NEW SAVANNA: Tossing Paint Binds the World, or, Green Chapel in Jersey City

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Tossing Paint Binds the World, or, Green Chapel in Jersey City

Yet he saw some way off what seemed like a mound,
A hillock high and broad, hard by the water,
Where the stream fell in foam down the face of the steep
And bubbled as if it boiled on its bed below.
The knight urges his horse, and heads for the knoll;
Leaps lightly to earth; loops well the rein
Of his steed to a stout branch, and stations him there.
He strides straight to the mound, strolls all about,
Much wondering what it was, but no whit the wiser;
It had a hole at one end, and on either side,
And hollow all within, like some old cave,
Or a crevice of an old crag—he could not discern
aright.

—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Urban Design Studio, as I’ve been calling it, isn’t quite so undifferentiated from its surroundings as is the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but it aspires to that condition. Here’s a shot of the North Wall:

The foliage all but disappears into the blue and yellow patterning on the wall, or is it emergence? Taking a closer look, could that be the Green Knight himself we see?

Let’s move around to the West Wall. Here we see a typical undifferentiated palimpsest of multiple interacting asynchronous causal agents, that is, different writers, different times, messin’ ‘round:

Note the purplish color to the left, and the leafy-form green spotting to the left. Now focus on the arcing black streak at the center, bottom half, how it moves down the wall, across a cinder block, and onto the deck slab:

Now you can see it, the black streak connects the wall to the cinder block to the deck. And not only the black, the yellow as well. What we’ve got is a spontaneous multi-agent Pollock spread across a complex 3D surface. Abstract expressionism never had it so good!

One more time, the money shot:

Is all this intentional? Well, I figure that the physical motions that caused the paint to be here and there where it, dried up, now is, yes those motions are intentional. Were the exact landing zones intended? Exact? No. But more or less, generally intended, I would suppose so. Hmmm, I wonder. What would happen if I just tossed this paint at the wall? Wheeeee! And there you have it, flying black streak of paint binds wall, cinderblock and deck into a fractured unity. Intention.

No one person intended all of this. Each bit, there by intention. Call it the kami, the spirit of the site intended it.

Let’s go inside and examine a purple case. Here’s a rear view, backlit, looking out through a hole in the West Wall:

There’s our purple streak, just to the right of center:

I urge you to look closely at this tableau, the small lady bug painting behind the cinder block at the lower left, moving up the diagonal beam, weathered, with the small painting attached near the top of the photo, then look to the right, a purple streak moving down, over one painting, then a plywood board, then another painting.