PAUL KLEE:WHITE IN WHITE

DREAM
I find
my house empty
Gone
All the wine

The river
diverted
Stolen
my naked joy

Eradicated
the epitaph
White
in white.
(trans. Anselm Hollo)

JOE MANGRUM

Watching the Tibetan monks meticulously construct a mandala made of powder of malachite, granulated lapis lazuli,topaz ,and other rare gems and minerals was an education.The technique involved spooning these powdered gemstones into a horn-shaped receptacle with a narrow spout from which these ingredients fell grain by grain. This naturally was done to the recitation of sutras.

The mandala they were constructing from particles of sand was the Kalachakra mandala. To briefly synopsize its iconography would require starting from the center with Kalachakra, multi-armed,and his consort deity, Vishvamata, the eight female deities surrounding them, copulating deities in the second enclosure--the males with three heads and six arms-- and so forth down through the fifth and outermost level.An inventory of the subsidiary deities gyrating in their own wheel of enlightenment or their own mandorla would take a page.

I went to view the monks--who were performing this ritual at the Museum of Natural History in 1988--a number of times,which was possible as it took two months to construct.On one such visit I spied someone among the novice monks who I had last seen a decade before shooting up with one of Warhol's lesser superstars. But I was not present when the mandala was taken to a pier, and there with ritual prayers dispersed into the river.

A Process such as this as this may seem remote from the concerns of a contemporary artist but appears to be at the root of Joe Mangrum's work. He has been making mandalas with his own toys and with his own methods since the mid-nineties. The word "toys" is accurate, as these include plastic soldiers and jungle animals. He has also used bullets,and compact disks.Also, in his more perishable altars, the petals of flowers such as Jane Magnolias, Birds of Paradise, or Heliconias from New Zealand.Stupa-like forms uphold these objects as well as sea-shells,twigs,twine, crepe banners, prayer flags, etcetera. Symmetry anchors this profusion. Somewhat.

His basic formats are not really western but the grids from which the Hindu forms are extrapolated. This is one of the few times that they have been used successfully by a western artist that I know.(The other instances,paradoxically,are in ' minimalists' generations and continents apart, in Malevitch, Ad Reinhart,Sol Lewitt, and by remotest retinal suggestion Agnes Martin.)

There are altars for ecological causes, against war, and for world peace. I don't regard their idealism as stupid, but as a dire need.

Lately, Mangrum has been making sand-paintings throughout Manhattan,twenty-two at last count.The colors are idioretinal, as in a Huichole yarn painting, or a Van Gogh, the forms wheelswithin wheels rather than mandalas.They share the quality of construction via reiterated prayer with his earlier work. He takes the altar-making process to the street.It's a blessing.

SCISSORING:MARK FOX AND CHRIS NATROP

Somewhere between the flat and the crooked is the scissored,somewhere between drawing and sculpture,a step that more or less skips painting. The material is paper, cardboard, mylar aspiring to the condition of lace, string,twine,or rope which can be straight , or curved,or knotted and tangled. Scissored imagery often uses the symmetry of the fold- and- cut process and then slices it, crumples it or tears it into a thousand pieces and reassembles it in a flurry. The space that such artifacts occupy is not painting space or sculptural spaceor enigmatic conceptual altar space. It feels like gesture space--the big abstract expression-ist swatch of a loaded brush of paint across canvas, but in this case across the whole room and in this case in a stroke which proves to be made of meticulously wrought fragments.

Two virtuosi of this process are Mark Fox, who shows at Larisa Goldston, and Chris Natrop,based in L.A. They are more like each other than they are like anyone else, but no more like each other than were Pollock and De Kooning. Fox tends to work towards a tornado-like centrifugal motion.Natrop tends to make constructions which may be leisurely walked through, a jungle of opaque and semi-transparent pieces and their complicated shadows. If speed were an attribute, one might say that Fox slings his imagery faster, Natrop more slowly--but of course this is absurd. It is simply that installation art is evolving its own time-sense,its own musicality, and this is something for which there is as yet more gesture, more pointing-towards, than legitimate vocabulary.

Fox's largest statement to date is DUST, which though not completely characteristic of his technique(s),is certainly a testament to his skill. Over a period of two years he made a painstaking reconstruction of every object that he owned as a paper cut-out facsimile which he then hung as if spiralling away in a tornado. Each of these cut-outs was painted toxic green from below in memory of the green underside of a tornado he saw as a child.It combines pedantic detail with wild centrifigal motion.It is the epitome of re-assembly through fragmentation.

It feels like a piece by James Surls done almost thirty years ago, which was a tree-sized sculpture made of an actual tree depicting a tree under possession suspended as if swirling with each of its branches transformed into a wielded axe. No formal relationship, in truth , save for this sense of churning centrifugal motion, and the sense that both conjure the storm.

Other of Fox's work is in the vein of urban ghost-making, floating paper constructions hyper-filigreed and drawn upon with the delicacy of etching. He will sometimes festoon these over sawhorses, which seems to be his muse- among- objects as the apple was Cezanne's. He also makes creatures threatening and/or forlorn.His earliest work was as a puppeteer--he won a Jim Hinson award for his work in theater. I envy those who have seen it.

Natrop's big pieces have the quality of painterliness in their use of swatches and washes of color,the quality of sculpture in its orchestration of shadows. Why it feels like a rainy day Vuillard or Bonnard eludes me, but it does.Natrop's smaller work--even those pieces 96 inches high--has an exquisiteness which is neither twee or precious due to the formal demands he makes on himself, which are far more varied than the mere turning out of prettiness on a lathe.The components add up.They seem to broach some near- moment when a shadow transforms into a silhouette or illustration. Almost and never quite yet.

Installation art has entered a period where it discorporates and re-integrates space in ways previously unknown. It is as if baroque alterpieces had volunteered to de-construct themselves as a ballet, as if the decor of Ravel's opera L'enfant en la Sortilege, with its lamenting wallpaper, cantankerous arm-chair, and coloratura fire were normal home furnishings.Some new relationship between sculpture and architecture is being worked out. Some of the best of this makes scissors and paper rock.

(Illustrations one and two are by Mark Fox, the second from Dust, which was installed

at Rice University in Texas; three and four

are by Chris Natrop; five is a reiteration

of Fox . Videos of the work of both

can be seen on the web.)

A BOOK ON LIGHT AND COLOR (1)

A BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR (1)(foreword)These are my gleanings on the subject of light and color from a period where I had no studio, and consequently was unable to paint. It was a difficult period and I divertedmyself by compiling an anthology of the texts on light and color which I liked the best. It soon became evident that our perception of light pervades our use of language to a degree which makes the idea of compiling a comprehensive work on the subject ridiculous. I am seldom deterred from the ridiculous, however, especially when such a project allowed me to vision and envision.
Several authors have assayed something similiar. By far the best, in my opinion, are Alexander Theroux's The Primary Colors, and its companion volume, The Secondary Colors. Both immerse the reader as if they are being dipped in red blue yellow et al. To read each was to become this or that color for a time--a novel experience, almost out of L.Frank Baum. I was delighted,I admit, to find that we cited different texts. Richard Feynmann's QED, on the physics of light, is a masterwork of plain-ness making intricacy clear.I discussed this project with only two or three people, primarily the poet Ronald Johnson,now dead, whose poems are a hidden glory of literature--particularly his long sequence ARK,which I feel is a psalm of the future. It is to his memory that I dedicate these notes,scattered as they are.

ORIGINS
"In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth,And the earth was without form and voidand the darkness was upon the face of the deepand the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the watersAnd God said, Let there be light; and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good;and God divided the light from the darkness,And God called the light Day and the darkness He called NightAnd the evening and the morning were the first day." (Genesis 1-5 in the King James Version)
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the word was God,The same was in the beginning with God All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.In Him was life and the life was the light of men, And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not. (The Gospel of St. John 1-5 in the King James version)
AKNATON'S HYMN TO THE SUN
Creator of germ in woman,maker of seed in man,giving life to the son in the body of his mothersoothing him that he may not weep,nurse even in the wombgiver of breath to animate everyone that he maketh! ...How manifold are thy works!They are hidden from before us O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth.Thou did create the earth according to thy heart. (14 century BC)
FROM THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD
There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth,beyond us all, beyond the heavens,beyond the highest, the very highest heavens;this is the light that shines in our heart.All the universe is in truth Brahman. He is thebeginning and end in life of all. As such,in silence, give unto Him adoration.There is a spirit that is mind and life, lightand truth and vast space. He unfolds the whole universeand in silence is loving all.This is the spirit that is in my heart, smallerthan a grain of mustard seed, greater than the earth,greater than the heavens, greater than all those worlds.He contains all works and desires,all perfumes and tastes.This is the spirit in my heart. This is Brahman.To Him I shall come when I go beyond this life.And to Him will come he who has faith and doubts not. (800 BC)

ALMOST WITHOUT WORDS

The first two images are of the work of Richard Greaves, the anarchitect, who
has built a community of salvaged-material structures in the wilds of Canada;
the photos were taken by Mario del Curto, and shown at Andrew Edlin gallery.
The third is one of Adam Cvijanovic's gigantic paintings, formerly shown @
the now defunct Bellwether gallery. Images four and five are by the admirable
Ben Grasso, who is based in Brooklyn. Six and Seven are also by Richard Greaves.
(Parenthetically, I would like to observe that both Cvijanovic's and Grasso's
paintings were done well before the housing-foreclosure crisis, and consequently there
is a case for regarding them as prescient, if not prophetic.)

F.SCOTT DOES RIMBAUD

From the French of Arthur Rimbaud
VOYELLES
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels,
Someday I'll tell you where your genesis lies;
A--black velvet swarms of flies
Buzzing abpve the stench of voided bowels,
A gulf of shadow; E--where the iceberg rushes,
White mists, tents, kings, shady strips;
I --purple spilt blood, laughter of sweet lips,
In anger--or the penitence of lushes;
U--cycle of time, rhythm of the seas,
Peace of the paws of animals and wrinkles
on scholars ' brows, strident tinkles;
O --the supreme trumpet note, peace
Of the spheres, of the angels. O equals
X-ray of her eyes; it equals sex
(translated by F.Scott Fitzgerald)

DEAN BYINGTON

The images of heavenly choirs received by the Abbess Hildegarde von Bingen are much the same images reported by sufferers of migraines according to Oliver Sacks.

When Leonardo wrote of being able to see fantastical shapes in the stains on a wall which had been much-spat upon, he was pointing to a basic facultyof the mind, says Valery:its tendacy to scrawl monsters on the margins of pages.It is as if we have an image-making device, the opposite of a screen-saver, which begins to doodle whenever a lecture gets dull. This faculty is related to but not synonymous with an eidetic mechanism, the talent of finding forms and faces, even illustrations, among patterns--such as those made by foliage--or shapes, such as those of clouds.

According to the art dealer Ron Feldman, Leonardo habitually concealed anamorphic imagery or visual puns throughout his paintings.This sounds right, but is hard to honestly confirm once one's own eidetic impulses have been triggered. Once we have started decoding hidden faces we will find hidden faces whether or not they are to befound. The great Safavid dynasty master of the miniature, Sultan Muhammed, hid them in the rock-work throughout his masterpiece, The Court of Gayumars, but though I have tried to locate each of them there remains a question between what I am actually seeing and what I think I see and am projecting myself, which baffles my account.

Wallpaper and other patterning metiers such as Indonesian batik or Ikat weaving do this in a different way, via the shifting in a pattern between foregroundand background. To be able to do this rhythmically is possible with geometry alone.To do this with fluidity requires the arabesque.

What Dean Byington does with wizardry is move among these levels. His paintings are collages of frottages disguised as wallpaper. This involves copying copies, blurring,enlarging,re-engraving, disguising, sewing up seams. Patterning camouflages illustration,and vice-versa.The one becomes the other's ground.

Enlarging a detail as large as I could on my computer screen simply captivated me with his ingenuity:it looked like an engraving by Hercules Seghers shading off into what might be an illustration for La Fontaine's fables by Gustave Dore which filigreed into lace-like or leaf-like reticulations. What fascinated was how seamlessly they mesh.

Quite without data or empirical proof, they seem to me to be work at the threshhold where images become stories, where the idioretinal aftermages on the retina of the sleeper coalesce into a dream. In this case, one does not have to be asleep to see.