About this matter of form.
TO bring form out of the void is to create identities where there were none.
The artist, alone in her studio, whistling in the void, models form through what the body knows-
mostly through how the body acts on what it knows, whatever that is.
IT’S that body-analogue we begin with.
BEGIN with nothing-no armature, no place to begin-just…beginning.
SHE wraps her arms around her task. A wet lump of molten Hydrocal hardens almost immediately, so no time to think.
What purpose anyway to forethought, except to freeze those identities and believe in their fixity?
WHAT the body knows is in fact not what the body thinks. It knows its own pulse,
and that of others, if it can only quiet itself enough to listen.
NEXT come skins of congealed paint, peeled parchment-style from their drying mats,
like tissue grafts for a burn victim. Burning being the essential condition of being alive.
THE plaster embodiment is fluid until it hardens, layer by sloppy layer-
not quite sure where it’s headed or where its last layer is.
It looks serene but only because the turmoil of creation has long since been skin grafted
and allowed to settle into a comfortable coherence. Mute, stolid, it doesn’t have to say anything.
THE surface seems substantial and yet it’s been ruffled and fingerprinted by its ordeal.
A lovely haze of pigmentation accumulates in it, merging with its epidermis,
a kind of patina caused by the eye’s affection for distinctions.
WHAT its core is like, we can’t see; to see it requires the total destruction of form itself.
SCULPTURE, yes, I suppose we need to settle on a name. Imbued with the nature of their making, for sure.
STILL, my mind, scuttling for certainties, wants to turn these aftermaths into something that comes bow-tied
with the museum identification tag: Oh, right, put it in this case, please.
Buddhist? Theravadin? Southeast Asian? American Vipassana?
Process Art? Figuration? Installation? Or something more–-let’s say–spiritual? SURE, why not.
BUT as I say it, I watch myself eyeing the ground for somewhere to settle.
The desire for a place to stand always seems to collect like mud on my walking feet.
No difference between feet of clay and the clay itself.
HERE is the gritty truth: I like to line my nest with hard-shelled quantities. I know that. I see myself doing it.
AND I also know that something is lost: some edge of quickened experience, some place of emptiness and becoming.
I realize the artist has been there all along, out there in the breezy day,
or where would this mute form have come from? It takes a raw ego, a shell-less egg,
to stay out in the updraft, eyes lifted off the rocks.
I wonder how she manages to leave herself behind. Is it the willingness to exceed her own awareness?
Not to care where the line of not-knowing begins?
Forgetting herself by looking within and seeing that nothing’s really fixed or firm?
That nothing’s worth hanging on to? That everything we think we are is just a con game?
HEARING the shell crack: the sound as loud as thunder next to one’s ear.
REALIZING that the artist and I are one. That if I trust in what’s not there-–if I let penetrating insight do its work-–
maybe I can uncover the nature of things. Maybe I can see how things are created, and who’s creating them.
AND if I’m lucky I will turn my head and glimpse, out of the fog of the unexpected,
the ghostly pop-up wraiths of truly empty form, arising and arising and arising and arising…
THAT’S the excruciating bliss:
TO notice the wind, blowing through the cracks of every fixed thing.
KNOWING is freedom. NOT-KNOWING is freedom. |