Louis Pasteur: Scissors Sharpened

Walking with writer and friend Mark Axelrod along a street in Paris, he stopped, fished a pad from his shoulder bag and quickly transcribed a sign that had caught his eye. I can’t remember what it was; perhaps it was Robespierre Dry Cleaners or Descartes Fine Chocolates or Picasso Pet Grooming, but it made us both laugh when he pointed it out. I’m writing a series, Mark said, of short stories based on these signs. Great idea. L. Pasteur: Scissors Sharpened While You Wait. Literature for me was still literary. For Mark it seemed so much fresher, a state of alertness in which, at any moment, a restless platoon of words might erupt and fix itself in antic nodes on the wrinkles of the world.   

Green Pastures, Quiet Waters

A cross, by sculptor Ted Prescott, is created by means of an unorthodox collaboration.  Diary cows require supplemental salt in their diets, provided in the form of bricks or blocks of salt, known to farmers as salt licks. Ted has fitted these uniform bricks of salt, available at any Agway store, onto a cruciform steel armature and placed them in a friend’s pasture where the cows, as they are accustomed to do, have licked and eroded the salt, giving the cross the appearance of ancient, corroded marble.

Cherry Hung With Snow

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.  A. E. Housman

A friend awaits, with acute eagerness, the appearance each spring of cherry blossoms. The Japanese architect Kenzo Tange observed that the cherry blossom lies at the heart of Japanese aesthetics. Whether Tange was simply making the beauty of nature analogous to the wood, silk, mulberry, clay, ink, iron and dyes of Japanese arts and crafts, or whether, as an architect, he was thinking of a more mathematical transposition from the fractal organization of a flower to the geometries of architecture and design, well, on that he did not elaborate. 

Then again, he might have been thinking of origami. To see a master’s chart of the successive folds used to achieve a model in physics or architecture, or just a geometric abstraction for its own sake, all from one sheet of paper, is to marvel at the miracle (as in the case of Chris Palmer’s origami abstraction) of its symmetrical complexity and snow-crystal beauty.

Degrees of Abstraction

Three pictures, three degrees of geometric abstraction. In the first, by Sonia Delaunay (Scene d’Interior), what might be a Cote d'Azur painting by Matisse is reduced to an arrangement of squares, circles, rectangles. Some simple patterns are achieved by repeating shapes like the triangles in the carpet, but the geometry is still very much at the expressive service of a recognizable tableau of two figures in a room.  

In the Frank Lloyd Wright window, the abstraction intensifies, though it still evokes a recognizable pattern from nature; the foliage of a tree or a sheaf of wheat. But you see the condensation. Half way between evoking natural forms and becoming a purely geometric ladder of chevrons, such pattern, clarified and reduced, is a central and eloquent means of abstraction. It recalls baroque music with its repeating variations on a theme that in turn would become a distinguishing trait of Minimalism, the repeating image, shape or note in clear, almost lapidary succession. 

In the Joseph Albers painting (Homage to the Square: Spring Tide), geometry prevails and all trace of other connotation disappears. Albers emphasizes the dynamic quality of succession that is so lyrical in Wright’s window, clarifiying it even beyond any sense of pattern into three diminishing squares that appear to come closer to the viewer as they get smaller.    

Samuel Beckett

And then another night fall and another man come and Watt go, Watt who is now come, for the coming is in the shadow of the going and the going is in the shadow of the coming, that is the annoying part about it. And yet there is one who neither comes nor goes, I refer I need hardly say to my late employer, but seems to abide in his place, for the time being at any rate, like an oak, an elm, a beech or an ash, to mention only the oak, the elm, the beech and the ash, and we nest a little while in his branches.

— Samuel Beckett, Watt

Turning, Yearning

For several years I described myself as a turner. I screwed pieces of wood to a flat steel faceplate, then attached the faceplate to a lathe which revolved the wood the way a potter’s wheel spins clay or a tire spins on a car. Tricky work as scale and ambition enlarged. Not a few rough chunks of lumber tore loose from their screws and came flying straight at me like caveman cannonballs. You learned to duck.

A friend just calls it turning, spinning around and around on an imaginary point in that ecstatic Sufi dance of the dervishes. It starts with a long initiation in which pain and exhaustion become the mystical earth into which you slowly inter your willfulness and pride. The hat you wear resembles a tombstone. The body breaks down. At first, you spin around a nail, fitted in the inlet between your large toe and the next. When the skin has worn away, salt is added to augment your pain. But gradually, "the body opens up again in a completely new way." As proficiency increases, an ease and equilibrium transforms the turning into a kind of effortless swoon, lifting the spirit, as our friend describes it, upward into a union with all things. "It's a dance of yearning that connects you to God." “Turning,” our friend paused as she recounted this, then she was weeping, “was the purest emotion I have ever felt, and that emotion was love.”

This bowl is not mine, but is made by a German turner named Ernst Gamperl. In an work of dramatic syncretism, Gampril staged a performance in an old church in Zurich where he placed his wooden vessels in a circle on a slightly raised circular plinth, leaving a space in the center where two dervishes performed their dance, spinning like wood on a lathe, like a planet on its axis.

The drawing by Cy Twombly is called Suma, an allusion to this sufi dance. 

I. M. Pei Cubed

Among the several I.M.Pei buildings I have visited (the pyramid at the Louvre and the National Gallery being the largest) I like best the small Johnson Art Museum at Cornell. It’s a minuet by a composer best known for symphonies and operas. All of his buildings are studies in serialism; in some, it’s too much, the geometry becomes too formulaic and the building looks dull--like the Javits Center or the Kennedy Library.  On the other hand, the pyramid, which is nothing but diamond-shaped panes of glass is not. First, it fits the semantics of France--the French love Egypt and the pyramid stands in view of the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde. Second, the transparency of the glass evokes the charm of crystal palaces, butterfly pavilions and chateau orangeries in a way that the ponderous Javits Center, alas, does not.

Rather than a multiplication of a single shape, lego-like, into an aggregate structure, the Johnson is a simple cube, a lyrical rebuke of brutalism, demonstrating just how silky and elegant concrete can be. The linear impressions made by the concrete forms during construction, the parallel beams in the ceiling, the windows and stairs etc., act as serial leitmotifs within the composition rather than a relentless times table governing the whole.

Salt and Pollen

Interesting similarity, don’t you think? The first is a picture of a work (fragment thereof) made of dandelion pollen by the German artist, Wolfgang Laib. The second is a photograph by our friend, Rob Ligas, of piles of salt on the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, “There is no other place like it on earth. It is about the size of Wales and is 3300 meters high." 

Red Book, Red Sun

I have a book, in tatters now, called Memories, Dreams and Reflections. It was given to me in my teens by a fellow-vagabond in Munich. He was shining like an angel, having just that week visited the curious castle described in the book. Here the author had transposed his apocalyptic visions into a cave-ish medieval reclusion of wood and stone. (Imagine what Wagner, Thoreau and Frank Lloyd Wright might build together on the shore of Lake Michigan.) I keep the book not just because of its long influence over my life and work, but because, in the flyleaf, there’s a drawing my Munich friend made of a map. It would guide me to a remote cave on the western edge of a Greek island. I found the cave and lived there for a month or so.

Lynne and I recently went to see the Red Book, Jung’s private and, like his castle, quite medieval-looking manuscript of obscure fantasy and psychic experimentation, on display at the Rubin Museum in New York. In it Jung drew many versions of circles and mandalas which, as mandalas traditionally do, served to center his mind during those months and years of induced turbulence, darkness and (by his own account) proto-insanity.

They brought to mind another circle. My cave was a 2-chambered socket high in the face of a cliff that rose straight from the smooth carpet of the Mediterranean. It faced west and as evening fell the sun became more outlandishly large, more fire-scarlet, more solar-god-like than it had ever seemed before, or has since.    

Serialism, Serialized

387. 388. 389. An old wagon lurches over ditches and groundhog holes. The task, on this blue June afternoon? To catch each bale of compressed hay as it cannonballs from the chute of the baler, to which the wagon is linked, then quickly settle it in place, interlocking it with the others so the whole sky-high stack will travel safely to the barn. Brick-laying, really. But there was bravado in the pure mathematics of it all.  Each day you dared to build your wobbly hay ziggurat one layer closer to the clouds. Bale 400. 401. Was it there, scorched with sweat, drizzled with dirt, that I first learned the risk and exhilaration of serial exactitude? 

April in Paris. The gardeners of the Jardin du Luxembourg are planting new annuals. The earthen beds are brushed as smooth as moleskin. Each hole is marked along a straight edge, each interval perfect to a fraction of a centimeter. The gardeners on their knees look like men at prayer. Is the artistic grandeur of France really just the art of a perfect interval between windows in its architecture, strikes on the metro, tulips in its gardens?

In the assorted mosaic of a log format, we’ll reflect on serialism as an aesthetic principle, we’ll look at its long, even pre-historic past in architecture, science and design and compare it with relevant instances in the present; we’ll dwell as much as we can on artists, writers, furniture-makers, musicians, etc. who practice this principle in one way or another (there is no house style), and on examples and exhibitions of their work all over the world. Hand in hand with that, we’ll try to promote the cause locally, where this site happens to have its two (well, four) feet down on the ground. 

Serialboxx is not just ours: the more people who become engaged, and the more eclectic the points-of-view, the better. Send an image accompanied by a paragraph or two. If it fits the philosophy of the site, up it goes. And those that are featured early on, when readership is still small, will get a rerun later on.

Thanks,

Lynne and John Diamond-Nigh