studio nov 10

studio oct 25 part 2

studio oct 25

studio oct 24: Tetraptych

Finally, I have week to spend working on images! Feels great.
Plus I like tetraptychs. My drawings feel less lonely in a four image series. A family of four + polyphony.

images from few weeks ago part2

image from a few weeks ago

notes sep 22

Adolf Wolfli,
General View of the Island Neveranger, 1911

Adolf Wolfli

I am learning a new language and the classes and homework keep me away from working. Images and ideas are queuing up for a round about the studio, and soon there will be thought pile-up. Perhaps that is a good thing for poetry.

Details from Ferdinand Cheval's
Le Palais Idéal,  France, 1879 - 1912

Details from Ferdinand Cheval's
Le Palais Idéal,  France, 1879 - 1912

Something made me go and look up images of outsider art a few weeks ago and the images have stayed with me since then. I wanted to see what its formal language, concepts, and contexts have been. The stories of outsider artists range from the curious to the completely unbelievable: a postman who collected stones from his daily postal rounds and built his dream palace from his collection by combining architecture styles from all over the world that had never lived together let alone seen each other (Ferdinand Cheval); a psychiatric patient--abused as a child and was convicted of similar charges as an adult--who made collages of baffling intricacy out of all packaging materials and drawing tools he could muster in the hospital (Adolf Wolfli); a lady who started decorating her house to counteract the dullness of life till she started to go blind because of her practice and then soon after killed herself (Helen Martins). It isn't fair to abstract their lives into a mere sentence. Perhaps I do so primarily because of the finite nature of my writing itself, but also because the enormity of their life projects lies outside of my comprehension... they feel like dreams I try to explain once my eyes are open. I am in awe.

Helen Martins, Interior of Owl House,
South Africa, 1945-76

Helen Martins, Garden of Owl House,
South Africa, 1945-76

In my searches I came across the term 'horror vacui.' The term literally means a fear of empty space and is easily applicable to nearly all the outsider or naive art works I came across. Although it is eerie, it isn't unbelievable that many of the outsider artists have suffered from psychosis of one kind or another. One can see it in the horror vacui in the images they make. But it is just as fair to say that the horro vacui is a result of the perception of the world: I imagine it to be an evenly crowded, dynamic, imposing, unrelenting landscape of whispers and monologues in which one could hardly find an opening to merge into. In a way the images become textures, because their busyness is constant.

Adolf Wolfli

Last week I was plastering the wall of a room I would like to be my studio. And though the wall was bare I could see horror vacui in its grey cement potholed surface. One could hide it with a wall paper, but the surface would remain underneath. As I plastered, I realised the irony of what I was doing-- though I was filling an empty wall with more material, I was in a way filling away its horror vacui, I was plastering towards an even tone, towards a blanker state. Sometimes you have to work really hard to achieve silence.

The concepts are muddled in my mind now: how is noise different from silence, language different from chaos, texture different from what is plain.

studio sep 15

visual archive sept 05

studio sep 02

Books

prototype for a book

I am currently working a book project, the drawing/painting marathon, a few poems, my website, some photographs, and learning Dutch. I have been back in the studio for nearly 2 weeks now, and even with all the projects going on, I still feel the backlash of being away. Maybe there are too many projects going on, but I think that is another symptom. The studio is a very introverted space for me, and traveling disrupts some sort of physical connection or clarity pact between space and mind.

What works for me about being away however, is that I can re-evaluate the general direction of things. I am glad that I have started a book project for instance. It gives me a space to realize the polyphony of image and ideas that I carry; i.e. in a book one can combine a variety of image, word, performance etc.

The concept of 'polyphony' was first suggested to me by a professor when I was working on my graduate thesis, a four channel video projection. Polyphony (or many voices) is an quality that Mikhail Bakhtin, a philosopher and theorist from Russia, attributed to the literary works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read a bit of Bakhtin when I was studying cinema at JNU. Those were his works on chronotopes, hetroglossia (?), and speech genres. I will dig up those readings and go through them again...

Currently I am reading two books of interest. One is 'The Painter of Our Time' by John Berger, and the other is 'Murphy' by Samuel Beckett. Both are very different yet very fulfilling reads for me. The Painter of Our Time is a novel that reads like the diary of an artist (with comments from a friend of the artist) who disappears from Budapest in the year 1956. Berger writes,

I must go to bed. But I have not finished. I shall never finish. That is my guilt to which I confess. I have made myself doubly an emigre. I have not returned to our country. And I have chosen to spend my life on my art, instead of immediate objectives. Thus I am a spectator watching what I might have participated in. Thus I question endlessly. Thus I risk reducing the world within my own mind to my own dimensions for the sake of discovering a small truth that has remained undiscovered by others... (pg 76)

It is a very good book. And the personality of Janos Lavin, the artist, is so deeply developed and real that I often confuse the novel with an actual diary. But of course Berger's voice is part of the hetroglossia.

Beckett's Murphy is a treasure as well. There is a passage about biscuits that I like very much. Murphy, the main character, has a ritual where he eats six biscuits for lunch and Beckett describes this process.

They were the same as always, a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a Petit Beurre and one anonymous. He always ate the first-named last, because he liked it the best, and the anonymous first, because he thought it very likely the least palatable. The order in which he ate the remaining three was indifferent to him and varied irregularly from day to day. On his knees now before the five it struck him for the first time that these prepossessions reduced to a paltry six the number of ways in which he could make this meal. But this was to violate the very essence of assortment... Even if he conquered his prejudice against the anonymous, still there would be only twenty-four ways in which the biscuits could be eaten. But were he to take the final step and overcome his infatuation with the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways! (pg 62)

I've always liked cookie anecdotes.

studio sep 01

studio aug 31

studio aug 29