Howard Roark

Michaux, Untitled Chinese Ink Drawing 1961

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image: Henri Michaux ‘Narration’ (1927)

The dynamic graphic quality of oriental calligraphy combined with it’s dissociation from meaning (from a western point of view) has had a powerful influence of Asemic artists; The surrealist Belgian poet and painter Henri Michaux (1899-1984) betrays an orientalist influence in his automatic drawings – abstract calligraphic pieces in black ink; “a new language, spurning the verbal” begun after his travels in China and Japan:

” The destiny that awaited Chinese was utter weightlessness.

The characters that evolved were better suited than their archaic predecessors in terms of speed, agility, deftness of gesture. A certain kind of Chinese landscape painting demands speed, can only be executed with the same sudden release as the paw of a springing tiger. (For which one must first be concentrated, self-contained and, at the same time, relaxed).

The calligrapher, likewise, must first be plunged in meditation, be charged with energy in order to release: to discharge that very energy. And all at once.”

During the 1950s Michaux experimented with writing and drawing under the influence of the psychedelic drug mescaline. These experiments resulted in a series of alchemic drawings and abstract poems and made Michaux a champion of the Beats – Kerouak, Gysin etc – yet Michaux’s use of the drug was more shamanistic; by removing himself from conscious influence and by emptying his mind ( Michaux; “monastery of the mind”) Michaux used the drug as a tool to explore a pre-cultural commonality underlying language and poetry:

“Sometimes words would be fused together on the spot. For example, “Martyrissibly” would recur to me time and time again, speaking volumes. I couldn’t get rid of it. Another repeated untiringly, “Krakatoa !” “Krakatoa !” or sometimes a quite ordinary word like “crystal” would return twenty times in succession, giving me a great harangue all by itself, out of another world, and I could never have augmented it in the least or supplemented it with some other word. Alone, like a castaway on an island, it was everything to me, and the restless ocean out of which it had just come and of which it irresistibly reminded me, for I too was shipwrecked and alone end holding out against disaster.”

(via Free writing « stalker)

Marble Book, 2011
digital offset printing on mohawk superfine paper, 55 pages, with hand painted edges, 43.82 x 33.02 x 5.08 cm / 17.32 x 12.99 x 1.97″

image courtesy of Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen. Photos by VEGARD KLEVEN

(via We Find Wildness)

dvdp:

Diffusion Spectrum Imaging, A new imaging technique, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, makes it possible to see in detail how neural fibers criss-cross the brain and connect its regions. Read more

//via wanderlustmind

metro arquitetos associados + paulo mendes da rocha: cais das artes

archiveofaffinities:

Tony Smith, Untitled (Study for Louisenberg Paintings), 1953-1955 

floresenelatico:

http://reform.lt

dvdp:

Hubble view of Vesta

(via Diego Rivera “Man, Controller of the Universe”, 1934 - COLT RANE)

This is how Edmund Burke Huey did it…  Image from The Moving Tablet of The Eye, the origins of modern eye movement research.