A Multiple Process to Cornell’s Art

I used past events, present events, my mood–syncrhonicity–to create my art. I once again imitated Cornell’s dossier system, to clarify my imagination:

TENSION  4/23/2011

I found myself facing two paths in my present reality. I graduate in August, and I can cower back into the comfort of school and get my masters, or I can face the unknown and attempt to find a job. I felt a strange connection to Sir Gawain and his cowardice. I felt like a coward sometimes. I feel like a coward sometimes. I want to shrink from the metaphorical sharp iron hovering above my neck. It’s not easy to be stoic when facing one’s own mortality. 

The past events reached my contemplation when my mind wandered to how much nature was an influence in my bloxes. There is always a trace of it. It’s usually always in the background, actually. I thought about the previous half of this project, and how most of my emblems connected with nature, also. 

I thought about multiplicity as a web; I imagined Sir Gawain caught in that web. There is so much tension. The ending discomforted me. Sir Gawain is left shamed and humiliated, humbled forever. Like emasculation. But, Arthur and his fellow knights laugh around him, agreeing to all wear green belts around their neck to commemorate him. Seemed like they were mocking him. Is that a happy ending? I felt uneasy when I read it. 

I feel chaotic in my writing right now. Like I keep shifting from past to present. Happy to sad.

There is a vivid image of blood boiling that I see when I read this one line: “The blood burns in his cheeks.” Like shame exploding from his face. 

I feel the further along I go with these bloxes, the more sinister my tutor text seems. It never seemed that way to me before, not even as child. I think it’s me. I think I’m feeling dark. Maybe it’s because of those two paths. Uncertainty is malevolent. 

I continue to be surprised by how open I become in this dossiers. It’s more than a diary. It’s an exploration of the imagination. I feel as though when I read the dossiers back to myself, I am psychoanalyzing myself.

I now understand the Grand Meaulnes Feeling that Cornell wanted to embody. It’s not necessarily a physical wandering, but a mental one, making connections and leaving breadcrumbs to find  the way back.

That sinister feeling is so vivid in my Multiplicity blox. The background, as usual, is a nature scene of two different paths separated by a twisted tree, burned and colored green, and given a layered effect. I covered this image, and every image thereafter, with a plastic wrap filter. It reminded me of suffocation, of that tense feeling I sometimes get in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. A discomfort. The background is dark. There are layers, but they are hard to see.

All the images on top are barely visible placed to the right, within the darkness. They pile up on top of each other, creating a multi-faceted wall. There is a painting I found only that was called “Covetous” with several abstract boxes that had multiple layers. Covetousness was one of the actions that shamed Sir Gawain. 

Then I skewed the color balance on the drama masks, whose mouths are open so wide it is surreal, giving them a creepy aura. They are lightened and blended, the brightest thing in the box.

Below that, there is a grotesque image I found (I am sure it is created, and not real) of two people drowning in boiling blood. I was disgusted and allured to the image. It was so sinister. It was perfect. I inversed the color and blended the image, so that it was so not so blaringly disgusting; I wanted  its malevolence to be more subtle.

I thought about tension. How the word was repeated in my dossier and how it was the perfect word for the ending to the book. I went back to Graphic Design: The New Basics by Lupton and Phillips, remembering the textual art created from that word. It had to be in there. It seems to fade into the distorted chaos that frames the background, but it also is the most prominent element in the blox.

Overlaying it all is a moist spider web that has drops of water clinging to its strings. I used a soft light filter on the image so that it would be merely an after thought in the blox, something that truly completed the sinister mood and reinforced the idea of multiple simultaneously.

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An Exact Process of Cornell

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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