The Times Quotidian

The Katha Upanishad
by Nancy Cantwell

Recitation by Christopher Isherwood

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The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;
thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard. —Katha-Upanishad, 3.14

So begins Somerset Maugham’s bestselling twentieth century novel The Razor’s Edge (1944),  whose main character gives up a life of privilege in search of spiritual Enlightenment. Maugham himself visited Ramana ashram where he had a direct interaction with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India in 1938. But, it is said that Maugham received his inspiration and direct translation for this epigraph from Christopher Isherwood, with whom he had become acquainted through The Vedanta Society’s Hollywood Hills center. This reading by Isherwood of the Katha Upanishad is of special note. It is translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester. From the CD liner notes: “We used to listen to Chris read this scripture in the early morning in the temple of the Vedanta Society on Vivekananda’s birthday. Needless to say, this translation is our favorite.”

The Katha Upanishad and Yoga.
The Upanishads represent a shift from the early Vedic texts, whose thinkers focused on rituals formulas, prayer and song, sacrifice and ceremony and those connections to the cosmic spheres. By placing its emphasis on the physiological make up of man, esoteric knowledge, and ontological inquiries into cosmic realities, the Upanishads and in particular the Katha Upanishad set the stage for the self-transformative alchemy that becomes the practice of Yoga.

The Katha Upanishad (commonly assigned to the forth or fifth century B.C.E.) is the first instance when we see a recognizable tradition of Yoga emerge. Within this poetic text there lies the first descriptions of the fundamentals of a yoga practice; the preparation of the body and the cultivation of stability in the mind that steel the aspirant for the discoveries of consciousness. The story unfolds as a conversation between a young, but spiritually endowed Naciketas and Yama the God of Death. Seeking the knowledge of the mysteries of life after death, Naciketas is initiated by the God Yama onto the path of emancipation. He is instructed in the practice of involution, the climbing of consciousness to ever higher levels of being, the transcendental self and the psychospiritual work that prepares the yogi for the event of grace. Reminiscent of the Baghavada Gita’s (500-200 B.C.E.) classic dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that occurs in a chariot, so the poetic metaphor of the charioteer is used by Yama to instruct Naciketas of man’s relationship to the Higher Self.

Chapter 3, 3-9
Know the self a rider in a chariot,
an the body, as simply the chariot.
Know the intellect (buddhi) as the charioteer,
and the mind (manas), as simply the reins.

The senses, they say, are the horses,
and the sense objects are their pastures;
He who is linked to the body (atman), senses, and mind,
the wise proclaim as the one who enjoys (bhoktri).

When a man lacks understanding,
and his mind is never controlled;
His senses do not obey him,
as bad horses, a charioteer.

But when a man has understanding,
and his mind is ever controlled;
His senses do obey him,
as good horses, a charioteer.

When a man lacks understanding,
is unmindful (amanaska) and always impure;
He does not reach that final step,
but gets on the round of rebirth.

But when a man has understanding,
is mindful and always pure;
He does reach that final step,
from which he is not reborn again.

When a man’s mind is his reins,
intellect, his charioteer;
He reaches the end of the road,
that highest step of Vsihnu.

And here exactly we find the first instance of the word Yoga used in context with its definition. A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment.

Chapter 6.10-11,
When the five perceptions are stilled,
Together with the mind.
And not even reason bestirs itself;
they call it the highest state.

When the senses are firmly reined in (dharana),
that is Yoga, so people think.
From distractions a man is then free (apramatta),
for Yoga is the coming-into-being,
as well as the ceasing-to-be.

The Photography of Robert Kato
by Naomi Pitcairn

Robert Kato’s photography is about finding beauty in the most unlikely anythings and anywheres. The images from his San Francisco Bay series “Man Forgets the Earth Remembers” are neither Kodak moments nor hero shots, but tributes to the grandeur of common places and the singularity of the ordinary. These bayside landscapes speak to the most quotidian of scenarios that under the watchful eye of Kato become opulent photographic renderings.

[View with PicLens]

Kato pursues his images with both controlled precision and serendipitous intent. He purposes only to be present, a certain place at a chosen hour, trusting that the images will come. Then, from the moment the vision alights on his lens it will go through a rigorous process of selection, calculated tweaking, and imbuing of the RAW file into a technical tour de force. Deliberate shutter speeds expose new colors, surprising details, sharpening the atmosphere while slurring movement, the camera’s giant owl eye casting a preternatural light on these seemingly mundane cultural landscapes.

[View with PicLens]

Robert became digital after looking up some old friends who were now “doing it” commercially. “They showed me their new digital darkroom” he says. “They had a Radius monitor, a power PC and Photoshop 2.5. Things you couldn’t do with photography, they were doing with Photoshop. All of my earlier aspirations of wanting to be a painter came flooding back.” His first first digital camera was given to him by his friend, Son Do, co-founder and CTO of Rods and Cones. It was a first generation, Sony DSC-T1 (I admit, I’ve never heard of it) and he cut his printer’s teeth on an IRIS 3024 back when people were doing inkjet printing using iris technology before color profiles or screen calibration… before…a lot of stuff. As the technology continued to advance, he continued to be an early adopter.

Today his studio sports 44″ and 24″ Epson wide format printers, both on loan from Do, as well as smaller models. He uses them not only for his own work but for the business he has started with fellow photographer, Larry Stueck, that specializes in post production consulting workshops for fine art and commercial photographers.

That is how I met RK, when he helped me turn some sow’s ears into Ilford Gold Silk. And although sometimes he looks at me so searchingly that it makes me nervous about just what he might be seeing… I just try to scuttle quickly around behind him so as to see what he is looking at instead…

Take the spontaneous canine dance of Three Dog Vortex. Like ancient guardians these three hounds swirl round a puddle amid a landscape that appears to have been in wait since the beginning of creation. An ordinary pool of water becomes a portal to another world, not unlike like the mirror Alice stepped through on that fateful day.

[View with PicLens]

Following Her Path offers another enigmatic view into parallel universes. It first strikes me as the simplest compositions: white above, black below. An empty morning sky, too weak still, to chase away the night, then gives way to the earth and a jungle of dried fennel stems rooted below. Dead center, there’s a path, and this passageway appears to head both towards the sunrise and deeper into the darkness at the same time. Think of a strange loop turning the perceived world inside out; the ant on the mobius strip coming and going at the same time. Much like Alice’s extraordinary journey brings her safely back to where she begins so The Path begs us to explore the fine line that divides the darkness from the light, the arrival from the departure.

[View with PicLens]

“There is a shift from one level of abstraction to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.”- Douglas Hofstadter - I am a Strange Loop

R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, October 24 - February 7, 2010
The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, October 4 - January 3, 2010
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
by Rita Valencia

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that the author of Zap and Mr. Natural, Robert Crumb, has undertaken the Greatest Illustration Project Ever Drawn–the Book of Genesis. Any narrative with all those “begats” would have to exert a certain charm for Crumb. The generally naughty R. shows himself to be extraordinarily obedient to this text, and demurs from any interpretive flourish in his cartoons–a wise decision, as the plain act of Crumb undertaking this work is its own statement which promises plenty of fun. His cast of characters includes a scowling, hirsute God, thunder-thighed Crumb-girls, and swarthy hangdog males, all tormented by the kind of terrible behavior that makes it obvious why God needed to give these people the The Ten Commandments.

R. Crumb’s drawings possess sweaty rigor and sturdy line. It makes the live ink on display in his Genesis cartoons glisten in a sensual and oily way. You can feel the fleshiness of his human figures; you can almost smell their dank perfumes. Slightly simian, utterly approachable, like soft homunculae you could take in your hand, the actors Crumb has drawn to populate the often horrifying saga of Genesis are as profane as Mr. Natural and Devil Girl. The irreverence is the point: there is no mystery to Crumb’s cartooning, only dogged workmanship, and a passion for drawing, indeed his project seems to reinforce a literal, mundane and pragmatic view of the “sacred” literature he is illustrating.

Genesis is probably more widely read by the general public than any of the other literature in my library, even though the ornate and downright strange prose can be daunting. Crumb’s graphic treatment brings you through the semantic jungles into the real juicy narratives whence all of our western values emerged: stories of Jacob, whose shrewd practices of animal husbandry and entrepreneurship out-maneuvered his crafty, deceitful father-in-law; or Joseph, the best of Jacob’s sons, who became the equivalent of Chief Executive Officer in Pharoah’s organization, and foresaw advantage in laying away grain for years of drought and famine. (Once the drought arrived, he finagled a way to swindle the starving farmers of Egypt into selling their land to Pharaoh in exchange for the grain he had been prescient enough to store.) Although there are stories here that are shocking in their seeming brutality (Noah’s Ark, Abraham and Isaac) Crumb’s sensual, expressive pictures, with their unsparingly frank visual style, seem to enhance the pathos in the narratives. Perhaps because Bible stories are a staple of kid’s literature, it seems natural to see the Word of God in cartoon form, and Crumb has performed a magnanimous coup with this new work, proving himself again as a consummate illustrator and, surprise, a Bible scholar. [Be sure to read the Commentary to the book, where Crumb writes about some fascinating research by a feminist Biblical historian that explains some curious anomalies in several of the stories.]

Charles Burchfield, like Crumb, was an artist who became a great commercial success, but he was never as sanguine and straightforward about it. As a designer and illustrator, Burchfield defined a certain look in the 20’s& 30′a both in his floral motif wallpapers (I grew up with floral wallpaper derived from his designs) and stolid magazine illustrations which were both comforting and promising. He was set to work during his military service designing camouflage patterns. In the late 20’s he quit his day job to become a very successful watercolorist who made images that captured the zeitgeist of depression era Americana.

The recently closed Hammer show was a comprehensive retrospective that covered his entire body of work, including occasionally unsettling quotations from the artist:

“What is man composed of anyway? I shudder when I think of the bestial impulses that so often flood my imagination. I am considered a decent citizen because I manage to keep these mental debaucheries from becoming antisocial actions; but as far as I, a lone individual, am concerned, I am that depraved being. And perhaps these orgies of imagination are all the worse because they are never relieved by actions. Yet may God confine them always to the mind (if they must exist anywhere and it seems they must.)” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, April 10, 1938

This quote appeared in a gallery full of somewhat creepy–though vigorously beautiful– paintings of snake like trees and burnt looking houses, ashen skies and the occasional insect-like floral motif. This soulful, strange and eccentric work gives pause to wonder what sort of “mental debaucheries” he was talking about, and one suspects they are something on an entirely different level than ravishing the odd wood nymph. The fascination with Burchfield’s work must be entirely connected with his psychological and spiritual journeying, for these paintings are more than pastorals, they are diagrams of nature overlayed upon a human personality and consciousness: an excruciatingly personal language and alphabet. Although his career trajectory coincided with the great cultural shifts of Modernism, Surrealism, and later, Expressionism; and despite his fame and populist themes, there is an outsider quality to much of his work.

Counterposed to Burchfield the accomplished designer/painter and placid family man, there was Burchfield the brooding transcendentalist who rejected the religion in which he was raised, but passionately sought the sacred imprints of spirit in the forms of nature. Early in his life he had a special affinity for nature, carefully digging up favorite plants he found in the forest and transplanting them to his garden. Late in life, after twenty years of success, he rejected the work that had brought him renown and refocussed on a series of glyph-like drawings he had produced during what he called, his “golden year”, 1917. These curious drawings, made with graphite and china marker, are simple biomorphic forms with unsettling titles: Fear, Morbidness (Evil), Insanity, Hypnotic Intensity. They are collected in a folio; its cover an age-stained sheet of manila paper with the following title drawn in pencil in a very controlled, but rather puerile hand: “Conventions For Abstract Thoughts”. This was the first in what became dozens of these sketch journals. In his maturity Burchfield underwent an epiphany in revisiting the work of his youth, realizing that he had ignored its mysterious power and so reconnecting with what he saw as its seminal virtues. In the late work of Burchfield, motifs and obsessions coalesce; he builds out with paper from core imagery often created in his early career, and so the drawings grow in an almost vegetal way. Plunging himself into the sacred character of the landscape which he came (again) to see as an objective correlative to his inner life, Burchfield seizes upon the demonic within but never with the notion of exorcising, only guiding and bending it into form.

Autumnal Fantasy 1916-1944

“All at once I felt that I was the most lonely person on earth, and it seemed to me that I could not endure the solitude; and yet it was so overpowering I could not leave it. I was, as it were, a prisoner who loved and hated his isolation.” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, November 6, 1947

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Disposable Plastic
by Guy Zimmerman
At a party at the Edendale Grill in Silverlake shortly before Christmas I learned about the five vortexes of disposable plastic, vast as continents and indestructible, that swirl continuously in the world’s oceans. I was talking to a woman named Sara Bayles who, in the hope of drawing attention to the problem, collects plastic trash choked up by the sea each day on Santa Monica beach. The image of the vortexes seemed to echo, dreamlike, the armada of environmental alarms that have circulated below the surface of my emotional life since childhood. And yet, at the Edendale, I noticed that something had shifted. Confronted with new evidence of environmental degradation the familiar cocktail of resignation, sorrow and species-shame did not taste quite so bitter. I have come to connect this shift to a concept that first bubbled up into the mind stream of pop culture only in the last decade or so: emergence.

Tibet Fractels

A central idea in new arenas of scientific inquiry with daunting names like “complexity theory” and “integrative levels”  emergence is tricky to capture in words, much less experience directly. The Wikipedia definition reads: “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Hurricanes, the world wide web and the architecture of termite colonies in the Kalahari desert are commonly cited examples of complex emergent systems. But your ability to read this sentence (and my ability to compose it) could also be viewed as an “emergent” property of the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms that, arranged in a very specific way, make up our bodies. That the material world has the capacity to generate surprising new forms in this fashion makes emergence something close to a theory of miracles, reconciling the material and the mysterious.

At the Edendale Sara Bayles and I were surrounded by practitioners of yoga, which is all about balancing body and mind, material and mystery. The party was a send off for a mutual friend named Tara Judelle, a teacher of asana practice who happens to be particularly focused on these issues. And so, at the Edendale, the idea of emergence reminded me of the embodied process of learning yoga, and how that process is not linear at all. Your body initially fights a pose… you make a series of micro adjustments…and then one day the pose simply reveals itself and you shift into a more refined alignment. It’s this sudden leaping into a new level of order that connects this experience to the concept of emergence. And there’s a correlate in meditation practice too – breath by breath you rest your awareness on a challenging thought or emotional pattern and after an eternity has come and gone you are surprised to experience an abrupt shift. A transformative insight emerges; you are drawn back more fully toward a non-dual experience of the present moment.

In recent months, Tara has been giving special focus to the organ body – being aware, for example, of how your kidneys align during trikonasana, or how your liver curves against your back ribs during a seated twist. Unlike muscle and bone, the organs are formidably complex entities. It can be unsettling but also enlightening to contemplate how these astonishing tissue-matrixes we lug around evolved over eons to do what they now do for us, which is to support the awareness that allows us to reflect on our experiences, question the meaning of our lives and engage with each other in a chaotic world. In a standing pose one day I had a visceral (literally) sense of the furious busy-ness of evolution, the constant, bubbling creative activity - trying this, shifting to that, juggling this, abandoning that to move over here and try this - that has animated our long evolution, and along with that recognition came the sense that darker energies must also be a part of this tapestry; that this creative activity needs some destructive capacity too or things would get too locked in and static, and while there may be no way for that destructive aspect to be pleasant or positive in-and-of-itself it remains still a part of this larger creative unfolding. And so on balance we human beings should feel honored to be the vehicles (one of them at any rate) through which the material universe can turn and look at itself, contemplate and praise itself, and that many of our emotional and psychological challenges stem from the sort of jury-rigged, boot-strapped, emergent nature of the operation, where this creative principle managed to arrange the carbon molecules in such a way that they formed into complex nucleic acids that then lined up in the astonishingly complex arrays of RNA and DNA  and then somehow, down the line, these strands of DNA gave rise to things called synapses and neurons which then gathered into brains and the whole rickety contraption continued to build on up through the different life forms until finally, with a certain species of mammals called primates, the brains reached a size where the skulls that contained them could barely squeeze out through the hip opening of the female, giving birth to an awareness that, still in the process of forming, was sensitive enough to be deeply scarred by the trauma of birth, and then again by the trauma of its extended dependency on unreliable adults, and then yet again from all the other traumas that follow birth such that human beings tend to experience themselves as separate, apart and terminally embattled, threatened and insecure and defined by a sense of lack such that collective life tended to ignite frequently into the most bloody conflicts imaginable and history became a sequence of wars, and of incessant conquest and domination, a cycle of violence building in ferocity until finally, in the name of survival, the species learned how to sublimate the violence into economic systems such as Capitalism that generated the technologies of convenience that have left vortexes of plastic swirling in the middle of the gorgeous deep blue oceans.

And yet something new is emerging in the human realm and many of us sense it. The material sciences are everywhere bumping up against phenomenon that undermine the top down nature of their own inquiries. One of the scientists most engaged in unpacking this aspect of emergence is the biologist Stuart Kaufman. Kaufman views emergence as a challenge to the reductionism that has defined the scientific view since Galileo. To explain reductionism, Kaufman quotes Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg: “the ‘explanatory arrows always point downward’, from society to small groups to individuals to organs to cells to chemistry to physics…” With emergence scientists have started looking back in the opposite direction, working outward from the smallest particles to the complex structures that arise out of them in unpredictable ways.

Galileo Before the Inquisition. 1847

In a move that is sure to tweak a few goatees in the citadels of science, Kaufman, an atheist, proposes appropriating the word “God” and applying it “not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself.” “I want God,” Kaufman writes, “to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours.” While I’m not sure we need to befog ourselves all over again with a lot of symbolic baggage (and I would argue that this creative force should be embodied as a female rather than a male deity), I do appreciate Kaufman’s sense of urgency. As Sara Bayles underscored for me, smiling, at the Edendale, there is no quick fix for problem such as the swirling vortexes of plastic. Despite my new year’s resolution to forgo plastic bottles, the vortexes will continue to grow for years and probably decades to come.

To survive the patch of environmental “bumpiness” that is surely coming we will need something to pray to and we will need all the miracles the universe can provide. We certainly can no longer afford to view ourselves as disembodied minds separate from experience and the exclusive authors of our own actions. The emergent view underscores that even our ignorance is an inseparable part of a larger story defined at every turn by surprise. It might be that a new capacity for non-dualistic experience will emerge in time for us to respond to the mess we are making of the world. The reductionist view of Western science has managed to give us an array of potent technologies and knowledge, and perhaps now, under the gun, we will locate the wisdom to use these tools effectively.  While optimism and pessimism are equally beside the point, why not embrace the idea that we are about to emerge as a wiser species? We’ve already broken the eggs, we might as well cook up the omelette.

Below are organizations that bring awareness to the problem of plastic vortexes in our oceans:

5Gyres
Blue Ocean Institute
Plastic Pollution Coalition
Green Peace-The Trash Vortex
National Geographic

Visages.1&.2 is a single book that can be flipped in one direction, turned and flipped in another. Each direction displays a different face. It measures 3.875″ x 3.125″ and includes 52 hand drawings. Below is an English translation of the text, followed by a slideshow and followed again by the original text in French.

Visages.1, Visage.2
Sculptures by Jean-Luc Degonde

Writings on Art, Editions Manucius
This artwork was printed in 100 specimens - including 40 in 4-color prints (quadrichromy), numbered and signed by the artist, which stand for the original edition.

The epigraph is by Heraclitus
While changing, he is resting

ENVOI
by Jean-Jacques Gonzales

The visual arts have this thing in common that they cannot do without referring to the world [externality] either, posing as a window, by being subjected to it [figuration], or by liberating itself from it [abstraction]. It goes without saying that the variations are infinite between the two limits, beyond which the work disappears. All this to say that the question of resemblance - by excess [a painting by Richard Estes, Big Man by Ron Mueck, for example] or by defect [a monochrome by Yves Klien, a stele by Brancusi for example] - is the very heart of the matter treated by Jean Luc Degonde ’s last sculptures, which appear to disturb the ancestral and peaceful division between the work and the world.

The subject could not be more academic; it is about portraits. Here we are, thus taken right away into the privileged field of resemblance, because a portrait is always a portrait of…

Yet here, under an outer shell of a classicism that we could qualify as purified [structure, line, framework, volume] although not deprived of flesh [brushwood, woodland thoroughly assembled], something else is coming together that exceeds it and agitates it, that suddenly breaks: in the halation of a perfectly identifiable human figure, the portrait frees itself from resemblance without abolishing it, and this being not under the worn paradigm of allegory, symbol or any rhetorician figure, but on a radically new mode.

Here, surprisingly, the portrait resembles itself; a strange proposal of a properly internal resemblance, without a world, recluse. Merely turn around these singular objects to be convinced. Take a little time within the space that circumscribes them. Or flip over successively, quickly with your thumb, the booklet pages in which these lines are written, where are registered fifty successive points of view of a single portrait so that the miracle happens and comes to disturb the ordinary experience of a volumetric object, which entails that none of its faces can see the others simultaneously, that each one is something else than the others, and that however, mysteriously, it appears to me in the whole of its shine.

Here, the mystery vanishes; in the kaleidoscope of multiples faces, only one comes to appear, infinitely opposing its resemblance while preserving it. Whatever the moment is, whatever the point of view is - let’s not forget that it is here strictly about sculpture - everything is visible at the same time, all resembles itself and it is always one and only showing, that doesn’t exist the same way a stone, a stock or a devil does.

An enigmatic presence, a light without shade shedding in the portraits of Jean Luc Degonde, impossible to interpret, a paradoxical resemblance finally freed from the weight of the world or the soul. A pure immanence crossed with a trembling shift.
A full presence rested on itself in its infinite metamorphoses. The face. The work.

The original French Envoi is located below the slideshow.

[View with PicLens]

Visages.1, Visages.2
Écrits sur l’art

Cet ouvrage a été tiré à 100 exemplaires dont 40 en quadrichromie, numérotés et signés par l’artiste, qui constituent l’édition orignale

L’exergue est d’Héraclite
L’envoi de Jean Jacques Gonazales
Les sculptures de Jean-Luc Degonde

Se transformant, il se repose

ENVOI
Les arts plastiques ont ceci de commun qu’ils ne peuvent se passer de la référence au monde [l'extériorité] soit, et pour faire vitre, ens’y asservissant [figuration], soit en s’en libérant [abstraction]. Il va de soi que les variations sont infinies entre les deux limites au-delà desquelles l’oveure disparaitrait. Tout cela pour dire que la question de laressemblance - par excès [une toile de Richard Estes, le Big Man de Ron Mueck par exemples] ou par défaut [un monochrome d'Yves Klien, une stèle de Brancusi par exemples] - se trouve au coer meme de l’affaire traitee par les dernieres sculptures de Jean Luc Degonde qui viennent perturber l’immémorial et reposant partage entre l’oeuvre et le monde.

Le sujet est on ne peut plus académique; il s’agit de portraits. Nous voici donc embarqués d’emblée dans le domaine privilégié de la ressemblance parce qu’un portait est toujours un portrait de…

Mais ici, sous les apparences d’un classicisme, disons épuré [structure, ligne, ossature, volume] mais non dépourvu de chair [brindilles, sylvestres minutieusement assemblées], quellque cose d’autre se noue qui l’excède et le trouble, qui vient à se briser: dans le halo d’une figure humaine parfaitement identifiable, le portrait se libère de la ressemblance sans pour autant l”abolir, et clea non pas sous le paradigme usee usee de l’allégorie, du symbole ou d’une quelconque figure rhétoricienne, mais sur un mode radicalement nouveau.

Ici, étonnamment, le portait se ressemble; étrange proposition qu’une ressemblance proprement interne, sans monde, solitaire.

Il suffit de tourner autour de ces singuliers objets pour s’en convaincre. Prélever un peu de temps dans l’espace qui les circonscrit. Ou de faire glisser successivement d’un saeul et rapide coup de pouce le feuilles de livret en lequel ces lignes sont écrites, où sont consignés cinquante successifs points de vue d’un seul et meme portrait pour que le miracle s’accomplisse et vienne troubler l’expérience ordinaire de l’objet volumétrique, qui veut que toutes ses faces ne s’y puissent voir simultanément, que chacqune soit autre que les autres, et que pourtant, mystérieusement, il m’apparisse dans la totalité de ses éclats.

Ici, le mystère se lève; dans le kaléidoscope de multiples faces, une seule vient à se montrer, différant infiniment sa ressemblance tout en la conservant. Quel que soit le moment, quel que soit le point de vue - n’oublions pas quil s’agit ici strictement de sculpture - tout est visible en même temps, tout se ressemble et c’est toujours un seul et même qui se montre, qui n’existe pas à la manière d’une pierre, d’une souche ou d’un diable.

Presénce énigmatique, lumière sans ombre qui se dispense dans les portraits de Jean Luc Degonde, sans reste, ininterprétable, ressemblance paradoaxle enfin délivrée de la pesanteur du monde ou de l’âme. Pure immanence traversée d’un décalage tremblant.

Presence pleine, reposée en elle-même dans ses infinies métamorphoses. Le visage. L’oevre.

Visages 1 and 2, by Jean-Luc Degonde
by Nancy Cantwell

When you grab hold Visages.1-Visages.2, by Jean-Luc Degonde, you realize that you have quite a phenomenal object at hand. Then when you take the book for a spin flipping through to rotate its two heads one is caught up in a delightful experience of perceptual perplexity. On the simplest level, the eye brain coordination plays tricks on you. The faces, disoriented in space and disassociated from surface tension, rotate in a seemingly random manner. Is it left to right or forwards then backwards? But the real discernment takes place when one recognizes how each physiognomic profile contributes to the whole. Every stop frame is a portrait in the most classic sense.

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Visages.1

Degonde asks us to identify with the question of who we are more than the assembling of the fact. We negotiate faces daily and more and more the idea of individuality, of identity is obscured by technology. We now have an abundance of representation options ranging from playful avatars to the deadly serious facial recognition systems that can quantify full body data for security processes. It is actually this abundance that Degonde puts to test. These are not mapping systems designed to capture the prodigious detail required to simulate an appearance, but instead stripped down slices of an affectionate assembling of just the necessary information needed to find the expression of resemblance.

The impulse to produce Visages came from the desire to give the viewer a tour around the larger original sculptures created by Degonde. The sculptures are produced adhering to the most classical of methods. Using a live sitter Degonde first fashions a clay model from which a waste mold is made. Then plaster is placed into the waste mold creating a reproduction of the clay original. The plaster model is then fitted with the wood branches of a Chinese Willow tree, sometimes referred to as a “Tortured Soul” because the way the twigs grow in a spiral, twisting manner. The pieces are chosen for their ability to best describe an accurate resemblance with the least amount of information. The branches create a continuous contoured likeness that calls into question the corporeal nature of sculpture. The once solid object becomes a fluid circumscribed path that holds close in its relationship to the line drawings of Visages.

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Visages.2

Degonde uses the words sentimental, modest and accessible when talking about his work. The portraiture of Visages surely thrives on the simplicity of the concept, paired exquisitely with its execution. Published by Editions Manucius, the edition of 100 books - including 40 in 4-color prints (quadrichromy), numbered and signed by the artist, measures 3.875″ x 3.125″ and includes 52 hand drawn faces. In his introduction to Visages, Jean-Jacques Gonzales notes each drawing registers “fifty successive points of view of a single portrait”and “none of its faces can see the others simultaneously”. With every flip of the book a new unique portrait is created, never to be repeated. Every person will flip in a different manner. The appearance of each face changes with every run through. Our habitual perceptual structures, charged with constituting a fixed personae, breakdown giving way to non-fixed identities. Even as we grow to know and recognize these faces as familiar the question of the who we are grows more elusive. Indeed a flip book is a modest and a sentimental vehicle, but a powerful instrument with which to explore the fragile nature of identity.

Jean-Luc Degonde is an artist and educator living in Paris, France.
Contact: jeanlucdegonde@gmail.com