painting the ether

Twin Twin Postcard Edition

2011-09-10T09:52:00.003-04:00

Pierogi Gallery organized by Matt Freedman
Sept. 9-16, 2011

Sound and Vision

2011-06-23T15:20:00.026-04:00

McKenzie Fine Art
John Aslanidis
Gilbert Hsiao
Laura Watt

As a painter, I have been greatly influenced by the power of the sonic experience, both in the act of deep, immersive listening and also the act of creating music itself. After hearing the works of the Minimalist composers (like LaMonte Young, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley) and the roots of their influences (like the idea in the Upanishads, the ancient Indian text which speaks of the entire universe being constructed of sound), as well as the ambient works and ideas of Brian Eno, John Cage, and Jon Hassell, I became interested in the common ground of painting and sound and their ability to perform a function, in my case, by creating conducive environments for meditation, contemplation and reflection. By implementing a sort of intentional synesthesia of sound and vision, my painting began to focus on the interaction of rhythmic, vibratory frequencies locked in a visual dance of pattern and structure. The sonic influence became apparent in the paintings in the symmetry, which is directly related to the stereophonic phenomenon found in our natural hearing. It also is present with the process. Just as a musician plays a performance in time, my paintings are made in a kind of performance also- line by line slowly applied with a squeeze bottle hovering just above the surface in a session of meditative concentration with little room for error. With sound, expirimentation began with a hand held tape recorder when I was seven years old. With two taperecorders I discovered I could “overdub” and my obecession with sound began. As a teenager I played bass guitar in various bands, composing fusion instrumentals. Then I began, and still am, creating experimental “soundscapes” with the mixing board becoming the significant “instrument”, manipulating raw sounds, either found or constructed, into ambient sonic environments. In addition to twelve solo albums, I have also done several collaborations, including with Angie Drakopoulos on the video/sound installations, “Aurorasis” and “Mythograph”, (excerpt under "animations" here), exhibited in Paris and New York. In 2007, I played bass guitar, guitar and did the engineering and mixing on the vinyl only release “A Jumpin’ Jackpot o’ Melody” by the minimalist art rockers, The Daycare Centre, which received airplay on alternative stations in New York, Canada and Europe. Through this synthesis, this intentional synesthesia of sound and vision, I have ultimately been interested, in a very scientific manner, in the basic, fractal or holographic architecture permeating the universe and how this is revealed through paint, sound and the conscious creative act.

Here are a few albums which had a profound influence fairly early on, defining a new way to “listen”: “Tantras of Gyuto”-Tibetan Buddhist chant, Music from the Morning of the World- Balinese gamelan, Brian Eno’s “On Land”, Jon Hassell’s “The Surgeon of the Nightsky Restores Dead Things with the Power of Sound”, LaMonte Young’s “The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China”, John Cage’s “Sonatas and Etudes for the Prepared Piano” and Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians”.

Untitled 1, 2011

2011-06-15T23:33:00.001-04:00

11"x 15" acrylic polymer emulsion on paper.

Untitled 3, 2011

2011-06-15T00:08:00.003-04:00

15"x 22" acrylic polymer emulsion on paper mounted on panel.

Untitled 8, 2011

2011-06-13T08:48:00.000-04:00

9"x 12" acrylic polymer emulsion on paper.

Untitled 21, 2010

2011-06-12T10:12:00.000-04:00

11"x 15" acrylic polymer emulsion on paper mounted on panel.

Untitled 5, 2011

2011-06-11T15:08:00.001-04:00

40"x 50" acrylic polymer emulsion on paper mounted on canvas.

Schrödinger’s Kōan

2011-02-04T01:33:00.013-05:00

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
-Richard Feynman

In many eastern philosophies, the brain is not the center of the human body, the heart is. The heart is at the center, with all other nodes of perception or cognition radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. In our society today, the brain is firmly in the central position with conceptual capacity being rewarded, psychologically and financially; so much so that the possibility of locating a center other than the brain is quite difficult. At first we may wonder why would the heart need to be in this position? And how? In the heart lie our moral compass, the intelligence of intuition, and our inherent capacity for compassion. The fruits of our cognitive abilities are wondrous and powerful indeed, but without a firm basis in compassion, we cannot implement the wisdom to know the proper means to employ these tools. There are many examples of this situation, when technology has apparently overtaken our better judgment: perhaps the best example being the fact that nuclear weapons exist on this planet in the first place. Our abilities to synthesize and manufacture complex chemicals to perform a myriad of tasks and releasing them into the ecosphere without proper testing of the consequences on human and other life being one of many other examples. And soon, we may be confronted with artificial intelligence. We may be able to make an intelligent machine or custom engineer our babies to order, but should we? In many of the ancient traditions it was known that the mind and the heart must work in unison. In the Zen tradition of Buddhism a kōan was the tool used to reconnect with the wisdom of intuition by shutting down the brain with trick questions that make it freeze, momentarily ceasing it’s endless computing and opening up space within. Now cliché, a very well known example of a kōan is “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?” Or “Close your eyes and picture clearly your face; now can you picture your face before you were born?” I have found that many theories in modern physics can successfully function as a contemporary version of the kōan. There is Schrödinger’s cat for example. Imagine a cat placed into a steel chamber with a vial of hydrocyanic acid and a very small amount of radioactive material. If the radioactive material decays it will release a hammer to smash the vial of poison and kill the cat. But in the course of an hour, the radioactive material has equal chance that it will not decay and the cat will live. Since we cannot see the cat, is it dead or alive? Here perhaps it is not so much the question that freezes the mind, as is the answer: the cat is both dead and alive. This thought experiment forces the mind into the paradoxical world of quantum mechanics, where the cat is in a state of superposition and only when the box is opened and we can observe, does the wave function collapse and we see it either dead or alive. Trying to ponder superposition or indeterminacy can push the mind into a convoluted exercise of mental gymnastics, bringing it to the edge of it’s usual functionality. I have found contemplating these concepts and others within contemporary physics to cease, however briefly, the locomotive that is mind, and for a moment stand in awe, quietly staring into the vast silent space.

Some Thoughts on Cezanne

2011-01-19T20:35:00.014-05:00

After teaching a painting and drawing class on the upper west side once a week, I would stroll through central park after class ultimately to be pulled into the Metropolitan Museum of Art like a helpless fleck of iron before a mega-magnet. Wandering through the Met, very often I wound up in another magnetic field; standing in front of a Cezanne. What is it about this painter that died a hundred and five years ago (born 172 years ago today) that is still so compelling? I’ve read the books, and know what people have said about him and know what he said about what he thought he was doing, but still something is there itching, something unanswered. He was a very scientific painter in a way, with a disciplined methodology; he observed intensely and recorded honestly. But the inquisitive depth of his perception transcended seeing the plastic world; he looked into the world before him and found that world looked back. In this reciprocal space, he painted not only what he saw and how he saw it but painted through what he saw to arrive at an essence, something elemental and essential. He slips through the barrier between the observer and the observed. What remains is not a depiction, the subject but a catalyst for deeper realizations, a means to an end to truth in structure through light and color. Often we see an artist representing nature, but with Cezanne I feel as if nature is expressing itself through him. There are theorists that talk of nature having an inherent intelligence that we could communicate with if we only knew the language. Cezanne ignores the Cartesian divide and realizes that he is nature. He has made himself a conduit- the sensations of which he speaks picking up super subtle vibrations and tuning in to nature’s radio. In a way all of his paintings are of this- and only taking on the illusion of a still life, landscape, or portrait. Perhaps on some level he knew this and realized all he needed was Mt. St. Victoire, a bowl of apples or a tree. His words give us a clue: "The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting....I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness."

Perception as an extension of thinking- David Bohm

2011-01-09T22:26:00.003-05:00

The Creative Act of Seeing

2011-01-09T00:51:00.013-05:00

In a way, I paint nothing. Empty space. Nothing can mean many things, mostly absence, but absence does not mean nothing, but rather something else unexpected. Can there exist truly nothing? If one exercises the mindful act of seeing, then a strong argument can be made that within the void there is most definitely “something”; an inherent structure that appears to be omnipresent, homogenous, and perhaps holographic. Subatomically, there is no empty space. Physicists realized that the rate of expansion of the universe was due to a hidden mass/energy, much too much to be accounted for by all the known visible mass. Not able to see it, but knowing it was there, they called it dark energy, or the energy of empty space. Suddenly, the no-thing-ness became thing-ness. Instead of a figure on ground, there is in fact only ground and seemingly disparate objects are in fact united (see non-locality). Could this mean that consciousness itself also has thing-ness, structurally related to this "ether"? It was discovered, shockingly, that the simple observation of subatomic particles affected their behavior. They found that they could know the momentum of a particle, but not it’s position or they could know the position and not the momentum. Here determinism was replaced by probabilities, with the apparent interaction with the observer being the catalyst. What this appears to mean is that when we look at something, we are changing it imperceptibly. If Planks constant were not so small, we may have perceivable changes around us due to our perception. (a new breakthrough expiriment shows the quantum effect works on a larger scale as well- see here.) But even though we cannot perceive it, we are altering our surroundings simply by looking. Quanta exist in superposition, kind of neither here nor there, or in every possibility at once, until someone looks at it, then it takes on thing-ness. It was a wave, now it is a particle. And it turns out that these particles are not really particles but wave packets of standing wave patterns interfering: the ether.

The Alchemy of Paint

2010-03-11T00:05:00.018-05:00

Imagine two different painters creating the same painting, say a red X on a white canvas. One is using a very small brush to paint tiny semi transparent spheres of paint on the canvas, building up opacity slowly, taking 5 months to complete. The other uses a roller and completes the work in about 5 minutes. They will be essentially the same painting, but while they might look the same, will they feel the same?

Paint, like all wave bearing materials, has the ability to store information in its frequencies about how it has interacted with its environment. Imagine a boat passing by on a lake. Long after the boat is gone, the waves in the lake created by the boats’ passing still contain information about the now absent boat, such as speed, direction, or weight. The modulation of all forces are recorded within the complex interference patterns created on the lake’s surface. Paint also has encoded in it the precise energies that placed it where it is. It could be reasoned that more subtle energies are encoded as well, such as intent and even the resonance of specific thoughts, emotions or perhaps a holographic record of all. Since it is a frequency it can be transmitted and received, unconsciously or consciously. Whether or not it is received, depends on the “reception” of the viewer. So, the painter takes this base, elemental substance called paint and “cooks” it, applying “forces” and infusing it with information. If the mixture is just right, the fortunate artist has then become a successful alchemist, transmuting the prima materia into gold.

Possible Futures: A Potential Role of Art in a Future Society

2010-01-06T17:32:00.019-05:00

What is the role of art in today’s society? It is often lumped in that amorphous section of the news that might read “Arts & Entertainment” or “Arts & Lifestyle” or “Arts & Leisure”. You might find the horoscope there, or cartoons, maybe the crosswords. I think that speaks volumes to its current role today. Is art really only a vague mix of various innocuous time killers? When we look at history’s most advanced civilizations we see the Arts at the very forefront of innovation, providing the fertile ground for new vital ideas in all disciplines. I doubt very much the great pyramids were built for entertainment, nor the cave paintings at Lascaux just to pass some time, nor the classical statues of ancient Greece as a diversion, and so forth. Art does not seem to have a tangible meaning in our society because we won’t let it be anything but what we have already labeled it. If we let it, it could help solve humanities’ biggest dilemmas. For example, I think most people would agree that humanity, as a whole, has an energy problem. We have put all our eggs in one basket by putting so much dependence on oil, natural gas and coal. The future of these sources is speculative indeed, but regardless, it seems to make good solid sense to seek out more efficient, cleaner, and abundant sources. After all, as long as we are living on this planet the sun will be shining, beaming down an unbelievable amount of usable energy; and the internal furnace of our planet’s core will be stoked, waiting to be tapped, etc. These are the obvious and inevitable ways of the future. The only barrier that lies between us and harnessing these basic sources is within our minds. Regardless of how we solve it, it needs to be solved for our perpetuity. The Kardeshev scale is a way of measuring our evolution by how we master our available energy sources:

“A Type I civilization is one that controls the energy resources of an entire planet. This civilization can control the weather, prevent earthquakes, mines deep in the earth’s crust, and harvests the oceans. This civilization has already completed the exploration of its solar system.

A Type II civilization is one that controls the power of the sun itself. This does not mean passively harnessing solar energy: this civilization mines the sun. The energy needs of this civilization are so large that it directly consumes the power of the sun to drive its machines. This civilization will begin the colonization of local star systems.

A Type III civilization is one that controls the power of an entire galaxy. For a power source, it harnesses the power of billions of star systems. It has probably mastered Einstein’s equations and can manipulate space-time at will.”[1]

Using this scale, our current civilization is Type 0. In fact, from a glance at the daily news, it might seem that we are actually going backwards, exploiting and killing each other instead of uniting for the common good. Seeing that we have monumental obstacles before us, we might look at our past, to see where we got it right and made genuine advances in our collective evolution.

All the great civilizations of our history held Art in high esteem, though its role may have differed, its value was greatly prized. These civilizations also were surprisingly advanced in other areas as well, whether it is astronomy, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, science, etc. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians, Sumerians, Persians, and Mayans to name a few, are all good examples of this. Wherever one finds great art, one also finds sophisticated advancement in many other areas as well. And, of course, we do have some great art today, and have had great art in recent history, but often because of unnecessary suffering and sacrifice at the expense of the artist and often without any support or recognition until after their death. We have accepted the myth of the artist as someone who is starving, suffering, maybe crazy, but probably harmless and rarely, a genius, bit certainly not something worth the risk of investing in. Part of this myth is that the suffering is necessary to make great art, but this is simply a falsity. (Cezanne is an example here- he never had to worry about money.) We can thank Van Gogh for much of this current myth. Poor Van Gogh who suffered so much, never to sell a single work, and today is the plaything of billionaires. If only he could have enjoyed a fraction of a fraction of that wealth! His senseless premature death could have been avoided and we would all be richer for the works he might have made. How many other Van Goghs might there have been with a little support and how might that have changed our future? The artists we do know about then and now had some kind of financial backing, either coming from a wealthy family or marrying into wealth to support the “habit” of art. This is just a sin. We all lose in this situation. A very good example of where we currently stand when it comes to the arts, I found as I visited family in Cleveland for the holidays. The local professional football team had been doing very poorly and so a big name was brought in to help out with an undisclosed salary somewhere between five and ten million. Five and ten million! The mayor of the city only makes 100,000 or maybe slightly more! And this recalls how the individual NEA grants were axed because pennies or a few dollars per person per year was just too much to spend on art. Because Andres Serrano put a crucifix in a jar of urine and named it Piss Christ, ALL funding for ALL artists are taken away. There is some sound logic for you. I once heard about a demented dentist in Brooklyn that was selling body parts from corpses on the medical black market, or something completely reprehensible like that. Following this logic, I guess we should imprison ALL dentists! Today, it is better to take away the chance of nurturing the next Van Gogh than to possibly be offended by an artwork that may challenge our fragile beliefs. A society like this, which is too rigid to allow the ideas that will save it to be considered, is simply doomed. Being an artist today is kind of like a prison sentence, with the prisoner possibly being better off. (In prison there are at least three square meals a day and medical care.) Today, the term “artist” is most associated with the likes of Beyonce, or Brittney Spears, or Kayne West, leaving the visual arts out entirely. In the visual arts the most popular artist in America is Thomas Kinkade. Are these “artists” our contemporary versions of Cezanne, Mozart, or Leonardo? Are these “artists” really the best we can do? Among the crowd that is more in the “know”, someone like Damien Hirst might come up first. To me, he is an example of an ultimately transitory fashion, which is inexorably linked to our collective societal psychosis, where shock equals quality and sheer capital buys success. This is artist as corporation. If you had enough money to put a pallet of hundred dollar bills in a gallery it would be awfully impressive. But isn’t it only impressive to a growth obsessed capitalistic society on steroids? Otherwise it’s just paper. Would a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde be impressive to a Type I, II, or III civilization? If it were, it would not be for the same reasons that it is considered “great” now. But Van Gogh will always stop a sensitive viewer in their tracks because he transcends the transitory and strikes at a deeper, richer vein in our collective psyche. His paintings speak about that which cannot be spoken, but needs to be heard and we desperately want and need to hear it. This is why someone will pay over a hundred million for one of his paintings. Someone may pay a fortune for a Damien Hirst now because of it’s current inflated market value and investment possibilities, but in a hundred years or less, it may be just a dead shark.

When we talk about art with those who do not have a vested interest in it, one immediately is aware of the gulf that has opened between the artist and arts community and the everyday person on the street. There are many diverse ideas and opinions for this. In my opinion, it is the lack of education, which has created this divide, or maybe it should be more accurately called an abyss. Education is the single most important element we can invest in, even before art. Without education, art with a capital “a” cannot and will not exist. This is the realm I am afraid we are now entering. Our society has been so dumbed down and hypnotized, that without an influx of education, the arts will slowly (or quickly) fade into obscurity; a footnote to tomorrow’s Hannah Montanas. Instead our money goes to building a perpetual war machine. Without education, it is evident that art is a luxury for the privileged in our society and often plays a part in displaying the elite status of a person. Also, it often appears as if trends in art are manipulated by sheer capital, not aesthetic value. It has always seemed odd that money is ultimately the bottom line in an area, which in my mind, is the only entity capable of touching the ineffable, the transcendent that is common to all humanity and is the antithesis of money. We can fool ourselves with grandiose, cerebral theories, trying to chip away at its hold on us, but we all actively pursue and need Beauty in our lives in some way. One cannot put a trademark on or patent Beauty or the pursuit of its treasured shores. The only thing that differs is how we define it. For me, the experience of beauty is that essentially positive, open space which remains after the ephemeral aspect of a sensory experience has melted away in the mind. It transcends the limits of the mind, as it simply cannot be contained. Beauty opens the mind and relaxes it: holding it still in reverie, allowing space for more fluid, intuitive insights. Certainly the ancients knew this, as the most innovative cultures put the pursuit of their definition of beauty as the highest of priorities. This would mean a society that is making and appreciating more Art is better adjusted to meet the problems at hand by embodying the perspective of the mind frame necessary to solve elusive problems. Art in its purest state is not limited by dogma, money or petty politics: it is open, brilliant and vast. Art can and will “be” whatever we want of it. All we need to do is empower it, nourish it, and it will expand our entire society in ways we cannot even begin to speculate.

[1] Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: a scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the tenth dimension (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 278.

The Pre-Socratics and the Role of Imagination

2009-11-14T22:28:00.009-05:00

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”- Albert Einstein

The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. These philosophers asked questions about "the essence of things"[4]:
• From where does everything come?
• From what is everything created?
• How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?
• How might we describe nature mathematically? [1]

The aspect of the pre-Socratics, which I find to be of particular interest, is the quality of their thought. Thought like this is a beautiful gesture: it is open, fresh, and playful; simple, yet profound. Thought like this is not exclusionary, nor is it arbitrary, but has made use of the sublime power of our forgotten imagination. By using their intellect and imaginations in harmony, they were to discover profound truths about our world that would not be proven or recognized for thousands of years. Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BCE) and the Atomist School is the most famous example:
“This was the doctrine of atoms - small primary bodies infinite in number, indivisible and imperishable, qualitatively similar, but distinguished by their shapes. Moving eternally through the infinite void, they collide and unite, thus generating objects which differ in accordance with the varieties, in number, size, shape, and arrangement, of the atoms which compose them.”
In other instances they were just wrong, but even in some of the “wrong” theories one may find a unique beauty, which makes them “true” in another way. Their logic and imagination combined in surprising ways, leading one into the realms usually reserved for Art. The missing ingredient in much of today’s thinking is imagination. It is relegated to the realm of childhood whimsy; endearing and enchanting, but of little value in our day-to-day existence. I think, in part, this is because we have collectively forgotten how to use it properly. It can be a force of unlimited power, as histories greatest persons have proven, but is largely unrewarded in our society because its role is sketchy at best. One thinks of Hollywood films as being the first thing someone might mention when thinking of imagination’s role in western society. Unfortunately, there seems to be a connotation between special effects (FX) and imagination: the more special effects there are, they more “imaginative” the film. Technology here has become a crutch- it turns out that being able to do any special effect one wants is actually not that interesting. Too much importance is given to making “real” FX at the expense of other important cinematic elements, such as a plot or decent acting. Some of my favorite FX moments are from when all film makers had was the rudimentary tools and were forced to make do with some string, a piece of foil, and a lump of clay. In this way we, the viewers are invited to make use of our own imaginations, which are infinitely better than anything Hollywood churns out.
We might also hear of an “imaginative” company or corporation. Motive is at issue here because our system rewards “imaginative” corporations to a fantastic degree. The “imagination” in a capitalistic sense is not the same sort, or maybe it is not being employed in the same manner, as the brand of the pre-Socratic. Take Anaximander, “…he believed the beginning or first principle (arche) is an endless, indefinite mass (apeiron), subject to neither old age nor decay, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything which we can perceive is derived. The apeiron was never defined precisely, and it has generally (e.g. by Aristotle and Augustine) been understood as a sort of primal chaos. It acts as the substratum supporting opposites such as hot and cold, wet and dry, and directed the movement of things, by which there grew up all of the host of shapes and differences which are found in the world.”
This sounds somewhat similar to the descriptions of the Zero Point Field of particle physics, a sort of basic elemental structure, pattern or field: ‘The term "zero-point field" is sometimes used as a synonym for the vacuum state of an individual quantized field. According to present-day understanding of what is called the vacuum state or the quantum vacuum, it is "by no means a simple empty space"[1], and again: "it is a mistake to think of any physical vacuum as some absolutely empty void."[2] According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence.’
If a thought experiment could closely resemble the cutting edge of physics two millennia ahead, what could we do now: what could we see? If our motive is only the next quarter’s profit, then we will get no further than next quarter, instead of millennia. In some ways, scientists today have also dropped the ball. In favor of maintaining university funding or corporate backing, they find what they want to find and disregard or belittle data, which is too threatening to the status quo. But as history has shown us, over and over, we are never fixed: all is changing. As sure as the church attacked Galileo for thinking the unthinkable, a new idea tomorrow will be attacked as well. And change marches on. As Heraclitus said- "Everything changes and nothing remains still. We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not." It would serve us well to remember this essential truth. Revolutionary new ideas will come and we should be prepared for them and keep a truly open mind. It seems humanity is at a crossroads and we can choose to evolve with dignity and awareness or we can go kicking and screaming. Or maybe we don’t go at all.

a beginning

2009-11-09T13:17:00.002-05:00

"There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement of the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one and there is neither evolution nor destiny: only being."

-Albert Einstien