Lapis Lazuli (Artefact IV)

WUNDERKAMMER

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Artefact No: 4
Description: Ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli
Location: Sare-e-Sang, Badakhshan, Afghanistan
Age: 6000BC to Present

Ben Timberlake August 6, 2024

Blue is the color of civilization. It is the color of heaven.  

When the first prehistoric artists adorned the cave walls, they used the earth colors: reds,  browns, yellows, blacks. There were no blues, for the earth very rarely produces the color. Early peoples had no word for blue: it doesn’t appear in ancient Chinese stories, Icelandic Sagas, the Koran, or Sumerian myths. In the Odyssey, an epic with no shortage of opportunities to use the word, there are plenty of blacks and whites, a dozen reds, and several greens. As for the sea - Homer describes it as “wine-dark”.  

Philologist Lazarus Geiger analyzed a vast number of ancient texts and found that the words for colors show up in different languages in the same sequence: black and white, next red, then either yellow or green. Blue is always last, arriving with the first cities and the smelting of iron. Homer’s palette, at the end of the Bronze Age, sits neatly within this developmental scheme.  

The Egyptians had a word for blue, for they also had the tools of civilization, long-distance trade, and technology, that allowed them to seek out and harness the color. 6000 years ago, the very first blue they used - the true blue - was ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli (the ‘Stone of Heaven’), found in the Sar-e-Sang mines in northern Afghanistan. It was this blue that adorned the mask of Tutankhamun, and that Cleopatra wore, powdered, as eye-shadow.  

Lapis lazuli was so expensive that the Egyptians were driven to some of the earliest chemistry experiments - heating copper salts, sand and limestone - to create an ersatz  turquoise that was the world’s first synthetic pigment. The technology and recipe spread throughout the ancient world. The Romans had many words for different varieties of blue and combined Egyptian Blue with indigo to use on their frescoes. But none of these chemical creations or combinations could match the Afghan lapis for the brilliance of its blues. 

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“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him  a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural.”  - Wassily Kandinsky

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The Virgin in Prayer, Giovanni Battista Salvi da Saassoferrato, c.1645.

At the Council of Ephesus in 431AD, ultramarine received official blessing when it was  decided that it was the color of Mary, to venerate her as the Queen of Heaven. Since then it has adorned her robes and that of the angels. Ultramarine was the rarest and most exotic color. Its name - meaning ‘beyond the sea’ - first appeared in the 14th century, given by Italian traders who brought it from across the Mediterranean. Lapis Blue was more expensive than gold and was reserved for only the finest pieces done by the most gifted artists.  

It was the most expensive single cost in the whole of the Sistine Chapel and it is said that  Michelangelo left his painting The Entombment unfinished in protest that his patron wouldn’t pay for ultramarine. Raphael reserved the color for the final coat, preferring to  build the base layers of his blues from Azurite. Vermeer was a master of light but less good  at economics: he spent so much on the ultramarine that he left his wife and 11 children in debt when he died.  

Once again, mankind turned towards chemistry to search for a cheaper blue: in the early  1800s France’s Societé d’Encouragement offered a reward of 6000 Francs to a scientist who  could create a synthetic ultramarine. The result was ‘French Ultramarine’ a hyper-rich color that is still with us to this day. 

But 200 years later there is still a debate as to whether we have lost something. Alexander  Theroux in his essays The Primary Colors wrote “Old-fashioned blue, which had a dash  of yellow in it... now seems often incongruous against newer, staring, overly luminous eye killing shades”.  

Anthropometry: Princess Helena, Yves Klein, 1960.

True ultramarine is perfect because of its flaws. It contains traces of calcite, pyrite, flecks of  mica, that reflect and refract the light in a myriad of ways. Many artists have continued to  prize it for its shifting hues, the heterogeneity of the brushstrokes it creates, the feelings it  stirs in us. As Matisse said, ‘A certain blue penetrates the soul’.  

Yves Klein worshiped the color and used the synthetic version but he owed his inspiration to the real thing. Klein was born in Nice and grew up under the azure blue Provencal skies. At the age of nineteen he lay on the beach with his friends - the artist  Arman, and Claude Pascal, the composer - and they divided up their world: Arman chose  earth, Pascal words, while Klein asked for the sky which he then signed with his fingers. 

It was only when Klein later visited the Scrovegni Chapel and saw the ultramarine skies of  Giotto’s paintings did he understand how to achieve his calling. Klein devoted his brief  life to the color, he even patented International Klein Blue (IKB), a synthesis of his childhood skies and the stone of heaven itself.  

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

Film

Tyler Cowen Playlist

Tyler Cowen August 5, 2024

Here is an idiosyncratic list of some of my favorite classical performances. Some tasks drive you crazy if you think too long about them, and this is one of those — best that I did it quickly!

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Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.

Centering In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

The Three of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Love, the Three of Cups
Number: 3
Astrology: Mercury in Cancer
Qabalah: Binah of He

Chris Gabriel August 3, 2024

The Three of Cups is the card of emotional intimacy, and the act of pouring one's heart out. These are the emotional declarations that arise from a night of drinking as the heart overflows.

In Rider, we see three women making a toast, their cups are raised high. Each has a flowing dress and flowing hair, and they seem to be dancing in an orchard. The sky is blue, and they  are smiling.

In Thoth, we see three cups, where each seems to be formed like a cluster of grapes. Lotuses shower water into them, and they flow into one another. The cups are crimson, the lotuses yellow, and the ocean they sit upon is a deep blue. This card is Mercury in Cancer, thus the gold and blue.

In Marseille, we find the same structure as Thoth, one cup atop two, and flowers going between. Through Qabalah we find the phrase “The Understanding of the Queen”

The Understanding of the Queen is Abundance.

The astrological character of this card, Mercury in Cancer, or emotional communication is perfectly symbolized in Rider Waite, it is the card of “Girls Night”, when women get together to drink wine and talk. This is the great catharsis of relieving pressures that build up throughout life when we pour our hearts out into one another's cups and drink.

As this card belongs to the Queen, the idea of speaking one's heart tends to be seen as feminine. Though exemplified and illustrated as being the domain of women, it does not exclude male friendships and the drunken expressions of love that accompany it.

These are the emotions brought out by drink, whether regularly or rarely. The gender divide is essential to this being the Queen’s Understanding, as opposed to the King’s Understanding in the Three of Wands, which is daily virtue.

We should acknowledge that these gender divides and stereotypes are outdated and can be quite silly, but for the purposes of understanding the Tarot it is necessary to explore them.The Three of Wands, the masculine equivalent to this feminine card, is about the masculine drive for simplicity, as opposed to the feminine drive for abundance seen here. The Stoic King might take pride in sleeping on the floor, but the Queen knows a royal bed is more fitting.

Of course, this is not an abundance of stuff, but of emotion. Our feelings are a great store of value; they are not a hindrance or a flaw, but a brilliant source of  connection to our deepest truth. This card shows that the Queen understands how to utilize this wealth of emotion through engagement.

The division of elements and genders is not essentially biological, but spiritual, anyone can experience all aspects of the tarot. 

When pulling the Three of Cups we are asked to engage in emotional catharsis, to see the abundance we have before us, to let our hearts overflow. It can also signify a coming abundance, an event that will bring much emotion with it. Do not shy away from your heart, let it be abundant!

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Film

Numerology, Fibonacci, and Magic

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Albrecht Durer, Melencolia I featuring a magic numerology square. (1514)

Flora Knight August 1, 2024

Fibonacci sequences may not hold a prominent place in traditional magic or witchcraft, but their underlying principles are deeply intertwined with sacred geometry and the natural spirals of the universe. Two spiritual interpretations derived from the Fibonacci sequence are particularly noteworthy in our modern magical understandings, and particularly in the practice of Wicca: the concepts of twin flames and the number 33 sequence.

The spiral and golden rectangle of the Fibonacci sequence.

The idea of twin flames has long been embedded in magical traditions. Love, often symbolized by two flames, is a recurring theme in love spells and incantations, where lighting two candles side by side is believed to elevate love to a higher spiritual plane. This concept is represented by the number 11, a significant number in witchcraft. The Fibonacci sequence begins with 1 + 1, a numerical foundation that has been embraced by some modern Wicca sects as resonating with the essence of twin flames. 

Another intriguing use of the Fibonacci sequence involves starting the sequence with the number 33. The number 3 represents the mind, body, and spirit, so 33 symbolizes the spiritual realization of these elements. When the Fibonacci sequence begins with 33, it leads to important numbers such as 3, 6, and 9, which are said to represent the ascension of the universe. Mapping these numbers on a grid also forms a pentagram, a powerful symbol in Wicca.

The 12th number in this modified Fibonacci sequence is 432, a number of profound significance in modern Wicca. The frequency of 432 Hz resonates with the universe’s golden mean, Phi, and harmonizes various aspects of existence including light, time, space, matter, gravity, magnetism, biology, DNA, and consciousness. When our atoms and DNA resonate with this natural spiral pattern, our connection to nature is enhanced.

The number 432 also appears in the ratios of the sun, Earth, and moon, as well as in the precession of the equinoxes, the Great Pyramid of Egypt, Stonehenge, and the Sri Yantra, among other sacred sites. While Fibonacci sequences were not commonly used in traditional magic before the 20th century, we see their presence everywhere, and they are meaningful in explanations of sacred geometry.

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“This sequence, when viewed through a spiritual lens, reveals the underlying order and symmetry in nature, guiding us toward a deeper appreciation of the divine patterns that govern our existence.”

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But beyond just Fibonacci, the study of numbers reveals secrets of the world, and to understand the magical perspective of the world, we must understand how different numbers carry various symbolic meanings:

William F. Warren, Illustration from Paradise Found. (1885).

1: The universe; the source of all.
2: The Goddess and God; perfect duality; balance.
3: The Triple Goddess; lunar phases; the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of humanity.
4: The elements; spirits of the stones; winds; seasons.
5: The senses; the pentagram; the elements plus Akasha; a Goddess number.
7: The planets known to the ancients; the lunar phase; power; protection and magic.
8: The number of Sabbats; a number of the God.
9: A number of the Goddess.
11: The twin flames; the number of ethereal love.
13: The number of Esbats; a fortunate number.
15: A number of good fortune.
21: The number of Sabbats and Esbats in the Pagan year; a number of the Goddess.
28: A number of the Moon; a number 101 representing fertility.

The planets are numbered as follows in Wiccan numerology:

3: Saturn
7: Venus
4: Jupiter
8: Mercury
5: Mars
9: Moon
6: Sun

Numerology has been a significant aspect of witchcraft for nearly 3,000 years, with most numbers being assigned specific meanings by various magical traditions. The most consistent sacred numbers, linked to sacred geometry, are 4, 7, and 3. These numbers represent the universe, the earthly body, and the seven steps of ascension, respectively. 

The story of the Tower of Babel illustrates the ancient understanding of the universe through numbers. The tower's seven stages were each dedicated to a planet, with colors symbolizing their attributes. This concept was further refined by Pythagoras, who is said to have learned the mystical significance of numbers during his travels to Babylon.

The seven steps of the tower symbolize the stages of knowledge, from stones to fire, plants, animals, humans, the starry heavens, and finally, the angels. Ascending these steps represents the journey towards divine knowledge, culminating in the eighth degree, the threshold of God's heavenly dwelling. 

The Tower of Babel.

The square, though divided into seven, was respected as a mystical symbol. This reconciled the ancient fourfold view of the world with the seven heavens of later times, illustrating the harmony between earthly and cosmic orders.

In contemporary Wicca and broader spiritual practices, the exploration of numerology and Fibonacci sequences opens new pathways to understanding the universe and our place within it. These numerical patterns and sequences are not just abstract concepts; they reflect the intricate designs of nature and the cosmos. By integrating Fibonacci sequences into spiritual practices, modern Wiccans and seekers of wisdom can tap into a profound sense of unity and harmony with the natural world.

The Fibonacci sequence, with its origins in simple arithmetic, evolves into a complex and beautiful representation of life's interconnectedness. This sequence, when viewed through a spiritual lens, reveals the underlying order and symmetry in nature, guiding us toward a deeper appreciation of the divine patterns that govern our existence.

As we continue to explore and embrace these ancient and modern numerological insights, we can uncover new layers of meaning and connection. The study of numbers in any form invites us to see the world not just as a series of random events, but as a harmonious and purposeful tapestry. This perspective encourages a more profound spiritual journey, where every number, pattern, and sequence becomes a gateway to greater wisdom and enlightenment.

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Flora Knight is an occultist and historian.

Nate Silver

Pay Attention: Simone Weil (1909-1943) and the Art of Selflessness

“She was the patron saint of all outsiders.” – André Gide

Nicko Mroczkowski July 30, 2024

How do you live a good life? This deceptively simple question is the source of the entire Western philosophical tradition. A certain path was laid by Socrates and we’ve walked it since, yet all of its detours eventually take us back to the original mystery.

Philosophy, of course, is also about knowledge and truth, but these things are worth little without a purpose in sight. It’s hard to admit, but not all knowledge is valuable. Consider ‘Information’, an iconic prose poem by American writer David Ignatow, which makes this point perhaps more clearly than any piece of nonfiction could. Its unnamed narrator describes the pleasure they’ve taken in counting out each of the two-million-something leaves of a particular tree. Knowledge is gained, it’s close enough to the truth, but it offers nothing. 

Generous in Pardoning the Offenders, Francesco I d’Este. 1659.

The proper task of the philosopher has always been using knowledge to teach us how things should be; while  the question of how they are is best left to the scientists. Simone Weil, a real philosopher’s philosopher, understood this prompt, but took things further. For her, to be a philosopher is not just to contemplate and tell us about ‘the good’, but to strive to actually be good. As she writes in her notebooks, ‘philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc.) is exclusively an affair of action and practice’.

Her unusual and tragically brief life is testament to this conviction. Born into a fairly wealthy family of professionals in Paris, she began her philosophical education at the prestigious École normale supérieure, which produced such celebrity intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Henri Bergson. Yet from a young age, she was notorious for refusing the comforts of her privilege and campaigning for the less fortunate. When granted a year’s sabbatical from the comfortable secondary-school teaching post that she secured after her graduation, she opted to build cars as an unskilled female (and therefore especially exploited) labourer in factories across Paris.

These episodes and tendencies are as much a part of her philosophical legacy as her ideas. When it comes to Weil, we need to look not only at what she wrote, but also what she did. Though she never actually published a full-length book, probably she was both too modest and too busy, there is no shortage of writing from Weil. Each of her texts is really the product of her experiences and the different phases that scholars sort them into – Marxism, Platonism, Christian mysticism – are also descriptions of the different periods of her personal life.

This is all pretty weird for a philosopher in the Western tradition. Many of us have discussed the relationship between theory and practice – the distinction originates in the work of Plato, the very first of the greats – but few have practised their theories to the extent that Weil does. She herself speaks of the ‘pettiness’ of the philosophers in their personal lives. Not necessarily to their discredit, but the great philosophers of the West have largely been armchair contemplators, favouring intellectual philosophical labours over manual ones.

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“The best thing the individual can do is make themselves as small as possible; but also as large as all of creation.”

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Not so with Weil, clearly. She believed that if, like any deep thinker, you really pay attention to something, really, you’re also already involving yourself in it. For her, to truly pay attention is to bring about a modification of one’s very being: namely, its disappearance. To be absorbed in something enough that the self fades from view. We typically associate paying attention with an active mental strain, as if our brains were squinting, as they might be in a boring lecture. Weil argues that this has it the wrong way around. It’s not so much that we’re training our focus on something, but more that we’re keeping everything else back – our desires, hang-ups, interests, and momentary emotions – in order to make space for the thing we’re attending to. And the strain we feel is the impatience to get back to our own matters. This is why she refers to attention as a ‘negative effort’, or as essentially passive. The wordplay is clearer in French: attention is attente (waiting), and paying it means anticipating, in large and small ways, the delivery of something bigger than us. When we listen carefully to a close friend, for example, are we not really setting aside our own cares and hanging out for whatever it is they want to confide in us, on their terms, which have become ours?

The Eye of God, Georgiana Houghton. 1862.

This way of thinking about attention has some consequences that are, once again, pretty strange. If attention is an emptying-out of the self, then a morality based upon it is one of radical selflessness. In contrast, Western philosophy has almost always held the individual and their freedom as the basis for any code of conduct. There are three traditional ways of establishing this foundation: thinking about how one could make oneself an outstanding person (Aristotle); thinking about the responsibilities that come with being a free individual (Kant); and thinking about how one’s actions impact the world outside them (utilitarianism).

Weil’s ethics of attention sidesteps these problems altogether. The best thing the individual can do, for her, is make themselves as small as possible; but also as large as all of creation. To live for others is her ultimate maxim. It makes sense, I think, why Weil’s life went the way it did. She saw the temptations of comfort as things that would ground her in herself. They were obstacles to, rather than opportunities for, the diversity of experiences that belongs to goodness. And she sought out this latter diversity by practising solidarity with the oppressed in every available context.

She certainly took this moral project to the extremes. She died of a heart attack at age 34. According to her biographers, she felt that she had to subject herself to the same conditions that her comrades were suffering in occupied France, having herself left for London to protect her family, and so she effectively starved herself to death. It’s difficult to say exactly whether this is an example to follow, but her compassion for others borders on the saintly. And her lesson is equally difficult to ignore: the right kind of knowledge is knowledge of others, and the right kind of life uses this knowledge to make things better for everyone.

A good life begins with paying attention to the things outside us, without cynicism, bitterness, or fear. We can’t understand who we are in the world just by thinking about ourselves. It all seems so obvious when put like this: how could we know what being good is without meeting the world we’re being good to? Like Buddha himself, we need to go out there and see for ourselves. Ironically, this kind of openness to others only strengthens our sense of the uniqueness of each individual.

This, then, is Weil’s advice. Be good: listen, lose yourself in the world, and in doing so, belong to it.

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Nicko Mroczkowski

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

The Body Electric

The Ace of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Ace of Wands
Number: 1
Astrology: Fire
Qabalah: Kether of Yod

Chris Gabriel July 27, 2024

The Ace of Wands is the seed, the catalyst, and the Promethean spark that sets the suit of Wands aflame. It is the very idea of fire. Across the three decks, we have the image of a gnarled stick emanating energy.

In Marseille, a hand comes through a ruffled portal, holding a large stick, one can see it came from a tree for twigs have been cut, and rays of energy surround it.

In Rider, a gleaming hand comes forth from a cloud, above a mountain and stream, it holds a stick still covered in leaves.

In Thoth, we have a far more vibrant image, deep reds and oranges make up this stick, with flaming Yods forming the Tree of Life. This is essentially an image of the formation of the Suit of Wands, a singular fire and its tenfold manifestations.

The Ace of Wands is a brilliant card and the first of the Minor Arcana. Fire is both the first element of the Tetragrammaton and the first divine energy. When we see this card, we should think both of a robed wizard with his magic wand, and of a matchstick, a miniature mundane wand. With a simple matchstick, one can set fire to the world.

Prometheus was a Titan in Greek mythology, his name means “Foresight”. As he foresaw the Olympian victory over the Titans, he changed sides. Though a friend to Zeus, Prometheus liked mankind. After Zeus took fire away from man as a punishment, Prometheus returned the gift of Fire by way of a stick, a hollow fennel stalk that hid the fire within it. 

Man was given not simple material fire, but the very idea of conjuring it. Each stick holds the secret of fire, but only when the art of friction is applied. When we light a match, we utilize that divine gift - with wood and friction we once again create fire.

The Ace of Wands is more than a matchstick. To expand the idea more fully, we need only look down to the material body. The Wand can also be understood as the creative Phallus. Myth assures us that the divine mirrors the human, even our vulgarity: the Egyptians imagined their world had been formed by the masturbation of a lonely God, Atum.  

God uses tools for the sake of creation, or at least, God is understood through symbols we are able to comprehend, and thus the body of man reflects the creative ability of the divine.

Whether the Wand in question is a phallus, an engraved ceremonial staff, or a matchstick, its goal is to manifest Fire. As the story of Prometheus shows, fire is the only element man could not conjure on his own. We are made of earth, and we shape the Earth, made of water, and our mouths bring forth spit, made of air, and we breathe it. Fire, the electric energy that gives us life, was entirely out of our control until we were given it. Fire is the vital energy.

When you pull the Ace of Wands, you are given the Promethean flame. With the tiniest spark of Will, you may manifest a brilliant fire.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Film

Monuments to Gesture

Letter (page 1), from the portfolio "Letter and Indices to 24 Songs", 1974. Hanne Darbovan.

Isabelle Bucklow July 25, 2024

“To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning”¹

Last month we looked at the gesture of grasping (a tool), and how the chaine operatoire (an anthropological tool) sought to grasp the sequence of gestures that bring something into being. Yet, gesture still slipped between our fingers, evading language and method.The gesture ‘is always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language’, so said Agamben.² But this ‘not being able to figure out’ simultaneously contains the gesture of trying to figure out. And so if a gesture is always about figuring out, then attempts at definition and completion are futile, because gestures operate in the sphere of potentiality. If we are to inch closer to the nature of being-in-gesture, we must turn to its traces – those figurations of a once-present gesture.

Two Figures from Emersons Nature, c.1938. C.P. Cranch.

Writing is one of those traces left behind when a hand, an instrument, and a thought meet upon, and move across, a surface. For that writing to be ‘comprehensible’ there must also converge a whole cultural system of rules and conventions which the writer and reader share – the ‘language’ Agamben refers to. But even before that, before the lightness of the thought-just-thought hardens into meaning, think of Brian Eno and John Cale singing ‘up on a hill, as the day dissolves’, his ‘pencil turning moments into line.’³ These ‘lines’ could be a drawing or a song verse in cursive script, but just because  those moments and thoughts have  turned into line, that is not to say they have arrived at a stabilised signification: prior to being connected up to make identifiable characters and made ‘meaningful’ (by way of rules and conventions) , a line is quintessentially visual, an abstract, pure form.

Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) was a conceptual artist who, for most of her life, lived and worked in her family home in a suburb of Hamburg. Between 1966-68 she visited New York where she became good friends with Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, pioneering conceptual artists and thinkers of the day. New York was where Hanne ‘tried to find something that [she] could work on for [her] whole life, it was where [she] built [her] work.’⁴ That work consisted of handwritten grids and columns of dates, equations, scripts, and transcripts; looping ‘u’s repeated then crossed out resembling lacework woven into graph paper; images and pages collected and collaged. Despite the incomprehensibility of her lines and cryptic mathematical prose, and the self-admitted fact that ‘the writing fills the space as a drawing would [and] turns out to be aesthetic’, Darboven insisted she was ‘a writer first and a visual artist second.’⁵ Her work was obsessive, ascetic, encyclopedic, machinic, and mesmeric. It is pure structure, pure gesture. 

In a letter to Sol LeWitt, Hanne said of her work ‘I write but I describe nothing’. Seemingly a paradoxical endeavour, there is logic to this illogic. Writing is the act (and actualisation) of thinking, while language is the description of it. Writing need not entail expressive language, instead writing can simply reproduce writing. Clarice Lispector wrote, in her Discovering the World, ‘In order to write the only study required is the act of writing itself.’⁶ And Darboven did study the act: in the monastic tradition of the biblical scribe, she would copy passages from Goethe, Brecht, Diderot, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gertrude Stein, Rilke, Sartre – retracing their studious concentration and hand movements line by line. As art-historian Briony Fer has observed, what Darboven embarked on was ‘a ritual re-enactment [...] of writing.’⁷ Driven to access the gesture, the activity, of writing itself..

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“The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive”

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Darboven’s Studenbuch (Book of Hours, 1991) is, as critic Donald Kusptit wrote, ‘a diary of gestures that unfurled [...] around the exhibition space.’⁸ In this sprawling work of yellow A4 pages filled with undulating ‘u’s, time – centuries of it – is experienced as monumental, and gestural, duration. Flusser reminds us ‘[the gesture of] writing is one of the ways thought becomes phenomenal’ but writing too makes time phenomenal. The ‘u’s used are the German equivalent of English ampersands: ‘and-and-and’, ad infinitum. Time and gesture flow, undifferentiated, through waves of this interconnected symbol. I summon Clarice Lispector again who wrote ‘I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time.’⁹ Darboven’s ongoing ‘and-and-and’ seeks not to represent time, but mark time spent, time lived and exhaustively worked through, on and on. 

R.M. Rilke - Das Studenbuch Leo Castelli, 1987. Hanne Darboven.

Marks in space and on surfaces indeed ‘mark time’, like the prophetic prisoner who inscribes tallies on the wall,or like I, in my teenage diary, who would log looks from crushes and endless days until summer holidays. The original Book of Hours similarly inscribed time onto surface, the liturgical text designating a temporal cycle of devotions and recitals across the eight canonical hours of the day. If, as Sam Lewitt surmised, ‘Darboven’s life project was to record and reconfigure the possibilities for expressing the movement of time as writing’, I’d add that her project recorded the movement of gesture in time through writing.¹⁰ 

Darboven’s proclivity toward copying, transcribing and repetition were not, as many have seen them, self-effacing acts of estrangement. In spending her time writing, Darboven was simultaneously writing herself into the work. In a 1989 interview with writer Isabelle Graw, Darboven explained she was ‘rewriting things by hand in order to convey [herself] through the mediation of the experience.’¹¹ The resulting work is entirely subjective, her identity being both invented and inscribed through the act of writing. ‘The act of writing’, Lispector said,  ‘is the inevitable result of my being alive.’¹² 

Writing is the trace of a once present gesture, a mark in space – announcing presence, thought, time – created by an action in space. The gesture of writing, a monument to moments of living. 

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¹ Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 8
² Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000) 59
³ Brian Eno and John Cale, “Spinning Away”, Wrong Way Up (Opal/Warner Bros, 1990)
⁴ Darboven quoted in Miriam Schoofs, “Hanne Darboven”, Flash Art (Online, 14th November, 2014)
⁵ Hanne Darboven and Coosje Van Bruggen, “TODAY CROSSED OUT, A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM”, Artforum, vol. 25, no.5 (1988)
⁶ Clarice Lispector, Discovering the World, trans. by Giovanni Ponteiro (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992) 135
⁷ Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art after Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 205
⁸ Donald Kuspit, “Hanne Darboven”, Artforum, vol.32, no.2 (1993)
⁹ Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life, trans. by Johnny Lorenz (New York: New Directions, 2012) 7
¹⁰ Sam Lewitt in Stephen Hoban, Kelly Kivland, Katherine Atkins (eds.) Artists on Hanne Darboven (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2016) 62
¹¹ See Graw in Miriam Schoofs, Joâo Fernandes (eds.),The Order of Time and Things: The Home-Studio of Hanne Darboven (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2014) 23
¹²  Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life, 7

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Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal. 

Es Devlin

Film

Geometry in the Garden Pt. 3

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Hanbe Garden, Mirei Shigemori 1970.

Peter Newman July 23, 2024

In the west of Japan, the Hanbe Garden is one of Shigemori’s less-known works and was completed in 1970 when he was seventy-four years old. It contains an intricately structured pathway that loops through the garden. Along the way are monoliths, inclines, vantage points, bridges, fish ponds, stepping stones, islands and a waterfall. On a plateau, some checkered paving from which a line of diagonal squares leads further.  

A pathway is the opposite of a grid. In culture, the path is one of the most prevailing life metaphors. The spatialization of a story, as we move from one event to the next. Walking a path in a garden is living  in a frame within a frame, a fractal of time on a much larger journey. Like most rock gardens, time moves slower here. The sense of everything in its right place feels generous and liberating. All has been taken care of — you are free to wander.   

Mitaki Temple. Mirei Shigemori 1965

Shigemori created another garden a few years earlier in 1965 at the Mitaki Temple,  built on a hillside on the other side of the city, not far from the centre. Among dense foliage, a two-tiered waterfall cascades down to a glade and into a pond, across which substantial stone bridges are placed. Rising from the water is a symmetrical rock triangle. Watching over the garden is a group of standing stones, like prehistoric elders. The garden is completely timeless, it feels like  it could have been sleeping for a thousand years, or much longer. That it seems so is magical. 

Between the Hakone Mountains and overlooking Sagami Bay, is the Enoura Observatory created by Hiroshi Sugimoto, which opened in 2017. Founded on the principle that Japanese culture is rooted in the art of living in harmony with nature, it aims to reconnect visually and mentally with the oldest of human memories. Enoura features a range of architectural styles from medieval to contemporary, much of it aligned with the movement of the sun. 

There is a recreation of a ruined Roman amphitheatre, encircling a stage with the sea as a backdrop. The stage is made from optical glass supported by a wooden lattice, appearing to the audience as to be floating on water. Once a year it will be naturally illuminated from beneath, as the sun enters the glass planks which point out to sea. Close by, a narrow walkway juts out from the landscape towards the horizon, as if a springboard into the void. 

Bamboo Grove. Enora Observatory. Hiroshi Sugimoto 2017

The gallery is built with Oya stone, the same textured volcanic rock used by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The space is 100 metres long and 100 metres above the sea. Built in line with the axis of the sun, on the summer solstice light will travel gradually across the space from one end to the other, as the day begins. 

There are many wonders here. A strolling garden through the landscape, in which a bamboo grove stands in perfect contrast to the horizontal seascapes, for which the artist is famous. A cabin filled with fossils from under the sea. A tea pavilion, with an optical glass rock on which to step through the square nijiriguchi door, a feature of traditional teahouses that require visitors to crawl childlike in humility if they wish to enter. At dawn on the spring and autumn equinoxes, light shines through this door and the glass step glints in the sun. 

Winter Solstice Light-Worship Tunnel. Enora Observatory. Hiroshi Sugimoto 2017

One of the most dramatic features of Enoura is the 70-metre tunnel pathway, which cuts through the ground beneath the gallery, emerging on the other side. On the winter solstice, light passes through the tunnel to illuminate a circular stone, in a ring of seating rocks. The solstice is an event celebrated by ancient cultures around the world, as a turning point in the cycle of death and rebirth. The tunnel is dark and made of steel, with a resting space lit by a light well halfway through. As you reach the other side, you come to a rectangular portal framing a view of the ocean and sky. ‘The sea, as people in ancient times would have seen it’, according to the artist. A perspective of time that naturally lends itself to reflections on mortality and the brevity of any single lifetime. ‘Yes, we disappear, but we don’t disappear into a world where there is nothing. My feeling is we return to a place where our life force is kept in storage for a while.’ says Sugimoto.

‘…she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains…’¹

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All photography by Peter Newman.
¹ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865 Lewis Caroll.

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Peter Newman is an artist. There are two permanent installations of his Skystation works in London, at Nine Elms and Canary Wharf.   

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