I read an article recently in The New Mexican (yup, hard copy newspaper over granola and Russian caravan tea) by W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher with the Intelligent Systems Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, titled ‘The Second Economy’, how digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic and invisible- thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution.’ It resonated with my Futurology 101: Welcome to the Third Wave project— yes, we are all in the Third Wave, the Information age, simultaneously paddling as hard as we can and enjoying blissful moments of no-time. It’s art and physics, the new age without the fringe.
As an artist working with the same material/ideas presented in the essay, I was compelled to contact Brian Arthur to continue the conversation, via email, about the impact of digital media on culture, and gave him the link to my website and Futurology audio. Here is his response:
“Your art reminded me of what the psychologist Robert Johnson once said: “It seems that it is the purpose of evolution now to replace an image of perfection with the concept of completeness or wholeness. Perfection suggests something all pure, with no blemishes, dark spots or questionable areas. Wholeness includes the darkness but combines it with the light elements into a totality more real and whole than any ideal. This as an awesome task, and the question before us is whether mankind is capable of this effort and growth. Ready or not, we are in that process.”
Your art somehow has that wholeness that can’t be analyzed just apprehended.”
A very insightful review- Thank-you. It gave me an idea- why not ask scientists to review art, and artists to review the implications of scientific research/data/hypotheses?
Happy New Year to all and keep the conversation going.
Another war ends. Oh, wait, who declared a war? Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Germany, Chile, Japan, Cambodia, Laos, -come home.
The image on the left is a photogram I made, comprised of miniature molded plastic soldiers made in China of 19th and 20th century US wars- Civil War, WW1, WW2, Korea- I need to check back at the hobby store and see about Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan. On the right is a photograph from my Aunt Dorothy Schnellock/Greene (in center, next to her brother Emil) from the ’20′s. It was taken in an advertising agency where she and Emil worked. She said the men were so damaged after returning from the war they pledged to make time every day for LIFE- here they are playing music during a lunch break. More music, more dancing. Happy New Year to all.
From Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere, by Henry Miller 1938
“In every age, just as in very life worthy of the name, there is the effort to re-establish that equilibrium which is disturbed by the power and tyranny which a few great individuals exercise over us. This struggle is fundamentally personal and religious. it has nothing to do with liberty and justice, which are idle words signifying nobody knows precisely what. It has to do with making poetry, or, if you will, with making life a poem. It has to do with the adoption of a creative attitude towards life.”
Henry Miller Library is sending the files today! And I am sending them a donation- all about the reciprocity. I look forward to putting together this project-thanks. One of the best resources I’ve found is NEXUS-The International Henry Miller Journal- an annual publication that welcomes the work of those whose research, critical reflection, insights into Miller’s world are presented. Excellent source and great reading.
I went to California last month to go through the Henry Miller archive at UCLA/ Special Collections and found, in box 57, the letters from Emil Schnellock I’d been looking for. I heard his voice- I heard their conversation through the letters they exchanged over 30 years (and received copies for project I am working on-thanks ULCA) When I look at Emil’s desk or the briefcase of what remains of his archive, which includes Miller ephemera and term papers on Miller’s then banned books written by his students when he taught at Mary Washington College, I get the ‘old friend’. That’s how Miller always regarded Emil, ‘my old friend’. Anyway, the letters from Emil fleshed out the relationship and released the mute button that made for a one sided Miller monologue with Emil as the flat character, the unchanging one. Ha ha- he changed, quietly and deeply. Reading the letters was like being inside a movie – the physical sensual body of the letters stopped time and yes, voyeur that I am, enveloped me in a way that a blog or email can’t. When I got to the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur to peruse the Emil Schnellock archive ( purchased by the Library- not sure of the seller??) I selected a few items to be copied and sent to me- but they haven’t been sent yet. Oddly enough, the place that supports all things Henry Miller- writer, provocateur, artist creative thinker, speak up man of the streets, is as they promise, the place where nothing happens. Still waiting to get the archive copies, another call, another email. Which begs the question- what’s the point of an archive if it’s not available to the present? Nostalgia? Cut them free- send me the copies I requested- let them out of the digitallimbo. I have work to do- no time for sentimental glances over the shoulder- bring them out! At least communicate- you know Henry would.
I saw this glove sitting on a woodpile and it was love at first sight. It’s the placeholder for a new series on manual labor, hard objects and tools and all the obvious overlooked gear of work, the fashion details of suiting up for life on earth. It ties into indigo of course…give me overalls or maybe the Japanese fireman jackets at the Museum of International Folk Art.
Last Wednesday we cut mature Japanese Indigo plants from the herb/dye garden at El Rancho de Las Golondrinas- the living history museum, 18th century paraje on the Camino Real. Julianna Lopez, the horticulturalist at the museum came over and we made the dye bath. I could just live in indigo blue…. Plants made a very strong dye bath- basically cut about 6 plants (3′ row), stripped the leaves off and stuffed them into canning jars, steeped them in kettle/double boiler – careful not to get heat over 160degrees farenheit. – let them steep an hour, strained out liquid, composted leaves. Added baking soda and agitated to get oxygen into the liquid -it really looked blue black – and then added hydrosulfite via RIT color remover– Dye bath turns gorgeous green. Start dipping- so like life. We dipped cotton hankies and all sorts of paper/ephemera, silk organza. I found the recipes/process online- very successful. I will be planting indigo in my garden next spring.
The fires were burning and the smoke was thick, the big dipper over the house held no water but instead brought this bear. Looking for new north. The Chinese compass looks to the south. Maybe we’re upside down.
He was a welcomed guest in the studio. Now off to find a new home….
I’ve been painting butterfly wings, a continuation of the In A Gadda Da Vida ‘Iron Butterfly. While in my studio I’d work on the paintings and then on Tuesdays I’d be at the Santa Fe Community College taking a sculpture class with Erika Wannenmacher. I started making dorsal fins and then had the eureka moment in seeing the relationship between the wings and fins. I love the form, the perfect gently curved triangular shape- one implying fear of the unknown, the other flight and freedom. Walking through fear, greeting fear, becoming intimate with my fears as they show up at the door (Astrologer Tom Brady refers to these visitors as the ‘shark at the door’)….the fin-wings and paintings are about courage and swimming in the dark and the freedom in knowing I can. I’m reminded of a quote by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi
“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
The painting installation will be part of a group show ‘Mining the Unconscious” inspired by Jung’s ‘Red Book’.
Pilgrims are making their way to the Santuario in Chimayo. On Good Friday a parade of pilgrims passed my house which is on the Camino Real, as they made their way from the Catholic church in Agua Fria to the capilla de San Antonio across the road from me and then east a couple of miles into La Cienega and the church there. I haven’t seen them the last few years. My Easter rite of spring is listening for the honey bees in the trees and working in the garden, examining the pyracantha, butterfly bush and rosemary for signs of life. Did the freeze take them or the lack of water? This death and rebirth ritual is witnessed by the returning hummingbirds, a couple of rockland doves, robins and redwing blackbirds.
In the studio, shark fins and butterfly wings, a large spoon….
It’s the last week for the Futurology 101: Welcome to the Third Wave in the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery.
April 2- Ernesto Mayans Gallery/Canyon Rd,
April 3-Harry’s Road House/Old Las Vegas Highway
April 5- Whole Foods-on Cerrillos Rd
April 6- Kakawa- on Paseo de Peralta
April 7 – La Montanita Co-Op/ Casa Solana Shopping Center
April 8 (till 7PM) and 9- Ernesto Mayans Gallery/Canyon Rd.
April 10- LAST DAY, Harry’s Road House
“In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and reaction occur almost at the same time. We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old ,fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age. ….
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude- a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.”
Marshall McLuhan, introduction to Understanding Media:The extensions of man, 1964
