I was unsure of myself with this blox. I had opened up possibilites when I wrote about my experience with Seger and adapting the exactness I felt with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I had visualized Sir Gawain’s intentionality as the aspect of Exact that I felt in the poem. I think it was the split between his chivalrous intention and intentions of desire that struck me the most. It seemed to visualize Calvino’s scale of exactness. The chivalrous intentions being the most exact, most well-calculated and well-intentioned, and the intentions of desire being vague, chaotic, but passionate and pleasurable. There is something appealing about mystery, and the lady represents the opposite end of the exact scale. She is vague. Sir Gawain wants to be exact, but the seduction of the mysterious lady pulls him away. It is the image of the kiss and the sword the are the symbols for this scale. But I felt that it was more complicated at that; my idea was too linear, and would be represented as such visually in my collage. So, I decided the best way to work out my feelings on this blox was to imitate a process that enlightened Cornell’s art: the dossier. I sat outside (my favorite place to think), and just wrote. It was a strange experience, fueled more by my own mood and intentions than the tutor text or adaptation. Here is the dossier:
Intentionality? 4/19/11
woke up in a horrible mood. I’m beginning to think my visualizations of the exact blox are too contrived. There is nothing complex about it. SO very on the surface. Where am I in the art? I have failed to put myself in it. Haven’t been able to FEEL anything about it.
Sitting out in nature to clear my mind and my mood. Its gears are squealing; can’t seem to stop thinking. There’s a lot of stress building up in my body, I can FEEL that.
School.
Work.
Money.
Boyfriend.
Family.
There have been days like this before; I feel like I’m drowning every time. No, the suffocating feeling isn’t from water. It feels like an electric shock, pulsating through my body, seizing my lungs. Can’t seem to take a deep breath. It’s out of my control.
I guess I know what Sir Gawain feels like. Intentionality split–wanting to give into the pleasure, the easy way out. It’s like fight or flight. I know how that is. But it’s out of his control, too. The Green Knight manipulates the whole situation. He treats Sir Gawain and his lady like puppets that are used for the moral lesson.
It’s like the exactness in the narrative traps them all in this static web or entrapped in a crystal. The symbol of exact. Maybe the exact in this narrative is malignant. Or maybe it’s just my mood.
My mood very much influenced this blox, and I feel its darkness reflects that more so than the narrative itself. I thought about the crystal as a prison, just as in one of Cornell’s boxes called the “Crystal Cage,” the crystal is a means to the imagination, but it is also the girl’s prison. I found an eery photo of green glowing crystals coming out from the darkness. It gave me that suffocating feeling. It was the void below the vivid crystals that struck me. I thought about that feeling of suffocating and how I thought it felt like an electric shock that seized my lungs. I connected it to what I said about a “static web” that the characters are trapped in, and thought about those crystal balls that are lit up with electricity, and it follows your every touch. I felt that it was the perfect image for what I felt that exactness felt like; it was how I felt. There was something too solid about it, maybe too exact. The tension of exactness in the narrative is due to the split between the sword (exact/chivalrous) and the kiss (vague/alluring), and that the exact is in a constant waving state between the two; there is always something that is dissolving. I put a dissolve effect on the “web” itself, as well as made the characters’ figures grainy with the film grain effect. The Green Knight is in the middle of the web, orchestrating it all–the source of the power. Sir Gawain is an unknowing participant, running into the web willingly because of the allure of the face of the lady of the Green Knight, who is trapped above in the Green Knight’s web. But there was a photo of a woman’s open mouth with dark gray lipstick that had a gold encrusted pearl on its tongue. I needed it to be in there. It was strange, dark, but seductive. I inversed the image, and put it to the far right, halfway between the glowing crystal and the void below. It’s image is haunting. I can’t truly explain why I needed it to be there or why I had to inverse it, only that it felt right to be in there.
Oh, and I almost forgot about the sword. It is flaming and attached to a stern hand. I put a dark burn effect on it, and put it in the way of Sir Gawain running into the web. Somehow, it felt that the exact and chivalrous way of the sword was the sinister aspect of the blox, as if the exact loyalty to King Arthur should not be held over the passion of lust.
I don’t really know what that says about me, but I know that I went from frustrated and empty to feeling myself in the blox through the dossier. It was the realization that I use my own mood to influence how I visualize my art. And I’m starting to feel that I really am creating art.
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