Carbon Dioxide Ice in the Late Summer
Fan and Dust Devil in Deuteronilus Mensa
Jumbled Terrain in Ius Chasma
There are mornings when language just isn’t of service to what is happening in the interior landscape. So it is ironic that in the language-centric world that is most online environments, the “out of language” still sneaks in. So thank you to my Twitter feed for taking me to an extraordinary site and the source of the images above, HiRISE, High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment: “Explore Mars, one giant image at a time” from the University of Arizona.
As for an appropriate language compliment to this feast? Quotes from Richard Tuttle. Consider it a kind of language version of a musical score for viewing.
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In our culture, imitation-based experience dominates reality-based experience. I find this an awful thing. But there are artists who know from the bottom of their souls that art is about the experience of reality. The reason we have art is because you can’t get a real experience from the world.
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Time and time again, the intellect robs the creative.
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In our culture there is a job for art, because we can’t experience reality anywhere else.
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The three things that interest me are the silence, the interest, and the invisible. The quieter side of things. The subtle emotions.
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An artwork is actually an accounting of all four elements, though no artist, no matter how hard they try, can bring them in perfect balance. They are arranged subjectively, finally.
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When I think of the particular similarity between my work and that of Matisse, I like to think that in both you see water washing away the tears of life, but in his case that brings you to earth; in mine, to the air. is literally the idea of a finite thing having an infinite range of appearance or expression because of its inseparable relation to other things, which is what water is — its relation to other things.
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Where the wall meets the floor is a special kind of zone. It’s a de-militarized zone. I’ve always hated plug-in art, because, at its best, a Flavin piece, it implies a whole stretch of dependence and very interesting questions about the link: artwork and society. I’m not interested in this. It’s already been done so well. The question is, what the light is in a piece. In those pieces the key thing is “shadows.” Here, something inside the piece is making the shadows. It’s about having discovered another dimension into a piece. The solution here is to plug into something outside the artwork.
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For someone to ask me what is beauty—I really don’t have any idea. Trying to do what it is I want to do, I think, eliminates, or tries to eliminate, beauty as much as possible. If it comes back or it happens naturally—the way you put a coffee cup on a table…. Beauty is somehow a trail you create through your work that’s left behind like a snail leaves its ooze. Where you’re going has absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing to do with beauty.
Incredible images! The third from the top especially appeals to me, as does the last one. I’ll be going back to the site. Thank you for highlighting it.
Thanks Rachel, that was very enriching. Nice start to my day.