Once, back in the early 70s, while listening to a Beethoven symphony in the park, I said to myself fancifully, “Suppose being alive biologically is only one way of being alive, and this communicating presence in the park is another way.” I felt that what it was like to be Beethoven was somehow contained in the music, as though the music were a transmutation, a phase transition (like water becoming ice), of Beethoven’s sensibility. His choices, his preferences, fill the ears at every moment of the work. It seems that something essential to the reality of the man Beethoven is in the organization of sound as he willed that organization to be.

It’s as though the artist, writer, etc., deposits himself in the things that he makes: the work becomes infused with its maker, who has willed the choices that comprise the work. That is, in each step of the evolution of a work, the maker decides what stays, what goes, what lives, what dies. Every detail exists at his dispensation, and thus the final configuration of the work comprises a record (a geology of details) of his choices, and therefore of his consciousness, the tip of the “biological” iceberg that is the self.

(from 8/05/05)

cover for me

prison prismatic

i who was

godzplaye

above below

africane

ghosty plethora

ghosty plethora II

trinity infinity

popp cosmicale

fragment of the core

earth moment

inertial ascendant

entry

dream medicale

tabernacle

what's left for now

pleasure principle

inside way out

fridge fruit, a little cucumber

dare domestic

care,

caring,

careful

juncture

What I’m Trying To Do: Words in Graphics, A Neurological Pairing

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. (Pablo Picasso)

From the beginning, the exciting thing about visual art for me was the uniqueness of the experience, the rare quality of what-it-was-like simply standing there looking at a de Kooning painting or a Rothko, for instance. Or a Cezanne painting, even a reproduction. As a student it was learning to “see” a Cezanne still-life that convinced me that the philosopher Clive Bell was right, as far as I was concerned: aesthetic experience is essentially the perception of significant form. Obviously such a perception, like all conscious experience, is a neurological event. About which, more in a moment.

First let me insist that a word is a thing and therefore its graphic representation is only a special case of graphic representation of things in general: both the word “cow” and a photograph or drawing of a cow have in common not only their reference to an absent cow, but their presence equally as visual facts, things on the page: you might ask a child to point to the drawing of the cow or the word “cow.”

But seeing a word on a page is different from seeing any other kind of graphic representation in that it engages language-processing systems in the brain simply by the fact of the word’s recognition as a word. Something very important kicks in; the “neural correlate” of our conscious experience is affected in a major way as our brains activate entire language systems. I want to explore (in many of my word/non-word combos) what happens in a graphic work in which words refer to as close to nothing as possible, when they do not function as label or comment, when they “mean” just enough to be recognized as words. What does “of” by itself mean? What does “so” mean? Yet clearly for English readers, such markings are necessarily perceived and experienced as words, as particular kinds of things, as word-things.

What happens when the context of such word-things is non-linguistic, purely graphic? I mean: how is an aesthetic experience affected by the presence of word-things among non-word things? Is the felt or intuitive sense of the relationship between word and non-word somehow right, or merely arbitrary and boring? Is the neurological coupling an interesting one, does the viewer find the form significant?

(1/15/07)

We don’t see what’s there to be seen. We see what the brain arranges for us to see. This is clearly and simply illustrated by the so-called optical illusion known as the Necker Cube. Here I try to combine multiple (truncated) Necker Cubes with simple words.