Cast Off

When I went to see Bruce Conner's film, Easter Morning at the San Francisco Film Festival in early May, I didn't know he was ill. It was his producer who let on after the screening. This news gave further resonance to the film which is a reconstruction of an earlier effort—a resuscitation, like the title says, Easter Morning: new day, new life, resurrection. Shot in 1966, rediscovered, re-imagined, revived in 2008, it is a beautiful collage with light flickerings and shadows. Conner died July 7th.



This isn't the first time he's died. In 1959, only two years since arriving in San Francisco, he held a show by "the late Bruce Conner." The "stuffed lumps of cloth, the nylon and wax" (how he described his sculptures) were inert and dead to him. He needed to move on.

He also hated to be pinned down. So when he received yet another request for biographical information from Who's Who in America he wrote back that Bruce Conner had died, and sure enough, for the 1973 edition of the book, the editors added deceased to his entry.

Easter Morning was his 27th film. He was known best for his films, but he never claimed to be a filmmaker. But there is something about his films, because they opened doors for him, gave him a name.

I got a Ford Foundation grant for filmmaking. I got an application blank which I tore up and threw away because I decided it was a waste of time. That was '63. I talked to somebody else later who said, "Why don't you do it. I work at the Ford Foundation. Why don't you fill the thing out because it's sort of like a game." I decided I would play it as a game. I would play it like a dialogue between me and an invisible audience. I'm exposing myself telling them all of my history. My vaccinations. Explaining my whole theory of art and life and what I intend to do in the future. How I'm to use whatever alms they will give me. I started drawing parallels of this kind of activity with religious rituals. Confessionals, and ringing of bells, and doing penance in the streets. Fantasies of movies that I would make. It offered me a chance to fantasize. It was my opportunity to write in an entirely different context. I've never been able to write in the context of publication. I knew all the crap that you have to go through. You write it. You type it out. You make a bunch of copies. You send them out to all the magazines. Over the next two years you'll get the copies back. It's most disastrous. I've never been able to do that. This was a way for me to have an audience. I would write letters. Well they loved it. Somebody loved it. They gave me a film grant and all I had made was sixteen minutes of movies. And I didn't expect to get it because there were a lot of other filmmakers who were more qualified and should have gotten it. Like Stan Brakhage was the man who had most to do with me getting into filmmaking, and he didn't get one. He really should have.

With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.

Nonetheless, he was an artist and what he was doing with film was what he did with anything: he rescued, recycled, reused, remade whatever he found. He collaged with images, collaged with film, collaged with stuff, detris, cast offs.

In San Francisco the trash was picked up by an organization called the Scavengers Protective Association. They went around the city with big trucks, gathering the trash by emptying the trash cans onto big flat burlap sheets. They would gather it up on their backs and dump it into the truck. Or, when the truck was full, they would hang them on the sides like big lumpy testicles. So they were using all the remnants, refuse, and outcasts of our society. The people themselves who were doing this were considered the lowest people employed in society... I decided, we'll have the RAT-BASTARD PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION: people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with society.

Christ Casting Out the Legions of Devils, 1989.

This was in the 50s, early 60s when men still wore ties and women wore gloves. Conner was what you'd call unconventional.

Artists were using oil paint which I felt was a pretty limited medium for spontaneity; for using what was around for you. We figured you could use anything you wanted to. The main thing was to make it, to make the image. To make the thing that you were trying to do, and whether it fell apart or not was of secondary importance. In fact, for me it became of primary importance. It became a dialog of how you relate to objects. You have a choice of how you want to relate. If you want to, you can take assemblage or collage and seal it in a solid block of plastic. Or you don't. Time is working on it. Manuel Neri would make his sculptures of plaster on cardboard, corrugated cardboard. The first time they were shown at the San Francisco Museum a couple or three years later, they had to sweep up the floor underneath every day because the plaster would keep popping off.

Metronome (1961, reworked 1995) wrapped in nylons.

Nylons figure a lot in his assemblages. And the atomic bomb in his films...


A Movie, 1958, found footage.

... until he became known for these elements in his works. When he was identified with nylon stockings, assemblage, short films with historic footage... he'd quit. He stopped making assemblages in 1964, and film—he came back to film when he could come at it another way.

"How you relate to objects," is the nugget behind his work. I understand this. It is how I operate—responding, engaging, being in conversation with the things I come across. Like this—this trio of frames from Mea Culpa, one of the films he did in the 80s with David Byrne and Brian Eno. Here, these spot shots are recast in a different role.





Mea Culpa from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1981. There's also America is Waiting online.

You know there's more. This is just a taste. Luckily there are some films online and books now, retrospectives having been done. But this is the end frame. All good things must come to an end. Or do they? That's just a line. Conner knew that. All things can be reborn.





Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Interview with Bruce Conner by Paul Cummings in NYC 4/16/7.

Sculptures and collage at Paule Anglim Gallery, SF.

The Lotus Series: The Final Series

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun. —Robert Rauschenberg

Less than two months before he died, Robert Rauschenberg's last series of prints were completed. They are the Lotus Series, a remembrance of and response to China, on view this summer at Greenfield Sacks Gallery, Santa Monica.

These very beautiful, light and bright prints are composed of photos Rauschenberg took on two extended stays in China in the 80s, first when he worked in the ancient Xuan Paper Mill, then later when he returned to Beijing to mount a ROCI exhibition.

ROCI is the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, a worldwide project Rauschenberg launched in 1984 in an effort to promote global peace and harmony. He believed that art can circumvent disparate political differences and function as a conduit of cultural understanding, nation to nation, artist to artist, person to person. Over the course of six years, ROCI mounted exhibitions of his and others' works, some of them collaborations, in eleven countries (many with political agendas at odds with those of the US) including Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Japan, Cuba, the former USSR, former East Germany, Malaysia. During these continuing evolving exhibitions, Rauschenberg would submerge himself in the host country's culture.



Twenty years later, ill and nearing the end of his life, Rauschenberg reworked his photos of China into 12 inkjet photogravure prints. They are spare, simple affairs, mostly just four images juxtaposed with a recurring imprinted lotus blossom. In his usual work, his combines and prints, there is lots of overlapping simultaneous imagery—here there is less and white space—also the floating lotus. Hovering over and under images of street life: doors, billboards, banners, and bicycles; and cultural artifacts of another time: sculptures, the zodiac, temple tops—hovering around the 10,000 things of ordinary and perpetual life, is the lotus, throne of the Buddha, pure mind, bodhi.



It seems significant to me that in his last days, taking stock of a host of images of a country he was getting to know, looking over sights and signifiers of culture, of life, he'd work up this conversation between teeming activity and philosophical contemplation. At last it comes down to this: there is life, and out of life grows understanding; without life, no enlightenment. These are sweet and wise works of an extraordinary and generous man who loved life and was friendly to all its forms. Om Mani Padme Hum, a prayer for Robert Rauschenberg, RIP.



***
In a related way, I was reading an interview with Ai WeiWei in this month's Art in America in which he describes the underground nature of contemporary art in China in the 80s and 90s. China was only then being introduced, in a controlled way, to Western ideas, philosophies, and artistic concepts. This was the time when Rauschenberg held the ROCI exhibition in Beijing, 1985. What was inspired and exchanged in 85 was swiftly suppressed in 1989—the year the exhibit, China/Avant-Garde, in the National Gallery was shut down and when students were crushed in Tiananmen Square. It is easy to forget, at a distance, just what conditions were (and are currently) like under Communist control. It is difficult to comprehend the deep societal and cultural attenuation that results after an sustained era of oppression. Change, WeiWei says, comes slowly.

It's a very complicated issue because China is a nation that needs change. The change is inevitable, given that the old part is really rotten and cannot meet contemporary standards of usage or practice. The question is how to change things and to what degree and, after the change, who reaps the benefits? What is going to be damaged in the process?

This from the artist who drops a Han Dynasty vase. He knows something about holding on and letting go relics.



Like Rauschenberg, WeiWei believes in first-hand contact and exchange. As his contribution to Documenta 2007, he brought 1,001 Chinese people to the exhibition in Kassel.

My intention was to use art to directly affect people and groups who are not generally associated with art. I'm fascinated with individual consciousness, awareness, a new sense among the participants that possibilities exist in the spaces between different cultures. We essentially created a big space of freedom there. The work itself had no other formal determinants or goals. The whole purpose was to encourage people to use their imagination to act on their own. The "visitors" ranged in age from 2 and a half to 70 years old. Many of these people would never ordinarily have a chance to go outside China or even leave their province. There were many farmers, people from almost every profession, and from 20 or more different provinces. Their experience of Kassel and of this contemporary art event affected their lives deeply. They often write to me saying it has marked their whole life. Now they will look at the world and understand the world very differently; the visit continues to shape them.

So there you have it: Overseas Cultural Interchange = Art Saves. It's true.

A nicely informative page about Ai WeiWei can be found at Artsy.

Pic of Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn courtesy of Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Cakes n Cookies

The things that can get in the way. Jury duty, for instance.
And cats. Cat sleep-overs, I've learned, aren't about sleeping. This cat will talk all night long. That gets in the way. Of sleep for sure.

Well I have things to say too. About art seen in LA.

There was, to begin with, Make It Rain, a full-wall projection of a 5 minute, 32 second video by Julius Friedman at Patrick Painter.



Footage of art-house auctioneer Simone du Pury in action taking bids and wielding the gavel is edited and matched to an audio mix that is alternately soaring symphony and chunky beat. The end result is an homage to the shamanic conjuring of monetary energy that is the big ticket art auction experience.



Dipping and bowing, du Pury makes it happen, makes it rain—and the automated tally board displays the quickly transforming numbers, dollars, yen, pounds, and euro—five figures, six figures, and the crowd cheers! Rainmaker, indeed. It's a "small" work (even if it is projected hugely)—a wry testament to the heady, magical, out-of-the-ordinary nature of the art world.
Also wry and upending is Friedman's resume.



What more is there to say? Is anything else necessary?

Give that man a cookie.

A couple of doors down, at Richard Heller, there was meat. Doesn't get any more elemental than this. Victoria Reynolds paints portraits of flesh.



I remember seeing one of her works, much like the one above, close-in view framed in ornate frame, some time ago here in San Francisco. I was awe struck by the deft rendering and the Victorian woodwork which mimicked the marbling of flesh and fat.

In this exhibit, she shows a series inspired by carvings of slaughtered reindeer she witnessed in a traditional harvest in Norway. The flesh is painted hung against a black background and framed in black. The black offsets the carnation and gives the work gravitas in the same way that the light/dark contrast worked for the Dutch Masters. This is Reindeer Vision, 44 x 32 inches.



The paintings are stark, no frills (save the frames), somber and respectful of the flesh (even if the titles are witty). This one, called Uteral Bonnet (26 inches square) is especially interesting as the piece of flesh, the form itself is something amazing.



It seems to me, though, it could get redundant, portraits of meat, an exercise again and again of the same thing, slight variations. She could venture sometimes off the mark, it seems to me, outside the tight parameters she's set herself. Otherwise it is: Victoria Reynolds, the meat painter.

I was thinking this and then I came across Cindy Wright. She paints, on occasion, meat too, to a different effect.



Bacon Cube 3, with bright light at 78 x 76 inches is certainly cinematic.



Meat 3, 67 x 47 inches, is right in there, so close you can smell it, and it is also about the paint. Wow!

My favorite, not flesh, but fish—Fishbone—is fantastic, dramatic, clean sweep. I used to paint carcasses so I am partial I suppose, but still this is a truly arresting painting getting to the guts of the matter with verve.



I discovered Cindy Wright at Mark Moore Gallery where another, very different, terrific painter, Alli Smith, was showing five new big canvases. Talk about the paint! They knocked me out!


Look at all that's going on here. I chose this example, Siren Crown, because it shows in the pic the different uses of paint—flat panel, painterly, globular—collisions and compressions—it's so dynamic! And her colors, the precision, punch. This is such confident exuberant work.



This is Never Enough, 64 x 68 inches, and absolutely, I could never get enough. Alli Smith takes the cake!

Across town, at Christopher Grimes, there was another painter showing. Joshua Podoll also paints large canvases of varying application. I know it isn't fair to compare ... but I have already done that in this post, so what the hay...



Air-brush meets brush work and strange perspectives and juxtapositions happen, but overall the effect is flat and I was left feeling dull. Having just experienced Alli Smith's paintings, I was quite aware of the contrast.



Enervated.



Energized.

Enough said.

Barnes & Bollinger, By Golly

I had to ask. Are they real?



Yes. These large-scale photos in the back room of the Hosfelt Gallery, SF, were real, of starlings swarming over Rome.



See what I mean?

I've seen footage of masses of birds swirling, undulating across some spring lake on the Serengeti, but something about these grainy black and white images struck me as surreal in a different, dark dream-like way. I fell into the atmospheric mood Richard Barnes creates in these particular, not-technicolor, images of bird clouds—like dust clouds, ominous and otherworldly.

What a find—and not even the main show, just a coupla photos in the back room. The main show is a group show, Summer Reading: Artists Interpret Literature with word & book works, cut-outs by British artist Su Blackwell especially endearing.

Barnes does work in color and in previous years, Hosfelt has shown a wonderful series taken in the back rooms of Natural History Museums. How I would like to see this work. Imagine this, Smithsonian (Zebra) in person at 48 x 60 inches large.



It recalls the series Richard Ross did in the 80s called Museology. This is light-boxed rhino is at the Field Museum, Chicago, 1986.



And then there's the great Thomas Struth gazing at glassy-eyed museum grazers.



Barely hanging on, weighted by the heavy load of culture (what else could it be?), these onlookers are at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. In contradistinction, Hanging Cherry Branch, N 70, Düsseldorf is heavy with life: fecund multi-petaled blossom, light glinting off. This one of his exquisite flower photos.



Which leads me to tell of another happy find.

First, I found Richard Barnes tucked in the back room of a group show and then, downtown at Rena Bransten Gallery, Rebeca Bollinger represented by one photo in a group show called Dreamscapes.



These circles of light and blur are The End and The Beginning. Certainly the Alpha and Omega to me, the just-so, Above and Below, primordial first light (or last), full circle. Awe-some.



Like Barnes, Bollinger creates an atmosphere with abstraction and indistinction. Is it real? This is Left Hemisphere—the right brain approach: enter the flow of it, the presence of light flickerings, glimmerings. Quite extraordinary. See more here.



New find—new favorite.


Struth pics from ArtNet.

Bent's the Best

Great little 3 minute film by British director Jules Nurrish screened yesterday in the Transtastic selection of shorts about, by, featuring trans persons in Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival.
Transtastic, it was.

Bend It is an art performance homage to Gilbert & George. Breast-bound artists Anat Ben David and Heather Cassils do the "bend it" trans dance atop pedestals. It's the song G&G danced to, in their own way when they began their life as art. It's a tight n sexy dance; they're buff n sexy androgynes. Oh yeah, "show me you're liking it." Bend it any which way you can.

Gilbert & George returned (backwards-like) to bending it and you can see a wonderful drippy dippy video on YouTube.

Big Buildings for Bad Guys

Here are the best bits of an article in today's NYTimes that addresses the slippery slide of working for money, power, fame. And likewise, whether money, power, fame can effect change for the good.

Bear in mind that semantics are not addressed, e.g., in my previous sentence, what determines "the good" ? In the context of this article: good is humane treatment of workers, environmental responsibility, protection of human rights and equality.

Four months ago the architect Daniel Libeskind declared publicly that architects should think long and hard before working in China, adding, “I won’t work for totalitarian regimes.”

Since then, Mr. Libeskind’s speech, delivered at a real estate and planning event in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has reanimated a decades-old debate among architects over the ethics of working in countries with repressive leaders or shaky records on human right.

With a growing number of prominent architects designing buildings in places like China, Iran, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where development has exploded as civic freedoms or exploitation of migrant labor have come under greater scrutiny, the issue has inched back into the spotlight.

One lightning rod in the debate is Rem Koolhaas’s mammoth headquarters for China’s state broadcast authority, CCTV, a minicity in itself in a capital where cranes dot the skylines and nearly every famous foreign architect has a project on the boards. Mr. Koolhaas suggested at the outset of the project, which he was assigned in 2002, that by the time his tower — a hulking hollowed-out trapezoid — was completed, China’s censorship of the airwaves might well have changed. (The building is almost finished.)

Mr. Koolhaas is known for arguing that market forces have in any case supplanted ideology. Some interpret that stance as a way of avoiding the harder questions and a not-so-subtle reminder that money drives the most ambitious projects in the West.

Robert A. M. Stern, who is also Yale’s architecture dean, drew some criticism last year when he accepted an assignment to design a planned George W. Bush Library in Dallas.

Mr. Stern shrugged off the sniping. “I’m an architect,” he said. “I’m not a politician.”

“I’m a guy who has on my wall a picture of the guy in front of the tank,” said Eric Owen Moss, a Los Angeles architect, referring to the famous photograph from the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. “But I’ve never turned down a project in Russia and China.”

Mr. Moss has designed the Guangdong Museum and Opera House in China as well as a ceremonial plaza, Republic Square, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which has been ruled by the same autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, since the 1980s.

William Menking, the founder and editor of Architect’s Newspaper, wrote recently, “To suggest that providing high-quality design justifies working” in China “is slippery ethics.”

“Albert Speer designing for Hitler might have said the same thing. His building itself is not political, but the act of building it, for a regime like that, is a political act.”

Mies van der Rohe designed a competition entry for the German pavilion at the Brussels Expo of 1934 that included swastika flags and Nazi eagles. Le Corbusier aggressively courted Mussolini and the Vichy administration in France to try to get their business. Apart from his notorious Nazi sympathies, the architect Philip Johnson was known for boasting that he would readily design for Stalin if the price were right. Some 600 architects from around the world — including Peter and Alison Smithson — vied for the commission to build the Pahlavi state library for the shah of Iran in the late 1970s; architects including Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown entered Saddam Hussein’s competition in the 1980s to design a mosque in Baghdad.

Bernard Tschumi, former dean of Columbia’s architecture school, said, “Some of the most amazing places were built because of dictators.”

“Architecture is always related to power and related to large interests, whether financial or political,” he said. Yet “there is a moment when the buildings are conceived as an expression of a political regime, he added. “Then it becomes a problem.

Mr. Sudjic of the Design Museum of London: “Now architects are careful about making emotional political stands about anything. That can seem like sophistication, or it can seem like evasion.

From I'm the Designer. My Client's the Autocrat. by Robin Pogrebin, NYTimes, June 22, 2008.

Read the full article here.

New Jew Mew

I've been waiting for the fence to come down and the new Contemporary Jewish Museum to open. The blue cube has been peaking over the fence for months, winking.
The blue cube is the Yud portion of the extension, designed by Daniel Libeskind, enlarging the original 1907 brick power substation refurbished as museum. Another portion, the Chet, runs down the middle. Together, yud and chet spell L'Chaim, to life. New life from old energy (building).



The blue cube is set akimbo to the rectilinear factory building, jumping out of it like alive with energy.



The blue cube is 3000 blue steel panels, shade-shifting, glimmering and set with 36 diamond windows.



Wow. Wowwowwow, what a beautiful building.



Inside too.



The Yud room, center of the cube, is spacious, spacey. Presently it houses a sound installation: music by various artists commissioned by John Zorn to compose works inspired by letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The work by Erik Friedlander was playing; Lou Reed came next.



Inside and out, the building, the works, the whole shebang reflects back on a heritage, ancient and multivalent.



It's not what I expected. I don't know what I expected. The shards of light gather here. No secular museum space this: spirituality worn on the sleeve, woven throughout.

The inaugural exhibition is In The Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis. The show includes a wide range—newly commissioned works, installations, illustrations, and an exquisite illuminated Haggadah from the 14th century. The biblical presence was strong here, as everything dealt in some way with "In the beginning..." In case you've forgotten, it goes like this:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

My money's on Matthew Ritchie for Best in Show. His installation was one of the works commissioned for this exhibit. It is multilayered, so bear with me as I try to capture it. Across two walls is a squiggly black line drawing (magic marker) with six empty centers. Colored animations are projected onto these spaces to the accompaniment of various overlapping audio tracks, music and spoken voice. The animations depict swirling universes, formless and forming, tumbleweed worlds, fire balls, storms and clouds of birds, surging oceans, molecules, under sea whorls: universes all, great and small. From where I sat, the violin was more prominent than the texts piped from other speakers, but I caught these words: "unrest, confusion, misery." Then there was, "reversal, defeat, failure." That wasn't the whole of it, but that was the message in that moment of unfolding. The worlds turning, tumbling, transforming were mesmerizing what with the hypnotic music and stories heard but not heard. A great experiential depiction of the notion that there are universes within and beyond this universe which we barely know the top or bottom of.



Another commissioned work I really liked was a wall painting by Kay Rosen. Her response to the creation of the world is Do Not Disturb (with the hidden refrain, It Is So.)
The words are painted on one side of the wall, like this:



Like any good scriptural mystery, on the other side of the wall, are the reverse of the letters, revealing shadow numbers, 0, 1, 2 stacked in columns of three. Their sum is the title of the work: 063 signifying the Void, 0; the Perfect Work, 6; the Work by half, the imperfect world we inhabit, 3. Perhaps, she suggests, if we humans could refrain from meddling, the world could revert to its original (natural) perfection.
Perhaps. It's also possible that perfection wasn't in the original design. Perhaps that hermetic, sealed and still perfection isn't what creation is about, but it is more like Ritchie's worlds within worlds, always changing, unfolding, unstable, tenuous. The shake-up always right around the corner. The big bang.

The sound of which (the Big Bang) was a part of Ben Rubin's wonderful stainless steel sound sculpture. Modeled on the Horn Antenna built by Bell Labs in 1959, the piece also recalled the logo of the Gramophone Company... His Master's Voice.





Sounds picked up by the antenna were identified by scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965 as background radiation, the remnant sounds still floating around space, of the explosion that was The Big Bang Beginning. Recordings of these sounds emanate from the sculpture, and right there, in the museum, you're hearing echos of creation. Awe-some.

If the Horn Antenna is like a giant earpiece, then a telescope is a giant eyepiece seeing deeply into the vast distances of the space that holds the mysterious sounds of the universe. Space also holds man-made mysteries and Trevor Paglen has been tracking them.

Paglen is a geographer-artist who hit my radar when he exposed the flight patterns to and from CIA secret prisons overseas. His work, photographs mostly, centers on the black world, the hidden network of clandestine governmental operations. At the Berkeley Art Museum he's showing new work tracing secret reconnaissance satellites. The Other Night Sky is an installation that projects on a large-scale globe an animation of the 189 satellites currently orbiting the earth.



Reconnaissance technologies today can locate individuals anywhere on the ground, record conversations, monitor and photograph activities everywhere and anywhere—defying borders and freely crossing the lines between public and private, legal and illegal. In his photographs, faint lines in the clouds, or between stars, are faint evidence: satellite trails, but the vast amount of information gathered by them is kept secret in the nearly impenetrable black world.



Science opened up the heavens. Galileo's telescope reframed how we understood the galaxy and our place in it. This revelation was the eventual undoing of scriptural authority, but that took some time—first Galileo was imprisoned. Paglen's photographs point to a networked authority wielding secret knowledge in a political inquisition. The parallels with the 16th century are uncanny. The issues of power, truth, secrecy recycle and the answers seem to still be in the stars, in the books, in the images.

Back at the CJM, there was a Barnett Newman painting, Onement II. It doesn't translate well as a picture, but trust me, it is beautiful, still, deep. Originally called Atonement in reference to Yom Kippur, Newman later changed the name of the series to Onement. Asking and receiving forgiveness for sins is the theme of Yom Kippur. Newman saw that his centered, balanced, still paintings weren't about getting right with god, but about being one with, being one, being whole. These are the ultimate global paintings, one without the other, without distinction, one, before the division of day and night, light and dark. From one all things are possible. Before one is a mystery. After one is possibility. But one. It's the place to be.



Onement takes the cake.


CJM exhibition photos courtesy of the museum; building photos are mine.
Paglen pics from Paglen.com
Horn Antenna from Wikipedia.com