⚠ Warning—this
aesthetic philosophy deep-dive might be too inscrutably byzantine for
you.
Pretentiously
vainglorious prefaces, titles, and abstruse words (like these) serve the
same purpose as height-requirement signs at theme parks.
To those who’ve chosen to jump off this
cliff, heedless of the challenges, I commend you for your open-mindedness,
willingness to try your brain at new concepts, and your marathon-level
attention span (if you make it to the end).
And to those comfortable within this ken:
I thank you—up-front—for perusing the word-imagery fabrications of a
philosopher-artist such as myself. Please bear-with my liberal
application of monsieur em-dash, madame hyphen, and cousin parenthesis.
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hover for brief description �🔗 click for magnification or link
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Transliteration
normally refers to slowly transcribing/translating—one character, word,
symbol or hieroglyph at a time—one language into another. Because art
and poetry can seem like a foreign language, I’m going to crawl around
inside my own
gulliver
and explain how I created both the two-dimensional artwork and poem titled:
woad poem. (
Links are provided to add superfluous details or permit examining
referenced artwork. Did I mention this is a deep dive?)
It Begins With a Mote of Detritus With Pearl-Potential: Unsurprisingly, first ideas about a new creation can be
born-out-of (borrowed from) works of others, or inspired by the artist’s
earlier work. When I saw this strong-contrast image of a nude—in
December 2019 (while scrounging for creepy images for the collage
AULDLANGSYNE's Mailbox)—I recognized it would be perfect for a future artwork and got out my
butterfly net.
Architect’s Eye, Engineer’s Ingenuity and the Passion of a Serial-Killer: When my time-to-create gland woke-up from a nap, I “found” about 50
similarly-stark images and began to experiment—slicing, smoothing, spinning,
and fine-tuning. After many days of failing to get even a tickle of
that
solving-the-puzzle feeling (I never became
fully-absorbed) I stopped trying to hammer-tune this
crap craft into
something aesthetically pleasing to me.
Disappointing Creations Need Titles Too: First I stared at it, then wondered about it,
and—eventually—understood what failed to happen: I’d enjoyed the process
of finding “just right” image slices, but received no spark during
sculpt-construction. I was enthralled by the building blocks but I
disliked the structure. So, I devised a
jarring meta-title:
imagine a suggestively-confusing title here. (
Meta because a title asking you to think of a title, is
eating its own tale; and
jarring because the adverb-adjective
sticks in one’s word-smithery—it is not really the opposite of
confusingly-suggestive which slides smoothly from eye to
lizard-brain, but not-not the opposite either.)
A Realization-Reenactment (Focused on Aesthetics): While doing the aforementioned disappointed-staring and
title-devising, my attention kept returning to the left-side of the
artwork. What was drawing my eye? Was I merely recognizing the
first found-image pearl in that section? Maybe a change in
distance? Thumbnail mode caused my interest to definitely be
re-piqued, but, in close-up, the miasma of interlocking/overlapping
shadows, edges, silhouettes, and flimsy fragments of fifty female
photo-montaged forms forced my curiosity to flee (
whew). But,
the leftmost portion—no matter if distant or full-screen—remained
intriguing and its abstract-composites continued to tantalize.
A Literal Return to the Drawing Board: With the leftmost portion as a focal-point, I restarted
the cut-stitch-paste-gluing engine. This lasted for a few daze. After becoming deeply engrossed in the process, trimming
and/or deleting about fifteen of the most detailed original images,
changing the color pallet on at least ten, and totally redesigning the
size and focus, the resulting artwork works. For me. And
that’s all a creator can use to determine finish-quality. It is
appropriately asymmetrical, contains both blurred and crisp details, and
the rest is mere suggestion, hint, and supposition. Pleasing to the
eye. Maybe a smidgen-creepy, but that adds to the allure.
The More Difficult the Self-Challenges the Less Challenging the
Self-Difficulties: Sounds like an
aphorism, but challenging myself is a successful
way to keep creating. My art keeps me learning. I decided to
craft a poem to accompany this artwork,
incorporating a phrase I coined in a letter:
...The little things are the big things. The big things might be
able to take care of themselves, but ‘death by a million tiny cuts’—as
metaphor—has an antithesis ‘bliss by a million tiny kisses’...
Critics Refer to This Next Part as a Pointless Tangent; I Prefer to
Call it a Brief Aside: I think it helps to think about a few claims made by Nietzsche in
his 1872 work,
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music:
...the existence of mankind only appears to be justifiable when it is
viewed as an aesthetic phenomenon...
...the highest form of artistic creation depends on some form of tension
between opposing forces...
Nietzsche's book is a dense,
complexly-expansive, review of classical Greek dramatic theater and
music. Fourteen years later, in 1886, it was republished as
The Birth of Tragedy, or: Hellenism and Pessimism with a second preface—written by Nietzsche himself—titled
An Attempt at Self-Criticism. (The first preface, in both, was written by the composer Richard
Wagner . . . yes
that Wagner, of antisemitism infamy.)
I found this excerpt from his
self-criticism poignant, not only because he describes
yours-truly, but he appears to be describing (with sarcastic
self-deprecation) his “target audience”:
...artists with analytical tendencies with a capacity for retrospection
(the type whom it’s always necessary to seek-out but with-whom one never
wants to seek) who are also full of psychological innovations and
artist’s-secrets...
The Nuts and Brain-Bolts Leading Up to My Two Dimensional Artwork
waod poem: My artwork descriptions, above, are definitely
synopsis after-the-act. I was not thinking about how my mind
was working as it was creating. (I understand some with less
high-functioning autism are hampered by meta-meta thoughts-about-thoughts
and—unfortunately—get bogged down, can't climb out of their own way, and
suffer because of it.) In looking back, I recall that my
odd-intuitive-creative neurons (
my only nod to
NEFND in this essay) encouraged my imagination, which influenced me to begin with the
strong-contrast nude I caught in my butterfly net,
which—in-turn—eventually led me to craft the final “found image”
collage-compilation from dozens of (fair-use-borrowed or
copyright-stolen*) erotic images.
I cropped the
blackspace, mirror-flipped it, imagined the word
poem reversed-upsidedown would approximate the word
waod. [Climbing deeper: Actually, my thoughts snag-focused on the
ash diphthong in the word
aesthetic and, subsequently, I zoomed in on the visual near-symmetricality of m-w and p-d...which came very near (
rch-close) to a voila moment...and a title was born.] Then I added the words, as title, at the mirror point
and extended a small amount of white-grey to the left-edge's mirror point
(
literally
a point) because I wanted to “break the rectangle rule” just a
tiny bit.
The Bizarre Gears-and-Gristle-Soup Beneath the Circuitry of the Poem: With this, I had a tall, thin, abstract image, which I could place
vertically—adjacent to my as-yet-unwritten poem. I also had a
title. And, I had the phrase:
bliss by a billion tiny kisses. That was
all enough. Because, by focusing on what I
possessed, I discovered my theme.
My life is not unlike many other
people’s lives: I have my share of missed opportunities and lost
connections. So, I would write a poem about
tying together all the disconnected plot points. Years ago, I
wrote a short story about dénouement (where I only explained “what the
characters were doing” in the final paragraphs). So I began with:
rarely are there anymore breathtaking
dénouements
in this place outside of
This place? . .the world . . . the Internet . . . this blog . . . or . . .
Intentionally ending in a dangling
preposition (a broken grammar rule) causes the reader to assume the next
line will complete the phrase (even though there is a large
paragraph-break space between lines) and the brain is already filling in
the gap:
...outside of Hollywood blockbusters? ...outside of novels?
...outside of where! And, I begin the next line without explaining. The first
line of the poem is an example of a hanging plot point, with a link
to a relatively long story about dénouement (but one would need to know
the definition to appreciate any of this). Second line also
ends in a preposition, but the phrase is completed in the third line.
yet as I crafted an important series of sentences for my son I
stumbled on
bliss by a billion tiny kisses (the antithesis of
death’s trillion tiny cuts)
Since I linked a word in the first
line, I chose to do it again. My second link was to the definition
of idiom, which
stumbled on and
coin a phrase, are examples
of. My third line breaks the pattern (does not end in a word which
normally begins a phrase) and, instead of linking to the definition of a
word, links to the description of a ancient torture technique called
Lingchi, which I point out is the opposite of my
bliss by a billion tiny kisses.
My forth line, however,
does end
in a preposition, and I continue the pattern by describing two more
different types of cutting (the first medical the second figurative).
barely realized unless our
split-brained
attention is
riven; focus forced into
The fifth line continues the phrase
begun at the end of the forth (with no links) but contains a line derived
from my previous essay pertaining to underwhelming and overwhelming
events: in that essay I posit that momentous events aid in the formation
of long-term memories (which is also connected to this deep dive's first
image). More important to this poem, in this line, I begin with a
statement and turn it into a question which suggests
we all fail to take notice when we happen to do something for the first
time in our lives
(like thinking about how this poem was word-smithed).
novel-for-you non-momentous events; happening right now, or isn’t this
a first for
I end the fifth line with a
preposition but complete the phrase in the sixth line (which wasn't my only use of
alliteration; another example:
series of sentences for my son I
stumbled) with a question about the composition of the poem
itself. I then begin another sentence which relies on the reader
understanding the unwritten connection of what the pronoun
it is
referring to (which is: the poem itself):
encouragement and compliance of contemplation of this composition?
Today it’s
In the seventh line
I continue the sentence with the idea that
when I posted the poem it would be at the top of my blog
(metaphorically the capstone) which is a series of stories
one-atop-the-previous (like a totem pole)—two different metaphors in one,
referred to mixing metaphors, which is also a grammatical
no-no. And I provide a link to who was president when I began the
blog in 2004:
The eighth line begins a new sentence,
which jars the brain slightly, because line seven did not end in a period
and this line did not begin with a capital letter (the intent is to force
readers to
engage level 2 thinking and read slower).
tomorrow waod poem’s intricate reflection collage silhouettes
will be unburied
The ninth
line proposes a distant-future presidency when people (myself, hopefully,
included) will re-read this poem and wonder at the poet’s prescience (2028
or 2032).
while conducting future memory mining exercises during
AOC’s presidency
The tenth and eleventh lines, are
thematically connected to previous ones (time-frames related to US
presidential administrations), which might-be building toward a
plot? Maybe, possibly? [Obviously this was written
before-during Trump’s first impeachment, otherwise it would have been
plural (impeachments).]
events during
The Buffoon’s impeachment and then place their recall
The twelfth
line alludes to the similarity between our human ability to
recall memories
and the Internet’s ability to recall items (like this poem) using
keywords. This line, again, ends in a preposition.
codes in
squire
where they may get dusty but never so unused as to
While the thirteenth line (and
the fifteenth line) completes the prepositional phrase begun in the
twelfth line (and the fourteenth line), the fourteenth line breaks that
pattern by beginning with a preposition–both showing and telling the
reader: one way to point out one’s awareness of man-made grammar rules is
to intentionally bend them. And, then, suggests a related
idea: that morals are also man made.
draw attention to bending the ground rules while recognizing they
exist
for the sole purpose of being broken —
morality
may be completely inside of
After the dash in the middle of
the fourteenth line, a statement begins (about where morality might be
found), which then becomes the beginning of a question in the fifteenth
line (about the
woad poem artwork’s sexual imagery . . . considered immoral by
puritans), there, the
poem intentionally causes a mental hiccup. The reader sees the
question: would the artwork, but “hears”
would the art work (as in:
would the art
succeed if it were less delicately prurient?) My aim was to ask: would it accomplish the task of catching-and-holding the attention of viewers if my art was more blatant—and I provide a link to a NSFW example, for those who might be in need of what I mean by blatant. Which is answered by the
poet-artist-myself at the end of the sixteenth line.
creative words generated by millions of imaginations but would this
artwork if
less delicately
prurient
or without its attention catch-hold — I suggest it would not
The seventeenth/final line is a
call-back-bookend bringing the poem to a close by returning the POV back to first-person (begun in the second line). It also intentionally causes another mental hiccup wherein the reader is "tricked" when assuming the end of the sixteenth line completed the rhetorical question (it posed to itself) and, then, realizing the answer has continued (into a different/unasked question). And that answer explains that this poem, this art, is only
important now to those who read it or look at it.
Which is my closing to say: thank you, to you, when you view.
The art and the poem were—like every
creation of all creators—immensely important to me, at-the-time, when I
was creating them. But, then my brain moved on. To the next
idea, the next instinct-driven concept, and it (my brain) uses the ideas
that got stuck-plastered in place from the creating-sculpture-thoughts to
inform my next thing.
be valued any less by me, its creator, who considers every view, by
you, a tiny kiss
* Subject for another day’s essay. “Most-people” are unable to be
objective and always bring their personal agenda to a fair-use versus
copyright debate. I always try to give credit to creative people,
even when all they do is screech “
mine.mine.mine.” (But I realize I do not have to pay my landlord with the
proceeds of my creativity.) I disdain people
artists like
Lars Ulrich
and champion creatives like
Aaron Swartz. Which indicates where my
personal agenda
lies, and that I'm aware of my place in the phalanx of
“most-people”.
odder pins and flypaper ideas:
