I wrote this a few months back as part of a collective show I played a role in putting together. This coming Saturday I’ll be in conversation with one of the cofounders of the collective and the curator of the show. Here are some words.
An Introduction to the Cosmic Through Abstraction
By X______ E_____ C_____
It is safe to reason that within the cosmic lies all things. The known and unknown universe in its expression to the particles visible and not yet detected, scales ungraspable, horrors of the imagination, and delights, all nest inside of this concept. The concept itself lies inside of itself. Like God, perhaps more ancient as recorded history makes little in the scope of what our conscious ancestors reasoned, the cosmic body stretching beyond our gaze to realms unseen and un-sensed is fruited in human response to the darkness on the other side of our eyelids. That we make these things real with our words, across languages, and across meanings, because landing on the dimensions of what we describe as boundless, is to take a breath, compose and recite the analogue of breaking down bit by bit a collective knowledge and understanding.
What is abstraction? Like asking what is paint, whatever the yield is, is many historical precedents combined in a dialogue that is ongoing over the nature of material and reality. Artists of all walks have and continue to make the bounds of abstraction tangible as the word implies an action as much as paint describes a reality. On the continuum of forms what it is that Alma Thomas through her marks, or Betye Saar communicated through her windows, or Clyfford Still in his numbered and dated titles. Perhaps in the question is an answer, that the tears in perceived space through the object creates another portal in which we may travel to a becoming. These days I think frequently of Jack Whitten’s idea of scale, of the materiality of Martin Puryear, of the expansive philosophies of artists like Theaster Gates, and the subversive spiritualities of artists like Ron Athey to name a few. Through these artists and more that portal becomes wider allowing comprehensives views of histories and people to pass with the effort it took to establish them in an elegance that we consume as recipients of art.
Poet, Harmony Holiday, writes on the backstage of black artistic expression, a place where I find myself. Through the eyes of the other I do not see myself, though in this place chronicled, I see more of what I have experienced in bringing myself to the stage I stand upon. There is a scope to my expression, one shared often with poets as much as any other type of artist. To quote one of my favorite poets, Tongo Eisen Martin, “I am not an I, I am a black commons.” The cosmos is a black commons and the cosmic body a black body. Within it everything exists as the absorptive property on the non color, or the supermassive, the cosmic takes on in a polychromatic, aggregate gestation engulfing even the most hollow/hallowed rejections. It is the poet's sense of the world driving the meaning derived in the exercise of shaping the senses into comprehension. The conscious connection to what we know and the illusory nature that what we truly do not is housed in that knowing. To all there is a pulse and without all there is nothing.
The material that our life's meaning is derived from, currency in its forms, legacy in its forms, pathology in its forms, and the callings, the talents, the zeal, are brought together through the traces of ourselves onto the map of the world. The concept of the indexical trace, what is left of our bodies in the absence of the former. Our governments have long used this principle as a means of accounting for our individual debt to society at large through systems of taxation and carceral punishment. We account for our time through collecting the bits and pieces of the transaction. Receipts, serial numbers, gift wrapped items that imprint a coded language that what we have is authentic, a kind of transference of the value of the object into our lives. The counter is also true. No amount of glue will stick another soul onto you. The very presence of that non transferable object sparks mythologies as long as any history and yet what persists equally is the art between and in the margins of the material world. As we are things with a presence, those things have a presence that is undeniable.
It is the connective tissue, as much awful in a bucket that is discarded as necessary waste. In this instance it is where the proverbial sausage is made, from the fatty, tissue lined, molded, shining with grease. Reflective of the grand blackness, the bestial creatures of astrological pantheons, heroic, flawed, defied beings, unnamable monstrosities, hellscapes, is life, springing like a tree. Not a tree that we would recognize in its majesty or even collapsed amongst the forest. A tree composed like a symphony. Across cultures we recognize the sacred in the form, a blend of what sustains and what is too big to be contained simply by virtue that to nourish it, all foundations must be cracked open. In that essence we form what we may and house it as a not perfection, as to maintain the weighted hand that flexes to scale what mountains may arise and set level to the great floor of the sky.