With reference to David Lindsay's "jale" & "ulfire"*
anther dead end i spent a lot of time brooding over
Then there was the time i invented Anaglyphic Painting.
Anaglyphic movies, the kind you watch wearing flimsy cardboard specs with one red lens & one blue***, for a primitive but compelling 3-D effect, already existed in the 50s (at least in parts). They consisted of a shallow space, one part reaching out toward you, & the rest rather vaguer but more distant. It was a pretty good trick. —That wasn’t what i wanted.
It was, i guess, sometime in the early 90s, while i was living at Moon Mansion. I had already experimented with Cubism (the conceptual kind, not the style-emulative kind) by way of the Fourth Dimension (with a little help, equally, from Ouspensky & THC); i could never (in my inconsequential painting career) quite rid myself of wanting to theorize about what i was doing, even as i was moving into spontaneous & anti-virtuosic mindsets (e.g. holding the brush with my left hand, or painting with an IBM card). This time, i wanted to deconstruct spatial perception.
Suppose you wore those glasses & then, avoiding the temptation to create illusory depth, tried to utilize the near/distant vector (partly, but frustratingly not completely, mappable onto “hot” & “cool” colors), letting it evolve just as other aspects, whether of shade, form, or rhythm, evoked the unfolding state?
I made perhaps half a dozen paintings wearing the glasses, after studying the oft-vertiginous effects of looking at some of my old pictures through them. The one time i displayed them—at a short-lived gallery in Oak Cliff, only reachable by a scarily steep ramp on one side (how’s that for a metaphor?)—i tied a pair of the glasses with string to each painting, but no instructions.
Never did get any feedback.
One of my acquaintances at the time, a smart person & a decent poet, made a cogent objection: he only could see out of one eye, so in effect i had created a “dog-symphony”**—in pitches he could not hear.
Not unlike my poems that used vocabulary words practically no one knew…
“Having a lot of ideas in my head does not make me a philosopher, any more than having a lot of cockroaches in my house makes me an entomologist.”
—Alexander Fayne
*See A Voyage to Arcturus.
**This was before Laurie Anderson performed for an audience of dogs. (My reaction at the time was: she should have assembled a bunch of smells.)
***not to be confused with the 3-D movies that require polarized clear-lensed flimsy cardboard glasses to watch