COMIC en JOSE: angel dust

Untitled (2008-2009) Bill Henson

Happy New Year! here is a sublime rock and ten thousand angels for you to admire

"Fireflies at Night" Yayoi Kasuma, 2000

Lately I've been thinking about lights and artworks with lights involved and well. you know, magic and loss and madness and celestial beings and electric forces and wavelengths and static and superstars and comets. I've also been having a little holiday..

One of my favourite holidays was riding a bike for miles down a beach at night and then swimming with millions of phosphorescence in the water while clusters of shooting stars fell on the horizon. So this post is going to be about that!..well, sorta. Also something to do with angels and light and spectacular things. Sounds a little vague I know..Maybe just let the lights dazzle you for a bit

From Yayoi Kasuma "Mirrored Years" Exhibition at MCA but can't find title

Yayoi Kusuma is so spectacular I don't really know where to begin. I definantly don't want it read like the Gagosian biography on her which doesn't even mention her obsessive compulsive neurosis and that she has lived in a mental institution by her own free will since 1973 (something she is fairly open about and which she see's as very much related to her work). But her influence on artists such as Warhol and Oldenburg and numerous others is now acknowledged and her incredible body of work including sculpture, installation, performance, painting, video, writing, is as well. In an interview with Grady Turner in BOMB66/ Winter 1999, whilst talking about her body painting, she kinda neatly summed up her art works effect in general

"Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama's hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the universe. This is magic"

light installation st kilda style

From Alan Vega's "Collision Drive" exhibition at Deitch Projects, 2002

Obliteration, magic..One of my favourite musical seraphim's Alan Vega, also kinda talks about this in reference to his also quite lovely sculpture works. He said that early on when he started out as a painter he wanted a particular painting to be all one colour but whenever he moved in the room it changed colour so he grabbed the light and smashed and crushed it into the painting..and thats how he started sculpture....

"Fountain of light" (unfinished) Ai Wei Wei, 2007

"Chandelier" Ai Wei Wei, 2002

"Untitled" (America) Felix Gonzales Torres, 1994-95

Someone once asked Felix Gonzales Torres who he created art for and he replied "Ross"...his longterm boyfriend who died of AIDS six years before himself.... Sigh...sob. The unbearable lightness of being.

Anyway we're going to segue into a different light realm now, you know lighten up a bit.. actually it's a field. The Ganzfeld.. from the German, meaning total/ complete field. I first had this experience looking at a James Turrell installation..which was like looking into space and trying to find a horizon line or any visual brain clue until your head just kind of exploded. Apparently you can achieve an even more startling effect by taping two half ping pong balls over your eyes and listening to radio static. I haven't tried it myself but whilst perusing the cognitive science journal Cortex (not sure how this came about exactly) I found peoples descriptions of their hallucinatory experiences of the Ganzfeld effect. So I'm going to transcribe them for you.

"Bridgets Bardo" James Turrell, 2008. Turrel describes the experience of the Ganzfeld effect as "feeling with your eyes".

Also check out his incredible observatory within a crater in the Ariozona desert.

"I saw a hand holding a large piece of chalk and writing on a blackboard something like a mathematical formula" (I'm starting with the most banal)

"A young woman passed by on a bicycle, very fast, she crossed the visual field from the right to the left, with her long blond hair waving in the wind"