shapeless shapes and invisible bodies

I don't know what it was -- both yesterday and today I went to see some art exhibits, and on both days I spent a whole lot of time looking at only a little bit of what I wanted to see.

Yesterday I went to the Arvada Center, where there are three interesting exhibits going on. But I only saw one: the work Perception: Color | Line | Pattern, which is down in the main floor gallery of the center. The exhibit basically explores abstract work from the last few decades.

The argument of the exhibit seems to be that the artists of these works were trying to create works without any visual direction. Art leading up to the modern phase was based on a cultured sense of vision that had the ability to read, say, a landscape painting the same way a literate person could read a novel. Modern art, the exhibit argues, if I understand it correctly, is an art without the visual cues that previous art had been informed with. It's art that doesn't have a visual narrative, or even a visual direction.

I'm not sure I agree with that idea. But I love the art at the exhibit. The selection and arrangement of the art is wonderful. Some of the pieces have a style like weaving or sewing or embroidery, like the works of Charlie DiJulio, in which ribbons or threads of color are painted across a wide canvas, or some wonderful yarn staircases done by Andrew Higgins.

Another set of works I like are by Jen Pack. These works use rectangular cushions arranged in wide, shallow v-shapes. The cushions are sewn over with wide strips of chiffon. These strips feel like mosaic tiles, in a way. In this sense, the work is kind of complemented by the work of Adam Holloway, which utilizes imagery like mosaic rectangles and pixelation.

Some of the work employs basic shapes. One interesting painting by Charles Richert is of colorful circles arranged in tight patterns before a white background. The patterns could be cell patterns or molecular or atomic organizations. The color schemes almost reminded me of the color schemes in the paintings of Lee Krasner.

There is a whole corner of the exhibit devoted almost entirely to the work of Marty Jaquis. His work is devoted to painting and making sculptures using brightly colored squares and cubes. The cubes, even in the sculptures, are often only two-dimensional. But they feel three-dimensional, often giving an interesting sense of space-distortion.

Another set of works I really liked are by the artist Vance Kirkland. These works place paint dots, of various sizes and densities of spacing, against fading backgrounds. The variations in density and size of the paint dots create an illusion of bubbles swelling up on the canvas. But something about the dots and colors also looks like it would belong on an ocean fish or a sea anemone.

There is also a lovely interactive work, but I can't remember who it's by. It's on an LED screen. It looks like a cubist/abstract painting. But it's in motion. Cameras nearby track nearby movement and color and allow those movements and colors to affect the patterns on the screen. I had a few different colors on me, so I could play around a lot to see the colors change and patterns shift. It was a lot of fun.

But I spent so much time in this gallery that I didn't have time to check out the other two exhibits. I did the same thing at the Denver Art Museum this morning. I went to see the exhibit of Sojourn, a collection of work by the Chicago artist Nick Cave. I had been planning to see some of the exhibits of the DAM's Spun program as well, but I spent so much time in the Nick Cave exhibit that I couldn't go see anything else.

The Nick Cave exhibit is really interesting. It's divided into two selections of work, basically: his "soundsuits" and his garden-like bead sculptures. The bead sculptures are dense pilings of chains of beads, all gathered onto metal frameworks of branches. Then, inside of these dense branches of beads, there are placed scluptures of things like birds and fruit, leafs and flowers. The feeling of density reminds me, not of abundance, but of overgrowth, like a tree that has been overgrown by vines. Some of these masses of branches and bead-vines grow over couches or chairs or stools. Sometimes life-size sculptures of dogs are sitting on the furniture. In one case the bead structure is gathered over the head of a mannequin in something like a knit or crocheted bodysuit.

The soundsuits are kind of similar to the crocheted mannequin. Apparently Cave came up with the idea of soundsuits after having watched television footage of the beating of Rodney King in the early 1990s. Cave felt a desire for some kind of protection against the violence and hatred of the world. He ca e up with the idea of soundsuits.

This makes sense. The soundsuits are kind of like gaudy shells made to go over the body. Some of the soudsuits have tall, thin, steeply arched spikes going up over the head, like the scabbard for a sword. These "scabbards" can extend downward over the body like a skirt or dress. Other soundsuits may bemade of brightly colored "fur," like something on a Sesame Street character. Other soundsuits might simply be of crocheted bodysuits, but with things spiking our of the suits, like steel branches with tin noisemaker toys, or globes, at the ends of them. One room is full of soudsuits in all different varieties, but with a constant of being made almost entirely of shiny, white buttons.

The soundsuits all have a cconstant style of being reminiscent of traditional dress -- like traditional Latin American or Caucasian or Asian or African dress. But there is also a feeling of the suits being a kind of astral body or an aura-egg. This wouldnt be so surprising. A soundsuit could be thought of as an "aural" suit. So an "aural" suit and an aura-egg wouldn't be too different.

One last room of the exhibit is devoted to videos of people actually performing in the soundsuits. The performances of the people dancing in the furry soundsuits are my favorite.

perverted leadership

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

In my second dream, I had a really hard time getting a strap for my backpack pulled up my right arm. The strap was too tight.

This image was directly related to an experience I had as I woke from my first dream. I had a sharp pain underneath my left shoulder blade. I wasn't sure what it was. But it hurt like crazy for about thirty seconds. Then it stopped.

This pain -- which was very much a part of my waking life, not a lingering image from a dream -- I mean, I was sitting up and rubbing my back -- is indicative of a heart attack. But I think the pain was psychosomatic rather than real.

The reason is, two nights ago, I watched the David Lynch film Blue Velvet. I also watched some bits and pieces of the film, as well as the special features documentary on the film, last night. At the beginning of the film, the main character's dad has a heart attack. He feels the pain in his neck, not in his shoulder.

It struck me as scary that he'd feel the pain in the neck. Probably because ever since, in early 2011, I got jumped by a group of kids (who did spend a lot of time punching me in the base and at the back of my head, as they were all the way around me in a circle, and just punched whatever part of me they could reach), I've felt like something bad will eventually happen to the base of my brain, and that I'll end up going insane or doing something really bad and violent because I've had my amygdala all screwed up or something.

So, for some reason, I think, just to keep myself from thinking about a heart attack being related to a pain in the neck, I removed the "heart attack pain" down from the neck to the shoulder blades, by using my own body.


Or -- maybe I had a real heart attack. I'd assume it's not unheard of for a 34-year-old to have a heart attack.

Another image from that second dream, the "sperm pipeline," comes from that first scene in Blue Velvet, too. The father is out watering his lawn when he has his heart attack. There's a kink in the hose, which, I guess, is supposed to be a metaphor for clogged arteries.

But I translated the image so that the hose becomes a pipeline -- a kinky pipeline, but with no kink in it -- and so that it carries sperm instead of blood. I'm not sure why, other than because it was a sex dream. Part of it may have to do with the fact that, when I first watched Blue Velvet, I thought that the ear Jeffrey found was a condom, like a used condom that had been left on the ground. I think the movie would basically have been the same if Jeffrey had just found a used condom instead of an ear. The movie seems to be about coming to terms with sexuality.

The other thing I think is interesting, though, about that sperm pipeline is that the two men who are having sex with each other in order to keep it running -- much just have so much sexual potency! I don't know what to say about it. Like with a lot of things in my dreams, while I'm in the dream I just seem to take things for granted. But when I woke up, I was just amazed with how much sperm those two guys were creating. Wow!

I think part of that might have to do with the fact that I was reading The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey, last night. The Ship Who Sang is basically a series of short and long stories following the career of a woman who, born with extreme birth defects, has her body implanted into a spaceship. One of the woman's (Helva's) missions is to carry 300,000 embryos to various pioneer planets throughout the universe. That's obviously a lot of babies. So I think I translated that image into a "baby pipeline," or a "sperm pipeline."

The orgy, I think, also comes from another story in The Ship Who Sang. In this story, "Dramatic Mission," Helva is assigned to carry a group of actors to a planet that has no performance art of its own. In exchange for the humans teaching these aliens how to act (they perform Romeo and Juliet, of course), the aliens give the humans a new, secret form of energy.

But there are all kinds of scandals and intrigues on the trip over to the planet. And at the planet, the way the humans interact with the aliens is very weird, almost like a non-bodily transfer of energy -- which seems very much like an orgy in some more spiritual sense. So I think these scandals and the weird alien interactions combined and touched ground in my dream to make just a plain old orgy.

I think that the dream ends with what I at first expect to be a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, but which ends up really being a performance of a musical for the cartoon Superbook, is due to my having read this story about the acting troupe as well.


But I'd also say that it's due to Blue Velvet. Near the beginning of the movie, a radio gives the station identification jingle, which sounds to me very much like a melody that might be heard in Jesus Christ Superstar. While I was watching the movie, I didn't quite articulate it to myself that way. But I did tell myself, That jingle really sounds like something from the late 1960s.

I actually think Jesus Christ Superstar isn't such a stretch for my imagination. The entire time I was watching Blue Velvet, I kept thinking of how much it must have been influenced by another film which used the song "Blue Velvet," Scorpio Rising, by Kenneth Anger. I'm not actually sure whether Lynch was influenced by Anger's film, to be honest with you. But the visual tastes seem to be a lot alike at times.


But what I didn't think of was that, the way Lynch plays with time periods and styles in Blue Velvet is a little bit similar to the way that Andrew Lloyd Webber plays with time periods and styles in Jesus Christ Superstar. In addition, Jesus Christ Superstar has a theme very much like that of the "Dramatic Mission" story in The Ship Who Sang: a bunch of people going out to some distant place to perform a classic story.


Here's the original opening for the Japanese version of Superbook, which is pretty hot.

And here's the opening for the American version, which is also pretty cool.

What also struck me as interesting about the dream was that the people toward the end of it recognized me somehow as their leader. But they had my intentions all mistaken. I had seen a cute girl. I didn't want her to think that I was a pervert because I was watching an orgy. So I backed up from the orgy so the cute girl would think I wasn't watching. Then everybody else watching the orgy just thought I was getting bored. So they decided to stop the orgy.


It's strange that I was in such a leadership position. But I also think I wasted my leadership in that instance.


I didn't want the girl to see me watching an orgy. And I was embarrassed because I was wearing girls' clothing. It was probably girls' clothing, too -- like for young girls, not for women, just given the pattern and the ruffles and so forth. Now, I did, apparently, want to watch the orgy. And I did want to wear the girls' clothing. But I didn't want the cute girl to see me doing all this stuff. The people I was hanging out with took this as their cue to stop it all.


But I think my problem is that, in actuality, I should want any girl I would be with to see all the perverted aspects of myself. If a girl can't deal with that stuff, then both she and I would be much happier understanding that far ahead of time. And people who look to me as a leader will, I hope, take me as being less of a sanctimonious prig if I can just accept myself for who I am and not be shy about advertising myself to the girls I like as being who I am.


Even in my dream I was, first of all, shocked that these people were looking at me as a leader and, second of all, regretful that they took my embarrassment as a sign of boredom. They seemed to carry out an action I didn't want them to carry out because they misunderstood the signals I was giving them.


I think that relates this group of people directly to the three "insubordinate identities" in my first dream. The fact that all three of these women are naked is, again, likely from Blue Velvet, from the scene where Isabella Rossellini comes walking through the lawn naked.


But the women also look a little bit robotic. I think they actually also come from an episode of the 1980s version of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, where Astro meets a part-robot detective named Sherlock Homespun. The detective has hair very much like the hair of the women in my dream.


Also, last Saturday, I went to the art gallery at the Arvada Center here in Colorado. The gallery is currently running an exhibition called Faces, Places, and Spaces. One of the works, by a woman named Marie Gibbons, is a series of masks, each showing a kind of mood or developmental stage of a person. The masks all seem to show the same girl going through these stages, although the girl may look vastly different based on the mood.

But one of the moods is called, I believe, "Limitation." In this mood, the girl has some kind of mechanical disk instead of an eye in her right eye socket. I think that this image -- an image of a partly robotic woman -- helped to create the image of the female identities in my first dream.