I found Xaviere Gautheir through a search for Hans Bellmer. She brought me to Angela Carter, who will give me some fiction to read once my copy of Angela Carter, Black Venus arrives in the mail.
On Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire;
"He said she danced like a snake and she said, snakes can't dance: they've got no legs, and he said, but kindly, you're an idiot, Jeanne; but she knew he'd never so much as seen a snake, nobody who'd seen a snake move - that quick system of transverse strikes, lashing itself like a whip, leaving a rippling snake in the sand behind it, terribly fast - if he'd seen a snake move, he'd never have said a thing like that.
(BV 14/15)"
-Angela Carter
On Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire;
"He said she danced like a snake and she said, snakes can't dance: they've got no legs, and he said, but kindly, you're an idiot, Jeanne; but she knew he'd never so much as seen a snake, nobody who'd seen a snake move - that quick system of transverse strikes, lashing itself like a whip, leaving a rippling snake in the sand behind it, terribly fast - if he'd seen a snake move, he'd never have said a thing like that.
(BV 14/15)"
-Angela Carter
"Of all the couples in the history of modern thought (Freud and Lacan, Marx and Lenin...), Kant and Sade is perhaps the most problematic: the statement "Kant is Sade" is the "infinite judgement" of modern ethics, positing the sign of equation between the two radical opposites, i.e. asserting that the sublime disinterested ethical attitude is somehow identical to, or overlaps with, the unrestrained indulgence in pleasurable violence."
Kant and Sade, the ideal couple. By Slavoj Zizek.
Apophenia is defined as the experience of seeking patterns in random or meaningless data. Some common situations in which this can be taken overboard are mental illnesses, gambling, religion, and paranormal studies (paranoia). Rorshach (or inkblot) tests use this trait in an attempt to harness the brain's need for meaning (in this case, visual meaning) in order to translate psychological stress into something that can be addressed. There are many examples of artists using the Rorshach as a visual effect, everything from this Gnarls Barkley video to Annette Messager's Handbook of Everyday Magic.
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| Annette Messager, selections from the Handbook of Everyday Magic found in Annette Messager: The Messangers. Prestel. 2007 |
Our brains are hard-wired to seek solutions, often through the recognition of patterns. Without this trait, there would be no internet, no urban planning, no networking, hell, no wheels or even the Promethean feat of having discovered fire. We wouldn't be human without our determination to distinguish. But, like any other inclination, there is a tipping point when the search for meaning can be taken to extremes.
Karley Sullivan. Three Symmetry. 2012
The effects are so easy, you just click a series of buttons. Technology continues to confound and delight me, and like deciphering a code, the pleasure of figuring it out is instant. Isn't that the spice of life? Figuring out how to press the buttons effectively? I felt like I had done just that, but soon realized how redundant and obvious it can become when the special effects overpower the piece. So I took a break from making, did some painting, and got back into reading books.
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| Karley Sullivan. Invasives: Controlled Burn, Privet on Fire, a Burning Bush. 8x12 in. each. oil on canvas. 2012 |
I'm not lonely.
I finished (I think) some paintings from last summer this weekend. They have the same twining separations that comes so "naturally" to my hand. It's like it works on it's own, the hand, I suppose it does feel a bit masturbatory in its mindless deftness. I never saw the problem with that. But, it doesn't satiate me, but nothing really satisfies me. Now, that's a characteristic with it's highs and lows.
I don't want to devote myself to computer/technology oriented art-making. I'm too tactile, too sensually grounded for buttons and clicking and carpal tunnel syndrome. Plus, there's that irritating tendency to break things into these categories. Of course, I don't HAVE to commit to anything so simple as painting vs. photography or video... The only commitment I need to make is to a purpose. And my sense of purpose is so broad, so egalitarian in it's bland need to just look, that it stands monolithic in it's blank beauty and mute image.
These paintings are the end result of various methods of noticing and interpreting what I see. There is a sense of being the witness to something indescribable. How can you formulate a description for something that is now only a memory and an image? It's language and it's humanity that bothers me, it's so dependent, so needy, language is. Someone has to be there to receive it, whereas an image exists in its own descriptives, no need for a known (and in common) alphabet. Isn't that dumb? Of course I feel like an asshole. Yes, I'm kind of depressed right now.
Oh, the paintings, the process...it began with a walk and an arrangement of the branches and the detritus stuck in the bush. The scraggy privet sat next to a dirty Baltimore river, and I wore gloves to touch it. Then there was photographic composition, which was edited on the computer. I didn't print it, but worked from the sight of the computer screen to draw the first take, flipped the image in the editing program, and hand-drew the opposite. The colors in the photograph were very green, almost flourescent as the photograph was taken after days of rain, next to a river, in the late afternoon when everything is so clear. The heat was unbearable. Every year it gets hotter and brighter, I swear that in 20 years I won't be able to go outside in August.
The change in the atmosphere will be a boon for plants that have enough access to water. Welcome back, dinosaur sized ferns, we've added some extra special carbon dioxide to the air, just for you! Welcome back extremes of wet and dry. The deserts are growing as the fires become too large and common to extinguish. Talk about nomadic. Talk about post. Talk about regressive. Talk about resilient. I digress. The orange comes from the colors that go behind your eyes when it's too hot to think and the sun is on your back like a bad unfocused need.
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| Portraits of Invasives: L. Vulgare or the Phoenix 8x11 in. (each), oil on canvas, 2012 |
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| Portraits of Invasives; L. Vulgare 8x11 in, oil on canvas, 2012 |
Here's another one in green.
I'm working on some more in blue.
Micheal Brakke used to warn me about making color paintings.
"As in:
here's the orange ones, and see there, the green ones.
And, if you turn to your right you can look at the blue paintings".
But, then again, he wasn't ever satisfied either.
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