Poet, painter, engraver and prophet, William Blake (1727-1857) is arguably the greatest artist Britain ever produced, whose singular talents in both words and pictures were neglected for almost a century after his death. For Blake, a man’s vision was the one and only great fact about him. Poetry, art and religion were not separate activities, but all extensions of man’s greatest quality: his imagination. For an artist, the only question that interested Blake was: Do you see?

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

The task Blake set out for himself was not to just depict a scene, but the representation of vision. For Blake, man’s ‘Original Sin’ was the losing of his visionary faculty to focus instead on more practical matters. The word mysticism originates from the ancient Greek, literally – to shut the eyes. In Blake, here is the artist-mystic, someone who claimed to have visions his whole life. ‘Seeing’ for Blake was not simply using the eyes, but the brain as well. Blake set out to use discipline and will-power on his senses to attempt to see further and deeper than any artist before him.

To see a world in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794.

In his prophetic books, Blake juxtaposed images and text in a way not done since the Middle Ages. His imagery is populated with great winged beasts, angels, demons, ethereal women, children at play, and imposing Yahwehs with long white beards. Blake synthesized many different myths and religious histories, both Christian and pagan, into psychodramas where the main action often would take place within the mind of a single individual. His creatures glow with a spectral, inner phosphorus, summoned up it would seem, directly from heaven or hell itself.

Rimbaud said: “The poet should be a visionary; one should make oneself a visionary . . .” This was Blake’s credo. Despite Blake’s unique gifts, he felt that the visionary faculty was something naturally occurring in all men. ‘The Man of Genius’ or those he called ‘The Men of Imagination’ were only individuals who had spent time and effort disciplining the visionary faculty.

Vision was not something you were born with, or somehow ‘caught’ by accident like the measles, but rather the result of a long, hard discipline of the senses, the forcing of the imagination in new directions. For Blake, everyone could see a world in a grain of sand – but only if they chose to see it. British author Colin Wilson deemed this essentially two different ways of seeing the world, that, can simply be called ‘The Inspired’ and ‘The Uninspired.’ The artist’s task is to connect the two. In Blake, imagination was “the real and eternal world”- of which the everyday “vegetable universe” was but just a faint shadow. Blake’s was not the reality of the retina. His pictures were a superior reality. Blake conceptualized the imagination – both in verse and image – as active, dynamic and most importantly, volitional. He makes almost all other artists seem like victims of impotent aspirations in comparison.

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

As Blake puts it: ‘And I know that This World is a World of Imagination & Vision… to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”

Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series of novels such as Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs often make use of Blakean imagery. In Michael Mann’s underrated thriller Manhunter (1986), William Peterson’s knack for seeing as killers do leads him to Francis Dollarhyde, the ‘Tooth Fairy’ killer. Kidnapping an unscrupulous tabloid reporter, Dollarhyde shows his bound victim slides of William Blake to terrify him. On the screen he shows him Blake’s The Great Red Dragon – the combined fears of all of mankind: the Prince of Darkness himself, from The Book of Revelations.

Do you see? Do you see? Dollarhyde asks. For Blake, the answer was definitely a yes.   •

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Re/Mix! Innovators, Appropriators & Copyright Criminals A New Course by John D’Agostino
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Cornell Remixes Bronzino: Joseph Cornell, Medici Princess, 1952-54,  Angelo Bronzino, Portrait of Medici Girl, 1542.			Oft-times an overlooked & misunderstood tradition, the art of sampling historical source material into new works of art and music is a rewarding, sophisticated and ingenious practice rife with departures, ruptures & contradictory possibilities.
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Joseph Cornell, Medici Boy, 1943. Wood box construction using elements from Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy, ca. 1500.			Raw material for artists to re-combine can be found literally anywhere, from archaic media, vinyl records, and trash, to photographs or finished works like painting. Challenging, subverting, co-opting, even re-inventing mediums, the Re-Mix in assemblage art, collage, Hip Hop music, photography and more is a tour de force of creative practice in the 21st century, encompassing an entire spectrum of originality (or lack thereof), from one-dimensional Appropriators, to Hackers, cover artists and mashups, to entirely new, emergent digital artforms.Featured artists include: Joseph Cornell, Romare Bearden, Yves Klein, Vik Muniz, Thomas Ruff, John Stezaker, Louis Comfort Tiffany, E.J. Bellocq, Dr. Lakra, Idris Khan, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Wangechi Mutu, Marcel Duchamp and Kehinde Wiley, among many others.
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			Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Acrylic on canvas, using an original publicity still of Marilyn Monroe from the film Niagara, 1953.
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Louis Comfort Tiffany, At the New Circus, ca. 1894. Favrile stained glass, using Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s watercolor At the Nouveau Cirque, 1892.			Re/Mix! will employ the art of sample-based Hip Hop as the quintessential paradigm for the visual artist. From the very first DJ’s of the South Bronx employing turntables and a mixer, sampling in Hip Hop music is the foundation of the genre. Much like their visual counterparts, its most innovative practitioners exemplify a selective, three-dimensional and highly sophisticated synthesis of old material into new, from producers like Prince Paul, DJ Premier and Da Beatminerz, to acts like De La Soul or Beastie Boys, to those that sample their own sounds, such as Portishead.
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Enrique Gomez de Molina, Rhinoplasty, 2010. Hybrid taxidermy sculpture, using jewel beetle wings, peacock feathers and buffalo horn.         John Stezaker, He II, 2008. Photo collage, using old film portraits.			Course Schedule Week 1: The Innovators Featured Artists: Joseph Cornell · Andy Warhol · Romare Bearden · Kurt Schwitters · Yves Klein · Laszlo Moholy-Nagy · Louis Comfort Tiffany · John Stezaker   Week 2: The Appropriators Featured Artists: Roy Lichtenstein · Marcel Broodthaers ·Sherrie Levine · Claes Oldenburg · Cindy Sherman · Vik Muniz · Jeff Koons · Banksy   Week 3: Copyright Criminals Featured Artists: Danger Mouse · Shepard Fairey · Da Beatminerz · Richard Prince ·Prince Paul · Hank Willis Thomas · Beastie Boys · Cory Arcangel   Week 4: The Bricoleurs Featured Artists: Jacques de La Villegle · Max Ernst · Wangechi Mutu · Conrad Marca-Relli · Robert Rauschenberg · Robert Heinecken · Marcel Duchamp · Dr. Lakra   Week 5: The Hackers Featured Artists: Alvin Langdon Coburn · Thomas Ruff · Adam Fuss · Walead Beshty · Lucas Samaras · Wade Guyton ·  Marco Breuer
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This course is currently in development for venues TBA 2013. For more information, please contact John D’Agostino.

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“You just go on your nerve.”

-Frank O’Hara

John D’Agostino, Corinthians, 2010.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

John D’Agostino, Loadstone Virtue, 2010.

Dreams of A Dark Abyss

The dreams of a dark abyss are a chosen hardship, like a poem.

 To enter into such a place is to engage in a poetic kind of thinking. Because the clear demarcations and road signs are all gone, only an imaginative, strenuous and curious state of mind will suffice to traverse the way. An idea of rigor pervades all poetic thinking.

Rigor is a measure of a content’s quality. It is the experience of “hard things” that are engaging and rewarding. But it is more than just a question of simply challenging or difficult content. Rather, rigorous content is personally and emotionally challenging. So too is poetry.

Poetry, as a relentless, mutli-faceted and demanding medium, has much in common with the traditions of the visual arts, most especially that of abstraction. Both abstraction and poetry are complex, ambiguous and provocative. Both have high expectations, and impossible personal standards. In both, the subject learns to “read” the poem/picture as he experiences it. The learner accepts some responsibility for his learning, and he must work to understand it. To not only elaborate on the material’s ever present suggestions, but sometimes even to add his own content to it. To complete it.

Rigor mortis, literally translated, is the stiffness of the body after death. It signifies a kind of severity, an exhaustive, point of no return, if you will. Both poetry and abstraction are similarly severe and extreme forms of their respective domains. However, perhaps ‘rigor vitae’ may be more appropriate here, as both disclipines engage a re-vivifying and re-enegergizing state of mind. The reader/viewer accepts the challenge to decode and understand the mysterious work laid before him, and is more alive for the effort.

The poetic image revels in its illusory nature. It exults in the impossible. A poetry of the impossible is a release from the constriction of normal things, an attempt to smash through the construction of the literal world. The poet’s use of words is quite different, just as the artist’s use of his imagery is different. The words are the same, the paint or ink or charcoal may be the same, but their values are different. Poeticization changes the value of well known things. They become musicalized, irretrievably transformed. The poet loves his words for their strangeness and mystery, not just for their obvious meanings.

The phenomenon of the poetic image is the phenomena of freedom. Excercise is often described as “rigorous,” and perhaps this is apt, since the rigorous image is similarly an excercise of the imagination. Mental muscles are flexed, stretched and tested. Freedom is not merely given, it must be exercised. Great images are often a blend of memory and legend. They have a history, and a pre-history. Poetic imagery engages this history, by summoning and evoking the history of images within each viewer, who must rely on the entire wealth of his mental records just to make sense of it.

Poetry, in guise as either word or image, retains a greater competition of surprises than perhaps any other discipline. It implies the decision to change the function of language, just as abstraction seeks to change the function of the literal, representational or identifiable image. What is found in either realm is that which is often passed over in daily life: the miraculous, the unknown, the undreamt of.

In the dead linen in cupboards

I seek the supernatural

- Joseph Rouffange

John D’Agostino, Entropy’s Blade, 2010.

Poetic images revel in Chinese whispers and communication breakdowns. What gets lost in the translation from person to person is often the most interesting. Imposing new meanings, misusing words, or using them for other purposes, maybe even cross purposes – is the metier of poetry. It sees the world as an iceberg: there is more below the surface of the water than above. These are not words or pictures, but maybe, ghosts.

Gaston Bachelard felt that the poetic image has a dynamic uniquely its own. That it is fundamentally variational. To read or see the poetic is to daydream. As J.P. Jouve called it, “thought enamored of the unknown.” All of Bachelard’s work, and not just his seminal The Poetics of Spaces, is in fact an eloquent and daring defense of poetry itself, which has had its many detractors, and may never win popularity contests. Surrealist Andre Breton called this animosity to the poetic the “hate of the marvelous” – arguing that the hostility towards such works was motivated more by fear and misunderstanding than by righteous contempt. This text first appeared as part of the paper The Abyss Gazes Also: The Pains and Pleasures of Seeing in the Dark by John D’Agostino, 2012.
View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here. Daydreaming is important. It is not just lazyness. It is sophisticated, three dimensional investigation. What the poet does is essentially create a trap for dreamers. As for me, Bachelard says, “I let myself be caught.”   •

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Promiscuous Visions:

The Hackers At The Heart of Photography

A New Course by John D’Agostino

-Captain Crunch, legendary Phone Phreaker.

Man Ray, Rayograph, 1925.

Matthew Brandt, From the series Rivers, Lakes & Reservoirs, 2010. C-Print soaked in source water.

John Chiara, 8th at Hooper, 2003. Dye Destruction Photograph.

Kim Keever, River Keeper, 2003. C-Print made with fishtank diorama.

Eileen Quinlan, Yellow Goya, 2007. Folded chromogenic paper.

Course Schedule

Week 1: Dégredés

Featured Artists:

Joseph Nicephore Niecpe · Marco Breuer · Lillian Bassman · E.J. Bellocq Curtis Mann · Edmund Teske  · Jacques Villeglé · John Chiara · Chris McCaw

Week 2: The Threat of Abstraction

Featured Artists:

Man Ray · Jaroslav Rossler · Barbara Kasten ·Roger Catherineau · Laszlo Moholy-Nagy · Walead Beshty · Aaron Siskind · Frederick Sommer · Eileen Quinlan

Week 3: Printers, Painters & Pictorialists

Featured Artists:

Mario Giacomelli · Jan Saudek · Alvin Langdon Coburn · Wade Guyton · Lucas Samaras · Robert Demachy · Matthew Brandt · Matt Saunders · Henry Peach Robinson

Week 4: Fire & Ice

Featured Artists:

Adam Fuss · Susan Derges · Yves Klein ·Hiroshi Sugimoto · Jorma Puranen · Kim Keever ·Wilson Bentley · Dupreez & Jones · Christopher Colville

Week 5: Digitalis Hybrida

Featured Artists:

Thomas Ruff · Jason Salavon · Andreas Gursky ·Idris Khan · Andreas Gefeller · Carter Mull ·Richard Misrach · Aziz + Cucher · Loretta Lux

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WORDS BY:     John D’Agostino
WORKS:      www.EmpireofGlass.com

  “The sun is God.”   – J.M.W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard The Dead & Dying, 1840. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

Take Turner’s The Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840). The picture is a maelstrom of blood, light, retribution and redemption. The picture was inspired by the real horrors of the slave trade, and would became a rallying cry for the abolitionist movement. Slave ship captains would throw men, women and children overboard to waiting sharks when the ship’s human cargo was dying faster than anticipated. They were insured for “losses at sea” but not “dead on arrival.” Turner’s vision is a horrific tour de force of visual havoc: chained legs and arms flailing in a watery deluge of bloody light and apocalypse. Turner’s critic and main champion, John Ruskin eventually sold the painting. He said it was just too painful to look at every day in his dining room.

Not quite gentlemanly British art, this was. Some artists, like Delacroix, disapproved of Turner’s methods: his filthy hands and dirty fingernails (one which he kept long on purpose to paint with like a “claw”), that bore the marks of a painter who quite literally was unafraid to wallow in the muck. One story goes that a young apprentice who came to Turner was cruelly turned away, when his lily-white, clean hands were demanded for inspection. “You’re no artist!” Turner angrily proclaimed.

Turner’s scenes were not so much scenes, as much as regions of the imagination. Light was his chief protagonist, no longer relegated to being some bit player in the chorus. His figures, in contrast, were often puny little creatures, engulfed in it all. The originator, the sun, was for Turner, the living core of all of nature. Passersby were often frightened by how Turner would stare endlessly into the sun, fearing for his eyesight. Didn’t it hurt? No, he said, not any more than like looking into a candle. As the apocryphal story goes, Turner’s dying words on his deathbed were: “The sun is god.”

Turner realized that the sublime was a verb, as in, to sublime – to elevate, to raise upward. His imagery does not come from the eye. It comes from inside the eye.

Painting from behind the eyeball, as it were.  •

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