John Martin – attempts at huge, Biblical scale become a distraction from the architectural fantasies being destroyed in passing. One of his most peaceful paintings is of the city of Babylon being destroyed by the Persians. But they have only just arrived. What really absorbs is the invented architectures, stretching as far as the eye can see. The invaders arriving on their boats have a job on their hands.
His maps of planned sewage and circular underground railways show a desire to wreak the same transformation on his physical landscape. A different sense of scale, and of genuinely apocalyptic change, arises from seeing Wood Lane and Porto Bello farms on the maps, linked to urban territory by lanes across fields.
Round the corner, one of Paul Noble’s pencil drawings matches these paintings both in size and carefully constructed fantasy. The people in John Martin’s paintings are either there to show jaw-dropping scale, or to be flung around by cataclysmic forces, or to be lonely witnesses as the Last Man Alive. For Paul Noble they are completely absent, represented only by ladders to be climbed, or mechanisms to be operated.
Lynn Chadwick’s Dragonfly and neighbouring stabiles have no references to people. Together with Nuam Gabo’s plastic sculptures in the next room it’s possible to see how geometrical and biological constructions can be an end in themselves.
Here’s a list of islands around Wales, pulled from Geonames with some Java jiggery-pokery.
The plan is to keep exploring the geography of this list, with inspiration from Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands.
Wikipedia offers a A Companion Guide to Atlas of Remote Islands, which is an interesting concept in itself. I was constantly looking on Wikipedia when reading through Wolf Hall, if only because my knowledge of English history was so poor. A book often seems closely symbiotic to the author’s diligent research (see Anna Funder on All That I Am). It makes sense that a book becomes a kind of boat in the rising oceans of data. A Wikipedia book is a collection of Wikipedia articles that can be easily saved, rendered electronically in PDF, ZIM or OpenDocument format, or ordered as a printed book. But the idea of a conventional book being the skeleton of such accumulated, formatted data is something else again.
For example, I would like to take the text of 2666, and run it through a geoparser, to gain a sense of both the novel’s sprawl and density. The book then becomes a navigation of meaning through all those points in space.
Some thoughts on Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666.
Map of Ciudad Juarez cc-by-sa Open Street Map
Films and books purposefully shrink the world, connecting continents with the efficiency of budget flights. Thrillers act out tour guides, triggering our holiday memories, interrupting the tourists at their cafe tables. Protaganists effortlessly move their havoc from one tourist destination to another, the globe becoming a series of themed computer game levels to quickly conquer. This restricted environment enables novels to be built on an improbable, but familiar foundation of coinciding events and characters. It makes possible the easy encounters and plot twists which make stories work. We consider ourselves sophisticated as we use literary novels to familiar with alien places, moving deeper than a city break can ever take us.
2666 has a similar global reach, spanning two continents. But it does the opposite. The world is returned to its true scale.
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The last day has been spent spinning cogs – a first engagement with processing.js.
An initial cog is generated, then new ones are added with random radii. Some jiggling about establishes the number of teeth, and the corresponding radius, position and speed needed to mesh with one of the existing cogs. If you would like a new combination of cogs, please click on the active area.
A few scribbles from the beaches of the Lleyn Peninsula.
Posted in passingthrough
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Tagged drawing
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A painting is underway. As it’s unlikely to be finished soon, here are a few closeups, which currently are more interesting than the entirety:
I’m going to keep coaxing it into existence, but despite the expanse of Easter time, there are many other things to do.
Anselm Kiefer has always held an unquestionable appeal. Reading today’s Guardian interview, I am told why. He is “almost theatrically” serious:
Putting a Euclidean diagram on a seascape is about the impossibility of capturing the sea. The sea is always fluid. The geometrical figure gives the impression of fixing it at a certain moment. It’s the same as us imposing constellations on the sky which, of course, are completely crazy and nothing to do with the stars. It is just for us to feel more comfortable. To construct an illusion for ourselves that we have brought order to chaos. We haven’t. I might have been born into a very literal state of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.
The previous post contained a fiendish Christmas challenge sent to me by the basket-weaving Gareth Williams.
Here’s my vague strategy together with the coloured in solution.
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