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MONDAY
ARTPOST
0102-2023
ISSN1918-6991
MONDAYARTPOST.COM
Columns by Artists and Writers
Bob Black / bq / Cem Turgay /
Fiona Smyth / Gary Michael Dault
/ Kai Chan / Kamelia Pezeshki/
Shelley Savor / Tamara Chatterjee
/ Wilson Tsang / Yam Lau
+ A Sunflower Memorandum
(Gary Michael Dault)
MONDAY ARTPOST published on Mondays. Columns by Artists and Writers. All Right Reserved. Published since 2002.
An Ocean and Pounds publication. ISSN 1918-6991. email to: mail@oceanpounds.com
DOUBLE DOUBLE
City Mirage Snow
http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/cms.html
The Painter The Photographer The Alchemist
http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ppa.html
The galloping jelly pink horse with pea green
spots
http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/phgs.html
Reality Irreality Augmented Reality
http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/rar.html
The Book The Reader The Keeper
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/dd202208.html
Windmills Fields and Marina
http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/07/wmf.html
Island Peninsula Cape
http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/05/blog-post.html
The Fence the Garden the Connoisseur
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/05/dd202205.html
Donkey camera and auld lang syne
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/02/
dd202202.html
The Fountain the Shop the Rhythmic Train
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/01/
dd202201.html
Hana Picnic Stones
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/04/dd202204.html
Terrain Little Red Riding Hood Rosetta
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/03/dd202203.html
Terrain Little Red Riding Hood Rosetta/ DOUBLE DOUBLE March edition 2022/ Kai Chan
Lee Ka-sing
CODA (2020)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/coda.html
Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ds.html
Eighty Two Photographs (2021)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/10/82p.html
Time Machine (2021)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/12/tm.html
Songs from the Acid-free Paper Box (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/sa.html
Songs from the Acid-free Paper Box
Museum edition (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/sab.html
“That Afternoon” on Mubi, a dialogue: Tsai
Ming Liang and Lee Kang-Sheng (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/ta.html
The Travelogue of a Bitter Melon (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/tbm.html
Swan House
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/swanhouse.html
Time Machine/ Lee Ka-sing
Holly Lee
Nine-Years (2020)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/02/ny.html
DOUBLE DOUBLE Box in a Valise a closecropped
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/05/ddb-cc.html
DOUBLE DOUBLE Box in a Valise on-site
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/05/ddb-os.html
Gary Michael Dault
Still Life Still A Book of Vessels (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/bv.html
The Book of The Poem (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/08/bp.html
The Nearby Faraway Small Paintings on
Cardboard (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/small-paintings-on-cardboard.html
Time Machine (2021) photographs by Lee
Ka-sing, Haiku by Gary Michael Dault
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/12/tm.html
Istanbul Postcards (2021)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/07/ip.html
Swan House (2021)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/swanhouse.html
Six Poems (2022)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/6p.html
The Air is like a Butterfly (2021)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/07/tab.html
Still Life Still A Book of Vessels/ Gary Michael Dault
Calendar Beauty Vintage Calendar posters
from China
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/03/cb.html
Kai Chan
Twenty Twenty An exhibition by Kai Chan
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/09/tt.html
2K-4.0 (Kai Chan + Lee Ka-sing)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/2k40.html
Shelley Savor
Mushrooms and Clouds but no Mushroom
Clouds
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/mcmc.html
Tomio Nitto
The Diary of Wonders
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/10/dw.html
Fiona Smyth
CHEEZ 456
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/05/c456.html
Libby Hague
Libby Hague Watercolours
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/lhw.html
The Diary of Wonders/ Tomio Nitto
Caffeine Reveries
Shelley Savor
Watching the End of the Year Drift Away
Poem a Week
Gary Michael Dault
Wet on the Snow
high in
a mountain
a crumpled
page
lies wet
on the snow
its message
dead
from the dark
in us
Travelling Palm
Snapshots
Tamara Chatterjee
USA (November, 2000) – We left Las Vegas,
spirits high with excitement looming as
we drove closer to the desertscape we had
envisioned and imagined for years. It never
occurred to me that our passage of desert
dreams would include several days of snow.
We finally arrived in Zion; as the sky turned.
The devastating winter flakes did indeed
impede our jaunt into The Narrows, but what
we did see was rather wondrous under a
blanket of snow.
ProTesT
Cem Turgay
ART LOGBOOK
Holly Lee
1. The «Turkestan Album» in color
https://iada-art.org/hhhh/turkestan-album-in-color
2. The Conquest of Central Asia through the Turkestan Album
https://voicesoncentralasia.org/the-conquest-of-central-asia-through-the-turkestan-album/
3. «The Way» Film-portrait of the artist Askhat Akhmedyarov*, directed by Evgeny Lumpov
(video 24:53)
https://iada-art.org/hhhh/turkestan-album-in-color
*Askhat Akhmedyarov was Born in 1965 in Uralsk, West Kazakhstan.
The Photograph
coordinated by
Kamelia Pezeshki
Birdseye maple by Kamelia Pezeshki
Leaving Taichung
Station
Bob Black
All poems move deathward
so too our hearts, so too our homes
so how to ask the shadow,
the comfort of the day, the door in sprungtime,
the contrition and calm of a muscular day when the wind is a wolf
and your body, exposed to the late-in-coming December expiration, decibels and creaks,
an old boat’s plank cuttles against the barnacles of the land’s desire
your body etherized against the loss of the press once against your side, she
scribbles in the margins scrambling for breath and meaning--.
you will someday seek the comfort of these things surely:
dusk’s dawning in spades and pried wide spaces left unlocked
the chipped corners of winter’s building groped at
whose voice chips away exhausted,
a red blanket defiant and remaining, stitched up with poems
those fearless verbs and unconjugated emotions:
count all of them in your waiting and inside the questions,
do not be afraid when fire falls from the sky.
Voyage, Voyager
“by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —….”--Mary Oliver
“All plots tend to move deathward.”—DeLillo
“не бояться, когда с неба падают пожары”—David Dector
How to ask the shadow,
when the moon comes barking, licking up and down the walls,
the loom of the bedsheets caked up in the hip of the room’s corner
the winter that brought you back from September
that winter that brought you back from the nation’s fear
all immaterial, ungoosed breath and a wintertide tongued toward the corner light, unchained
let it all go
let lee loaned lift
let long away amid arear, a of all
the sentences we wrote upon our wrists red and blue in the dark
the clauses choked from the claustrophobia of a broken heart, grandmother once feared
all these endless alphabets, the disdained alphas and the oneiric omegas
all that mattered, once
reimagined when you picked up the frozen stick in the creek, crawfishing backward
and our life swam upstream for the first time,
the pictographs that penciled our collar bones and inked the spines,
the alphabet and algebra of the lives we voyaged from there to here,
our passages and the passengers we once were, the glowering and the gathering
the flowers picked open with our canines and the maps incisored
voyaged along the riverbank in Yilan—
lavender, orchid, plum flowers, calla lilies and the daylilies upturned and drenched
the stories speak of this life, the recipes left dry and brown in the tea tin in the red cupboard:
so too our hearts
a door in Springtime:
so too of love
so too of hearts
so too the click of selves
so too you
so to you
do not be afraid when love falls from the sky.
So now
how to ask again
the shadow to seek and share what it knew, once
of what you have seen and what has been taken away
the children who climbed the emerald mountain by the baying sea:
their conviction rang out amid the nightjars and swifts
the remains and rickshaws along the old quarter’s street--
shall we count ourselves blessed
among what remains,
the tokens in the pockets, the coins in the seat’s sleeves,
the reflections that muddied in the night of the street mirror,
grandmother’s sprouting laugh, father’s cold sandwiches left aside on Christmas in wobby bar
the stories gathered on the plates in the reservoir of the wine glasses late at night
the welkin and distant laughter
atop and amid the abiding--
neither stanza nor firmament have words for that, or for this
the fishbones plucked from the filet set out for the cat,
gawking amid winter, the light and listeners listless in their nocturnal unraveling
organs of longing thawed, the last of your vows at night and the Earth’s orbit:
so too the click of our selves
so too you
so to our hearts
so to you
do not be afraid when love fails from the sky.
How to ask the shadow to cut away the wafer hurt,
cut away the heart ache, the twinge left in the joint,
loves ligature where the forlorn listens and the audience audits their languor
their longing heeding lullaby and lament
so too of love
so too our hearts
so too the click of our selves
so too you
so to you, then:
how?
To tell the shadow, this
do not be afraid when all falls love from the sky,
cut away the heart ache, cut away
while a door in Springtime opens
and all the poems come scattering, all language toward the deathward
yet we remain
far through the distance left, alive and liquid
far through the distance left, alive
the moon in the hinge of our hearts,
the tree and the pen line forever loquacious in the snow.
for: David Dector, Chiwan Choi and Robert Black, my father.
so too of love
so too of hearts
TANGENTS
Wilson Tsang
Ruth’s Raindrop
Open/Endedness
bq 不 清
轉 彎 抹 角
BEAT AROUND THE BUSH
他 們 說 你 仍 需 為 你 的 所 作 所 為
投 案 —— 那 些 錯 置 、 胡 言 與
亂 語 和 美 妙 的 邏 輯 謬 誤 發 生 於
市 郊 這 裡 是 為 什 麼 陽 光 有 其
意 義 。 我 們 皆 是 賦 予 別 人 的 文 物
They say you are still wanted for the crime you
Committed — those dislocations, mumbo
Jumbos and beautiful logical fallacies that took
Place here in the suburbs are why sunshine
Means something. We are all artifacts for others.
而 這 個 早 上 , 我 們 又 一 次 以 惹 人 歡 喜 的
微 笑 溝 通 卻 又 同 時 相 互 誤 解 像
誠 懇 和 順 理 成 章 的 成 語 。 置 於 櫃 中 的 記 憶
以 我 們 獨 有 的 坐 姿 與 說 話 方 式 陳 列
而 其 口 音 就 只 有 空 氣 中 的 氦 氣 能 夠 聽 懂
And this morning, we again communicated
With pleasing smiles but misled each other like
An honest eventual idiom. Cased memories are
On display in ways we sat and talked, in
Accents that only helium in the air understands.
為 什 麼 這 些 除 了 跟 你 和 我 們 也
息 息 相 關 呢 ? 河 川 蜿 蜒 如 一 條 不 持 久 的
蛇 吞 噬 沿 途 的 植 物 與
三 文 治 。 鬧 劇 與 悲 劇 相 遇 的
十 字 路 口 發 生 了 意 外
我 思 , 故 我 在 , 思 考
Why does this matter to not only you but
All of us? The river meanders like an impermanent
Snake swallowing plants and sandwiches
Along its way. There is an accident at the
Intersection, where farces and tragedies meet.
I think, therefore I am, thinking.
Greenwood
Kai Chan
Study
paper, wire
… 談 笑 間 …
Yam Lau
圓 滿 光 華 不 磨 瑩 , 掛 在 青 天 是 我 心
- 寒 山
CHEEZ
Fiona Smyth
From the Notebooks
(2010-2022)
Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2023
Number 160: An array of Recent Notebooks (with a slice of grand piano)
A Sunflower
Memorandum
Gary Michael Dault
Excerpted from DOUBLE DOUBLE
December issue 2022
A Sunflower
Memorandum
Gary Michael Dault
I was raised long ago in this earthly place,
But I do not care for my home.
I owe my very life to its bountiful moisture,
But the earth is not my sky.
----Muhammad Iqbal (translated from the Urdu by Mustansir Mir)
Here is the Sunflower or Helianthus Annuus: “helios” (sun) plus “anthos” (flower)
plus “annuus” (annual).
Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two is a piece of original work in the format of a book by Lee Ka-sing (2022),
inclusive of 176 photographs in sequence. Published by OCEAN POUNDS in 2022, 372 pages, 8x10 inch, hard
cover, and was released in both paperback and ebook editions. More information about the book visit this link -
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ds.html
The dry, attenuated almost plaintive lyricism of the sunflower, the noble-grotty
heliotropic sunflower (in that its flower its always facing the sun), its rudimentary
petals, powdery with a light-scooping, moisture-holding, almost monastic attentiveness
required to nurture, develop and enshrine its payload of close-packed, geodesically
arranged seeds of shining jet, lends the plant a more-than-usual protective, almost
maternal quality.
The plant’s relentlessly tall, rather rough-hewn stalk and its hairy, primordial leaves
seem unceasingly dedicated to the focused production and protection of this glistening
seed-bed core at the heart of each flower (called the plant’s “chapter”), its powerful
engine of perpetuity.
What of the sunflower’s look? Is the sunflower’s vigorous roughness and raggedness
the result of its three-metre quest for extraordinary height—in its search for ever
more light and ever more air? Is the plant coarsened by a weariness earned in the
fulfilment of its elaborate botanical program (fecund all the time)? Does a sunflower
ultimately begrudge its own skyscraper growth? Does it inevitably grow leggy and
emptied in the course of carefully generating the florets on its flattened central
receptacle and is it poignantly post-partum in the demanding production of its throng
of shiny black seeds—which are actually small dry fruits, apparently referred to as
“pipes”? Certainly, much is expected of the sunflower.
The sunflower keeps working hours. It is, for example, diurnal. That is to say,
it springs to vigorous botanical life during the day and, exhausted, grows gratefully
somnolent at night. Just like the rest of us.
Lee Ka-sing’s book, Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two, is beautiful and relentless,
attributes not often found together. The book is not a taxonomy, nor a life-cycle, nor
a mere progression of images. Ka-sing describes the book simply as “176 photos in
sequence.” But a sequence is not (or need not be) a narrative, not a life-story.
For me, Diary of a Sunflower is virtuoso work of photo-conceptualism, a protracted
stutter of still lifes that claims meaning—eloquent meaning—from repetition and
accumulation and, in the course of that amassing, repeatedly offer, from photo to photo,
subtle differences, tonal variants, the rustle of sub-events and nudging revelations.
The book is an essay, in the original sense of “essayer,” to try, to attempt.
Like many works of tireless, insinuating anatomization of a subject, nothing much
really seems to happen—at least not quickly or obviously: in the beginning there is
the flower, with its ragged, upstart petals. Sometimes the blossom hangs down, like
a sigh (p.16). Occasionally, the blossom is partly cradled in (and semi-occluded by)
a shrouding, protective leaf (p.52). Some of the photographs (p.58) are All Leaf and
nothing else. Page 144 offers a view of the sunflower in a sort of swoon or dying fall,
whereas, in contrast, p.158 gives the giant blossom the sudden, incoming power of a
fiery asteroid hurtling to earth. By p.220, there are serpentine stems and bulky leaves
weaving together into a bulwark of fortress growth, while suddenly, on p. 252, there a
momentary, inexplicable blackout—in which the mighty flower now hangs down into
the photograph as a silhouette—as if someone had pulled a plug.
But then a suite of brisk, steadfast blossoms follows (p.253ff), ending the book:
all passion spent, all faith restored, the seed-entrenched blooms baked, crisped,
windswept, the sunflower’s essential, eternalizing story.
In William Blake’s famous poem, “Ah! Sun-flower” (from his Songs of Experience,
1794), the rather Christ-like, sacrificial plant is “weary of time” and “countest the
steps of the sun,” its whole wracked being seeking “that sweet golden clime” where
“the traveler’s journey” comes finally to its end and finds fulfilment.
The other great sunflower poem is Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” from 1955.
In Ginsberg’s poem, the sunflower is a wreck: “…corolla of bleary spikes pushed
down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-betoothless
mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire
spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust
root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, Unholy
battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!....”
This is unforgettable writing, but Ginsberg’s betrayed, industrially-compromised
sunflower remains as remote from Lee Ka-sing’s as Blake’s touchingly martyred plant
is.
The sunflower of Ka-sing’s Diary of a Sunflower is neither protagonist nor victim.
Therein lies its majesty. The plant’s meaning comes in the fullness of time—like
breathing.
Gary Michael Dault
December 30, 2022
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