A landscape of dusty desolation is beautiful as bare reminder or relic memory of each wonderful thing that no longer dwells there. The broken building brings a nameless frame that haunts this hallowed emptiness like scrub green masks hang dry mist upon the shallow valley. Sparse Somali scene, a momento mori under the infinite emptiness […]
Category: art
Pandemic Murals
Context: Coronavirus murals: inside the world of pandemic-inspired street art Interesting to consider the ways in which popular culture embodies a communication medium for an inadvertent yet optimally-concise and autonomously self-propagating information pattern of ourselves, our minds and the hyper-extended cognition of (an ancient, symbolic language of) technological self-representation. The article could have done with a few more […]
Malevolent Machines of Fear and Fantasy
Not so much “in the belly of the beast” as she is orchestrating the mechanism and behaviour of her own projected monsters. Similar observations might be made of humanity in gestalt: we find ourselves inadvertently consumed by these malevolent machines and embodied technological architectures of our own manifest fear. Art by Will Murai
Trompe-l’oeil: All is Not as it Seems
Trompe-l’oeil is clever but, beyond immediate aesthetic effects and technical mastery, is really just the specific instance of a generalised principle of deception by which an artist fools our gullible brains into suspending their disbelief in the reality with which we are presented. The presence of a logical depth is in this way emphasised by […]
The dancing rhythm and flow of colour and form, the interdependent harmonies of narrative and depth: the presence of Christ (here) is that third perspectival point that inflates, shapes and guides another extra-dimensional space and geometry of psychology, perception and projection. Rubens cultivates a representational gravitational node that here manifests in a recursively self-propagating representational […]
Observe: the creative node in a cultural network – the artefact, the object, the concept – is never the terminal boundary of the artist’s endeavour. The contour and flow of living information systems in minds and cultures are dynamic and adaptive; the life and boundless complexity of an artefact is that cascading field of consequence […]
When so much contemporary art – as with politics and ideology – survives and thrives on a pure and insubstantial superficiality that is profoundly hollow, fragile and ultimately meaningless, this art demonstrates a deep stylistic and aesthetic value and enduring emotional, psychological impact. I truly love this work – it is evocative, alluring and conceptually, […]
Jimi Hendrix is one of those icons and representational idioms that provide a counter-cultural mnemonic eloquence. His presence is resonant with Jim Morrison, a prismatic Dark Side of the Moon, posters of Henry Fonda on his Harley in Easy Rider. The cultural nodes of these idioms are undergoing constant representational metamorphosis and this artistic thread […]
The Burden of Shock
…and there we all are, withered and worn by the aggregate burden of pandemic catastrophe, political ineptitude and an endless stream of normative everyday entropy that, not only does the media present to us because this salience of shock value is the central bank of any currency of garnering attention, but which is inadvertently also […]
Beauty is a Joy and a Forgetting
Beauty is such a strange sadness to a wise beholder. Truth, wrapped in youth like those blossoms that in aging inadvertently aspire to become the hollow frames or elder coccoons to which their own pattern or tapestry in time must trace an inevitable descent and unforgiving trajectory. We celebrate the flower, the spring growth and […]
Worthless Chemistry and Orchid Dust
Fashion wears us more than we could ever be said to wear it; we only have these experiences and ideas in direct and reflexive proportion to the extent that they, in fact, have us. We do not search for meaning – it searches for us and there, finding us as so many yawning vacuums and […]
Consider how all art, all self-expression can only ever be the hyper-inflating interior surface of some compound, complex emptiness; how from nothing we have made everything (possible) and how the rich curvature and self-inflected acceleration of all thought, all culture and all reality was always (and already) the mischievous logical negation of unity, of completeness […]