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Aequanimitas Encoded in Sound and Light

Kōan Jeff Baysa, M.D.

As a curator, my first interaction with Iranian-American composer David Abir was in organizing the group exhibition, One Hand Clapping: The Interstices of Sound, Language, and Silence in the old Smack Mellon space in DUMBO, New York. He created three walls, each inset with a speaker, arranged in a triangular formation, playing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in staggered and overlayed sequences that one exquisitely experienced haptically and aurally as one walked amongst them.

From his physician father, the artist may well have inherited his sense of music’s healing potential. From his Persian heritage, he was attuned to the characteristics of Persian music that favors a modal system and is deeply connected to emotional expression and the human experience. Studying on his own, he also realized that classical music provides a range of emotions and can evoke calm and meditative resonances.

On another project at the now shuttered Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan, he presented a version of Tekrar (“repetition” in Farsi), a looming  totemic sculpture designed that he designed, loosely based on the anatomy of the human ear. Experimenting with fragments of compositions, he found that playing them slightly out of phase and at graded volumes allowed new patterns to be formed. In combination with diffuse lighting of varying hues and intensities, they exerted a powerful peaceful effect.

During the onset of the COVID pandemic I was in Louisville, Kentucky and encouraged him to work with our Co-Immunity team at the Kentucky College of Art and Design to produce a video to be delivered via virtual reality  headsets to afflicted and intubated patients in intensive care units to lessen the trauma of crucial procedures. With visual and aural components that he developed for Tekrar, it would also be broadcast on the closed circuit television network in the hospital wards for its therapeutic effects. In smaller sculptural variants of Tekrar, we proposed placing these light and sound sculptures as calming meditative devices in high stress and anxiety hospital areas: post-surgery and emergency department waiting rooms.

Writing music utilizing sampling and digital technology to create collaged compositions delivered through his soothing light and sound sculptures, David Abir offers elegant alternative remedies for the human condition.

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Here’s an interview largely drawn on my experiences as the third Critic-in-Residence for the Great Meadows Foundation of Louisville, Kentucky.

Mahalo nui especially to Al and Julien, Vian, Jed, Natalie, Joey; Moira, Joyce, Denise, Andrew, Jeff at KyCAD (Kentucky College of Art and Design); and each of the Kentuckians who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

https://under-main.com/newsletter/a-tapestry-of-talent/

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Ancient Stars, New Constellations

The COVID-19 pandemic has been crowned “the world’s unrivaled  equalizer” and many have embraced this. But even though it strikes  across all socio-economic classes, the blows are not delivered equally.  The coronavirus has pulled back the curtain to shine a glaring spotlight  on the deep divides of medical care delivery in America. The  vulnerability of specific populations is reflected in their  disproportionately higher morbidity and mortality statistics, blamed on  the commingled complex social determinants that include limited access  to healthcare and cycles of poverty. The curtain, pulled aside, has also  revealed just how interconnected and interdependent we are as humans,  sharing vital concerns of individual and community health. It is a  wake-up call to a heightened awareness of our reliance on ostensibly  invisible individuals in our society from grocery shelf stockers and  food service laborers to personal care workers, but also an increased  consciousness of the plight of our society’s most vulnerable: the  homeless and the incarcerated, the addicted and chronically infirm, the  physically and mentally disabled, the poor, the very young, and the  aged.

The American writer James Baldwin opined, “The purpose of art is to  reveal the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” Art making  has ultimately been about self-expression, from the powdered hand  silhouettes by Neanderthals in caves to megawatt auction market  celebrity artists – as well as outsider artists who have no designs  whatsoever on the art market. The arts are the means through which  humans make the ineffable sensate; it is an elaboration of the emotional  abstractions of the limbic system into the realm of the physical and  perceivable.

In theory, the detonation of a neutron bomb would leave buildings  largely intact while eliminating enemy combatants. In an inverse  analogy, the explosive pandemic in one fell swoop collapsed the  infrastructures of the art world, leaving creative economies intact but  exposed, susceptible, and affected. Brick and mortar institutions have  been depopulated and the art world has shifted to virtual presences.  Those unsustainable art world dynamics of crushing overheads, fierce  competition, and manipulated auctions are now laid bare to be  questioned, and to force change. Our future challenges and  responsibilities are to build new art world infrastructures without  reinstating the misguided monetary armatures of the past. Withdrawal of  funding for the arts, precipitated by the pandemic, complicates this  task even further.

Artists have been tested before on navigating the transition from the  what of the present to the how of the future. Our creative communities  now similarly see the roles of art as coping mechanisms, educational  opportunities, and calls to action. Commonalities between COVID-19 and  the HIV AIDS global epidemic include misinformation provided by federal  authorities, poor coordination of public health strategies, and partisan  willingness to allow certain groups of people to suffer and die. A  principal of the World Health Organization was asked what about the  pandemic kept her awake at night. Her answer: “complacency” and the  headlong rush to get back to a semblance of the old normal knowing full  well that it no longer exists. There is now only the disequilibrium of  the new normal. Viruses are ancient, integral members of the biosphere,  essential as precipitants of evolution. We can expect the SARS CoV-2  virus to be around for a while, as the HIV AIDS virus continues to be  present in our current populations.

The pandemic’s requisite social distancing has sentenced us to  purgatories of solitude and has disclosed the crucial importance of  socialization and the power of touch. Shut-in homes with dysfunctional  family members have become their own pressure cooker detention centers.  School age students are increasingly intolerant and frustrated, acting  out against being confined. Graduation from high school and medical  school now occurs virtually without the celebratory sensory rites of  passage. Banned from delivery rooms, fathers are deprived of the primal  skin-to-skin bonding of holding their newly born sons and daughters.  Legions are departing this life alone, robbed of the loving surround of  family and community during the final moments of passing, bereft of the  parting gifts of touch and voice. Bodies are being stacked and stored in  refrigerated containers. Some are interred in mass graves, others are  serially fed into crematoria; most are sequestered from their cultures’  mourning rituals. New psychosocial pathologies of depression and anxiety  like post-pandemic stress disorder (PPSD) may well emerge.

Medical scientists will continue to fight on the front lines of  halting transmission by finding, testing, and treating COVID-19 while  developing effective vaccines and cultivating herd immunity, but SARS  CoV-2 is a novel virus and mutations are expected. Already a subset  disease may be emerging: pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome  (PMIS).

Past pandemics have forced us to confront sickness and finitude and  have thus molded economic policies, shaped societies, fostered new  technologies, and galvanized creative and intellectual communities.  Artists are the conveyors of solace, bearers of hope, agents of joy,  guardians of memories, and the storytellers for future generations. The  successful application of solid science research towards ultimate  solutions, of necessity, factors in social psychology and vital  behavioral changes. These goals are most successfully communicated and  efficiently implemented through the arts, with artists as our new scouts  and seers. Equitably protecting those most vulnerable is our primary  humanitarian mission.

This pandemic offers widespread opportunities to reconfigure ancient  stars into new constellations by which to navigate our future, for  humanity’s survival lies not in perseverative behavior, but in how  resiliently we respond to and look beyond these tragedies…or not.

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“Strange” a solo exhibition by Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo at Primo Marella Gallery, Milano, Italia [22 September - 16 November 2016]

Strange is the second exhibition of the talented well-traveled Congolese artist Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo at Primo Marella Gallery. Frequently citing French poet and art critic Claude Baudelaire as a primary reference, his first exhibition curator Sandra Skurvida commented: "Underneath both style and art, lies body politic" and elaborated on the genesis of the sapeurs "the subversive dandies of the Congo (. . .) whose hyper dapper style and performatively elegant manners . . . metabolize the 'gentille' appearances of colonialism as it stripped the Congo of its own customs and resources."

Of his current exhibition, the artist maintains: "Strange refers to a primary antagonist, an aggressive alien creature who abuses and attempts to kill the Earthlings, and its parallels to our politicians who are also our executioners." An analogous sentiment is evoked in the popular cartoon Pogo in which a character pronounces: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." It is a journey into the strange and fictive world in which society is transformed by the Alien and its collusion with multinational organizations and their self-serving interests. The artist invites the audience "to fly in the free painting spaces" that he has created to experience the chaos and disorder of contemporary society.

He further alleges, "My new body of work deals with the economic, social dependence and absolute policy that our politicians and multinationals maintains with respect to their people or populations used for their selfish interest. This project shows the daily practices of some of the largest multinationals and world leaders. Their profit is achieved thanks to the poor."

The works encourage different levels of appreciation and pivoting perspectives, from the political to the personal. In an overview of both exhibitions at Primo Marella Gallery, the unexpectedly linked triad of beauty-fashion-pain is a thread in Mwilambwe's art production. Historically, the shift from the traditional Congolese liputa[1] attire to sapology[2] finds theater in the Congolese sartorial attitudes of the sapeurs in the Kinshasa versus Brazzaville steam-venting posturings that are veritable nonbloody conflict resolutions. Kinshasa sapeurs tend towards garish and daring color clashing; those from Brazzaville prefer to match and accessorise. In one of the works in the exhibition with unclothed paired figures, one is barefoot; the other is elevated with multicolored stilettos festooned with red bows.

The figures in this exhibition are largely unclothed, and it's their nakedness, revealing secondary sexual characteristics, that is noticeable in contrast to the first exhibition. In one image, against a black background, a body has vacated its red-jacketed, white-shirted garb, remaining upright. Its hollowed-out absence, abandonment, or disappearance, makes as strong a statement as a despot's bronze statue. Garments can make powerful and empowering political statements that reflect a characteristic African modernity. In Fashioning Africa, a conference whose proceedings were published in a book, a group of international scholars brought their perspectives to the topic of "clothing as an expression of freedom in early colonial Zanzibar to Somali women's headcovering in inner city Minneapolis. Nationalist and diasporic identities, as well as their histories and politics, are examined at the level of what is put on the body every day.

Citing Homer, Plato, and Proust, among others, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, "not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice." Mwilambwe's images lend their nuances to the term "naked truths." The concept of beauty aids us in paying attention to that which is just by invoking fairness and fostering its perception sensorially. The neuro-physiologic basis for empathy provides the de-centering of the self-concerned individual leading to a heightened concern for others in the contexts of conviction, morality, alerts to injustice, ethical fairness, and verity. Ultimately, this segues and translates into social justice.

The strategies by which the sensate body is displayed and re-presented by Mwilambwe disengage and dismantle fossilised parameters that straightjacket our abilities to imagine the potentials of other worlds, re-organised. The recent history of the DRC is marked by civil war and corruption, and the Congolese media operate against systems of warring political powers and violent turmoil. In this artist's brilliant approach through art, imagination blossoms, hopes grow; the borders become the center, and the interstices, the essence. In a notable video interview, the artist asserts that his works show "the confrontation between reality and the dream" as he personifies the Alien and definitively underscores the indomitable resilience of the Congolese people.

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Multiplication

Leon Wyczółkowski Regional Museum in Bydgoszcz, Poland

Curator: Monika Kosteczko-Grajek

Artists: Dominik Lejman is one of six artists taking part in this project. Bogna Burska creates a found footage movie, Janek Simon prints self-portraits using 3D printing, Michal Brzezinski deals with bioart, Anna Zaradny's audiovisual works use the aesthetics of error, Tomasz Dobiszewski is responsible for connecting pinhole photography and new media.

Copy That: Art and Multiplicity in the Information Age KJ Baysa "Good artists copy but great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso “A mere copy cannot exist, but only originals do” - Arthur Danto     “Copy that” is Internet slang for “I understand.” The copy is an integral element of art that struggles to be free from its definition as a lackluster imitation. The making of multiples by the printing press revolutionized the transfer of information and exponentially expanded the number of people receiving it. In a similar manner, photography revolutionized people's perception of history, time, and self, raising issues of privacy, documentation, and truth. The digital/information/new media age and cybernetic culture, democratic and anonymous, have revolutionized the dissemination of text and visual information, distinguished by duplication and repeatability. The Internet has impacted all industries in ways that could not have been imagined several decades ago. Rife with reproductions and multiplicity, it similarly raises debates of open access, fair use, and free culture. Borrowing a term from immunology, it can be said that multiplication, an arithmetic factor, can be expanded exponentially by amplification: the initiation of a cascade of duplicating processes from an inciting stimulus. The explosive effects of mass production and distribution are exemplified in Internet broadcast phenomena like Instagram where individuals instantaneously reach a global network of friends and strangers with copies of texts and images through their mobile phones. In like manner, the role of Twitter in disseminating identical messages in organizing flashmobs as well as revolutions has been repeatedly well demonstrated.     Issues surrounding piracy have always been central to reconciling commerce and creativity, yet it has also been a stimulus for social and technological changes. Accompanying the mushrooming growth of mutiples are intellectual property issues of plagiarism, copyright, and patent. Within global copy cultures, ownership and authenticity issues are further complicated by laws that differ from country to country. With its tradition of artists copying master works to develop their skills, China produces 70 per cent of copies of famous masterpieces for export to North American and Europe. In a global view, copy and creativity are not necessarily contrary terms.     In the digital age, copying technologies have several implications and impacts: 1) art can be reproduced much more quickly; 2) many more copies can be made; and 3) the user can manipulate the context of a work of art through technologies that allow the adjustment of image size, resolution, magnification, sampling, and mixing. The ultimate consequence is the shift in the meaning of literacy in the information age.     In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, the author described the role of technological reproduction and its influence on aesthetic experiences. In digital entertainment, it takes form in the remix and the mashup. In the natural world, this phenomenon of repeating patterns at every scale is seen in fractals. Comparably, in the information age, the core concept is the meme, defined as the smallest unit of cultural information, a unit of imitation and replication that behaves like a human gene with ideas that can replicate, mutate, hybridize, and evolve. A meme can “go viral” and be propagated virtually ad infinitum through the Internet via postings on social networks, blogs, forums, and emails. Benjamin spoke of the impact of film and photography with their effects of shifting perception on the decline of aesthetic experience, and referred to the “loss of the aura” i.e. losing the originality and authenticity of a work of art through the process of mechanical reproduction. In contemporary art, a prime example would be the iconic image of DaVinci’s Mona Lisa and its innumerable iterations.     Over the last several decades there has been a shift in artistic practices from two and three-dimensional objects to performative works to experiential works. Benjamin describes the unprecedented levels of participation with electronic art media. This has been furthered by the digitalization of sensory input. The audience has been displaced from the role of passive observer to active participant with interactive technologies that deliver haptic, olfactory, and gustatory sensations, and their digitalizations have allowed the realm of the senses to achieve reproducible global dissemination. Benjamin additionally describes a tension between new modes of perception and the aura. Attendant to these immersive experiences and corresponding focal shifts from the body to the brain are the subjects of transmodal sensations and true synaesthesia, involving perceptions, cross-wired perceptions, and misperceptions.     One hallmark of contemporary art is said to be self-replication in forms of artistic production like assemblage and collage that creatively cobble parts together and form a cohesive whole. Another creative expression using a multiplicity of images is crowdsourced art, evinced by the ongoing Johnny Cash Project in which more than 250,000 people from more than 172 countries participate by each individual creating a variation of a single frame in a video that is then integrated into a collective whole.     One cannot discuss technology without the inclusion of the role of new materials in creative output since the challenge for an artist is to investigate new methods and new materials. These often emerge from the commingled matrix of art, technology, and science, and often first developed by the military or private industry. The E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) movement was distinguished by the use of new materials that lent themselves to experimentation. Artists and engineers created groundbreaking performances that incorporated new technologies like wireless sound transmission and video projections that were instrumental in breaking down the ostensibly rigid partitions between art and science. E.A.T. experimentations in the 1960s led to media-art explorations of the 1990s that then led to the ArtScience movement of the 2000s.     The DIY (do-it-yourself) movement and the availability of affordable 3D printers to the general artist-maker have sparked an additive manufacturing phenomenon that has been called the new industrial revolution and turns, on its head, the concept of what the artist making multiples can build. There are applications in jewelry, medical prosthetics, dentistry, aerospace and automotive industries, among others. Experts predict that 3D printers will democratize the act of creation and thereby revolutionize the manufacturing sector in the same manner that desktop publishing changed the print industry. The biggest impact is that the consumer-artist is simultaneously placed in the position of designer in the copy-making process. Predictably, the concomitant issues of intellectual property and patent infringement will problematize the future of this copycat industry.     As they grapple with the multiplicitous nature of production, artists are taken to task to find a strategy to navigate within these facsimile cultures and to analyze the processes sensitive to transcultural, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, the lexicon requires adaptation from older dated concepts of mimesis and imitation, to be re-focused on the evolving flexibility, porosity, dynamism and process-related aspects of copying. There should be less concern with the meaning of an original, and more with the process of creating the copy, and a shift from the position about the way an art piece looks, to one that stimulates thinking about how it behaves in situ and how it influences and is contextualized by its milieu. Kóan Jeff Baysa, M.D. November 2014

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THREE ENGLISH ARTISTS MOVED TO LOS ANGELES . . . .

Derek Boshier • David Eddington • Jeremy Kidd

If you didn't know these three artists and were asked to match the images to the personas, chances are that you would err. The impressive range and talent of these accomplished artists supercede the more than several years separating births, the differed and shared locales of their art training, and the number of kilometers separating their English birthplaces. In these works I see the contemporary concept of the mash-up:  conceits of collage and assemblage . . . the reorganizing and layering of image and object components whether virtually or digitally, whether juxtaposed, obfuscated, enhanced, or seamless, whether direct or intercalated. These artist, skilled in presenting permutations of verity and contradiction, also deftly demonstrate, within these real and imagined matrices, the human figure in its primacy and erasure, in figments and fragments. KJ Baysa Curator

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Helios: Unbound and Bound

Kóan Jeff Baysa

People set their daily agendas by sunrises and sunsets, dependent on the earth’s relationship to the sun. Clocks and calendars are adjusted globally to accommodate the workday to the changing ratios of hours of sunlight to hours and darkness.

In the geocentric view, the Sun appears to "rise" from the horizon. In reality, it is the earth's rotation that causes the sun to appear. The impression of the sun moving against the sky is a result of earthbound observations being made in a rotating reference frame. Across the globe mythologies were constructed to explain this illusion. Centuries later, this was eclipsed by the heliocentric view by Copernicus, with revolutionary repercussions.

However, air travelers are a privileged lot. Untethered from the earth, they are privy to unique perspectives from which to view the changing landscape below, and to witness spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Theoretically, from this aerial vantage point, if one were to travel westward at the same speed as the rotation of the earth [1,037.57 MPH at the equator], one could chase the sun and view an endless sunset; in the opposite direction, one could be maintained in perpetual darkness.

Helios, Unbound and Bound, contrasts the creative views of two artists, each working in a different medium, of the phenomena of sunrises and sunsets. Paul Pfeiffer, winner of the first Buxbaum Award given to an artist participating in the Whitney Biennial, is an international artist working in video. In Study for Morning After the Deluge, 2001, he digitally stitches the images of sunrises and sunsets into a single unfathomable image. Jane Farver, Director of MIT List Visual Art Center, writes of the piece: “As a ribbon of waves scrolls over the setting sun, day breaks simultaneously at its opposite edge. When the sun disappears at the bottom of the frame, the sun is isolated against the sky until the waves reappear at the top of the frame, and the loop begins again in an endless and impossible ying/yang of sunrise and sunset.” She compares it to Turner’s painting, from which Pfeiffer’s title is derived: Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory) --The Morning after the Deluge. Pfeiffer comments, “In a sense, Morning after the Deluge is a study of the human figure: its place in the history of Western art and its disintegration at the dawn of the digital age.”

The inspirations for the paintings and works on paper by Shingo Francis, selected for Helios, Unbound and Bound, are the innumerable sunrises and sunsets at which he marveled as he traversed from west to east, and east to west between domiciles and studios in Japan and the United States. Awarded the 2003 Fumio Nanjo Award from the Mori Museum, Tokyo, the artist interposes clear layers with those of differing pigments, burnishing successive layers by hand allowing light to reflect back through the underlying canvas, and “activating the colors . . . keeping the light alive." For example, Shingo Francis’s Bound for Eternity is a suspended C-shaped acrylic work on paper that appears to float and surround the viewer in a visual arc. The expansive band of color exudes reddish volcanic or solar primal energy as its intensity fades on its peripheries into a gaseous feathering yellow-green.

Although using vastly different mediums, both artists’ works share the perspectives of indeterminate vantage points, and in their abstractions, are quite human in nature, reflecting the nature of the air traveler, in flight and grounded, unbound and bound. What is imparted is a sense of the galactic, the infinite, and the sublime.

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Sudden Springs Suite

Charles Michael Norton at TAMA Gallery, TriBeCa, New York Kóan Jeff Baysa 2007©     Charles Michael Norton, trained and renown in Europe and the West Coast of America as a sculptor, now transliterates three-dimensional objects into remarkable paintings. The physicality of gathering, the materiality of emotion, and the concretization of thought were hallmarks of his sculptures. From this background he brings the concept of building structures, an architectonic methodology combined with the archeological metaphors of excavation. This current exhibition of his new acrylic paintings on Belgian linen at TAMA Gallery in TriBeCa, New York, gathers many of the breakthrough pieces that he has painted over the last three years. They are partly inspired by the recently acquired country property he and his artist-spouse Ruth Hardinger named Sudden Springs because of the land’s numerous aquifers.     A broadening spectrum is seen in the artist’s palette with the increased use of red and yellow pigments. The addition of flesh-colored paints such as Titan Buff and Portrait Pink introduces a human element. This shift is reflective of a different way of seeing and initiating a different dialogue with a varied approach to constructing his paintings in a malleable, more forgiving way, one that allows for adjustments. Worked primarily with cadmium-based colors for their vital intensity, these paintings have more organic refer-ences yet retain their architectural concern with the line. Painting without brushes but in-stead with spatulas and tools identical to mud knives he used during an earlier stint as a taper in drywall construction, he employs the similarly vigorous physical gestures of both endeavors.     To achieve specific effects, Norton arranges and blends paints on the blade before their application onto the canvas, employs tape to mask out certain areas, and uses subtractive rubbing to reveal, blend, or negate underlying layers and colors. Areas of raw linen canvas underscore the palimpsestual nature of Norton’s resonant paintings. Layers are created through sweeps of the paint spatulas and exposed by scraping. Described as reverse drawing, pigments protected by overlying tape are flayed as the tape is drawn away, breaking up space, apposing and exposing layers. The drawing analogies are ex-tended to include the strategies of shadowing and outlining with black pigment. The artist often creates a genealogy of paintings, as one may receive the residuum of pigments on the knife from another. Windows and portals reveal labyrinthean passages and strata of paint, analogous to overlapping membranes or layers of tissues, thick and opaque in some areas, tapering and diaphanous in others. Rubbed areas, direct evidence of the artist’s hand, lay open with exposed nerve endings. Perceptions shift with differing and simultaneous vantage points, from the optical push and pull of images, and from microscopic and telescoping perspectives. Within these illusionistic interstices the materiality of the medium is revealed. Scabrous surfaces and congealed colors stir visceral reactions, and the biomorphic agenda opens up the potential for narrative, for the stories that are borne within.      “Ornette” is named after the legendary musician who formulated the term “harmolodics,” a concept of compositional improvisation that promotes individual freedom while simultaneously respectful of other musicians and achieving harmony. In the eponymous painting, the viewer is led through a quasi-synaesthetic experience of visualizing free jazz melodies. Four adjacent and indistinct vertical planes, like major chords, lie over minor chords, and are Norton’s deliberations resolving visual dissonance and striving towards harmony within the planes of the painting, an origami folding of space and time. A rhythm is orchestrated as the viewer’s eyes are drawn across the painting, between the long ultramarine blue vertical note on the left to the red diagonal pitch bleeding off the right corner. Blaring deep red colorations bared by circular windows riff off of rectilinear scales of reticulated yellow pigment , as flesh tones and raw linen evoke somatic references. The tintinnabulation of colors in the upper right quadrant stand resolute as traces of a compositional problem solved, with the remnants regarded as important as what has been concealed.     Norton has the depth and the skill to imbue the smaller paintings with the gravitas of the larger works. The painting’s vertical divisions resemble dynamically shifting tec-tonic plates in “Second Summer 6” where the physicality of troweled pigments is even more evident in its intimate scale. Since the suite of paintings is partlly inspired by  coun-tryside views familiar to Norton, the works can be read through that filter, as the artist remarks, “like a squashed landscape.” The cresting green-pink-black bead of paint near the top edge of the painting demonstrates this, as well as the escarpment of built-up pig-ments near the lower left edge. Skinned in some areas and revealing its understructure, the painting bears an area rubbed raw down to the red. Eddies of pigments swirl at the vertical edges; flecks of paint adhere to the rough surfaces over which it was dragged. Ultimately self-referential, this work evinces dripping, oozing, pooling, melting, smearing, slipping, shearing, and smudging, from the laying up of buttery pigments onto as-sorted surfaces. Differing viscosities result in colored dribbles and drools. Spontaneity and serendipity manipulate the force vectors between the edge of the blade holding the pigment and the various receiving surfaces, producing patterns as surprising as those that echo stones skipping across water or the photic feathered undulations of the Northern Lights. Within the delta of pink stand islets of blue. Visual poetry results from the dance and the dialogue, the immediacy of communication between the artist, the paint, and the surface. “It is all about the paint,” Norton remarks, “with forms servicing forms, colors servicing colors, creating feeling and emotion. It is abstract and it is expressionistic, but I seek a fresh approach that stands apart from Abstract Expressionism.”     In his prognostication of the value and utility of abstract art in the book of his collected lectures, "Pictures About Nothing," former MOMA curator Kirk Varnedoe re-minded us that more than mere pure looking is necessary to begin to understand its man-made and made-with-intent experiential language. Within these complex paintings and their nuanced histological references lies a sensate humanness. At their core, these paintings evince mark making that invokes their genesis as essential human gestures from the exceptional persona of Charles Michael Norton.  

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Peregrinations with the Uncrowned Artist Laureate Kóan Jeff Baysa - July 2010     “John Kingerlee, I presume,” I greeted the renown artist at the designated rendezvous: Tangier’s richly-historied Continental Hotel; I rose from the settee in the chandeliered waiting chamber to embrace the self-taught Anglo-Irish artist whose work I had previously written about in shows mounted in New York and Beijing, but had never met heretofore. We struck up a fast friendship. Fond of William S. Burroughs, he brought me along to frequent the prior haunts of the notorious writer and painter, with daily coffees in the Petit Socco of Tangier’s medina, watching the wanderings of huddled European tourists and the daily routines of locals. We walked along the seawall and squinted in the sun looking across the water to Spain.     Kingerlee’s peregrinations triangulate the areas between the comfort of an embracing brotherhood in Morocco, the sense of community in Moorish Spain, and Ireland. His Irish house at Kilcatherine, is as tenacious and hardy as the man: a sole limpet in the crook of a craggy windswept outcrop in the spectacular Beara Peninsula, near Cork. One of my fondest memories of spending time with John and his wife Mo in Granada was the joi-de-vivre shown in his dancing to music by an all-female rock band in the movie that we had just watched. He played that segment of the DVD over and over. Disdainful of television programs, he purchased a large monitor to satisfy his voracious appetite for movies on discs (especially favoring Tarkovsky and Lynch), one of the few indulgences that he affords himself. Illiterate until he was 11 years of age, John Henry Francis Wedgewood Anthony Kingerlee, of hardscrabble beginnings, has grown into his skin and skull and matured into a well-read accomplished artist with studios in three countries. As a young street ruffian, he befriended the different, was a defender of the downtrodden and a lover of animals. St. Francis of Assisi is one of his heroes and Francis is his confirmation name. This trait is in his blood for his aunt, a horse trainer, literally lived an entire week in a stall with an allegedly untamable horse in order to gain its confidence; Kingerlee was once uncoaxable from the companionship of a “wild and dangerous horse,” as he crouched in comfort beneath the large animal in the stable. Down the hallway from the living room in his Granada apartment, whose rooftop terrace looks upward at the parapets of the magnificent Alhambra, is his smallish studio with shelves thickly piled with unframed works on paper; framed works stacked several deep buttress the walls. John is a gardener, a cultivator tending to his garden of ideas and materials, as he tends to the soul. It is partially within this matrix that John Kingerlee’s oeuvre has developed, as his works can be said to have specific terroirs, informed and infused by experiences and allegiances in Morocco, Ireland, and Spain.                 Kingerlee’s influences are legion and eclectic. He admires the nonconformity and spontaneity of the CoBrA artists for their sociopolitical activism that criticized the Cold War sentiments of their day and formed a milestone in the development of European Abstract Expressionism. He loves Joseph Beuys for his sense of destiny and Paul Cezanne for his reductive forms; Emil Schumacher for the powerful expressiveness in his action paintings and Paul Feiler for his gestural abstractions that simplify the world into richly active surfaces of tone and light. Despite his admiration for artists, Kingerlee aligns himself more within the ranks of writers than among those of painters, had initial aspirations of being a poet for his life calling, but had a family to support. He admires Ezra Pound who taught himself fencing and Confucianism mostly while imprisoned in a cage. The wellspring of inspiration for his oeuvre is Pound’s The Cantos, an unfinished epic poem of 120 sections, each a canto, begun in 1915; it spans 50 years and is resonant with Kingerlee’s personal thoughts on economics, culture, and governance. However, in each of his inspiring heroes, there has been a struggle, a fatal flaw, an infliction of trauma, or a sense of destiny. In some cases, Kingerlee’s concern with the lives of these artists overrides their artworks themselves. Schwitters suffered from poor health and died neglected and in poverty; Pound was persecuted and imprisoned for his beliefs. Indomitable, Schwitters was steadfast in his belief that his works would eventually be appreciated as genius, and Pound is now credited as a seminal influence in a veritable who’s who list of literary giants.             It is not difficult to see and experience the origins of Kingerlee’s fascination with forms, shadows, and light. While walking with him, we often stopped in the middle of a curving passageway in Tangiers’s medina or Granada’s stoned-lined hilly streets to examine the interplay of patterns of rocks and light, of detritus on the street, of shadows and graffiti on the walls, quotidian compositions that escape the eyes of ordinary passers-by. As homage to a dear mutual friend who we recently lost and sorely miss, we visited Bill Zimmer’s favorite graffiti on a wall a stone’s throw from the neighborhood video store where John and Mo select their daily trove of DVDs to watch successively, into the evening and the Spanish night.                  Having shown Kingerlee’s grid paintings at the National Museum of China in Beijing, I now primarily focus on his works on paper. Because of their spontaneity and immediacy, drawings on paper are closer to the thinking-in-the-moment nerve centers of artists, than any other medium. Kingerlee’s works on paper evince his adept strategies of marrying the everyday to serendipity and surprise as he deploys collage as displacement, fragmentation, and fetishization. Collage, from the French coller, to stick or glue, is a medium that has the requisite expediency and transcendency that Kingerlee requires to take found objects from the quotidian and transporting them into the universal. Its strategies of apposition and proximity reinforce old associations while creating new ones, drawing literally from materials experienced in the real world, then manifested in the personal and in the collective. Furthermore, collage disrupts the surface of a work with a contrasting physicality and unifies disparate parts into a whole, a semiotic collision and collusion. In this realm, Kurt Schwitters is the prime inspiration for Kingerlee, conflating treasure with refuse, underscoring the slippages between life and art. Abundant fodder for collage lines the walls and covers the floor in piles in his studio. I gladly contributed wrinkled receipts and torn tickets to his stockpiles. His actions result in the repurposing of items previously thought valueless, inconsequential and trivial to create works of wonder, making new statements within new contexts. Collage affords the opportunities for the daily to collide with the singular, to create simultaneous realities, to layer histories, and to fashion a fresh vision from old materials. The familiar is made strange and the strange familiar as Kingerlee breathes meaning into these surfaces: art, the ultimate alchemy, coaxing a significant something from next to nothing.     To his studio practice the artist applies the same discipline with which he conducts his five daily prayers that route ever-present distractions. He draws parallels between making a artwork with chaos theory: that dynamic systems are quite sensitive to initial conditions, so that long-term predictions are nigh impossible, speaking to the nature of collage. I observed the artist at work in his Granada studio, mixing a mound of powder with oil, turning and kneading the doughy heap repeatedly to even consistency. Kingerlee is in his element here: a gardener in his garden, an alchemist in his lab . . . thoughtful, irascible, intensely working and speaking to Mo or himself or anyone else who will listen . . . of cabbages and kings, of usury and Sufism, of Pound and Beuys and Schwitters. He then applied the paint to the paper surfaces with palette knives and brushes, keenly scraping and cutting with the knife and vigorously daubing with the brush, a repetitious physicality that splayed the bristles into a starburst on the end of a stick.     At the Continental Hotel in Tangier, Kingerlee offered me a glimpse at his sketchbooks. Scanning the pages I observed flotsam captured from daily wanderings . . . a ticket, from the ferry crossing that he has taken so many times between Africa and Europe, now sails the ochre and brown-washed pages of this diaristic tablet, rich underimages that recede beneath the watercolors like objects cast off a ship. Working with palimpsestal and nacreous gestures, marvelous congregations of images, materials and gestures form with a Daedalian artistry. I recall John sitting on his hotel bed, back against the wall, working swiftly on individual drawings, adding a glyph in pencil or splatter of paint here, a sketched figure or squeejeed bar of color there, among the collaged elements. The pages are saturated and crinkled, heavy with color and images, literally bursting the books at their seams, barely able to contain the genius within. Manipulated when wet, some of the pages evince his “stick and rip” technique of flaying paper like wounded skin or peeled bark, revealing layered histories through their resulting jagged fenestrations. Pigmented washes create gauze-like palimpsests; squarely regimented shapes are reminiscent of his stratified grid series of oil paintings. Paint applied in pools, and then tilted and manipulated, form rivulets of pigment, like the saturated canvases of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, or Helene Aylon’s gravity-tense pouches. The torrid clime of Northern Africa and Southern Spain is invoked by puddled opaque chocolate paint. Colors, when applied thickly between pages, then pressed together and separated, assume the patterns of ferning ice crystals. A collage piece with Arabic remains an abstraction to those unable to read it, symbols at the bottom of a tide pool, obscured by the blue that washes over it with the suggestion of a reflected sky.     Despite his successes as an international artist, Kingerlee, a man self-made and self-aware, states, “Just to be here is a miracle.” He has chiseled down a spare and essential existence for himself, with the mantra, “reduce . . . reduce . . . reduce.” If ever there were an artist laureate for everyman and of the everyday, John Kingerlee would certainly be crowned.

[truewrit]

The Neurouniverse Talent Spectrum

Kóan Jeff Baysa, M.D.©

              The very definition of neurodiversity is struggling to find a footing in common parlance within its own community. One view holds that atypical or divergent neurodevelopment is a normal human variation to be acknowledged and accepted as part of humanity as pivotal as biodiversity and cultural diversity. There has been an explosive increase in population of diagnosed autistic individuals, and within that has developed a movement to identify and include, as model examples, prominent successful individuals (Gates, Einstein, Jefferson) as possibly neurodiverse. The term “cousin” has been appropriated for someone who has autistic characteristics but has not been medically diagnosed as such.

       A young man with Aspergers who was visiting a neuroscience institute was asked what he would do if they could develop a pill for autism. Before replying, he thought awhile then responded that he would take half the pill. This underscores the schism that exists within the autism community. There are those who pathologize autism as a disorder that afflicts an otherwise healthy individual. In contrast, advocates of neurodiversity, purport that autistic people are not disordered, but rather have a different type of order resulting in thinking about and perceiving the world differently. They do not want to be cured, but want to be understood that they are “wired” differently, and have acceptable alternative cognitive strategies that are well suited for certain milieu, like the creative arts, computer culture, research and laboratory work, among others. Advocates of neurodiversity strive to recontextualize and depathologize autism spectrum and other conditions like ADHD, synaesthesia, schizophrenia, savantism, dyslexia, and OCD. Those that oppose the concept of neurodiversity may do so with the fear of over-depathologizing or over-normalizing a situation that eschews access to treatment modalities and subverts funding for research. Some become closeted autistics, sequestering their families in environments where differences go unnoticed, in private schools, home schooling, then choosing careers that minimize social interaction. Others frame neurodiversity as a civil rights movement with terms like “neurobigotry” and “passing for neurotypical.”

       About one in ten individuals with autism have specific skills in which they excel, like extraordinary memory or artistic abilities with its attendant rewards of a sense of mastery and resultant self-esteem. Arguably, not all individuals with synaesthesia, autism spectrum, or Aspergers have extraordinary artistic talent. Differences are manifest in ways of processing information: language, sound, images, light, texture, taste, or movement. It is postulated that the beauty or difference in perceiving synaesthetic sensations is conducive to and results in expansive artistic expression in contrast to the opinion that having synaesthesia automatically confers astounding artistic abilities.

       As a curator and writer, I have been very fortunate to be invited to be involved with this series of AUT exhibitions. In 2010, I wrote an article for the exhibition catalog, The Neurodiverse, Neuroplastic Universe, bringing awareness to the autism spectrum in conjunction with the artwork presented. As co-curator in 2011, I am foregrounding the spectrum of talent within these neurodiverse communities. In 2012, as chief curator for the exhibition, I want to create immersive environments that embrace the experiences of neurodiversity.

       The 2011 exhibition is inclusive of artists with attributes of ADHD, synaesthesia, schizophrenia, savantism, and autism spectrum, some compounded by degrees of deafness and blindness. Within this exhibition, I felt strongly to include artists who might be classified as neurotypical for their artistic expression demonstrating their sensitivity to the perceptions of the neurodiverse.

       Shari Belafonte is a noted celebrity, but less known for her remarkable skill as a photographer focused on her project Mythostories, about an autistic boy, a shutterbug, with a cyberbabysitter who takes him throughout the universe where he captures images of the remarkable situations and creatures that he encounters. Like American visionary artist Joseph Cornell, a self-avowed armchair traveler, who never traveled outside of the eastern United States yet created elaborate environments of Europe, Tim Conaway travels in his mind to faraway landscapes and meticulously depicts them using colored pencils and markers. An Aspie with profound deafness from ototoxic antibiotics in infancy, Zoe Kakolyris paints remarkably elaborate Henry Darger-like landscapes densely populated with similar looking individuals, often including herself. Kevin Hosseini is a prolific painter, receiving accolades and commissions. He has autism and was recently diagnosed with schizophrenia. He visited Iran, part of his parental heritage, and the works in the exhibition reflect his remarkable skill in capturing the impressions of his visit. Similarly skillful are the exceptional cityscapes by Kristina Woodruff, a very accomplished autistic savant painter with synaesthesia.

       Noted New York-based painter, Carol Steen, collaborated with an animator to create a dynamic visual of her synaesthetic response to a sound clip, attempting to convey to a nonsynaesthete what she experienced. In a possible case of temporary trauma-associated synaesthesia, Nina Yankowitz created the series Voices of the Eye (1972-76). In her Dilated Paint Readings, she states “I created visual scanning paths by composing a vocabulary comprising serial, chromatic sequences directing the viewer’s eyes along the painting’s surface. Adding or subtracting light/value to the hues and the distance between paint marks notates the tempo and directs the pace of reading colors as phrases in a score.” C. Michael Norton is not a synaesthete, but transduces his paintings in direct response to music. His all-time favorite jazz musician and composer is Ornette Coleman, innovator of the free jazz movement of the 60s, who has inspired numerous paintings that Norton claims that one should be able to play and hear. Mathematician and physicist California power couple Jiayi and Shih-Wen Young present a silent video that can powerfully invoke a specific acoustic memory.

       Among the favorite images that Deborah Giles likes to paint is the Statue of Liberty and aliens. In the larger work exhibited, the statue wears her medical bracelet and her eyeglasses. Legally blind and profoundly deaf since infancy from rubella, she uses sign language and a writing pad to communicate. Several self-portraits are included in the work of autistic artist Seth Chwast, who rarely speaks, but found his voice in describing the world in paint after taking a class in oil painting at age 20. Casey Metcalfe, an Aspie who describes himself as having “autism lite,” is obsessed with money, not for its monetary value, but for the portraits of famous individuals, like presidents, on them. He watches world news for images of world leaders, depicting them in colored pencils. Included in the exhibition are his portraits of the fateful Kennedy brothers, JFK and RFK. Heads are included in part of the series of astounding works by Michael Madore, a Yale graduate with Aspergers who acknowledges his longstanding attraction to detailed diagrams and the working sounds of appliances, “neuroimaging glitches, German scientific nomenclature, and somewhat annoying flashbacks to the 1880s” among others.

       Poland-based hyper-energetic art heavyweight Dominik Lejman excels at animated paintings: video projections that frequently depict humans in mesmerising repetitive behavioral patterns. From her studies of ADHD and inattention blindness, Ellen Levy presents a revelatory video that combines elements of looted Iraqi national treasures, the con game of three card monte, and references to cardplayers in paintings by Caravaggio and La Tour, in a shuffle of attentiveness, distraction, and sleight of hand.

       Interdependently, art shares practices and experiences of wonderment, problem-solving and experimentation with science. The outstanding works by talented artists in this exhibition exemplify these traits and were additionally selected for their rigor in conceptualizing the images and for the flair and finesse demonstrated in their making.

[truewrit]

Neurodiverse Neuroplastic Universes Kóan Jeff Baysa, M.D.

As sensate beings, by definition, we perceive the world through our senses. For some these sensations are altered through filters such as blindness and deafness. In some the filters are a cross-wiring of the brain, termed synaesthesia, or by autism spectrum disorders: complex neurodevelopmental disorders of unclear etiology, characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, by restricted and repetitive behavior, and the inability to read non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, posture and vocal tones. Attention has been brought autism by the popular 1988 movie, Rain Man (one in ten autistic persons has savant skills, while half the number of savants are autistic), recent alleged links to childhood vaccinations, and the revolutionary animal advocacy work of Temple Grandin.

Neuroplasticity challenges the idea that brain functions are fixed in certain locations and is supported by increasing evidence for a networked brain. It is linked to the concept of neurodiversity that embraces atypical development as a normal human difference that is to be recognized and respected as any other human variation, asserting that affected people do not need a cure, recognizes new forms of autonomy, and gives them more control over their choice of treatment including whether there should be treatment at all.

In the art activities in which I’ve been involved as an art curator, critic and collector, I’ve worked with individuals with autism spectrum disorders, also known as pervasive developmental disorders, in several settings. Years ago, I was a board member at Creative Growth, “a center serving adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities, providing a stimulating environment for artistic instruction, gallery promotion and personal expression” in Oakland, California; two of the notable artists here include Dwight MacIntosh and Dan Miller. In 2003, Seth Chwast, a young man of 20 who rarely spoke, took an oil painting class at the Cleveland Museum of Art that opened up a whole new world of expression for him; a board member of the Art Omi International Artists Residency, I met him when he was one of our 2008 residents in upstate New York. In the mid-90s, painter Michael Madore, diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, and I both worked at a pharmaceutical advertising company; he as an editor, and me as a writer. While hospitalized in 1987, he took the advice of his psychiatrist and entered the Yale MFA painting program, graduating in 1990, exhibiting at Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York to critical acclaim.

Like synaesthesia, autism is perceived with both positive and negative aspects. While some are covetous of those having synaesthesia, believing that is the guarantee of creative genius, in actuality, not all synaesthetes can express themselves well through art. Some researchers assert that the links between autism and talent begins at the sensory level, embracing both excellent attention to detail and the ability to systematize objects. Some innovative companies, like Specialisterne in Denmark, and Aspiritech in Chicago see individuals with autism as an underutilized  resource. Among the traits valued are maintaining a high level of accuracy, and often preferring work to socializing.

One of the most well known individuals with autism is Temple Grandin, a professor at Colorado State University, a bestselling author, and a consultant to the livestock industry in animal behavior. She attributes part of her success to her ability to recall detail. Grandin states that she would not support a cure of the entirety of the autistic spectrum. “If I could snap my fingers and become non-autistic I would no do so. Autism is part of who I am.”

Artist Steven Wiltshire’s disorder affects his ability to interact with other people, but it has also given him a photographic memory and a gift for putting it on paper. With just one aerial view of cities like New York, Dubai, and Tokyo, he is able to depict these entire cities in amazingly accurate detail. Other artists attribute their creative output to their disorders: “Thoughts and images swirl around endlessly, making it difficult to stay calm and focused. Art has helped me find a way to calm down and channel my energy into my work. It is a refuge from the fast-paced chaos of the world around me. Art helps me live with my disability. I can escape from the world and channel my nervous energy into creations. All in all, art lets me expand my horizons and feel part of something great,” says artist John Williams. “Being object blind and context blind, I’d tap everything to make noise, to hear its “voice,” flick it to feel its movement, turn it to experience how it caught light” adds artist Donna Williams.

Aspergers Disorder is a milder variant of autistic disorder that promotes hyperfocus on intense interests with impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication, often including physical clumsiness and atypical use of language. While autism and Asperger's have certain similarities, there are also important differences. In general, a child with Aspergers Disorder functions at a higher level than the typical child with autism and may have normal intelligence with relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. However, children with Aspergers Disorder are additionally at risk for other psychiatric problems including depression, attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Some see Aspbergers Disorder as a type of hyperwiring of the brain with advantages in specific work, sports, and creative environments. Workplace advocates of individuals with autism praise their organizational ability and facility with detailed repetitive tasks.

Many athletes with Asperger's are undiagnosed and excel at solo sports positions like catcher, goalie, surfer, runner, and martial artist. The heightened awareness of surroundings most likely benefits Maui-based Clay Marzo, a surfer and two-time NSSA National Champion who won his first WQS contest, the Quiksilver Pro Puerto Escondido, in 2009.

Artist David Downes claims, “Having Aspberger’s Syndrome influences my work. I am very focused and can capture architecture and urbanscapes in vivid detail.”

Ari Ne’e-man, an individual with Aspergers Disorder and founder of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, is studying political science at the University of Maryland. New genetic advances worry him, who doesn’t believe that autism can or should be cured, predicting that with a prenatal test for the suspected causative gene complex, people like him might cease to exist.

There are survey books that showcase the works of autistic artists, notably Drawing Autism by Jill Mullin. Those that address Aspergers Disorder specifically include The Exact Mind: An Artist with Asperger Syndrome by Peter Myers, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Sally Wheelwright and American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome by Lawrence Osborne. This last author worries that we are "medicalizing creativity to the point where it becomes a diagnostic cluster of symptoms." Historically, creativity has often been linked to madness, being an outsider, or seeing reality strangely. The works of autistic artists are being highlighted in exhibitions like Seeing with a Different Eye: Art by Adults with Asperger’s Syndrome, hosted in 2009 at the Massachusetts State House, as well as art venues like The Outsider Art Fair, Cavin-Morris Gallery and Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York.

The internet can provide a way to integrate online and offline friendships, but in a notable subset, it can be isolating, leading to terms like cocooning and a new breed of armchair travelers whose vicarious brand of tourism, they feel, obviates the need for actual travel to the sites visited online. Computers and held devices allow individuals to work solo from home. Our technologically mediated reality has artificially personalized experiences, yet created a type of isolation. We can connect over wide geographic distances, but at the risk of widening interpersonal distances.

Unlike adults, youth in the digital age radically define the terms “relationship” and “privacy” in different ways. As a bizarre example, the term “Internet Asperger’s Syndrome” was coined by two youths in their 2009 online art project, We Live in Public (and the end of empathy), in which they "put a couple dozen cameras all over his loft and recorded the inevitable breakdown of his life with the love of his life", and set up internet chat rooms for public discussion of the results. This factitious diagnosis, they claimed, "affects people when their communication moves to digital" causing them to "[stop] seeing the humanity in other people" and to behave in other ways that they felt paralleled the perceived social dysfunction and hyperwired symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome. One might postulate the presence of individuals with autistic spectrum disorders in Second Life and imagine the virtual designation of AAS: Acquired Asperger’s Syndrome. As there are synaesthete wannabes, I envision Asperger wannabes, for their positive attributes, as well.

Most of those on the autistic disorder spectrum have impaired social skills and can thereby examine and experience the world from an outsider’s perspective. We patience and insight, we can learn from them things we could not learn by ourselves and gain from them a view of the world relatively free of certain socioeconomic filters. With patience, understanding, and support their creativity and innovation will certainly flourish.

Kóan Jeff Baysa, M.D.

[truewrit]

Sound Soaring from the Visual Precipice Kóan Jeff Baysa M.D.     Uber-curator Harald Szeemann, in the introduction to the catalogue for his landmark exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form (1969) stated, “In order to entertain certain ideas we may be obliged to abandon others upon which we have come to depend.” Natalie Bewernitz and Marek Goldowski, Cologne-based artists who have worked together since 2000, and whose work, Life at the Witch Trails, was heralded as a standout at ISEA Singapore, abandon expected trajectories and uniquely underscore the legitimacy of sound as a creative medium within the rubric of expanded media. They create ‘living’ structures incorporating sound by the simultaneous interplay of several senses. Bewernitz, from a photography and new media background, and Goldowski, from music, theater, performing arts, film, and technology, contribute to the emerging technoculture of interactive sonic environments with their cross-platformed immersive installations and performances.     As sentient beings, we experience and acquire knowledge of the world through our senses, but it is ultimately the “perceiving” organized by the neural networks in the brain that constitute our “realities.” Disrupting the long-held divide between the senses and the intellect, and between perception and meaning, both artists and scientists utilize varying methodologies, and find common ground in their investigations into the nature and structure of reality, driven by curiosity, experimentation, and a sense of wonder. Ultimately, sensory perception is limited by its nature. These artists shift the primary focus from the object itself that is perceived, to the very process of perception. Beginning with nonmanipulated material, they use high and low technologies to fragment and transform, reassemble and reembody information, so that the model is no longer anthropocentric and ossified, but de-centered and fractionated, into digitalised, particulate, or molecular bits. This reconstructing of sensory data allows for its blending and reorganization on a unitary level, resulting in syncretic sensory stimuli that parallel synaesthetic experiences.     Bewernitz and Goldowski work with the sculptural properties of sound: dynamic and space-occupying, interacting with the inorganic physical environment and organic live audience. Cognitive neuroscience investigates how the physical properties of the world are organised in the brain to yield conscious perception, and it is the disruption of habitual perception and cross-talk between areas within the brain that do not normally communicate that lies at the heart of the widely misunderstood phenomenon of synaesthesia. This condition, first documented in 1812, in which a sensory stimulus of one type evokes sensation in another sensory modality, is now recognized as integral to the creative process. According to leading researchers, in non-synaesthetes, cumulative life experiences "prune" inter-sense connections and create a more effective inhibition of the remaining connections; in synaesthetes, pruning is less and inhibition is less effective.          Although not synaesthetic, Bewernitz and Goldowski assume a parallel multi-modal and immersive approach deploying the haptic, tactile, vibrational materiality of sound, and in combination with optical and auditory components, create new, abstracted, emotional, and imagined spaces. In one of their first collaborative pieces, Gaslampe (2001), the music approximates the particles of a gas flame, with its visual dynamics and streaming noises. The aural colludes with the visual to invoke sensations of glow and warmth.     Ambitious in scale, the artists take on individual cities as part of their long-term project Unveiled Presence, first morphing then sensory mapping metaphorical bodies from architectural elements. Monitoring the life/live functions of a city, they plot the data to a corpus, converting representation from one sensory mode to at least one other. In 2010 they captured vibrations of objects and locales in Helsinki through laser light and encoded the data that was then transduced into an audio-visual presentation. Similarly anthropomorphizing and embodying architectural presences by simultaneously capturing the acoustic “lives” of four quadrilaterally configured New York water towers, the artists propose to create a site-specific installation inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s A bruit secret (1916). Another iteration of their secret sounds concept was the sonification of the New York subway system, transmutating its quotidian operational din into “yelling, crying and whining.”     With EPG (Expanded Polyphonetic Generation) (2003), the organ of taste and palate discrimination was recast to a role as mechanical mouth muscle that orchestrated constructing a neo-language through the reordering of digitalized data. The movements of the tongue against the sensors of the electropalatographs in the mouths of each of the two “conversants” created a cannibalized dialogue, a Frankensteinised shuffled re-embodiment of selected quotations by vocal innovator Meredith Monk. In Die Leichtigkeit (2002) the identifying image of a fictitious female suicide assassin is degraded and obfuscated by her own voice sounding her farewell message.     Current explorations in expanded technologies will make possible the full complement of the sensory spectrum, for example, with electronic noses, remote surgery, and digital taste synthesizers. To these, the supernumerary senses of proprioception, muscle memory, and immune system self-identification will likely be added. Having already importantly pioneered projects in these areas, the artists’ next ventures into this expanding universe of sensory experiences are greatly anticipated.

[truewrit]

LUNCH WITH MOZART, 2000. Oil on canvas, 72x108 inches

"Spun Out of the Gravities"

©Kóan Jeff Baysa

The newest oil paintings and bronze sculptures in the third of a series of exhibitions by Norman Sunshine at the Neuhoff Gallery continue to track a trajectory of evolving existential clarity, refining and defining the artist's position and import in the universe, and psychological growth and maturation that Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung termed "individuation." It is claimed that the perpetual tensions between chaos and individuation nurture the conditions conducive to making art. Citing every artist's elusive goal of achieving immortality through perfection, Sunshine has intentionally and repeatedly placed obstacles within his art practice, challenging his creative resources to resolve them, with mounting self-confidence. With prior investigations of history and beauty, he has been increasingly focused on his own triangulation of shadow, anima, and self in space and time. In the first of this series, entitled "The Living Still Life" (2000), the paintings inspired the sculptures; in the second exhibition, "Apples of the Hesperides" (2002), the converse occurred. If the operative words in the previous series were "joyous . . . playful . . . and optimistic" in this colorful series they are "dark . . . chaotic . . . but hopeful." In this third exhibition in the series, entitled "Worlds" as a group, the artist shifts direction and mirrors his emotional reactions to the current tragic, terrifying, and chaotic state of today's world, and his private ruminations on mortality. He reveals, "I have come to realize that my importance in the world is only to myself." Creating from the unconscious, the artist is unmoored, exploring uncharted and uncertain territories. It is a "cautionary tale," he states, dangerous and tenuous. The flat and volumetric man-made and organic components of the bronze sculptures retain their tense, balanced and gravity-defying relationships of previous works. Painterliness is manifest in patinas, oxidizing acid washes applied successively to the metal surfaces imparting subtly layered colorations within the rugged surfaces. The plasma-cut flat components of solid bronze plates are derived directly from shapes in his paintings and refer both to Matisse's paper cutouts and Sunshine's earlier exploration of collage. A fixed and palpable tension exists between the vunerable soft organic hollow forms of the apples and the unyielding hard angular solid shapes that support and compress them. The circle, present in previous drawings and paintings, appears here as a thick hollow ring encircling and girding the vertical elements. Interpreted as a reference to the planet Saturn, it invokes the term, saturnine, synonymous with melancholic, describing a condition historically thought to be provoked by lingering grief and fear, undercurrents of the artist's present concerns regarding the state and fate of the world. A shallow base adds structural stability while framing negative spaces within the interlocked shapes. Dynamically changing as the sculptures are viewed in the round, these visual interstitial voids are of critical importance to their compositions. The "Forgotten Worlds" grouping of four bronze sculptures is "more of a dire warning" he states, and cautions how, over time, the precarious balance of privileged worlds can tip either way. While the sculptures are no more static than Zeno's paradoxical arrow in flight, the paintings are aligned with Archimedes's forward-moving arrow in time towards entropy. The sculptures evince a joyous seriousness; the paintings, a serious joyfulness. The artist chose the apple, a symbol of aspiration, to reinvigorate it from its overuse in modern painting. The round shapes in these new paintings, metamorphosed from the original apple images, have lost their umbilical references and float untethered and shadowless above the landscape-like ground, spun out of the gravities that previously anchored them. The palette has shifted to brighter colors that excite the paintings, but the multicolored spheres presented cartographic challenges because their juxtaposed pigments could not be allowed to be overpowered by the active background of horizontal movements and swirls. Some of the spheres now abut the divisive black lines; others begin to leave the pictorial planes. These round shapes, truly flat but appearing volumetric through the artist's deft use of hue, intensity, and value, read doubly as circular windows that reveal underlying worlds. The paintings initiate a divided dialog on their telescopic, or celestial, and microscopic, or cellular, references. The invention of lenses and their pioneering uses in Galileo's telescope and Leeuwen- hoek's microscope upset and re-ordered man's perspective and rank in the universe. References to rocky planets, formed from dying stars, and galaxies are affirmed when the artist says of his new images, "It is the outer space of my own imagination." As shapes shift and alter their relationships, the paintings, he admits, appear to be searching for another space. In the most recent paintings, the black lines that previously served to separate and flatten the planes have been lost, appearing as if the individual panels were separated then rotated into horizontal formats that now resemble sectioned tissue on a microscope slide or a NASA image of a remote star system. The round figure is now centralised with a corona against the active ground, and in these landscape-format paintings the heavenly body-as-cell unit conceit is most apparent. The tondos, or circle paintings, are isolated apple-derived forms that can be read as vortices, planets or eyes. Curiously, in the term "the apple of one's eye" the apple is actually the pupil of the eye, the aperature through which light enters the globe, and is associated with something or someone precious that needs protection. Another visual analog is the jade bi, a disc of neolithic Asian origin with a central hole that serves as a portal to the heavens. The original apple references have been progressively distilled from issues of beauty and fascination to the gravitas of abstraction and uncertainty. The self-claimed "chaotic nature" of the paintings invokes the original Greek definition of khaos as the primal emptiness and origin of the universe, moving the works towards the realm of timelessness. American psychologist Rollo May stated, "The capacity to create is essentially the ability to find form in chaos, to create from where there is only formlessness." It is from hallucinatory, visionary, ecstatic experiences and unconscious creativity that new worlds and spaces such as these are imagined. Within the referential but ultimately unlocatable entropic spaces of these paintings, wisdom, safety, and purity can hopefully be found. The summary effect of these placements is the apprecia- tion of the artist's journey of self-knowledge and self-realization, refracted in images seen as stellar evolution, the life cycle of stars, and apoptosis, the sequence of cell death. Southern writer James Baldwin remarked, "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers." The questions laid bare in Sunshine's most recent paintings, bereft of their black divisions and cast shadows, allude to an eponymous and suffused light that has entered his space.

©Kóan Jeff Baysa All rights reserved

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The Psychic Blossoming of a Well-Tended Wound (2010) - Detail; The Psychic Blossoming of a Well-Tended Wound (2010), Diptych: (L) Oil on canvas, 72 in x 72 in; (R) Unique serigraph (hand colored) on canvas, 40 in x 30 in. Courtesy Elizabeth Moore Fine Art.

Ricochets and Tangled Trajectories by Koan Jeff Baysa, M.D. In its own way, tracing the origins of painter Margaret Evangeline’s current works at Elizabeth Moore Fine Art recapitulates the ontogeny of creole New Orleans. Last summer, the artist’s random discovery of an alleged image of Marie du Barry, consort to King Louis XV, led to a fascinating investigation of the tangled and wrought histories of three Maries: Anna Marie Tussaud, Marie Jeanne Becu du Barry, and Marie Laveau. Both Tussaud and du Barry rose from the French lower classes through different paths, and were invited to the royal court. Tussaud survived the Reign of Terror through her utility and service to the sans culottes by receiving the heads of the victims of the guillotine in her apron and casting them in wax to make death masks. Creative license blurs and tangles the histories of Marie du Barry and Marie Laveau, a voodoo priestess and free woman of color in New Orleans who shares her family name of Glapion with Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary who came under recent criticism after the security breach of a state dinner. In these paintings, the shared voluptuous attributes of du Barry and Laveau, are commingled in a creolization of the former, with the artist experimenting with descriptions of the latter as having “red lips, skin the color of a banana, or bronze, or red gold” resulting in a syncretic identity depicted with a Warholian conceit and palette. The artist remarks that this beauty is eerily and similarly found in present day Rogers. Evangeline effectively deploys the metaphor of stem grafting: placing a scion within a created wound of a rootstock, resulting in hybridity, hardiness, and sturdiness, and in her own words, “the blossoming of a well-tended wound, the essence of creolization.” The opposite and untoward process, dehiscence, the gaping apart of a healing wound, can also be found in the history of the creole. In the signature work of the show, The Psychic Blossoming of a Well-Tended Wound (2010), the painted canvas in oil of a floral motif is apposed with the unique hand colored serigraph on canvas of du Barry, taken through generational degradations of serial recopying, without any intentional matching of sizes or other devices. The artist tracks a reincarnation of that image from life to wax to photograph to print to painting in parallel with excerpted histories from du Barry to Laveau (to Rogers). The floral references come from her earlier works with smooth and shiny surfaces, references to water, pierced by shot and creating flower-like blossomings of twisted metal and the transference of this explosive, expanding, spiraling energy into paint. Curiously, these petallated forms can also be read as jewels of knowledge depicted in Buddhist paintings and in its smaller versions with dripping rivulets of paint, invoke the bleeding sacred heart motif seen in Mexican catholicism. The diptych works very well in tale and contrast, attracted like two separately charged plates from different trajectories, but arriving at a brilliant confluence through the creative hand and mind of the artist.

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Root System, 2002, Oil on Linen, 54" x 38"

Karen Marston: Myth and Medicine by Kóan Jeff Baysa, MD "My works", the artist remarks "are about the poetics of seeing".  I was impressed with these remarkable paintings, their vibrant imagery, skillful brushwork, and expansive references. When she states that "the structures of nature are the structures of the body, are the structures of emotion" she echoes the ancient physician Galen's concept that the various emotions are seated in specific organs. As a physician specializing in hypersensitivity disorders and as a freelance art curator and writer, I strive to keep the tradition of the artist-scientist vital with concurrent clinical and curatorial practices. "Curing" and "curating" are both derived from the same Latin root curare, "to care for". Marston's paintings, distilled affirmations of life translated into powerful images, have at their core primal fears of suffocation, drowning and the struggle for breath using aqueous, arboreal and anatomical motifs. She demonstrates these symbologies dramatically in Breathing Underwater (2003) in which a bronchial tree appears to have just succumbed beneath the water's surface, creating a whirlpool by its submersion. In utero, the human fetus is tethered by an umbilical cord in its amniotic sea, dependent on a branch-patterned veined placenta for oxygen and nutrition. Its lungs are fluid-filled until its first inhalation initiates the respiratory cycle that connects it with the outside world. If a small amount of fluid remains in the lungs after birth, "wet lung", a transient condition with tachypnea (rapid breathing) occurs. In contrast, a patient with progressive congestive heart failure slowly drowns as the lungs fill with fluid from pulmonary edema. Therein lies the poignancy of the vitality of breathing poetically presented in Red Lungs and Poppy (2003) in which the intensity of the red poppy and its stem fade into the trachea and lungs against an atmospheric background. Within Marston's visual vocabulary, links between myth and medicine are exemplified in the phenomenon "Ondine's curse", named after the beautiful water sprite who sacrificed her immortality for a knight's love. He pledged his breath to her in marriage, but when she discovered him to be unfaithful, she took him at his word and condemned him to remain awake in order to breathe. Falling asleep would result in death. In clinical medicine, its analog is sleep apnea. Years ago, the artist was profoundly affected by witnessing a deluge that caused the Delaware river to overflow its banks, thereby creating a landscape of marooned trees with skyward limbs and exposed roots. In the Kaballah, the Tree of Life is a map of personal energies and a means of bringing balance into life. Yggdrasill, the mighty tree In Norse mythology, represents the World Tree of life, knowledge, time and space. Uprooted trees, therefore, are powerful emblems of rupture and displacement. In dream analysis, images of water suggest conscious thought while whirlpools imply wakes of past disturbances. Links are found with Shakespeare's Hamlet and his complex affections for Ophelia. Feeling ultimately rejected, Ophelia allows herself to be drowned in a whirlpool vortex. The artist gathers archetypes of water, trees and breathing in the striking Root System (2002) where bare branches above water bathed in shadowy light are mirrored below by a pair of illuminated, submerged lungs. Marston masterfully grounds the essential physicality of water, trees and human anatomy in her self-reflective paintings, balancing purposeful ambiguities and emotional gravities while underscoring her belief in the dualistic nature of life and its contradictions. With metaphors of interface and transition, finitude and survival, concealment and revelation, these paintings come from a point of pain and betrayal to arrive at regeneration and independence. March 2005

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Liminality KJBaysa

         Taking a sidelong approach to commenting on the recent works by the accomplished LA-based English artist David Eddington, I sought clues for the origins of the powerful undercurrents in his works. The words west cardinal and cycads came forward, telling references to water safety and ancient plants that hint at his tremendous respect for nature and history, evinced by his adoption of sustainable and ecoconscious practices. The title of the exhibition, Bilge Water, is the liquid that collects in the bottom of a vessel derived from rough seas, rain, hull leaks, and interior spillage of waste and chemicals. Accumulating bilge water must be pumped out, for in large amounts it could sink a vessel. Metaphorical of the ineluctable degradation of ecosystems, given our present course, it reflects the artist’s keen sensitivity to the fragility of the earth.

         Each component of a painting is placed there by the artist’s hand, and like chess moves, their positions and relationships on the canvas have gravity and consequence. Moreover, images can be indistinct, morphed, or obliterated. In viewing Eddington’s works, the Russian term: ostranenie, comes to mind. It means to see in strangeness, to ultimately acknowledge one’s own complicity in making known what is known. It is a quality that defines Eddington as an artist’s artist, whose production of work is as vital to him as breathing, and whose day without any time in the studio creating is felt to be hopelessly lost. He has moved past solid praise that he can paint well and escapes categorization, with the humility to acknowledge that in the end it is no more than pigment on ground. Focused on the very process of making a painting, his dogged explorations of varying combinations of concepts and materials raise him to creative and critical levels far above familiar iconographers.

         In Pictures of Nothing, Kirk Varnedoe holds that “even staunchly figurative art can find its way to abstraction and abstraction often cannot lose its figurative connotations.” Eddington admits that over the last several years his paintings have included more figurative elements, using the term “hero” in referring to them, not in the championing sense, but as an anthropomorphisizing conceit. It was a gradual dawning, as opposed to an epiphany, of having realised an essential truth that lay bare all along. Painting figures, in contradistinction to abstract images, he says, is a way of populating his canvas with images that look and reflect back at him, engaging him in dialogue.

         Each encounter with a work of art can be likened to interpreting a Rorschach inkblot, subject to an individual’s education, experience, bias, acculturation, and intelligence. What absolutely fascinates me about Eddington’s paintings is his ability to present multiple readings, often inarticulable, holding the viewer hostage on the cusp of any legibility of his intentions.

         In Eddington’s works of commingled illusions and allusions there are no single conclusions or pat summations, but instead, marvelously painted jewels of memes and indecipherable factions. In the liminal languages in which his paintings are couched, the coupling and uncoupling of his worlds of nature and symbology provide potentialities and bring appreciation to both.

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Atlantis-Eden-Antarctica

By Kóan Jeff Baysa, MD

       It’s the driest, emptiest, coldest, most paradoxical place on earth. An ice sheet nearly 3 miles thick covers all but 2.4 percent of its 5.4 million square miles. It’s arguable who was the first man to set foot on it, but it wasn’t until 1935 that the first woman set food there. It’s a veritable desert whose driest valleys haven’t seen rain in more than 20 million years, yet it constitutes 70% of all the earth’s water as solid ice. It’s in darkness for 6 months of the year, when the earth is tilted away from the sun. It’s the continent of Antarctica.

       Although many more artists have created works in the Arctic, it’s again Antarctica where Argentine artist Andrea Juan has chosen to create her latest series of works, New Species New Eden, reflecting the changes of the icy continent, morphed and shrunk by global climate changes. Currently Head of Cultural Projects from National Antarctic Affairs of Argentine Chancellery and Professor of Visual Art at National University of Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, since 2004 she has carried out performances and video installations in Antarctica based on scientific investigations related to climate changes. Juan’s conscientious work has low impact on the fragile environment, and documents her installation and performance events of impermanent markmakings in the environment, and transient gestures of colorful lines in space, on film and video.

       This continent of ice caps atop landmasses has been termed an improbable, fragile, even the true Eden, as well as the site of Atlantis. Fifty million years ago Antarctica had a temperate climate with evergreen forests and animals that eventually perished as the icecaps slowly formed. This once-warm climate is evidenced by the fossils of plants, including ferns, uncovered by the current auto-excavation of the Larsen ice shelves by global warming, with specimens found in the Weddell Sea off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. The Antarctic Peninsula has again warmed significantly over recent decades, literally uncovering another deleterious amplifying impact on the environment: subglacial methanogenic microbes in the subglacial lakes that will potentially release significant quantities of the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

       Against the stark landscape, the artist has created scenarios that reference the critical aspects of global warming: the rise of water levels, the acidification of the ocean, and the release of methane. Her current series of photographs and moving images convey an excavated edenic site populated with anonymous ideal bodies and flora: new species of algae, phytoplankton, and lichen. The dramatic large-scale color images in The New Eden series are inventive interventions played against the stark desert that surrounds the southern pole. The artist works with tulle, chosen for its color and transparency, associating certain colors with dangerous gases and materials. In one image the colorful new foliage is born aloft, like a kite in the Antarctic winds. Invaginations extending downward from the surface of the forms invoke new plant morphologies. O-shaped and circular shapes in colorful felt read as lichen, and new species of algae. Balls of red and yellow forms in felt with contrasting blue and green stripes, respectively, represent phytoplankton, upon which the shrimp-like crustaceans known as krill feed, forming the critical base of the region’s food pyramid.

       In her current video, made in the Antarctic summer of 2011, an anonymous lone dark-haired and bearded man dressed in black, stands in the landscape, with balls made of colorful felt worn about his trunk like a backpack, in sharp contrast to the monochrome environs. He appears again, holding the balls, representing new plant life, aloft against the backdrop of a rushing glacial cataract in her new edenic Antarctic. For the first time, animals appear in her videos: a dark still abstract shape on the ice moves and reveals itself as a Weddell seal. An Antarctic dove and a Papua penguin inhabit the stark landscape. There are magical moments: one perspective captures the rhythmic motions of sea ice slush, mimicking breathing. In another frame a drop from the tip of an icicle captures the redness of a nearby object and for an instant it appears that the icicle is bleeding. The monochrome nature of the landscape is contrasted with the subtle pastel tones of the sky captured in pinks and blues in one scene, and a spectral rainbow in another. Alexei Pliousnine, a Russian musician mixing natural and digitalized sounds of moving glaciers with other ambient sounds, composed the track that underscores the video’s varying moods.

       Andrea Juan's newest works are celebratory imaginative re-invigorations of the paleobotany and microenvironments that have been revealed by the loss of the ice shelves in Antarctica. Rather than highlighting the geopolitical aspects of the protocol controversies, she brings deft lyrical allusional attention to one of the most deserted yet critical areas on the planet. Through majestic sweeping gestures in the outdoors, she posits a hopeful harmonious relationship of idealized individuals working with new species on the icy continent.