I talk with my hands

It's funny when the wide Internet ocean washes up two similar pieces of information in one week, but that's what I found on my shore. First, the always delightful Brain Pickings people posted a curious article about erotic Surrealist hand signaling.

Like so much about Surrealism, it seems laughable in its juvenile naughtiness. It's mostly crude jokes appended to the signs of the ASL alphabet.

But when you see two things about gestures, you need to take notice. And so, when I finished laughing at A Glossary of Gestures for Critical Discussion, I knew I had to share these...

The Critical Whirl. ‘I’ve read too much Marx and I can’t get my words out’

Circle hand clockwise in a small but rapid motion towards the audience. Accelerate and repeat until idea unpacked.

Though these are just silly coincidences on the web, they call to mind a few things...first I think about the way gestures and speaking are related. I've been reading a good deal about the origins of language over the last few years in hopes of putting together a class, and I've been fascinated by some of the ideas I've encountered.

Closely related is the way that gesture clarifies communication - I have heard stories about when the telephone was new and how people couldn't quite communicate through it clearly, lacking facial expressions and gestures. Even now, we have to supplement emails and postings with punctuation and hints about the emotional tenor of our messages ;-)

Finally, I was thinking about Andrew Solomon's doorstop of a book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, with its detailed discussion of deaf culture. These are, of course, not about that, but they do imply the limits of speech and the need for us to have recourse to communication by other means....Solomon poses an interesting question about ablism in his book, suggesting that deafness is not - as it is so often figured - a handicap of 'deficiency' as a form of 'horizontal' identity, a term he invented to describe the kinds of communities we join that are not passed down to us through genetics, heredity, or tradition. From time to we all need to join other communities, and these sites talking about gesture codes play on that need in a small way...

Sudden changes

It's a strange feeling when you have a number of paintings going over a period of weeks and then, all of a sudden, you have a number of paintings nearly done all at once. That's what happened this week - all at once it seems five paintings are in the final phases and I am just tidying up...Here is a picture of new one (which takes a phrase from Roland Barthes: "It is the act of writing that subjugates pictorial gestures so that to paint is never anything but to inscribe")

I am still messing around with solids for the Impossible Books, too, and here are some other pyramids...these are made from equilateral triangles and fit together very differently than the ones made with right triangles...I am still getting the hang of reconciling what I think a solid should do in space and what it actually does. Definitely I was not wired for sculpture...

Impossible book models

With my sister, Mary Beth Brown, I am working on some models for a show in February at Philadelphia Sculpture Gym called Impossible Books. Early on, we decided that 'impossible' books were text books and have tried to deal with that problem...I'll flesh out that idea in writing in the weeks ahead, but here are some photos of the first of what I hope will be two or three models...

Each unit is part of a text about principles that guide the study of American History in a freshman class...

...they will nest in a structure within which they can be rotated and considered on various levels...

We're thinking of 3D printing the pyramids and cutting the framework from wood...just wrapping my head around the geometry is a bit of a trick right now...

Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings at Arcadia University Gallery

Installation view of "Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings"

I have been trying to get out to Arcadia University Art Gallery for a few weeks. As everyone in Center City Philadelphia knows, it's a trek...but it's worth it.

This is especially true this month, as the gallery has mounted an unusual exhibit of meditative works from India, Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism describes linga as a "mark" or "sign" but also as the "name of the pillar shaped form of the god Shiva." Because Shiva is as a generative force, the pillar-shaped form he takes is described as kind of 'phallic symbol.' Evidently, Shiva is worshipped in this form as the result of a curse put on him the brahmin Bhrgu. But it's interesting to dig around a little on this and to learn that the linga and its cousin, the shalagram are forms of 'aniconic' images; symbols that are intended to represent deities. The way the linga is discussed in the literature I encountered suggests it is primarily a sculptural form, but in this exhibit, various forms of ovals play the part.

The paintings are riveting. Arrayed on three walls of the gallery are about thirty five pictures, all vertical in orientation (like portraits), none larger than twenty by sixteen inches. Each is hung on an invisible horizon that encircles the gallery, so they are all about level with the head of a person of average height.  Framed under glass, the paintings dimly reflect your face as you look at them. The majority of the paintings are broodingly dark, like cartoon holes. Some of these seems to be eclipsing rings and busts or color that shimmer and peek out from behind the dark forms. A few paintings are built on vibrant colors, which seem shocking in this context. An ovoid burst of Pepto-Bismo pink appears to raise cerulean eyebrows in a 1994 picture described as being from Sanganer and New Delhi. In another, a dark rose lozenge is criss crossed by pale blue gray droplets of paint. One senses that everything is planned; in some pictures the central form has straighter sides than in others, giving it a different gesture or attitude. In a few, as in a 1987 picture from Jaipur, it wears a necklace of three dots. Occasionally, a tiny dot appears within the form below the center, like a kind of painterly belly button.

Anonymous tantric painting, Shiva Linga, 1972, Jaipur unspecified paint on found paper 13.75 x 9.25″ 

All are painted on rather fragile and forlorn looking scraps of paper. Writing appears to be struggling to pass from the back of some sheets and into plain (if backward) view on the display side. Here and there, it looks like conservators have tried to patch thin areas of the paper. Effulgent mists of red, blue or yellow paint (or is it ink? India has a long tradition of watercolor painting...) drift lightly across surfaces. Sometimes little holes of have been worn through by painting and one gets the impression that they may have been been created by intense gaze.

Looking at the paintings slowly and in succession, one understands their meditative function. It's hard to imagine the abundance of them in the gallery is anything like the way they would be used in the world (in fact, the gallery notes mention that "When complete, the paintings are pinned or pasted to the wall at home to foster private meditation, eventually to be replaced by another fresher example"). On the cold and quiet winter day I visited the gallery, it was easy to pretend this was a space outside of the art world's usual hustle and bustle of make-believe commerce, but it wasn't so far outside of that as to preclude feeling a little strange looking at ostensibly sacred objects in an avowedly secular context.


The crossroad of the sacred and the secular becomes an important aspect of the exhibit. Being very spare and abstract, the paintings seems entirely different from western devotional art. They appear to appeal to the kind of general spiritualism that has replaced organized religion in contemporary life...despite being firmly rooted in a specific set of religious texts and imaging conventions. Gallery notes observe "an uncanny affinity" between these works and "examples of 20th century abstract art from Europe and the U.S. (works by Paul Klee and Agnes Martin are frequently cited as examples)". Those of us who have sat through secular sermons that 'justify' non-western art in terms of western modernist aesthetics will, I hope, be forgiven for rolling our eyes.

The idea of anonymity in today's art world, saturated by celebrity as it is, is strange enough. The idea that a work of art could be a useful object, one that focuses attention, limits distraction, and encourages meditation sounds revolutionary. Walking through the show, I was, more than once, put in the mind of Philadelphia painter Quentin Morris, whose Buddhist sympathies inform his monochromatic paintings and drawings. In the gallery notes, we read of the French poet Franck Andre Jamme, "who has played an instrumental role in introducing these works to western audiences." Jamme has an interesting story, and was apparently entrusted with access to the paintings after considerable hardship. It feels strange to have such easy access to them given how well-concealed they were - until relatively recently - in the religious communities from which they originate.

So how far would you go to see something really great? The magnetic pull of New York is inescapable in Philadelphia (and this exhibit came to us through NY's Feature Gallery), but people seldom talk about going to Baltimore, DC, or Chicago to see great work...let alone visiting the West Coast or traveling abroad. There are whole art worlds in these cities in the shadows of their respective megamuseums. What are these artists doing and thinking?

I'm not of the economic strata that can plan my travel around exhibits in London or elsewhere  (even Baltimore...), but I worry that we are getting a little local in our art viewing...that a diet of a few galleries interrupted from time to time for an art fair is good enough and that when we come face to face with something strange and wonderful, we'll see it only through what we already know. With the collapse of the art criticism world, I cannot count on reading about shows in other cities as easily as I once could, and that's terrible. If those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, what happens to those who don't know what's going on around them?

Speeding along

So for the last large pictures, I made up this crazily complex system of masking and stenciling. It was a great acceleration over the first iteration of this idea earlier this fall (where I masked each value of each hue in sequence), but it still seemed to take forever (really, it took six weeks to make the paintings...)

This time, it seem to have figured it out smoothly enough that I can rip through this process. Here are some pictures of another new canvas, where I was able to get two colors on in one day. Hopefully done soon...stay tuned!

Grad panels, a 'circle-of-life' thing...

Mark Tansey, Triumph Over Mastery

Early December: time to look at what the grad students are up to this year.

A few years back, I wrote a little bit about grad panels, and once again I am losing sleep over them. I am doing a lot fewer this year than most as I am out on leave, but I still need to join in for a few. Going this year is odd, since i haven't been in any grad students' studios. I am part of some gray facade of higher ed this year...the committee member no one really knows.

Add this to the fact that I cannot keep straight the rituals of various schools (is this the school where we ask the candidate to leave and wherein we have the real, substantive conversation in his/her absence, or is this the school where they stay and we are awkwardly keeping comments to ourselves for a few minutes?) and I am a mostly useless committee member.

Except for one thing: I am honest and I have no stake in anyone. 

I hate committees where people know the candidate and overlook obvious shortcomings of the work or the thesis. I fear ever being that teacher, one who has formed an attachment to a student that precludes clear-eyed evaluation of the work. 

I did three meetings in a week, and I've seen too much of that. When the work is good, it makes you play the downer, pointing out some way in which it could be better. When it's less than good, you are the one whose impatience at being a part of the conversation colors the whole meeting.

All of which leads me to ask, why do we do these panels this way? When I was in grad school, a students could select a panel of more-or-less total strangers (you know, the sort of people who might go see shows?) They didn't talk about the work as though you were going to revise anything; they talked about it as a thing that was done and sitting in front of them that needed to be figured out in 40 minutes. They didn't want to make better, they wanted to understand what it was. It was the best thing in the world - you saw how the work played to people who hadn't been listening to you figure it out for 15 weeks. They would never see you again. They told you it was great. Or that it wasn't great. Most of the time, they split the vote. 

As I get farther and farther in my teaching career, I get more and more clarity about what I can and cannot hope to do as a teacher. I see a lot of my colleagues trying to change lives. I hear a lot of conversations about teaching predicated on recalling 'that teacher' who changed your life. 

I have had great teachers. I have learned a lot, and I'm grateful to the many formal teachers I have had, and to the colleagues I learned from. But I can't get on board with the mystical, charismatic teaching ideal. What I see every time I sit down with students shows me that that's a bad idea. What I want to see is work.

Work in the studio..."What lies at the heart of everything is not fire"

After the making a litho this summer, I thought I would try rationalizing my application of color, moving from light to dark and doing a whole hue family at once...

The stencils get kind of intense....

...as the painting comes together, I have to start a punch list of revisions to be made. This is when the planning pays off...I know what I did and how to fix it...

Getting very close to finished here...I like the gradient space the word cloud sits in. A few more tweaks and we'll be done.

Found while preparing next semester's classes...

"'Words, those guardians of meaning, are not immortal, they are not invulnerable,' wrote Adamov in his notebook for 1938; 'some may survive, others are incurable'. When war came, he added: "Worn, threadbare, file do down, words have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws.'" (21)

"We have histories of massacre and deception, but none of metaphor. We cannot accurately conceive what it must have been like to be the first to compare the color of the sea with the dark of wine or to see autumn in a man's face. Such figures are new mappings of the world, they reorganize our habitation in reality. When the pop song moans that there is no new way of saying that I am in love or that her eyes are full of stars, it touches one of the main nerves in Western literature." (23)

George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

Are Emoticons the Future of Language? | Off Book | PBS Digital Studios

Night Gallery All Paintings