THE FIRST STONE GIRL by ED BAKER

Ed Baker is a "Poet. Artist. Neolithics. Olde Bonze." -- to wit, click on that link to see images and information of an active, restless artist mind.  One of his major achievements is "Stone Girl" and we are fortunate that Leafe Press has published Stone Girl E-Pic, about which another poet, Conrad DiDiodato, says:

"...a remarkable visual and minimalist poem, in which Baker's drawings are integrated with, and indeed, form part of, the poem itself. Baker is 'in that stream of & flows with' the Objectivist and the Black Mountain poets, and is part of a circle of poets that includes Cid Corman and Theodore Enslin.

"...here is work that manages to retain all the elements and yet make contemporary Vispo look very empty, leaving the reader to look for the essentials of a more tradition-based visual poetry: a minimalism that matters and the most purely 'concrete' art that ever illustrated text. Writing that cuts to the bone, iconoclastic and original, and a 'Stone Girl' art sprung out of the lines themselves. Writing and art on Baker's terms."   ["Vispo" is short for "visual poetry"]

This is all to say that SitWithMoi is delighted and honored to receive a mini-book that Ed Baker titles The First Stone Girl and dates as 2005/2013.  It is cleverly designed, consisting of a 12-inch strip of paper folded six times to create a 2" x 2" accordion-style book ... with the French Flaps that I love!

Here's what it looks when it's pulled out:

It's a work that is very clear.  It speaks well on its own behalf.  So I'm going to post the images page by page below, with the captions being the text accompanying its image (I particularly like the second image below where a checkmark becomes a "returning gull"):

just like this Walking Mind

sudden breeze // returning gull

giving up all of this she is

some rock thinking Kiss-Kiss!

no words necessary

And so the book would seem to end with this sign-off by Ed:

But our prolific Ed can't seem to help himself.  He has to go on!  To continue -- on the back of the book!

Here are those "post script" images:

Stone Girl pointing it out --again

in her eyes  yes!  yes!  yes!

same landscape cutting through

just her in this too-busy mind

making no-sense make sense --to me

The inability to leave a page blank.  Especially when the matter at hand is "Stone Girl" which has consumed Ed's attention for years. The inability to leave a page blank is entirely appropriate here -- I might not trust the obsession otherwise.

At times, art surfaces best when they compel their surfacings.  They are the result of compulsion -- a helplessness against what is making itself manifested, e.g. "just her in this too-busy mind." You see it in Ed Baker's work.  In this mini-book, I mostly see it in his inability to leave the back pages blank.  Ed Baker's art, therefore, arises from a source one can trust because the source is so powerful the artist was helpless against its impetus. The Dude can draw -- his line is impeccable.  But that wouldn't matter as much if the compulsion wasn't there, pushing his hand.

It's also worth linking to this article first published by ARTNews in 1952 by Him-Who-Concocted-The-Phrase-"Action-Painting": http://myhomepage.ferris.edu/~norcrosa/ModernArtWebsite/Pages/ArticleLinks/rosenbergActionPtg.pdf

Which is to say, Ed's art-making is also process-driven (my term, but perhaps not his) in that the making of his art is concurrent with the searching for whatever he is searching for.  In textual terms (as he's a poet, too), it just means that he'll have figured out what he wanted to say after he reads the poem he will have just written.  (This approach is the opposite, of course, of a poet/artist having an epiphany and then trying to write a poem manifesting it... versus having the making be part of the epiphany-making.  That's clear, right? she winks at y'all...) Perhaps you can glean what I'm trying to say in this other example of Ed's art:

That's not the kind of work that is pre-planned, or pre-ordained before its actualization.  Here's a photo below of the artist in his studio, and one might say the same thing of the large painting on the right:

There's much info on Ed Baker in the internet; Google him for some fantabulous information -- this LINK TO IMAGES alone is interesting!

So, where shall we shelve this Stone Girl?  Well, why not on Mary Scheller's chaise lounge!  (You might see next to the chair a crate sidetable featuring another publication, 5 SKETCHES, something Moi edited for Ed and which will be the subject of a future post).  Thanks, Ed, for this:

[As with all images on this blog, you can click on them to enlarge.]

SITTING LOW TOWARDS EARTHLY ROOTS

Babaylan poet-scholar Leny M. Strobel sends over an image of a chair from the Cordillera, Philippines:

I love it-- would someone please make Moi a miniature version? :)

I appreciate this chair for many reasons (its sculptural element, the innate spirit that lives within (not all objects carry a spirit), its simple but welcoming presence, etc.).  But the element that continues to strike me is how it reflects its culture through its form: by being squat, it makes the sitter sit low to the ground and that's significant.  To lazily quote from the Cordillera Wikipedia page:

Cordillerans view land as the source of life, an integral part of their cultural identity, that traces its origins from the land. Land is considered sacred and tribal land can neither be owned nor sold, but it nurtured to produce life for the communal benefit. For Cordillerans, the loss of their land, or their alienation from it, can be equivalent to taking their lives. It is because of this belief that Cordillerans now and in the past have willingly shed blood to defend their domain from colonisers, and have fought for the right to remain on their land.

A higher positioning of the seat would make the sitter farther away from the floor, the land.  So the design bespeaks a marvelous fit between Form and Content.

Having said that, the above is just my take on the chair as I look at it and reflect on what I know of the Cordillera (I grew up as a child partly in Baguio, part of the Cordillera).  If someone actually knows about chair design and how this Cordiller chair was made and/or designed in this manner, please do let me know (GalateaTen@aol.com).

Thanks, Leny!

A CHAIR FOR A HEART

Yes, I have the token Playdoh project by my son.  He built me -- okay, he built it for a class project but gave it to Moi! -- what I consider to be a Chair For A Heart:

The cradle is Playdoh, the cushion is from cotton balls and the heart is papier-mache.  Here are the individual components:

Art Criticism Alert: The "chair" appropriately is a cradle rather than the conventional chair because of the subject matter's requirement of care, intimacy and love.  Equally appropriate, the cradle must come with an attached hand (brown Playdoh) to hold on to the heart.  The heart, interestingly, is not out of Playdoh but from the more fragile papier-mache material because the heart is, uh, fragile.  And that is your art criticism du jour; I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed blathering it.

Nota Bene: for some real art criticism albeit still in non-conventional ways (because Moi is non-conventional), feel free to check out my books MY ROMANCE or, in short story form, BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS (the latter if you're feeling frisky). 

Synchronistically, my son was eating a pear the other day and he carved this out:

My son, my one and only son: he is my undisputed Heart...