

inspired by the work of Luz Marina Ruiz (hat tip: Natalie d’Arbeloff)

I entered a book tall as a clock tower.
Its pages all had timers set to self-construct:
bird, leaf, crescent, an orogeny of stairs.
The seasons were orderly as line dancers.

You can make a book from anything that folds.
Waves & breakers, for example, with
the ocean for a text: the reader bobs
like a boat with a shark’s-fin sail.

Books can be small as wallets bulging with bills,
those go-betweens everyone thumbs through
but nobody reads. (This, by the way,
is why money always smells of sadness.)

Books can be rooms completely taken over
by feral wallpaper, patterns unavailable
in any store. Some books can’t be opened
without changing all their contents.

That’s how it is with dreams, too: they change
in the telling. Night falls, & the words
merge with the black paper. You need
the moon’s red monocle to make out the stitching.

September 22, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The Animators

Sparked by Natalie’s postcard, “blinding light.”

The first time they outlined their hands with blown pigment, it was a holy thing. With the help of the sacrament they had shifted over, and placing their palms against the stone flank they felt warmth and movement, the charge of spirit. Through this thinnest of membranes they were making contact: the Others’ hands or forepaws were right there. Quick, get the paint!

Each time after that, though, it became a little more routine. The dried prints did not open into new passageways as they’d hoped. They made more prints, but it wasn’t quite the same. The rock began to feel like rock, instead of the living animal they knew it to be. Someone grew violent after ingesting the sacrament and split a boy’s head open before they could subdue him, so they decided to try the ceremony without it.

While most people just sat in the darkness feeling their bladders fill or resisting the urge to scratch certain itches, a couple of men claimed that it was better this way — they had a more direct access now, and if others did not, it must mean that they had violated some previously unknown taboo. Fortunately, their improved access privileged them with detailed knowledge of such things, and they began to speak the beginningless Law.

Now when they outlined a hand, it was to bear witness to one or another revelation. The steadiness of the rock was the whole point. Some things — perhaps most things — eluded contact, except in dreams. Those who knew could teach the rest how to become better dreamers, but it would come at a price, because don’t we have to kill in order to live? The Others were hungry for visions, so it was decided that the acolytes would stay underground and paint the pictures in their heads. They would give up sun- and moonlight for the welfare of the tribe.

The longer they stayed in the bowels of the earth-animal, the better and more vivid their visions became. Children were born down there and grew up by torchlight, clothed in thick pelts from the game they learned to draw without ever seeing it. Their parents marveled at their facility with the increasingly complex tools of animation, but grew alarmed at the obesity brought on by their sedentary habits. Come out into the other chambers, they pleaded. Explore the maze of passageways! That’s what we did when we were your age. But the kids wouldn’t listen.

The old shamans also felt lost. This new generation didn’t sit passively and wait for messages from the other side; they often began by sending messages of their own. The vision room became fully interactive. Those who lived aboveground only visited it four times a year, now, and the cavemen and -women regarded them with a condescension befitting their status as child-like primitives. You are living in a world of dreams, they would intone, eyes bulging, their corpse-white skin bared for effect. Be sure to keep bringing us fruit and game, so we can keep dreaming these dreams for you. A priest would lead them to the frieze of hand prints. Here are the ones who wouldn’t listen. See them reaching. See them trying to be born.

May 4, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Rhoneymeade

Yesterday I finally paid a visit to the Rhoneymeade Arboretum, Sculpture Garden, and Labyrinth, which is about 35 miles northeast of here, right out in the middle of a farm valley. The only other sculpture gardens I’ve visited have been those attached to major urban museums, so I was interested to see what difference, if any, the rural location might make.

Well, for one thing, not all sculptures here are made by humans. Also, trees both native and exotic take pride of place in the garden and in the nearby labyrinth, a refreshing shift in emphasis from most modern presentations of Art, where nature plays a supporting role at best.

Nor were all the human sculptures either anthropomorphic or completely abstract, though the majority did fit into one of those two categories. “Flight” was one of a half-dozen or so that seemed to take its surroundings fully into account.

The birds here do what birds always do to public statuary. This plaster and resin sculpture is identified as “Brown Man” on the website, but “Thoughtful Man” on the laminated directory in the studio at Rhoneymeade itself. One way or another, it’s obviously getting lots of attention from the local birds.

The plaster was beginning to fall off in a couple of places, and the grass had been left to grow long around it. Given its manner of composition — a life cast from a living model, according to the owner — I imagine that the artist fully anticipated its slow return to nature.

Complete set of Rhoneymeade photos (9) / Slideshow

December 2, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Wild apples

Jay Pfeil - Wild Apples

Be sure to check out the 18th edition of the Festival of the Trees at Riverside Rambles.

The above print is one the few original artworks I own: “Wild Apples,” by Jay Pfeil. Please excuse the reflection on the glass — since Jay makes a living from her art, I thought I’d better not make too easily reproducible an image.

In addition to its merits as a work of art, it’s valuable to me as part of the Plummer’s Hollow historical record: it depicts an actual tree that stands about fifty feet from my kitchen window, as it appeared during the the artist’s nine month tenancy in this very house, back in 1979-1980. In fact, the print came off a big press that stood, as I recall, right next to the wall upon which it currently hangs in the guest house living room.

View at larger size

Here’s the same tree as it appeared a week ago, with just a little Photoshoppery to make it a look slightly etchified (excuse the technical art-talk here, folks). I didn’t notice until I compared the photo with the print that Jay must’ve reversed her own sketch at some point in the printing process, because in reality the two trunks overlap in the opposite direction from the way she depicted them. Aside from that discrepancy, one can clearly see how much the tree has grown over the past 28 years, and how much it remains the same. A couple bad ice storms have taken their toll, but every year the tree is still dotted with apples that only the deer could love — and it gets well fertilized as a result.

We have several wild apple trees around the fringes of the field, and I’m sure they represent either old rootstock shorn of its grafts that survived the bulldozing of the Plummer Farm orchard back in the 1950s, or else the direct offspring of orchard trees — apple varieties don’t come true from seed. Here’s a photo taken in what is now our shed lawn, showing a bit of the orchard in the background as it appeared in 1919.

The child in the photo was a Plummer relative up visiting his grandparents, Jacob and Mollie Plummer, who had a house in town at the time, but probably spent at least part of the summer here in the guest house. I would love to know just how many people have lived in this modest little dwelling over the 150 years of its existence. Just the other week, someone contacted us through the Plummer’s Hollow site to say that an ancestor of his had been born here back in the 1880s, and my Dad — who has done extensive research on the history of the place — had never heard the name. In fact, that was the first good evidence we’ve had that the place was even rented out in the 19th century, when Plummers still lived in the main house year-round.

Jay Pfeil and her soon-to-be husband Richard Sackett only lived here a short time, but they made a big impression on me. I was 12 and 13 at the time, and my brothers and I used to drop in after supper at least once a week for jam sessions: Richard was an accomplished guitarist, and my brother Steve played the five-string banjo. Richard got a job with a local landscaping company, and when time and circumstance permitted, he used to go busking in the streets of State College with some of his musician friends. Jay was exhibiting her works at local and regional arts festivals, with encouragement from her artist mother, who came to visit a couple of times — the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, I guess. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the three of them were role models of a sort, the first people I’d ever known who put art and music at the center of their lives. True, my mother is a writer, but my parents were never what one would call bohemian.

The winter of 1979-80 was a rough one, and Jay and Richard had to leave their Volkswagon bus at the bottom of the road for a couple of months, where eventually it got vandalized. The isolation per se didn’t seem to bother them too much, but they left, Jay said, because there wasn’t enough light here. It’s a north-facing hollow, and the guest house in particular is dark because of its proximity to the woods. For me, of course, the cave-like ambience is one of the main attractions of living here, but then I work with words rather than images. Jay and Richard moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Jay continues to make intaglio prints of local trees, among other things. In a biographical statement on the Piedmont Craftsmen site, she says,

At present I am immersed in drawing new leaves in the spring, with a special love of the native Fraser (or Mountain) Magnolia. I am also continuing to work on a number of other series, such as ‘Paths Through the Woods,’ ‘Plant Portraits,’ and ‘Full Moon’ … Through my daily mountain hikes, I strive to etch or draw my work in their natural locations. Due to the time-consuming and complex nature of etching and engraving, larger works are often finalized in my studio. It is my hope that [by] conveying my enthusiasm and reverence for the wild world … others may enjoy, respect, and conserve the environmental diversity that surrounds us in a sustainable, cooperative balance.

Though Jay may have ended up putting down roots farther south in the Appalachians, the seeds she planted here continue to bear fruit, albeit in a slightly altered form.

November 23, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Hunting vs. gathering

Hunters, by Banksy

Yeah, yeah, it’s Black Friday. But it’s also just three days until the opening day of regular rifle deer season in Pennsylvania, which for some people I know is like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s rolled into one. So while the gatherers are standing in checkout lines, the hunters are moving tree stands around, cleaning their rifles, and going to the target range.

For the righteous among us, of course, there’s always leftover tofurkey and Buy Nothing Day. To each his/her own. Me, I’m going out to look for some photos.

September 11, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Iron aged

So much of modern urban coolness seems to derive from smooth, reflective surfaces.

A deliberately aged, industrial artifact can draw a crowd.

Surrounded by millions of strangers, who wants to risk open vulnerability?

Unless you grew up in the rust belt, surrounded by shuttered factories, I guess you’d have no particular reason to associate a Richard Serra sculpture with unemployment, drug abuse, and domestic violence.

The primary associations would presumably be romantic or nostalgic. It would seem almost rustic, perhaps — a wall in search of a garden, an extension of the earth.

Its vulnerability to the elements might connote a kind of innocence. Visitors would be warned against touching the rusty surface, or even (for the indoor portions of the exhibition) snapping photos.

All it takes is a simple frame to turn the innocent ironic.

But the sculptor wants to provoke “an engagement between the viewer, the site, and the work.” We must do what we would never do with a stranger: take off our sunglasses and meet the iron’s yellow eyes. No irony there.

September 8, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Ansel Adams and the Polaroid

Visiting an Ansel Adams exhibit, I am unable to fully focus on the largest prints, distracted by the reflections in the glass behind which they are imprisoned. Is this how the photographer intended his work to be seen, with the world of the gallery imposed like a double exposure over El Capitan or the New Mexico cemetery in the moonlight?

The exhibit explores the decades-long relationship between Adams and Edwin Land, the founder of the Polaroid Corporation, for whom Adams worked as a consultant. Fascinating material — especially the many snapshots Adams generated as he tested the various films and cameras. But given the fact that the exhibit was sponsored by Polaroid, and not knowing much about Adams other than what I can remember from an art history course I took 20 years ago, I am unable to exorcise the demon of distrust. How really central was Adams’ experience with Polaroid film to his overall career as an artist?

They quote a couple of sentences from Adams’ autobiography: “Many of my most successful photographs from the 1950’s onward have been made on Polaroid film. One look at the tonal quality of the print I have achieved should convince the uninitiated of the truly superior quality of Polaroid film.” The uninitiated, yes — that’s me. I am able to relate to the many test snapshots on exhibit far better than to the iconic Western landscapes, in part because their small size requires close viewing, where reflections on the glass are not nearly so distracting. And the subjects are casual and domestic: the corner of a porch. A woman standing on her front stoop.

And at any rate, as a very amateur digital photographer and blogger, I am most struck by how this artist renowned for his long exposures celebrated the instantaneousness of the Polaroid. “To have a print and a negative from the same exposure is a tremendous assist in the creative process,” Adams wrote in 1961. I had also always associated the Polaroid with low-quality color snapshots of family gatherings, but the docent tells us the film was in fact designed for nature photography. All of Adams’ Polaroids in the exhibition are in black-and-white.

The docent talks about Adams’ difficult relationship with color. He spent the last years of his life trying to master color photography, but finally gave up, she says. His whole approach to photography was shaped by his early training as a classical pianist; he was a composer, not a mere finder, of images, and he couldn’t handle a lack of total control over colors and values. Moreover, he found the medium’s promise of verisimilitude deceptive:

Color photography is a beguiling medium in that it offers some apparent simulation of reality, to which the majority of the public respond. Because of economic necessity, the development of color has been keyed to popular demand (much more than black—and—white photography), and the approach to professional work has focused on “realism ” of color and fail—safe technology.

The taste—makers in color photography are the manufacturers, advertisers in general and the public with their insatiable appetite for the ‘snappy snapshot.” I have come to the conclusion that the understanding and appreciation of color involves the illusion that the color photograph represents the colors of the world as we think we perceive them to be. The images are, at best, poor simulations, but the perceptive alchemy translates the two—dimensional picture into the common world of experience. Picture reality is a philosophical and psychological impossibility. Color pictures are so ubiquitous that the casual viewer comes to accept them as the true “reality”, the color process reveals for them the real world, which is not hard to understand because the “real world” is, for most people, an artifact of the industrial/material surround. The colors of the urban environment are for the most part far more garish and “unrelated” than we find in nature. The Creator did not go to art school and natural color, while more gentle and subtle, seldom has what we call aesthetic resonance.

Among the large prints in the exhibit, the one that most impresses me has an industrial subject, “Pipes and Gauges, West Virginia, 1939.” The composition of curved white pipes and small gauges, with its frank sexuality, is far warmer and earthier than any of the landscapes, “artifact of the industrial/material surround” though it might have been.

March 29, 2007May 14, 2016 by Dave Bonta

The Dog

He’s gone, my leader.
Turned into a bird or some other
uncatchable thing.
The world without him
tastes like a thrown stick.
I don’t know what to do.

I take a running step
& stop: there’s no tug
on my collar,
no comforting rebuke.
I keep trying to call
his name & get
the same old howl.

This week at Poetry Thursday, again the prompt was ekphrasis, but with a prosopopoeic twist: to speak from within the work of art.

October 13, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Art beyond sight

Descending the stairs at a parking garage yesterday, I was captivated by the sight of honey locust leaves outlined by dew on a flat black roof. What does it say about me that this is my first successful picture of autumn leaves this year?

Imperfection, even shabbiness, is far more attractive to me than some idealized view of nature. On a trip to upstate New York last week, I took a number of pictures of the spectacular Taughannock Falls, but the only one that struck me as worth saving (and I still don’t think it’s all that great) features the mist rather than the waterfall.

The trouble is simply that I’ve seen too many photos of waterfalls, too many depictions of hillsides blazing with autumn colors. It becomes very, very difficult to escape the gravitational pull of the clichéd shot and see these kinds of scenes anew. The particularity of the scene becomes lost in translation into our ready-made vocabularies of perception.

Yesterday morning, I was led to ponder the process of translating visual art into tactile experience by an exhibit on the interpretation of art for the blind at Pattee Library, University Park, Penn State. (In addition to being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, October is also Art Beyond Sight Awareness Month.)

Each of a number of famous works of art was reproduced and described in the manner of this bronze head from Benin: a full-color reproduction at the top, paired with a description for the sighted, then below it, a black-and-white reproduction, giving a sense of what is lost when colors are translated into contrasting textures in the adjacent tactile version — durable paper “printed” with varying kinds of embossed surfaces. A detailed interpretive description in Braille rounds out the display.

For works of sculpture, I can’t help thinking that direct contact with the object itself would be far simpler (aside from the obvious fact that the sculpture in question may be located in Lagos). I wonder if there are any art museums that allow people with sight loss to handle more durable pieces of sculpture?

In any case, the “look but don’t touch” mentality of art museums really gets to me sometimes. It is perhaps an inescapable necessity for the public display of artworks that they be placed behind velvet ropes, but with this comes a strong sense that art is something apart from ordinary life. The work of art, we in the West have been led to believe, is as changeless and immortal as a Platonic form. This is of course pure fantasy, enabled in part by the ability of the sighted to gather information at a distance and to preserve it in a static form (as opposed to a sound recording, which cannot be divorced from the time required to listen to it). Those who rely on touch, taste, smell and hearing for their knowledge of the world have no choice but to immerse themselves in the ever-changing flow.

I wonder if someone blind from birth can even form a conception of the transcendental, predicated as it is upon the possibility of apartness? Does the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity even make sense for such a person? Imagine a world without visual media. Would it be as easy to destroy?
__________

I’m going to West Virginia this weekend. See you on Monday.

June 14, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Nobody’s fool

My third entry in the self-portrait marathon

How public. Like a frog.