Microglistening/Nitroglycerin

Kurt Vonnegut once gave himself a hard time about writing “the usual load of horsecrap about modern art.” Undoubtedly he made at least a few modern artists smile when he did that.

When I was 15 my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Ann Dennis, asked me if I’d be willing to give a lecture about art. I said Sure, being then as now what my daughter and many in her demographic call “an attention whore.” I remember the thesis of my lecture was going to be that all artists go by rules, but “going by” rules is not the same thing as following them. The rules, either followed or violated, serve as the jumping-off places for works of art. And for an example I’d drawn an array of similar shapes in different sizes. The shapes were arranged so that some of the spaces between them provided relief for the eye, and some of the spaces were teemingly crowded, though none of the shapes touched. I was going to ask my classmates what an appropriate title would be, advising them that titling a work of art can be crucial in its public acceptance, and sometimes in its prominence.

Alas, the lecture was never given. Alas, I can’t remember why. But I remember IT, the basics of it anyway, and it helps me to understand my own latest work above:

Here is a drawing of shapes and shadows. There is some sense of near and far, but within a limited implied space. There is some indication of movement and energy, There is a lot of “here is what a pencil and eraser can do.”

Beneath the drawing are fifteen calligraphed words. Read left to right and top to bottom they say “May inelegance necessitate implemental eloquent correction concatenative interdisciplinary obbligati replicative synergistic reconstruction or disestablishmentarianistic daydreaming.” They form five lines of three words each. The words on the left start with letters that, top to bottom, spell “Micro.” The words in the middle have letters in their middles that spell “Glist.” The words on the right have letters on the right that spell “Ening.” Concatenating the three yields “Microglistening.” That is a word that yielded 181 search results in the search engine I used; though most of them were from the phrase “micro, glisten” there was at least one example of “microglisten” as the title of a blog post. But I had coined the word (or I thought I had coined it before I did the search) not only for its literal implied meaning but for its phonetic similarity to “Nitroglycerin,” a volatile substance that explodes when overnudged yet can save the life of a heart patient.

Long story wrap: I’ve created something that exploits patterns of light mimicking shapes yoked with a pattern of words following a strict set of limitations to yield an experience like none other, though akin to some of the other things I’ve done along these lines. All of which may be horsecrap, or horsecrap about horsecrap, or Other. That’s for you, the Viewer and Thinker, to decide.