Totally Mod

I'm nearing the end of the record label conference room and reception area project. We're getting down to the nitty gritty details, including a modular system of furniture/storage/partition walls. Here are some sketches I did today:

Conference room table:

Waiting area:

Check in:

Kitchenette:

Back on the Grind

Winter vacation is over, and the spring semester has begun. To get back into the swing of things at Pratt, we are doing a short 3-week project in Studio: designing a waiting area and conference room for a record company. We were each assigned a piece of music which will serve to inspire our designs, and I got "Pierrot Lunaire" by Schoenburg (hear it)

The piece is a haunting, dream-like melody which for me evokes the ideas of Freud and Jung. To capture this jarring, atonal atmosphere I used mirrors, plexi, and strips of red paper.


The piece can be divided into three components, a wind/string section, a piano, and a woman singing/reading 21 poems by Albert Giraud. Each of the materials represented one of the three: the mirrors stood for the winds and strings section, the shards of plexi represented the staccato inserts of the piano, and the undulating strips of red paper represented the woman's voice.


Schoenburg was obsessed with numerology, so much so that the entire title of the piece points out that it is "3 times 7 poems", and I have carried over this interest by utilizing each of the 3 materials 7 times.


The piece is celebrated today as Schoenburg's "atonal masterpiece" and the last great work of his expressionist period. I think that what I responded to most was the tenets of expressionism which emphasize emotionality over realism of form. I endeavored to capture the jarring, anxiety producing emotion of "Pierrot Lunaire".

Church Going

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

-Philip Larkin


Personally I love to visit religious buildings, and the sentiments Larkin expresses really resonate with me.

This Be The Verse

This poem by Philip Larkin is one of my all-time favorites, and I'm using it simply to introduce those of you who aren't familiar with his work to his sardonic wit, because what I really want to share is a poem called "Church Going" that I will post next. For now bask in the succinct perfection of "This Be The Verse"

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

-Philip Larkin

For Lorelai "Rory" "Meowface" "Fatty Lumpkins" Mills-Smith

Curiosity

may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious
have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contrary, curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again, and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

-Alastair Reed


God I love that last sentence!

Poetry is Art Too

So one of the big ironies of my being involved in visual arts is that I am a huge reader and lover of literature and poetry as well. So today, for the first time on Ash Smith Art I am going to share poems I've been enjoying lately. This is a poem by Robert Frost, he is one of my all-time favorite poets, and I'm sure we all remember "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", but this is a poem that I'd never seen until this week. It really shows how versatile and gifted Frost truly is (he makes a rhyme with Formic!!). So without further ado....

Departmental

An ant on the tablecloth
Ran into a dormant moth
Of many times his size.
He showed not the least surprise.
His business wasn't with such.
He gave it scarcely a touch,
And was off on his duty run.
Yet if he encountered one
Of the hive's enquiry squad
Whose work is to find out God
And the nature of time and space,
He would put him onto the case.
Ants are a curious race;
One crossing with hurried tread
The body of one of their dead
Isn't given a moment's arrest-
Seems not even impressed.
But he no doubt reports to any
With whom he crosses antennae,
And they no doubt report
To the higher up at court.
Then word goes forth in Formic:
"Death's come to Jerry McCormic,
Our self-less forager Jerry.
Will the special Janizary
Whose office it is to bury
The dead of the commissary
Go bring him home to his people.
Lay him in state on a sepal.
Wrap him for shroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
This is the word of your Queen."
And presently on the scene
Appears a solemn mortician;
And taking formal position
With feelers calmly atwiddle,
Seizes the dead by the middle,
And heaving him high in the air,
Carries him out of there.
No one stands round to stare.
It is nobody else's affair.

It couldn't be called ungentle.
But how thoroughly departmental.

-Robert Frost