Recent work by Scott Von Holzen from my Worpress feed. The words sung by Delores… ‘
But you see, it’s not me It’s not my family In your head, in your head, they are fighting With their tanks and their bombs And their bombs and their guns In your head, in your head, they are crying
In your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie What’s in your head, in your head? Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie-ie, oh
…. seem very apt at the moment.
Scot reworks the words through visual art.
His blog post includes other reworkings, covers of the song, as examples of this done through music.
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse,that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed.
Mos Def – Fear not of Man 1999
All over the world hearts pound with the rhythm Fear not of men because men must die Mind over matter and soul before flesh Angels hold a pen keep a record in time Which is passing and running like a caravan trader The world is overrun with the wealthy and the wicked But God is sufficient in disposing of affairs Gunmen and stockholders try to merit my fear But God is sufficient over plans they prepared Mos Def in the flesh, where you at, right here On this place called Earth, holding down my square.
Sunday afternoon beckons. Saturday was interesting. The usual suspects played up.
If you have work to do and need some chilled and slightly warmed sounds to keep you focussed and alert, try Tru Thought’s latest chilled 2 hour slot of modern British and Global tunes. I am proud to be part of this that follows…
The mix above features Sampha, a great upcoming artist using music to explore and express experience. He sings at one point about ‘la la la la fingers in my ears…’ like lately we all maybe hear too much stuff we don’t need to hear. Like Sappho said “What cannot be spoken will be wept.”
Great video of artist Tauba Auerbach who works right on the edge between arts practice as personal subjective research and objective material research to the point where they become some other thing. That they are they reinforces the post-curricular, nominal nature of their work. That they seek to find the substrate that underpins our surface world fills me with wonder and awe. The header image is a boat she painted.
In this video Tauba says “I want to learn new things constantly. And I am always trying to find the pattern behind things. I have educated myself about a number of mathematical and scientific principles through crafts like paper weaving and paper marbling. To marble paper it is all about relationships and ratios…”
This appeals to me a great deal. I read nothing but books about maths for about 6 months once on the principle that maths may describe the underlying substrate of the material world. In the end I was unconvinced but concluded that maths provided the best map we have available for the underpinning of the objective world, but the maths was the map not the territory.
So like Tauba I explored art making as a way to get there by other means, subjective means that meant something to me personally. I made a things called ‘A Step Back’ here as this path about maths led to me exploring ideas about recursion between the digital and analogue domains and the oddly dissociative effect of things being in both domains. Recursion as a phenomena connects lots of things in maths, science, art, ecology, sociolology, philosophy, on and on. I believe it is a source of creativity and distributed or collected intelligence between intelligences other than just people, see here. Art making helps us encounter distributed intelligence. James Bridle wrote a great book about this idea, see here and the way it is embedded in the world.
Tauba also talks about art making as a way to get out of thinking in words. This is also important. Materials used in art making have their inherent material intelligence made available through the act of art-making. This intrinsically and in an embodied way extents your perceptions to re-view the world through art making. Thus arts practice facilitates the extended mind see here.
Tauba’s website is here and a great pdf called ‘Thy Fearful Dissymmetry’ is here to see more.
And the original link was for Art21, a great arts website here and here.
My daily walk in the morning is now overlapping the darkness before sunrise. I walk as the rookery wakes and masses in the nearby Oak tree. We now rise and depart together as the night’s darkness departs. I always say hello.
As the light of summer departs a new year is upon us. Samhain is the end of the year in the Celtic calendar. As dusk is the end of the Celtic day. The Celts started their day and their year in darkness. The proper order, for we all start in darkness, as do all seeds. A moment for time travel. Looking to the future. Remembering the past. Ones we have lost. Time is upon us.
So too am I remembering the past. I have been going back over my photography archive, all the way back to 2005 when I got my first digital camera. It holds 13000 photos. This surprised even me. I edited this down to my 400 best and put them up on my portfolio site. Click the image below to go to my portfolio and see the images. I chose a picture of geese because they are honking overhead now as they return for the winter. Time turns. It is circular.
Click me to see…
I also bring you Van the man singing Celtic New Year, on Jools. There is a very grainy clip of this on Yootyoob but this one is best. He starts at about 3m 55 sec. He so captures for me, that sense of darkness and light, longing for absent friends, some passed over to eternal darkness, and light, the looking forward to meeting friends again even if it is when we pass over into darkness. Like “Bette Davis said, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” We begin and end in darkness. Peace at last. I head this post with an image of the coming green of spring. See you on the other side.
Moving Space 