Posted on: October 30, 2009
Untitled by Mark Rothko. 1948
Philip Ball’s recent article, Who’s afraid of the avant-garde, provoked much thought. Why do we seem to “get” modern art, but not modern, experimental music? I think the author nears the core of the issue here:
There are certainly parallels in the way we make sense of acoustic and visual information. Chief among these rules are the “Gestalt principles” identified by a group of German-based psychologists in the early 20th century. These are a series of implicit mental rules that help people to make good guesses at how to interpret complex sensory stimuli by grouping them together. We make assumptions about continuity, for example: the aeroplane that flies into a cloud is the same one that flies out the other side.
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Posted on: October 27, 2009
Pandora, by John William Waterhouse. 1896
I looked again at one of my poems from the 90s, and tried to place it in context. Then and now. As experiment, as reevaluation. The quotes are new additions and, as always, this is a work in progress .…
He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.
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Posted on: October 19, 2009
Shrink. Directed by Jonas Pâté. 2009
The forms of why
The reasons for pauses
Ellipses of the body
Stutter forth like breaking trains
Art does know
But then someone tries to say
What and where
Art knows without ever
Belaboring the point
If we explain we kill
So movies about suicide
Movies about making movies
Shrink when they should see!
Expand everything
And keep quiet about it
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