Joy

"IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY"
   
                          ---Jenny Holzer Untitled (In A Dream)


Note that joy and happiness are not exactly the same thing.  Look HERE and closer HERE, and  HERE and my favorite, HERE.  (scroll down)

Dream House Part V: Outer Space, Andrea Dezsö, and "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly"

"The imaginary lunar landscapes reference the Apollo 13 expedition, which never actually made a landing on the Moon.  'Houston we have a problem' was uttered during the mission and continues to be a magically compelling turn of phrase.  What captured my imagination is how not being able to go somewhere physically opens the possibility of epic mental Odysseys, and how we can stuff empty space full with rich imaginary worlds, then move in."

     ---Andrea Dezsö (b. 1968), "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly," Exhibition Pamphlet, Rice Gallery (2010)

In "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly" now on exhibition at Rice Gallery in Houston, Romanian-born artist Andrea Dezsö creates an enchanting dream world inspired by space travel.  As Dezsö explains, as a child growing up in Communist Romania without a passport, travel was an impossibility. The space missions of the 1960s and 1970s offered her the vicarious pleasure of the odyssey, catalyzing her artistic vision of a whimsical other-world, untethered by the limitations of reality.  

Known for her "tunnel books,"  Dezsö translates this smaller scale media form into the larger space of Rice gallery.  Through small and odd-shaped windows placed at different heights, we gaze into multi-layered laser-cut tunnels up to six feet in length extending back into the gallery space.  Against the softly glowing cerulean and sea-green landscape, we see the silhouettes of those who populate this space---mythical figures that intermingle the features of humans, insects, and plant-life. Dancing on the edges of these tunnels, the joyous poses of Dezso's surreal characters welcome us and make these vistas seem less remote and less austere than most depictions of outer space. 

Along these lines, I am most taken with Dezsö's characterization of her work as a domestic endeavor.  Perhaps the allure of this space is not visitability but inhabitability--the desire to "move in" as she expresses it.  Dezsö, while new to this art form, thus grasps the inherent play between interiority and exteriority that large scale installation invites.  The mind's eye creates both voyage and destination, but the medium of art turns this imaginative world into a physical reality.  Much as Dezsö longed to travel, we desire to cross the glass window of the gallery to occupy this world. Yet although this is an impossibility, her exhibit also reminds us of the possibilities for creating the worlds that we wish to inhabit.  Dream houses are precisely that--the architecture of the imagination.

On exhibit at Rice Gallery April 8th through August 8th. 

Dream House Part I: Nests

"If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encounter a sort of paradox of sensibility.  A nest--and this we understand right away---is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security.  Why does this obvious precariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind?  The answer to this paradox is simple: when we dream...in a sort of naive way, we relive the instinct of the bird, taking pleasure in accentuating the mimetic features of the green nest in green leaves.  We definitely saw it, but we say that it is well hidden.  This center of animal life is concealed by the immense volume of vegetable life.  The nest is a lyrical bouquet of leaves...when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.  Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?"

---Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The next few entries will feature utopian homes.  In this entry taken from philosopher Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, the nest is not simply a dream home, but a home that catalyzes reveries of security, in spite of its essential insecurity.    The nest of the real world--constructed of natural ephemera---is fragile and vulnerable.  Yet the nest exists not only in the real world but in our imagination as an ideal space that is protective and intimate as well as open and ethereal. 

A few days ago, I saw a broken egg on the cement beneath a tree. But this disturbing sight conjured the nest from which it had came and then, comically, the Swiss Family Robinson (a family in a nest in a tree) and finally a house on a mountain top. To reside on top of the world, surrounded by a "lyrical bouquet of leaves,"  would be the ultimate domesticity. Cosmic....confidence!

Boundaries Part IV: Incarnation

Today's quotes come Myra Jehlen's essay "F.P." in which she recounts the death of a friend. The first quote captures her encounter with the permanence of death, something she discovers through the unmalleability of her friend's body:


"They said to choose clothes in which they would 'prepare' her. I thought, having had to die, she shouldn't have to undergo being prepared and said I would dress her, not knowing how difficult it is to dress a dead person. To begin with, I couldn't pull out the intravenous tube that still connected her to a morphine drip. The tube had been inserted into a catheter through which she had been undergoing a chemotherapy. When I tried to pull out the tube, blood seeped from the opening of the catheter. So instead I cut the tube and so doing saw that she was dead. I had wanted her to wear a favroite gray cashmere turtleneck, but I couldn't put it on her. She was too heavy, although she weighed less than eighty pounds, and too stiff, so I dressed her in a shift and pants. She looked terrible, yet fully and definitely herself. You're never so wholly incarnate as in death.
When I was dressing my friend, I expected her to help. The utter stillness of her arms and legs filled me with hopelessness."

In the second quote, Jehlen describes her own feeling of being "stuck" in the memory of a last excursion with her friend and "stuck" in the night before she died. But in an interesting twist, she juxtaposes another story of a woman who is "stuck" in the night of her child's birth. As Jehlen muses:

     "You get stuck, then, when you meet up with something that makes the limit of your perpetual motion just too obvious.

     Stuck, you turn back. My friend didn't appear to me, so I made her appear: one night, I dreamed she had come back to life, or rather that she hadn't died. At first, in my dream, she was as she was in the moments before she died. But, in the dream, as I bent over to see how she was, she grew better and better, until, in the dream, I called out to the doctor to do something, since something could be done."


---Myra Jehlen, "F.P." in Raritan, Spring 2002

Boundaries Part III The Harlem Book of the Dead Part II

This third installment of quotes focusing on the boundary between life and death (and the second installment of quotes from The Harlem Book of the Dead) features a portion of the interview between Camille Billops and James Van der Zee conducted in his 91st year of life. Van Der Zee not only photographed dead strangers, but also his own mother (who died at seventy-five) and daughter (who died at the age of sixteen). If Van der Zee's responses seem strange to modern ears for their pragmatic viewpoint towards life and death, they also offer a strange comfort in their refusal to make too much of either of these states of being--or perhaps too much of a distinction between either state of being.


The conversation begins with this comment from Van Der Zee:

"Why should a spirited mortal feel proud, when like a swift, fleet meteor or fast-flying cloud, man passes through life to his rest in the grave?" They've asked me, "How do I feel?" I told them that there's nothing to it; you do things the way they ought to be done. I don't see anything to be proud about. It's pretty difficult for a man to feel proud when knowing as he does the short space of time he's here and all paths, even those of our greatest glory, lead but to the grave. So it is very difficult to feel proud when Death says this. You're here today and gone sometimes today."

His description of his feelings about the death of his one-year old son, Emile seems to illustrate a surprising detachment, and yet this word does not capture the whole of his sentiment:

"I think he came when we was living in the Victoria Apartments on Lenox Avenue [in New York City] at that time. He only lived a year, and I didn't get a chance to know too much about him."

Not troubled by his role, he relates a mildly humorous dream that he had about a photographic subject. The humor emanates from his own response to the curious behavior of the subject. But in referencing a dream world Van Der Zee's commentary also draws attention to a space that seems to reside between life and death...the surrealist dream world:

"One time I dreamed I went to make a picture of a dead woman who reached in her chest and took out her heart and threw it over here, then she reached in there and took out something else and threw it over there. I just waited to see if she was going to take out something else...but I wasn't scared or nothing like that in the dream."

And finally, his thoughts on death in general.

Billops: HOW DO YOU SEE DEATH, MR. VAN DER ZEE?


Van Der Zee: So when one more clean shirt lasts me the rest of time. When I pass out on this long journey that I shall ever make and I cease to soothe with soft words and song a heart in which there is an ache, I trust that tears will dim few eyes and those who do weep will soon forget.


Billops (editorial note): (At this point, Mr. Van Der Zee lights up his cigar.)



--Camille Billops, Owen Dodson, & James Van Der Zee, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part I: Hibernation

In this multi-part series, I will feature quotations from works of different eras and genres that share an interest in the blurry boundary between life and death, yet come to radically different conclusions about death's familiarity, permanence, and meaning. The first quote, taken from Anthony Doerr's short story, "The Hunter's Wife" is fairly recent and addresses this subject in the most direct manner. It offers an easy segue into the landscape of these two realms through a discussion of what we might call a death-like state of living....hibernation.

"As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed both hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then she lowered her face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her entire head was inside the trees. She felt the soft, silver tips of its fur brush her cheeks. Against her nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then empty. She heard blood slug through veins. Want to know what he dreams? she asked. Her voice echoed up through the tree and poured from the shorn ends of its hollowed branches. The hunter took his knife from his coat. Summer, her voice echoed. Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles."

--Anthony Doerr, "The Hunter's Wife" in The Shell Collector (2003)

Eidetic

"Listen, I will speak of the best of dreams, of what I dreamed at midnight when men and their voices were at rest."

--The Dream of the Rood, late 10th century

Cornell Part I: Sweet Dreams

In Mary Ann Caws' superbly edited volume, the boundaries between Joseph Cornell's dream world and the space of the street begin to blur....Note especially Cornell's passive voice construction in his entry on March 1, 1947 which suggests his receptivity to his environment. This is the first part of a multi-part series which will focus on Cornell and his world....to be continued at a later date.


Feb 8, 1947


dreamed of vaults with all kinds of whipped cream pastries. Rich
day....layer cake~cherry Danish~calm feeling


Mar 1, 1947


~before going into library a pink icinged vanilla cream-filled
rolled cake had been observed~later when stopping by to purchase
some things its disappearance from its plate glass pedestal in
the window brought a real kind of regret of a delicacy that went
beyond the mere regret~lunch in a diner, banana creme pie, doughnut,
and drink


Feb 6, 1950


lunch of pancakes a complete sense of peace (rare) before leaving
for New York

--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)