Juxtaposition Re/Vision
"Chaos: when the present determines the future but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future."
There is a place on the lake where the southern swells bang into the vertical bluff of Red Rocks Park. Picture a remote cliff in Scotland a half mile from my house. Peregrines nest there. The waves rebound from the rock faces angling out into the swells sweeping northward to create a quarter mile field of moving pyramids of water. Wind speed determines the scale of the moguls. Often, they are not navigable on a paddle board. It is chaos pure and strong, a visceral slice of WTF. Skirt that, my friends. Always.
Edward Lorenz, a weather scientist and MIT professor, wrote the above quote after running primitive computer modeling of meteorological systems in 1961. He stumbled, as brilliant minds do, into an entire field of science predicated on the study of havoc, a field of mathematical research of dynamic systems in pursuit of underlying patterns within the seeming randomness. His creation of the field of chaos theory ultimately yielded in 1972 the Butterfly Effect meme, which we all know: "A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can create or stop a tornado in Texas."
Miles Davis famously stated, "It's not the note you play that's the wrong note -- it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong. " His album "Kind of Blue" is the best-selling jazz album in history. The line-up of his band, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb were given very few instructions, just some themes and scales on paper. The album was recorded in only two sessions in March and April of 1959 with a minimum of takes. In only 46 minutes a new art form emerged -- the modal improvising, the vibe, the accessibility of the blues feel are unparalleled in the history of recorded music. It is a flawless gem of collectively making shit up instantly, creating grace in a few moments in a room with horns and drums and keys and strings. And...
Pause here. I sat down to write to you, my friends, a blog piece on "chaos" and got to this point before realizing that I already did this. Some quick sleuthing brought me here: (link to the blog dated 4/13/2020). As I read through those lines from this vantage of six years in the future, I was struck with its relevance and accuracy summing what I was going to relate for RIGHT NOW. Give that a read and then return to this spot.
By chaos, this is what we mean:
View Untitled Waterlight in motion
View Transverse Projector in motion
View Waterlight in process in motion
OK then. Chaos? Covered. Is chaos persistent? Apparently. Like those washing machine pyramids from a south wind howl. But Lorenz's thinking about how something begins relative to how it ends up nails right on the nose another concept in the chaos arena -- juxtaposition. How something starts can vary dramatically from how it ends. Does the intention make the thing? Or does the thing make itself? And does the process, the act of the making, ultimately determine the result? Did the butterfly flap?
Visually, there is no prior analog for the artwork that Jackson Pollock created starting in the early 1940s. I'm assuming you have all seen his work, (and if you haven't, go now and sit your butt down and breathe deeply and slowly. Pictures of his work are mere shadows of the experience). His fields of colored chaos are without precedent, although his wife, Lee Krasner, was sort of on the same farmland. Pollock painted on canvases on the floor, dripping industrial enamels, flinging paint with brushes and cups, dancing a deliberate body tango to make lush landscapes in space of lines and pops, dots and splatters, sinuous and bristling with languor and lightning, an energy field of movement and tonality. Staring into the dense lacework, one feels an expression of infinite possibility. Randomness exists. Right there. Utter chaos. And it is exquisitely beautiful, although initially, the public and critics were not impressed.
(Side bar: Helen Frankenthaler has an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in NYC right now until July 3rd. Sublime depictions of lush nowhere).
I have a book of collected images of my work with a brief bit of text with the title "Random Order." I love the oxymorons we stumble upon in life, and this is one that careful ears will recognize. Within the book is a panel named "Photon Sphere" or "Fuzzball". Both names are on the back of the artwork, one slightly pretentious, one honest. I realized after years of making art that no matter how hard I tried, generating true randomness on a panel is inhibited by the mechanics of being a human. It is our nature to find a rhythm when making repeated gestures with our hands, like it or not. AND we are a collection of hinges, with specific ranges of motion. So, I hung a battery-powered mini-grinder with a carbide burr on the business end as a pendulum from the ceiling 18 feet above. I had to tune the contraption with a cardboard wing to dampen the spinning and a block of steel to give it more weight and bite. I turned it on and let it run till the battery died and then repeated the process multiple times until I had the density I wanted in the sphere. To keep the image centered, I had to shift and turn the work table occasionally . Conceptually, the art was making itself, dancing to and fro, a mechanical ballerina with sharp toes doing hours of pirouettes. Random? Exactly. Orderly? Yep.
Listen to "A Day in the Life" from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. There are a couple moments where the song disintegrates into utter chaos, an orchestra of swelling dissonance. Then a chord, which sounds suspiciously like my Mac turning on. And the name of the album? Sgt Pepper is a mondegreen between John and Paul having breakfast. Pass the salt and pepper, please. Sgt. Pepper please.
"Quasiperiodic Oscillation" is the name of another book of mine. This phrase is stolen from astrophysics as a description of a rhythmic pulsating signal from a deep space object like a pulsar or a black hole, specifically, a signal with a varying amplitude or frequency or fluctuating phase dynamic. How could something from deep space not have a specific rhythm? Well, neutron stars have been recorded spinning 716 times a second. Or more broadly, how can anything OUT THERE actually maintain ANY rhythm? Chaos large scale? As a reminder, there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. There are 200 billion stars in our 'hood, the Milky Way galaxy, which contains an estimated 3.2 trillion planets. There are more planets out there than there are seconds since the Big Bang. Raw chaos materials are abundant.
Closer to home, the Grateful Dead played a song named "The Eleven." The song is in 11/8 time so it never really lands. There is no downbeat so it spins in the air, hovering, circling. On their album "Two From the Vault" released in 1992 of a concert in 1968 is 14 1/2 minutes of this tune with very little singing. Instead, we experience a six-man band making up a song in real time, every musician playing off each other, creating form and rhythm and harmony on the fly, sprinting, converging, disintegrating... Creating order from randomness is the superpower of this band. Dissonance resolution is a speciality.
Formlessness becomes art. OK. But is a butterfly's wing flapping causation or correlation? Did a tornado occur? Or stop? This is part one of a two part exposition and the notion to consider at this juncture is the ordering of the randomness. How does timeless beauty arise from a block of marble, a collection of paint pails, some talented humans some afternoon fifty years ago... What spark? What idea? What notes? What dance moves? AND, once the intention is set, what cracks need to be filled? What wrong notes need to be made right? What bass figure spontaneously changed the direction of the lead solo instantly. Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist for the Dead, once shared in an interview that he would play phrasing that he knew Jerry, lead guitarist and interstellar explorer, would be listening to that was leading to a place of climax that Jerry would anticipate. And when that moment occurred, Bobby would not play the expected moment, just to mess with his buddy. He would be streaking into another idea and grinning.
These images on your screen are samples of my grapples with chaos. Start with a blank, lean in, move my hands, lean harder, move more, turn up the music, double back, until the piece itself takes over and I'm simply in the room wearing headphones and a respirator and safety glasses in a flow state with dangerous tools and tape and sharpies and loudness. The Muse is the boss and I am the minion, the toy of the witches, etching and scribbling marks that can not be erased...
To be continued. Very soon.
I'm printing T-shirts that say
Supernova Remnant
on the front. Who wants one?
Love and hugs and summer sun.
Savor the light. Notice.
Lean in.
B mac
P. S. Yoda said, "Do or do not. There is no try." George Lucas had a movie idea, so he made one. Nice intention. And the result of starting into a process juxtaposed with the result of that project? A single step, a note on a napkin, a phone call... A Star Wars movie just came out this week, 49 years ago almost to the day from the first one. As they say, "Stay tuned!"
P. P. S. Juckstapuzishun. Use the Force.
