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Visited Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s studio today and got to walk around inside (in funny foam slippers). Lee painted on the walls and Jackson worked on the floor.
Like all blanks, associative leaps through space need to be created. We must understand what makes electricity arc through the air. A conscientious reader confronted with a string of unrelated passages separated by blanks will, for a while, dutifully attempt to form bridges from one passage to the next, to discover the writer’s logic or pattern, the work’s intended accumulation. If no such thing is discernible, however, the reader will eventually, understandably, move on to something else. Such is the risk of communicating through silence. The rewards include the powerful bolt of understanding a leap can create, an understanding that reaches the reader beyond words, beyond rational explanation, and so is more intensely felt.Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: the Writer as Cartographer, p. 55
Fun and Nourishing by Frank Chimero
Related sad news (via Phoebe): Morrie Yohai, “the man behind Cheez Doodles,” has passed away at 90.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
Brian Eno, predicting the future, in 1995
The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one and one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both and create a third thing. This third thing and the two original things then trigger cascades of thought and reaction; you know things you didn’t know you needed to know until you know them; then you can’t imagine ever not knowing them again. Then these things transform all the other things and thoughts you’ve had. This chain-reaction is thrilling and uncanny.
Jerry Saltz, The Alchemy of Curating
Found in Between the Click and the Curator, an epic stringing-things-together style post by Erin Kissane (that is but part two of five in a series).
Erin writes:
Alchemy is such a great figure for this process: it walks and quacks like a science, but at the core, it’s all correspondences and symbolic resonance and story.
That’s a piece of what one sort of curatorial work aspires to achieve. And if you ask me, it’s what we should hang over our desks as well, whether we call ourselves curators or bloggers or editors or tropical penguins. Whether the frisson is emotional or intellectual, if we’re not making the hair stand up on their arms in a flash of recognition, we have work to do.
Also not to be missed are the post’s extra paths, references, and footnotes, which have taken care of my Instapaper reading for the next week.
Broadside 3, 2009, by Paul Ramirez Jonas:
A portable lectern serves as a pedestal for an oath typed on a tablet of unfired clay. Should you choose to use the microphone, the lectern can also amplify and broadcast your voice. Oaths are another form of score; the one presented is ready to be performed by you. Does the oath’s power come into effect only when it is read out loud and repeated word for word? Or is a silent reading enough?
The painter makes patterns that invite the beholder to project remembered images upon them. The perception of images involves therefore the recollection of visual experience.E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (via Sam Williams)