Drawing and Writing

That title: Through a Distant Mirror… Tuchman…intriguing to think- past Alice: we see ourselves distantly in the past as we encounter it because of our own assumed detachment- objectivity as it is  or may be… in my drawing I concern myself with the physical intuition drawing can bring to cyber space and in the world of information arcitecture proceed to a thought  experiment open to the world that flooded Tuchmans fire with then new wave of European criticism Mieka Bal forwarded- however in America that current is very distantly viewed- as though some other present history … and so… what happens is a fattening of the culture on images, imagery to sell…and in the end… healthcare will tell you how it goes…the good news is we turn to culture to sustain our inner artist- so on my end I am working to relate a new world potential the cell phone may yet get to… As Zappa put it in his distant kindness” hungry freaks Daddyo”…

Here’s what I think- Jasper Johns should take time out from his current project to do some vision charts in his old style and just post date them with a 1964 date or so and then resume the highly laudable project that he, Stella and of course myself maintain which is the interest in stating Mannerism as Modernism’s alternative present culture for continuing the research into play levels of abstract narratives of the contemporary mind….

Olbrich Gardens Madison WI has a temple constructed by Thai government as a thankyou to UW by alumni, and this traditional  building has a resonance to my own forms which are are Asian carpentry cognates abstractly scrolled. The Viking boat like forms make sense because the Vikings in fact pulled lumber from Burma back home for boat building and I can probably safely create in the thought experiment the likelihood the other culture borrowed the forms of the Boat Houses and created a variation in local architecture. The idea of a thought experiment also in and of itself very much pertains to my work as I study the potential architectural profiles of these forms as they loop space.

Now drawing has always been the visual arts thought experiment yet even so from the nexus say of architecture where are the Greek or Roman plan drawings? In fact the idea of an architectural drawing shows the meeting of thought experiment and information architecture: that is to say- those temples were verbally transmitted and close to pure thought experiments while our idea of an architectural drawing reflects our idea of information architecture rather than architecture .The Stanford OnLline Encyclopedia of Pilsophy traces many histories of the “thought experiment and two I will quote are that of Lucretius who propose throwing a spear into infinity would if it met some border bounce back or pass through. If it passed through space is infinite – if it bounces back the wall or border constructed must itself be in space there for space extends beyond any border and is infinite. Another though experiment is to the effect that if you drop a chain from the timber framing of a gable and connect the ends what will you get. You intuitively know it will be a loop. Cyber space itself is a loop and in the interplay drawing can make there of the intuitions it brings from the world it may as each generation does in some sense repropose ‘nature” at that meeting of information architecture and drawing intuition as thought experiment . A variation on the first experiment I encountered in highschool math is that a basketball thrown into the fourth dimension would bounce back inside out….

My drawing experiments are a carving out sensation which reinforces connection to intuition as it plays out in my fielding cyber space of abstract circuit of

joinery forms  that partiall intersect and develop overlapping yet open reveals and they develop a history of their own and forms of their own based on free play. Free play is the interesting element: for example consider predictability.The human body operates very much on the principle, simply of equilibbrium of gravitational pressure as it effects gases solids and fluids.  So , if you take an Anatomy/Physiology course- how many of those forms encountered struck you as in any way predictable? ie the forms of the heart valves for example. I think there the free play of evolution in creating our bodies over various times beginning in the ocean and then to land explains some very mysterious forms because centralizedd release of pressure is a structural solution in water fluidity of dimension which developed later on land becomes very strange and interesting and  appears unpredictable. Is it? Guess what- I am not going to answer that….although I will gesture and make drawings best I can and then the rationalizations. The history of the rationale in art can be related strongly to Kant and the concept of criticism turning back on itself to revise its concepts, and the physicist Bohm in his Implicate Order essay terms it a process or raising things to view to see relevance- the word levant meaning to raise to view…

The architectural scholar Vidler traces Kants relationship to autonomy in terms of architectural histories of Modernism that redefine the idea over time- and  Eisenman in his contribution to  Vidlers Histories of the Immediate Present calls this a ‘bracketing  process” I like this term coming from an architect because a bracket is an architectural form and in fact my abstract scrolling s are very similar to Song Dynasty column brackets….

Parallel to Vidler I place Mieka Bal the critic who has evaluated over a lifetime the idea of narrative levels in speech , and it is the quality of levels of abstract narrative within art that I concern myself with to the extent of cyber space and its annunciation potential to drawing at it its pronounced new realms of trope and visual salad. Salud?

Heidegger’s unconcealedness or Alethia is in this case a groundbreaking ie I have in the course of time improvised on Asian carpentry forms which gradually have asserted about me a change from groups of drawings to a specific arhictects book of my making which is essentially a Thai Temple. Assembling these into absolute coherence will take time but this drawing is the groundbreaking…

1. These particular works are very flooded with a color sensitivity: the visual arena is of course physiologically predetermined to the extent we see peripherally with rods that relate black and white and our focused field finds color emphasis at the cones. My modus operendi are abstract circuits of archaic Asian timber framing cognates which improvise from within the culture of my art and these circuits seem to move my normal peripheral vision to center and central vision outwards- and so the odd imbedding of color and drawing. In my childhood environment similarly in Hawaii the drought struck ranchlands were sequestered to mists and about the fields the rock lines of ancient foundation stones strewn beneath the monochrome hills and volcanoes while plant life on vegetation thresholds and levels of the elevations changed the visual arena constantly. Puzzle toys of these same structural elements placed in balls and given to children gave me an orientation into this riddling art form…. Which color my interest in art language as compressing and fusing the veneers of structures into a kind of metaphysical plywood block of abstract material one may abstractly carve through the trope of drawing.
2. A flood of the nature of nature within human imagination resides upon the interplay of thought structures towards meaning as they build form itself  upon a free play out which the tangible and intangible mirror between surface, appearance and substantial being as can be determined intuited stated or presenced. What is “form itself”? Like steps within steps our languages  devolve of considered states of mind given narrative levels of conditioning and such motion towards  autonomy of mind brings me to the cultural strong theory of Kant to the effect reason evaluates itself upon its experiences  to forshadow upon a formative matrix within perception and so then the threads that emerge to connect and sequence. A cultural undertow to this is Freud’s premise that the subconscious is like a person not master of their house. To study the histories of lives dreamed by the rooms that contain their occupants I turn to the Eastern story the Story of the Stone as a reference into the paradigms of that culture. In the West the state of flux out of which to consider further for me begins with Heraclitus.
3. The story of the Stone presences the following technique- the artists gesture towards the book he writes are received by the book- which responds. In other words it is like the Iching in which a relation exists between human connection to meaning and the presencing of events as they show in a game. In Western art the game thread is taken up strongly by the Duchamp tradition and I receive this intuition of narrative levels as relating to trope: the expanding of context as the imagination demands- beyond the original rules… and so then these measures of change correspond to entropy which may be defined as the degree of change a system arbitrarily encounters which then obliges a measure of change.
4. A project I am working on involves creating for Honolulu Library an illustration for the I ching which reflects on my experience of leaving the doors one day to sense through the glass a strange disarray in the position of interior shelving of a group of books… so I returned and picked up the books which as a series were the Story of the Stone which begins with a monk noticing a stone and curious about its strangeneness returning to pick it up, and read upon it the histories it had engraved of the reincarnations of its lives….. The Iching to give its corollary mentions the image of the well which as a clay bucket is a stable form that was constantly moved to new locations as communities often had to remove in those times due to dangers and dynasities, while the architecture and cities change- the source form remains. I utilize the very structural forms of Asian carpentry forms and improvise these into circuits which mean a reflexivity of art as it were- self reference within the context of arts shared ambitions.
5. The drawings enclosed bring to digital space the formative sense of the weight of the hand as an intervention upon photography which carries with it the evolution between scratches, marks , engraving , bas relief, seal carving, architecture, painting drawing and sculpture as narrative levels preparing the abstraction of drawing which is a language impulse in my book relating probably , in its earliest origins to “tracking”….
6. To make sense then of the many connections perhaps the idea of seal script can be forwarded as am image of my idea: the carving of forms upon a cylender which is then inked and rolled out subsequently adapted to the printing press. I carve a particularly vocabulary onto the cylendar while adopting the idea of scrolling into the image: flattened to paper the bending of space yet remains as a sculpturotectural connection. In general cyber art carries a memory, like the evolotionary stages of the fetus…this memory being the matrix of mark, engraving,  sculptural relief and printing. The word sculpture in fact derives from Skr- approximately-“scratch” And so it is one begins from scratch….and yet gets somewhere…Lulu Arti

Poor Lucky… well as I was saying Palladio’s intuition of a temple veneer to domestic housing vernacular recieves a nod all around if we go to the insulated Eastern culture in which Chinese vernacular housing was ever meant to be transported… that is to say: the commentary to the commentary on diagram 48 in the Iching explains the meaning of the well as the form that stays the same, while civilization moves, because people often had to move their housing to accomodate new dynaties, building styles might change but the well that one draws from keeps the same form…. I actually quote in my abstractions the timber framing joinery by which these houses were quickly assembled, and this skill as developed accounts for the temple forms which are bracketings, complex expressions of these root forms, and my improvisations likewise.

A seventeenth century novel- The Story of the Stone is a Chinese novel that gives a view into society from the point of view of a primarily female clan- and this very unusual change of view is internally commented on in a chapter where the protagonist wakes up drunk and sees the world of pictures dimensionally- as a aWesterner would attempts to walk through the picture, and the chapter winds up with a rumination that sometimes people from other cultures can assimilate a culture to an extent that makes them almost exceed the model: by which he must have meant (this protagonist was male- or androgynous : a reincarnation of Guanyin Bodhisatvah of mercy cult of which first allowed nuns and such convent harbored within clan who were of royal wealth and connnection)

In our time the writer -artist -critic Mieka Bal founder of Amsterdam Institute for Cultural Analysis wrote a view of the Bible from a female point of view and so I sent her an email asking if she was influenced by the book which she responded to saying she was aware of the book…. In my own work I respond to the idea of Ursula Von Rydingsvaard who fuses veneers of plywood to carve- but in my terms I think of cultural veneers to compound and carve with carving itself a metaphor for the quarrying and excavating of cultural veneers as the imbed and fuse an abstract expression towards the nature of nature from within human nature…