Gary Justis's Open Salon Blog

For Mother

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:05:41 -0400

Mom and Gregory Justis Jr. 1982

There is a favorite photograph in our family...one my brother always carried with him, of Mom holding Gregory, my brother's first child. Both Mom and the baby show a dreamy level of contentment. Gregory looks almost flower-like as Mom caresses him.

“You have the ability to be anything you want to be.”

She fashioned a simple sentence that guided us through sorrows and uncertainty, laying hope continually at our feet. It still guides me , and as she approaches her 94th year in September, I re-organize, and re-cultivate the kernels she so lovingly planted, for all of us so many bright years before.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, Woman of All Roses.

A Mother's Day card by Gregory Justis Sr. 1962

Parts excerpted from;

Woman of All Roses, Open Salon, May 7, 2010

"Dragon King" a video work by Michael Goldberger

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:05:04 -0400

The video “Dragon King” by Michael Goldberger asks us to enter its world from below center of the action, to cross a threshold into the tumult of an adolescent vision. We are asked to throw off the supercilious preferences we have piled up (in our minds) amid the deliberate adult scripts we follow day to day.

The adult Michael Goldberger is asking something that is familiar to us when looking at new experiences and new art. He is asking us to plunge into his and our environments carrying foolhardy man-made miracles as the day’s spectacles roll around.

Originally I looked at this work of art with some trepidation, but when I had made it to the end, I found myself wanting a second and third viewing. I wanted to find a place for the activity in the video to carry meaning. I discovered the action was a vivid distraction from my own rational sensibilities, plying the work's earnest investment in transcendence.

The meaning of art can attach itself to the product in the making process, or later in the process of viewing by others…yet rational meaning may not exist in the mind of the artist in the initial making of the work. Meaning may still enter into the dialogue through the thoughtfulness of future viewers in times that befit the disposition of an era.

Great Art does eventualy fit all eras. If there is meaning, that meaning becomes adjustable, poignant and correct in its innumerable hi-points in time. It slides into the consciousnesses of the public. It is continually reinterpreted as “new truth.”

There is a primeval quality to the action of this work; the action is infused with a pulsating drum rhythm that translates to a dramatic, physical urgency. Goldberger is seen striding across a large field with pyrotechnic prosthetics attached to his head and his hands. All are ignited, spewing fire and smoke. We look and want to believe we are getting a proscribed view of a task that needs to take place in the tradition of an alien social order glorifying pre-eminent power. There is purpose and energy in the player’s action when he shows us the substance of his corporeal preservation of himself and his kindred. The work is as powerfully wrought as the name implies.

Goldberger writes: “Their forms are ever changing, true dragons, true beings of power, needn’t be flying dinosaurs, but can take any form, from the splitting atoms of atomic warheads, to the sun that heats our solar system. All that matters is their breath, their power.”

In another readingof this work, the human life cycle of a man is encapsulated in the collected sequences of the video. There is an initial blooming of the pyrotechnics in the beginning scene, and then the picture narrative is wholly subsumed by the bluster of creative youth, spewing fire as a carrier of thought and ideas. This action plays out to middle age, then smoking impotency. The cycle ends with the final collapse of the player.

The vestige of the (now deceased) creator in the final scene is depicted as a clump of pyrotechnic hardware, seeming to have a life beyond the architect of its manufacture. It stirs fully conscious and takes up the bristling acts of creation until it falls towards degradation and silence.

This work of art is a poignant, unambiguous summery of man-made creativity from beginning to end.The powerful images burn themselves wholly into our memory. The work conjoins sacrament and purpose towards atonement for our sometimes-inauspicious human beginnings.

"Dragon King" by Michael Goldberg (view in HD)

This work premiered at University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal Illinois April 16- May 12, 2013. Michael Golbergers website-in-progress can be viewed here

Thanks to:

The creator Michael Goldberg, Scott Rankin, Professor of Art, Video, and Barry Blinderman, Director University Galleries along with his wonderful staff, Kendra Paitz, Tony Preston-Schreck, and Gabriel Johnson

In Analogue Home Time

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:04:03 -0400

After the early walk and feeding time, Buddy likes to wait at the bedroom door for the cats to emerge. Eventually they come out one by one lazily stretching in the light. They take turns touching Buddy's nose, then break into a sprint down the hallway with the giant in hot pursuit.

From the upstairs picture window the higher reaches of the front yard infuses the living room with a green hue. The tangle of this intimate jungle gives up a secret or two, letting loose the expressions of inanimate and living faces.

One of the best times of the day is "practice time." In the intimate space of the downstairs L. J. plays Chopin. I sit with her and take note of how much better she sounds than the day before. The cats come 'round listening for the melodies that put them at ease.

As I go upstairs to contemplate dinner I look back, longing to stay in the moment.

The Reincarnationist

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:01:04 -0500

Portrait # 38g (The Reincarnationist), digital photograph, projected light, dimensions variable

I keep thinking about my friend’s aunt who insisted her deceased brother came back as a cartoon character; some hybridization of Homer Simpson. I talked to the lady and told her I didn’t think a human spirit could come back as an idea.

She wanted to know why this wasn’t possible, since the existence of reincarnation was really a theory, and as far as anyone knows, each of us only exists as an idea anyway.

As we talked, I was thinking that every profound idea contains some real fictional gems. Disbelief mixed with a level of discretion can tease the mind making it more amenable to the unfamiliar, where original thinking comes into being. Two types of ideas, either well suited for each other or not, can work towards coaxing our attention out of our commonplace element…a kind of wistful/wishful imagining.

“But I’m flesh…look I react to you, I have skin.” I said.

She smirked. “Well, Homer and his many iterations have skin too, very nice skin. No blemishes as far as I can tell.”

We both laughed, but in the ridiculous context of this conversation, she had a point.

I was remembering some things that continually irritate me. Sometimes I am so sick and tired of hearing stories about other dimensions I feel my head will explode. When I go into a public place, or I’m talking to someone at a party, the inevitable line from some stranger is, “I feel you are an ‘old soul’.”

It always makes me feel awkward that strangers might know something about me that lurks in the shadows of my consciousness.

The day I was forced to sit and listen to someone drone on endlessly about spiritual linage was the same day I was trying to close on my house. My loan agent was forcing me to listen to her past-life drivel. She kept distracting herself from her point in fits and starts. Listening was pure agony. There was some debate with her sense of chronology of past lives.

Of course this debate was taking place with her present incarnation and several other individual parts of her former selves, including an animal or two.

She finally captured my attention with the last bit about animals. My period of punishment shortened considerably. She was talking about some theory having to do with a person’s natural channeling of animal impulses. According to her, feeling one’s own non-human urges was the result of previous animal incarnations. I had never considered this. The idea did nonetheless explain a few of my own feelings.

Later that evening, I found an entry in one of my journals from 1985.

“I’ve never felt more like an animal than I have these past several months. People tell me I have qualities, never wholly human and wholly distinct from tameness. This is an accurate observation because it reflects my feelings, my inner life. I look at past pictures of myself and I know the urges behind that face…a wanting nature with a suppressed predator drive… itching for a pursuit of some kind.

I haven’t experienced comfortable moments in years. I crave the aroma of forests and decaying matter. When I see small creatures, the rest of the world stops. There are inconveniences; I have an abnormal flow of saliva, and itchiness in my limbs that sends wrong signals when I’m around people, my family, friends and sometimes girlfriends.

I was on a windy street in my hometown last week. A passing stranger grabbed my wrist. He looked into my eyes for a second, and then he threw up his other hand as if my gaze blinded him. I felt suddenly off balance while he held on, pulling me to the ground with him as a large, flat piece of roof metal flew past us, cleaving the space where we stood moments before.

This incident was excruciating, but seemed to break the spell of my wildness. I don’t know how, but I remember lying there, eyeing the back of his beautiful neck, only for a second, and not feeling any urge to bite it.”

That was a phobic period I was always frightened to re-visit. Going through the pages of this record was a real exercise because it was difficult placing myself into the mental space of the person I used to be. I had a period of strange, dangerous wildness. It was a brief period that passed without much consequence except for my feelings and urges. There were no injuries to others or questions that could have alerted the authorities about my dangerous attitude. My life, in spite of my unusual state of mind, was for the most part providential and headed in a positive direction.

I sat back and thought about it. “The person I used to be.”

I realized the temporal constructions of the mind could be reconciled with my skewed vision of mortality. If chronological events are fixed as part of some physical law, then I am outside of cause and effect. But I realize this is not the case.

My mind is working hard to construct time, building a framework I can navigate while being a different person from one moment to the next. It’s like an overlay of infinite varieties of the self, one on top of the other in no particular sequence.

Memory of these fleeting manifestations creates the continuity, until the mind lets go of the particular memory and the link is broken. I understand with some clarity the broken link gives the self a boost into another version of the self. Reincarnation is real, and taking place in the physical realm all the time, in a single body’s life cycle.

In the past, there was a nagging question about my brother’s account of witnessing the birth of his child. Years ago when he recounted the event to me, I marveled at his level of excitement. He said when he saw the childbirth, it was like a heavy, impenetrable curtain being lifted in his awareness.

At the time of his revelation, I hadn’t made a connection between cause and effect and the life-changing event he had described. Now there was sudden relevance in how the link with his past life (being a mean guy) and his new life was broken. The change in him was astonishing and the old version of my brother, one who was my tormentor, a trickster and instigator of intrigue, ceased to be.

With his transformation, he was unable to recall his dark collection of transgressions. There was a surprising result in all this. His inability to recall his darker self forced my own change, and my memory of our familial discord faded. We became good, close friends. We were new and better people.

My brother died in 2006. As devastating as it was to lose him so suddenly, my memory of him is vivid and there is not any dissension I can recall between us.

I’m convinced there is a part of the process of Reincarnation taking place in the corporeal realm, or the physical “here and now.” There is wholeness and great beauty in the reality of recognizing this. I can grasp it…and I can also determinedly live again and again with this understanding.

Note: this piece was posted on Our Salon January 12, 2013

Nerve Engines

Mon, 1 Oct 2012 09:10:01 -0400

Engines are normally thought of as mechanical contrivances that transpose energy into physical motion. It affects changes in matter. The engine’s function and purpose are integrated toward a constant need to ameliorate our immediate circumstances.

A Nerve Engine influences the state of our senses through the representation of energy and its transfer. There are visual and aural elements sometimes affecting changes in our emotions.

Sourcing energy, or the suggestion of energy, gets our attention.

With the chaos of fire, explosions are strung together, only making sense as present and intense terror, yet there is always fascination in the dissolution of matter and the unsystematic dispersion of force.

Controlled force mitigates our terror to some measure. In a way, the audible rhythms advocate a machine language, while encouraging our fascination for systematic dispersions of force.

Images

photograph and first video: garage fire, Bloomington, IL, summer, 2012.

No fatalities or injuries occurred.

second video: “Nerve Engine 1b” m/m macro video, 2012