Not sure if there is a better word than 'spirituality' for what I shared during the weekend's talk about my experience with Christine's UNE at LACMA: the suspicion and dismissal of what I saw as an 'industrial' object, how this transformed into the 'cosmological' as I passed through it, the sense of portal bringing me to the dissolving of 'object' and even 'objecthood' to a state of transport that defied -- and still defies -- explanation, formulation, bearing, belief (yes, dis-belief at the heart of the spiritual)...
Emergence from UNE: 'material/force' eclipsing 'form/matter' only to avail a second eclipsing of 'material/force' by the ineffable, dematerialized wonder of it all...
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Another emergence (via Kandinsky's didactic gem):
Today I am going to the cinema.
Today I am going. to the cinema
Today I. am going to the cinema
Today I am going to the cinema
.
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4 comments:
Jon, your description of that experience on Sunday was so beautiful. I haven't experienced UNE in the flesh myself, but I can imagine how its massive presence would invoke that kind of double eclipsing. I've had similar experiences with Noguchi's works -- and also with the stones at Stonehenge, which I got to see up close (I could touch them and smell them!) on a private visit two years ago. For me, what was so remarkable was that, even though these works -- both the Noguchis and Stonehenge -- were made of stone, each had a sense of the numinous that wasn't entirely alien or other. There was a warmth there -- not a human warmth for sure, but it was as if the stones were beckoning me back into my evolutionary past, to my own origins in nonhuman minerals and microbes. This is so very different from the transcendent spirituality of someone like Kandinsky, whose works point to some other realm with which I share no fleshly convergence.
Taney, I remember my wife and I were almost kicked out of the Noguchi museum in Queens, because we kept touching his late basalt works after repeated reprimands to stop doing so! Yes, we felt such a deep warmth, connection, magnetism to each of them; almost something like they were echo-relatives from an earlier shared existence, ("evolutionary past...nonhuman metals and microbes" indeed!).
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I struggle a lot with Kandinsky's (fleshless) "Point to Line to Plane" example. I guess this fleshlessness is also part of my attraction to engage with how he used it as an example for the 'emergence of sound' (out of the functional and mute "."). The series of (his human) interventions to gradient presences towards an untethering from the lingual to be liberated as a 'sound' strikes me as an engineered maneuvering. And yet, it also provokes me to query the sequence from 'particle' proceduring to entire 'plane' [of immanence']--and how the technology of the written cross-thresholds into a realm of (in-)visible sonic presence, pulse, power--as far more than a 'designed' outcome.
Jon, you are the universal donor (and Magus magician) who moves lineages of every stripe into the realm of sound. From illicit touching of Noguchis to UNE to Kandinsky...echo relatives indeed.
As Brother Todd would say: "Pour me a big one!"
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