Category: Art

String Theory – Force of Reason vs Mass of Criticism

On By cjx07sterIn Art, Dreaming, ExistentialismLeave a comment

—S-T-R-I-N-G—

)))))|||T|H|E|O|R|Y|||((((((

Which comes first – chicken legs or egg timer?  I think for me, it was probably the egg timer. Chicken legs came later in life.  Mum used to make baked chicken but memory is strong on egg timers which weighed more in my mind that chicken legs.  Certainly egg timers have more mass than force, at least from outside the realm of the timer.  I mean it’s all force with a chicken leg, scratching around in the dirt looking for grit, with their head cock-eyed down to the earth and sky for an instant.  No the face of an egg timer is pretty straight and it doesn’t exert any force whatsoever, except on the mind of the child watching it.  Which is why egg timers, mechanical ones are a pain – they tick along like a chicken scratching.  What you really need is the timer that just has sand falling down inside a glass.  Yes but they are hopeless mate, what happens is that the sand falls down due to the force of gravity, it has some small mass, and then when it’s all down you basically spin the thing over and it starts again, but unless you are watching it, you don’t know when the time limit is reached. I think there is something comforting about having a ringing or dinging of things, ring ding at the end of an allotted span of time, you wind it up, set it on the table, and then at the end of the time interval, it rings, just like the phone.  So you go get your egg and turn it off on the stove.  Yes for sure now you don’t need an egg timer – now I can set any time I like on the microwave, put the egg – all mixed up – inside a bowl – and just turn on the microwave, which automatically turns off – and the ringing thing is to tell me to “REMOVE FOOD”..

As if I didn’t know anyway – hungry for the egg, and eggs come before chickens as you all know.

Yes it’s all chicken and egg with mathematics as well.  What comes first ? The chicken of an idea or the egg of theory.  Which has more courage, which succumbs to the mass of criticism or the force of pure reason. Lets be reasonable now.  The old equation learnt in high school – F = MA is the same.  It implies kind of that Force = Mass x Acceleration.  Newton again, but definitely gravity existed before the apple on the tree, and the Acceleration faced by the Apple was due to the Gravitational Force acting on it’s mass.  So a more natural equation would be —- A = F/M … yes I think I like this better, but you see typesetters don’t like division A = F/M.  So what happens when the mass goes to zero – dummy. ? I hear the critique coming – then basically the acceleration is infinitely better isn’t it.

So what you are saying is that without the Mass of Criticism, there would be infinite acceleration of an idea, with just the slightest amount of reason behind it. Yes, it can get a bit that way with people.  Wake up with an idea, hide it from the critics and with a minor reason – go destroy something.  It is very hard to make something decent without a mass of criticism to balance your force of reason out.

I had an idea about string theory.  With a kiwi fruit just sitting there on the table, it looked so … I don’t know passive – just sitting there, as though not to be loved, forced down by gravity on a table waiting for someone’s enjoyment or neglect.  Inside a whole universe of life, but outside, just an object of still life. Waiting for a painter or something.  As an Idea with no reason whatsoever, I felt the urge to tie a string to the kiwi fruit, as though it was a present perhaps, or like the world on a string perhaps.

There are many string theories, most of which are not comprehensible by the average person, even mine.  I am sure my string theory, an idea, without the force of any reason whatsoever, with the gravitational impact of a whim and with the mass of intellect of what it takes, waiting for the microwave pseudo egg timer to go off, or my wife to say “please REMOVE FOOD from the table, and what is that silly string doing tied to it ?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUPERSTRINGTHEORY

A Bridge in the Fanfare for the Workers of Sydney

On By cjx07sterIn Art, Australia, Engineering, Music, TravelLeave a comment
The Sydney Harbour Bridge

It’s made of iron and rivets and paint. Tons of it.  It crosses the beauty of Sydney Harbour and spans two sides of the emerald city of Sydney, NSW.  It’s orientation catches the light of the sunrise to the east and frames the perfect sunsets in the west.  When you cross it at night the light zooms up from below to catch the strong arch, home to thousands of bats and insects which fly around up there.  The Australian flags fly at it’s zenith and seem to state something for the nation of Australia.  You see flags are a rarity in Australia, compared to the USA, where everyone has one.  In Australia only important buildings have a flag to fly.  Up on the bridge there are flags flying on the great creation of the workers 80 years ago today.  Dr John Bradfield’s original idea and masterpiece developed from around 1900,  it opened on 19th March 1932 amid much fanfare.  Notably in true Australian style, someone stole the show on a horse and cut the ribbon with his sword.

Today 80 years on the sun was shining in the morning, as I crossed the bridge on the train.  It is the feast day or St. Joseph patron saint of the worker. It took about 100,000 man years of work to create it. No computers calculating the odds, no adding machines, it was all done on slide rules and rooms of drawings and sketches all calculated down to the point where expectedly the two  sides of the bridge met.

Of course everyone has seen the bridge, it really gets a birthday every year on New Year’s Eve when it acts as the mounting bracket for thousands of fireworks to help celebrate the new year.  Yes, although originally set up to carry traffic linking the two sides of Sydney Harbour, the bridge has developed into a performance space for the common man.

As I was crossing, looking up into the arch this morning, musicians from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra were scaling the bridge and getting ready to play.  It was their anniversary as well I understand.  A fitting choice of piece being Aaron Copland’s “A Fanfare for the Common Man”.  This piece was in fact originally commissioned by Eugene Goossens whilst he was conducting orchestras in the USA, who eventually became the first permanent conductor of the Sydney Symphony.  I like the piece, I wish I had heard it, but the wind and the rain probably carried the sound to where only the seagulls and St Joseph and maybe Dr John Bradfield, who conceived the design and who made it his own quest in the early part of the 20th century.  Happy Birthday Sydney Harbour Bridge !!

— See report on the bridge fanfare – 

The Surrealism of a Folded Tin Guitar

On By cjx07sterIn ArtLeave a comment

Picasso seemed fully aware of the tangential nature of proof in artistic depiction.  Always trying to describe a searing truth in his mind’s most amazing determined eye, the physical working of it was rough, crude, but carried the truth with it, like a sword in the back of a brutish bull in a bullring.  That the matador and horse were almost interchangeable.  That always eyes are on the same side of the face.  That a skull with horns could be well represented by a bike seat and handlebars and rusting mounted on a wall.

All the works of art had been sent her to New South Wales from France and would be on display here till March 2012.  Picasso, simply titled, and people had been queuing up to get in, to see all the special works of the famous painter/sculptor.  You could tell by the conversations in the large lobby where a latest (not by Picasso) all black opus entitled ‘Stephen Hawkings‘ hangs across from two plaster busts regarding the floor where bits of broken white bust lie quietly. In the ticket queue you could overhear that some people had studied Picasso carefully or quickly or not at all.  I had read his biography some years before and forgotten most of it.

Having purchased tickets, we all had to come back at the scheduled time and queue politely in an anteroom with a large screen video showing Picasso doing paintings on glass.  Birds mostly. Quick and true.

Then at the appointed time, we marched across the lobby in double file as though marching through the entry to the bullring and into the first gallery room, one of about a dozen which represented the different phases of his artistic career.

I was in the centre of gallery room number 5 “Brushes with surrealism”, and having seen galleries 1-2-3 and quickly through 4,  was optimistic that I could begin to understand something of the artist. I was standing in the middle of the ‘Bullring’. I was imbued with the art, the deconstruction, the destruction of 3D forms, and its smattering of surreal truth on the walls of the gallery. Truth and Picasso a master at it like a matador, each work of art a conquest, and when finished a death.

There on the outer edge of the Bullring I could see a large guitar like painting.  The sinewy strings aboard the neck of the body of the bull, and I writing notes with a Katana and looking over at the guitar.  I wandered slowly over, past the people like pebbles of crushed stone that made up the field of the ring.  There on the wall was the guitar.  The painting.  I moved closer.. The painting originally white with grey brown and black shades started to develop depth and shadows.  The painting changed as approached.  Gradually the painting of a guitar dissolved into 3 dimensions of painted metal and tin. Looking at it now from 5 feet back, the guitar became folded metal which looked like something from the Australian outback.  Remnant of a roof perhaps, but cut with metal shears and folded by hand to become a painting at 20ft. And with strings added.  The tin now, folded cut metal, an now from the side looking for all the while like a tin gate, all twisted and bent. Yes, from the side it just looked like a bunch of metal folded and painted badly.

I came to see Picasso’s works, I saw many others, in fact all of them twice.  What I saw was that art reflects on life and truth, but in itself cannot be true to that.  I loved how cleverly folded  painted tin on a wall, could at 20 paces look for all the people in the gallery like a painting of a guitar. I could hear the screams of the crowd assembled at the bullfight where the Matador and Horse are conquered by the bull, and his latest wife looking on the comic cubic Picasso who wrestled with tin snips and cut himself no doubt on the tin, trying to make music with a painted folded tin ‘guitar’.