Rabbi Lawrence Kushner:
"A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.”

In/Side and In/Between. 
 

"Such a collection of ephemeral treasure is an example of how we find the things that tell us who we are, even if it gives instead the impression that a parallel universe of KM’s own work has found him - by carefully infiltrating the most ordinary places: the local newspaper, or the fold of a carton of milk, or the back of a parking ticket." (Elliman*)

*Who is Elliman? Or KM? I dunno, beats me - I wrote the above down on a piece of paper that I found some time later and forgot where I got it from.

Below: The work of Mia Feuer

Thoughts when living through the Trump years and its aftermath:

"To trust immediate intuition rather than collective examination that is rational, careful and intelligent is not wisdom. It is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one he has always known."

- Carlo Rovelli in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: spilled milk, a broken toy, a scraped knee. As adults we know that kids have no clue of what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective. Children do not yet know that the world doesn’t revolve around them.

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. Yet evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.”

- Neil DeGrasse Tyson

01/25/18
Above: Anna Reivilä - Bond

According to Japanese religious ceremonies, ropes and ties symbolize the connections among people and the divine, as a mean to identify sacred space and time.

Inspired by Nobuyoshi Araki's images and their mixture of raw violence and beauty, I study the relationship between man and nature by referring to the Japanese bondage tradition. The Japanese word for bondage, kinbaku-bi, literally means “the beauty of tight binding”. It is a delicate balance between being held together and being on the verge of breaking.

I search spaces where nature’s elements combine to create interesting natural tensions and continue this dialogue trough my interpretations by extending, wrapping and pulling upon these indigenous forms. I create a new sense of volume from the existing components.

Using ropes as lines is my form of drawing. The lines create interactions, making connections between the elements—a reinterpretation of the landscape. These three-dimensional drawings are physically unstable—they exist only for the moment. By recording the process the photograph becomes part of the piece.

Robert Smithson installed 12-inch-square mirrors to the site in his project "Yucatan Mirror Displacements" 1969. The mirrors reflected and refracted the surrounding environment and gave a new angle to see the landscape. In a similar tradition of Smithson’s use of mirrors, my lines show how shapes of the elements and the connections between them come visible when something alien is added. I’m not only changing their essence, but also my own point of view. Every space is different and I’m interested how the volume of any given site can be stretched by the use of several simple lines.

Above: Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt ), Reticulárea (ambientación), Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1969

Above: Tomás Saraceno - Galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider's web, 2009

Above: Anne Wilson Wind Up: Walking the Warp

What does Eisenman think about when she’s on Fire Island? “Ghosts,” she says, explaining that the island evokes — or rather is haunted by — the spirits of a generation of men and women: artists, thinkers, people of color, the affluent, the middle class, the ignored, the displaced, those let down by their government, those who caught the disease too early, those who didn’t realize they had caught it at all, those who thought they would never catch it but who did, all of those who were lost to the dark times when she first came to New York City in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Many gay men and women, many of whom would have been her peers, were dead and many more would die later. Her first major institutional show, a group exhibition of wall drawings at the Drawing Center in 1992, occurred the year activist Mary Fisher rebuked the Republicans for their policies of silence, tennis star Arthur Ashe had announced that he had been living with HIV for years, and the FDA approved the use of ddC in combination with AZT. It was a time of further disappearances. Crisis provokes lists: We count what’s gone and what remains. Everywhere the island attests to the dead, to the bodies who are not there, the figures who might have been paintings, the figures who might have loved paintings. “You can feel them there,” Eisenman says.

. . . Eisenman tells me she has been recently spending her days on the island drawing her friends. Later that night, she sends me images of the small works on paper. A woman sits looking at her computer, her head held up by her left hand. A man lies naked on a towel strumming a guitar while a woman, her legs open to reveal tufts of pubic hair, listens intently. Friends lounge on the beach, make a human pyramid, and check cell phones against a backdrop of beach grass. I consider the living as she considers them. Drawing is a way of keeping them there.

"Painting Ghosts," by Andrew Durbin for Out Magazine, October 2015

"These feelings — anxiety, despair, hatred, greed — ... have elements of delusion, elements you'd be better off without. And if you think you would be better off, imagine how the whole world would be. After all, feelings like despair and hatred and greed can foster wars and atrocities. So if what I'm saying is true — if the basic sources of human suffering and human cruelty are indeed in large part the product of delusion — there is value in exposing this delusion to the light."

- Robert Wright in Why Buddhism is True

"Among those who don’t write, it is perhaps difficult to fathom the important role that not-writing plays in writing. Gertrude Stein famously quipped that in order to be a writer, one must have lots of time at one’s disposal to do nothing. Given the dominant role that introspection plays in every creative process—especially one that is in many ways a direct transmission of mind—such activities as reading, traveling to foreign lands, taking long walks, and staring into space should be understood as playing an equal, if not more important, role as actually putting words down on paper. We might go so far as to say that with regard to writing, there is no such thing as procrastination; indeed, procrastination, not-writing, is the very essence of writing. "
- Travis Jeppesen on artist Heman Chong in Art in America. 

Below: The Catalan Atlas by Abraham Cresque, 1375
Added 10/01/19

Above two gifs: https://iilluussoorr.tumblr.com/

Some "Ghosts" May Be Sound Waves Just Below Human Hearing

There are many possible explanations for hauntings, not least that humans are highly suggestible creatures, especially when we want to believe. But some ghost sightings might actually be the result of sounds — sound waves that vibrate just below our range of hearing, dubbed the “fear frequency.”

Sound is basically mechanical energy in the form of a pressure wave with crests and troughs: vibrations create a disturbance in the surrounding air and ripple outward, like tossing a pebble in a pond. Frequency measures how many crests occur within one second in a wave. The unit of measurement is called a Hertz (Hz), and 1 Hz is equivalent to 1 vibration per second. A plucked guitar string might vibrate 500 times per second, causing surrounding air particles to vibrate at the same frequency, so the sound wave’s frequency would be 500 Hertz.

The typical range for human hearing runs from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz), although this varies from person to person, and shrinks as we age. Under ideal lab conditions, some people can pick up sounds as low as 12 Hz — well into the “infrasound” range. But even when we don’t consciously hear such sounds, they may induce feelings of anxiety, especially at higher intensities. This has led some people to dub infrasound in the 18.9 Hz range — i.e., just a tad below the threshold for human hearing — the “fear frequency.”

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke 

“The universe is a pointless, self running machine and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without fanfare.”
-Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

"It’s too facile to say that the mysteries of Twin Peaks can be waved off as 'just a dream.' But from Eraserhead to Lost Highway to Mulholland Dr., Lynch has long shown a fascination with how fragile our reality can be, given that so much of our understanding of ourselves and our world is defined by what our brains have retained — often hazily. We tend to remember dreams as a series of connected events that seemed vivid and logical at the time, but that recede as we try to piece them back together. That’s not too far removed from how we sometimes recall our own pasts."

- Noel Murray writing about Twin Peaks season 3, episode 14 for The New York Times

Above: Chautauqua Summer Studio 2015 - Durational visual mapping of my time spent in one place < - > translation into work that can exist outside the studio. 

Above: Mineko Grimmer, Remembering Plato (installation view), 1992. Painted plywood basin, fir trim, nylon cord, steel hook with chain, spotlight, pebbles and brass rod. 99 3/16 x 61 3/4 x 7 3/16 in.

Below: Robert Longo, Untitled (Raft at Sea), 2016-17, charcoal on paper, 140” x 281”

Summer, 2014 - I finally was able to finish the editions of prints that I started from my residency in Venice last summer. These are in process shots while printing at Rutgers. Many, many thanks is owed to Randy Hemminghaus for all his help - these editions wouldn't have happened without him.

All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world; I am always weaving it because it was once broken.
Anais Nin, 1942

How to Live Without Irony (via The New York Times)
Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age's Ethos (via The Atlantic)
We've Been Arguing About Irony vs. Sincerity for Millennia (via The Atlantic)
New Sincerity (via Wikipedia)