'The earth was born from her who crouched with legs spread..'

Post from  19th August, 2012.

'When you gods took your places there in the water with your hands joined together, a thick cloud of mist arose from you like dust from dancers....'

Four years later the image below appeared (the earth is the goddess is the earth is the human is you).

'...if you allow yourself to be ensnared by its curving white sands and the bright turquoise and emerald green of the shallows, you'll forever be a haunter-of-edges. If you don't watch yourself you'll turn to stone down on that beach, a sea-smoothed rock-creature with eyes that are holes where the sky shines through....'

Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted, 2016

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looking

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the body adorned

A second post from the breadcrumbs taking me back to the origins of my stealing.... 

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Indian Art

The beginning of my stealing.... (3rd August, 2012).


In response to Mark's question, this is the kind of temple that I found this sculpture on in my trip to Karnataka in 2014.

I had been told in my Indian Art History degree that Hoysala sculpture wasn't very refined. I wasn't expecting much, so I got  a big surprise.

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content v subject matter

Anish Kapoor, in conversation with John Tusa.

'Kapoor himself insists, I've nothing to say, which is where, here in his Camberwell studio, we begin.

JT Why do you say you have nothing to say?

AK One of the currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it points to the experience of the author. That is to say it dwells in the author. It seems to me that there's another route in which the artist looks for content, which is different from  meaning. It may be abstract, but at a deeper level symbolic content is necessarily philosophical and often religious. I think I am attempting to dig away at - without wanting to sound too pompous - the great mystery of being. And that, while it has its route through my psychobiography, isn't based in it.

JT So at least you are walking away from the romantic idea of the artist, that it is the life of the artist, the view of the artist, the experience of the artist which is absolutely central to the art, and you take the artist with the art bag and baggage.

AK I am. I think I'm saying that there is another position. Maybe its my Indian roots that prompt me in that direction. Of course, I also see a connection thereby with the minimal art of the sixties and seventies. The idea that the object in a sense has a language unto itself, and that its primary purpose in the world isn't interpretative, it is there as if sitting within its own world of meaning.

JT You make the distinction between subject matter - and one can certainly see that your pieces are not about subject matter - and content. Your sculptures are full of content. But just fill out that antithesis.

AK Putting aside subject matter is saying that a content can arise. It does this seemingly out of formal language, considerations about form, about material, about context. When subject matter is sufficiently out of the way, something else occurs; maybe it is the role of the artist then, as I see it, to pursue this something that one might call content.'


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'do something small every day'

Today I found a box full of paintings from about two years ago. In the present I always feel that I have no idea what I'm doing, or where to go next. But if I look back at the traces of past days that felt like that, from enough distance, I see that things were happening.

Sometimes I think that everything that I want to work on has already come. I'm so quick to put it into a box and pack it away, or turn the page. Other times I think, no, this is how it goes. Something comes, and then you turn the page and don't look back. Then I find things again, and look at them beside new things.

Complexity theory (which I worked with for many years as an educational researcher) suggests that interactions through time - i.e. history - are essential for emergence to take place. Emergence itself is mysterious, in that whatever appears (ie. the song, the painting, the poem, the dance, if you work in the way that I do) can't be directly tracked back to any specific event or idea. But interactions through time have to occur if there is to be any hope of emergence; for the unexpected arrival of something unplanned. 

Anish Kapoor talks about 'the arising of content', as opposed to the conscious creation of 'subject matter'.

If I want things to arrive, albeit from a process that I can't fully see or control, I need to make sure that I keep the interactions going. The complexity perspective helps me to see why I can't necessarily make new paintings every day. Things can't keep appearing endlessly, without periods of food or rest. 

'Do something small, every day' 

Austin Kleon

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grounds

Yesterday I made grounds. Grounds are amazing. When I first started making them, I thought I was putting something off. Or waiting for something. Or preparing something.

Now I know better. A ground is a thing. It's full, pregnant. It's itself. It's everything in the world.

There are some little-known Indian miniature paintings that, in contrast to the general Indian thing of being fecund and teeming and full, are mainly ground. Pure space.

This is a triptych, three separate canvases. The first canvas is simply a golden field.


You can find everything in the Indian tradition. You want gods? You can have gods. You want no gods? You can have no gods. You want literal gods? Plenty of them. You want gods that are symbolic of universal forces? No problem. You want yourself as a separate worshipper? Sure. You want yourself as an integral part of all that is? Easy. You want to separate yourself out from daily life and go on an internal journey? Loads of different pathways for you right here. You want to be in the thick of it, with colour and perfume and sensuality and money and music and dance and joy? Welcome.

Also, you don't have to choose between these binaries. You can have the whole damn lot if your psyche can handle it....

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