Sunday, February 9, 2014

Bent, Uneven and in Heaven – Discovering liberation from the aesthetics of flat, strait, and clean.

by Shawn King

Corners, lines, grids: our culture is so attached to them. Take them away, and what is to notice about the resulting change in our consciousness? Our minds have evolved to seek out and focus our attention on the exception, the outlier, that which is different and out of place. But out-of-places-ness can only arise when a matrix of repetitiveness or sameness fills our experience. Lay a tile grid and a single misaligned or cracked tile will torment you. Walk into a typical room and the eye jumps to the dark corners, the pockets of wasted space that gather spiders and dust. Corners brood over us because they won’t give back any light finding its way into them. We use fuss and force to create uniformity and strait-ness, only to have any deviation or mark magnified a hundredfold, dressed as a villain by the order surrounding it. But once we have finally removed every flaw, then there is nothing to hold our attention, evoking in us either boredom or restlessness.

But when our minds encounter that which is curved, asymmetrical, shaped but not overly disciplined, our thoughts organize it all into relationships among components, and what results is a playground for our attention, inviting in the same way a great work of abstract art or especially magical natural object or landscape can be. (Images from the Ecodome, superadobe earthen dome, Cal Earth.)


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