Nine Doughnuts – “The circle, is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.” – Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky wrote in his essay Concerning the spiritual in art “Religion, in the sense of awe, is present in all true art.” For Kandinsky, painting was above all deeply spiritual (“geistig“). He was highly influenced by the sensorial properties of colour and sound, and sought to visualize these properties through increasingly abstract compositions.

As a painter, Kandinsky saw himself as a prophetic figure, whose mission was to translate the most profound human emotions into universally comprehensible symbols and visual sensations. He saw music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art, and strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings.

During his tenure at the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Kandinsky refined his earlier, romantic philosophies of intuitive painting toward a more reasoned construction of composition through geometrical elements.

Nine Doughnuts, the first lithograph of the series, makes reference to Kandinsky’s widely reproduced painting  “Farbstudie: Quadrate mit konzentirischen Ringen” (“Colour Study: Squares with Concentric Circles”) although at first glance, it is perhaps more akin to Kandinsky’s monochromatic work ‘Thirty’,1937, in which the picture plane is divided into thirty squares, each displaying various forms of mark making. As the first in a series of four lithographs, 9 Doughnuts is itself a study, a rehearsal if you like, in the ‘spirit’ of Kandinsky. At once an exercise – devoid of colour as an emotional trigger – in signifier and signified and, also representing a test – exploring the behaviour of the (litho) stone to a variety of media.

The signifier here is the doughnut, (torus, or concentric rings) repeated nine times. What is signified can shift in each example. For instance one doughnut bears the inscription “let’s go Dutch”, another fades towards the liminal realm. A constant signified in all however, is the circle as symbolic of the universal concept of wholeness and a combination of opposites; the solid defines the void and vice versa.

“The relationships in art are not necessarily ones of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of meaning.”  – Kandinsky, Concerning the spiritual in art, 1911.

Nine Doughnuts is not only sympathetic to Kandinsky and Expressionism’s tendency toward the spiritual but also with the later language oriented works of Smithson (Spiral Jetty), Johns (Zero Nine) and the stereomatic reproductions of Warhol. The doughnut references a span in human history that dates from the sun worship at the dawn of man to the butterscotch fudge of Krispy Kreme and beyond to theoretical physics’  ‘wormhole’ and ‘donut’ theories.

Most of all 9 Doughnuts will look as good in your living-room as Kandinsky’s Colour Study: Squares with Concentric Circles any day of the week.

AM

Keep it Sidereal – The fourth of a series of four lithographs to be produced with Hole Editions in 2010, Keep it Sidereal references sources as diverse as the practice of geomancy; apocryphal documents and texts, creation myths and Romancing The Stone – the 1984 American action-adventure romantic comedy by Robert Zemeckis, starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito. An array of meanings is presented here formally, in a symmetrical fashion suggestive of the armorial bearings of a secret society. This arrangement creates a framework for multiple readings which conflate to cancel one another out ‘ad absurdum’ as in a superficial t-shirt design found on the rails of Primark.

Geomancy (Greek: γεωμαντεία, “earth divination”) is a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand. The most prevalent form of divinatory geomancy involves interpreting a series of 16 figures formed by a randomized process that involves recursion followed by analyzing them, often augmented with astrological interpretations.

Once practiced by people from all social classes, it was one of the most popular forms of divination throughout Africa and Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Books and treatises on geomancy were published up until the 17th century when most occult traditions fell out of popularity. Geomancy has recently seen a new interest through the works of John Michael Greer and other practitioners, with more mainstream occult circles practicing and teaching geomancy.

To the lay person, Geomancy may imply someone who summons stones as necromancy implies summoning the dead. As the lithographer attempts to summon an image from the pure, sensitive Bavarian lime stone surface with a gentle caress; the accumulation of greasy marks that helps him realise that he himself is miasma; his body an agent of the greasy mark. Many craftsmen believe that working with stone helps them to connect with their ancestors.

According to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, many religions use a stone to signify God or to mark a place of worship. One example of this is the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca, known as God’s right hand on earth. The Kaaba marked the location where the sacred world intersected with the profane, and the embedded Black Stone was a further symbol of this as an object that linked heaven and earth.

Art, for Macari, is a form of self contained belief system, which like any religion provides its adherents with a way of viewing the world, a set of sacred objects and texts, and a host of saintly masters and disciplines, and sacred spaces within which to pay homage to their chosen objects of adoration. To make art, and to appreciate it, are acts of faith, rather than acts of reason or common sense. The value of art is immaterial and cannot be measured: art creates a distinction between mere cost and value.

‘Pantocrator’ is a word describing the representation of Christ as ‘almighty’, or ‘all powerful’ in early art. It is a word from the Greek for ‘all’ and ‘strength’.

The Centaur Chiron in Greek mythology was a teacher of Achilles who lived on Mount Pelion in Thessaly. The Centaurs were violent drunks but also healers. Greco-Roman poets write of Pegasus’ ascent to heaven after his birth and his obeisance to Zeus, king of the gods, who instructed him to bring lightning and thunder from Olympus. Chiron is depicted here in Vaya Con Dios kicking Pegasus ‘in the nuts’ the resulting blow has caused Zeus’s lightning bolts to spill from their equestrian luggage and become employed as a comics convention to emphasise an impact.

The Spanish ‘Vaya con dios’ literally translates as ‘Go with God’, a phrase often uttered by Sureños – Hispanic ‘gangbangers’ first seen in South California – shortly before dispatching a rival gang member. It ironically has come to mean its opposite, i.e. ‘go to hell’.

Hole Editions Lithography

From p. 164, Yabukoji, in The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, Translated by Philip B. Yampolsky, Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1971.

The sound in the case of this  drawing is, “the sound of one viewer clapping”.