Ma Water; a pictorial reality

As I'm still working on the next blog entry (started back in february!) I shall at least post this information, which is quite important to me...


I will be presenting my final presentation of the project on the 26th of April in Morrice Hall Theatre at 8pm. You can find your way there by checking out Morrice Hall on the McGill website. You can also follow these instructions, as first given to me by Sophie on my first visit there... it worked!
Walk up McTavish street (indeed you'll have to walk, no cars permitted) until you reach the SSMU building on the left, on your right should be gates (black and big), go through the gates and follow the building on the left, to go around it. There will be a door. The theatre, also known as Tuesday Night Café, is there on the left (once inside). *memory help: tuesday night café on tuesday ;)
The fee is 1$... that is because you give up buying one bottle of water to take part in this presentation ;) 
Still waiting for confirmations, but live music may be... Sophie Price is a confirmed guest artist :)


RSVP to make my life easier at postalpoems@gmail.com
Thank you so much



Three laughing men by the Tiger stream represent Confusianist, Taoist and Buddhist monks that were so enthralled in their discussions that they passed a river full of tigers without realizing until after the fact. (XII century)


The title of the presentation is Ma Water; a pictorial reality.


Why? I like the connotation of frenglish in Ma Water, mon eau, my water... the difficulty in figuring whether a word is feminine or masculine when first learning french, and... that the element of water in taoism is a feminine principle...
The meaning is also in regards to the japanese concept of Ma, which is sometimes associated with negative space, the space in between the forms. As water is formless, contained in form. This form is the presentation, the stats used, the chosen references, the theatre, your bodies, my body... in this sense it is pictorial. While seeing a few lectures from Robert Irwin, I wrote down a few guiding principles of his talk. One of them was about abstraction, how every artist made their work as real as possible, that everything exists in a set of relation, and those relations make our pictorial reality.


See President's Lecture: Robert Irwin on Abstraction


So this work is about my water pictorial reality... Because the evaluation of this presentation is under the plant science departement,  I made a special effort to have clarity in the form, in the thoughts, in the logic. Nevertheless, I have found myself eager to allow the feminine waters of the unconscious speak their own true wisdom within, and around the form.


A bit what I am trying to do with this blog too. How to blend the personnal knowledge, what Robert Irwin describes as "watching something through our feelings and taking the meaning out", the experience of understanding, and re-birthing it with a different form, richer with my personnal experience. I have found this quite arduous.


Let me go on with more of Robert Irwin's wisdom :)
Actually, Piet Mondrian inspired him with the concept that everything exists in a set of relations. I smiled when I heard this, simply because I remember as a young teen feeling so clear that "everything is connected". Now, 20 years later, I still think this... or should I say, now I know this, every step, rendering it more clear.
In his lecture, Irwin also spoke of our limitations (form) as being the nature of our lives, hence our fascination for transcendance (formless).


"No room for form with love this strong" Rumi

Painting by Piet Mondrian View from the dunes with beach and piers (1909)


"Phenomenal beauty lies also in the fact that shadows cast on it." Robert Irwin


Robert Irwin also spoke a while on how the "I" in "I perceive" isn't given... The concept that I can move is because the world doesn't... Have you ever been in a train, perceived you were moving, but in fact were not? A strange feeling that relates to our changing perceptions of the world, and as an "artist", one is continually engaged in re-examining how the world functions (I like to, and wouldn't limit it to "artist"). This hability, in the end, can create a pictoral reality, which to some may seem abstract, but to me is, as Irwin calls it, "a desert of pure feeling". Together, nourrishing a collective body of knowledge, we create sophisticated art, as a form.

"The critical difference [between artist and scientist] is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. In other words, he uses himself as the measure. Whereas the scientist measures out of an external logic process and makes his decision finally on whether it fits that process in terms of various external abstract measures." Robert Irwin

Buckwalter, M. 2010. Composing while dancing; an improviser's companion. The University of Wisconsin Press. 231 pages