Revelation in art: Fast Forward 1998
In this article I discuss the relation between some 'meccano' or 'nuts-and-bolts' poetry which I wrote in London in 1997 and found the reflex of in this exhibition in Bergen in 1998. I have later discovered how closely the four sonnets relate to the essential in the story about Lenin's death such as it relates to my person. If there is no element of direct borrowing from the poems in the making of the exhibition, it is something close to a miracle. The relation to the 'revelation in matter' is interesting. The article (with not much changes here) was written in 2004.
Jacob's sheepskin technology was about transferring geometric patterns to sheepskin of the young by 'gim-söy' telepathy. The story from Genesis is about the magic of the phonological alphabet and how that can shape the world. It is the basis for the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
In "Time and the sonnet", I have presented an algorithm for sonnet analysis which in fact can be automated for making computers write probably quite impressive sonnets. The algorithm is based on fundamental cognitive properties - and it explains the sonnet form that was developed from the late medieval times onwards, and many of the other poetic forms from that time. It is also that algorithm which seems to be contained in the 'keys to heaven' and much of the number mysticism in the holocaust.
In Easter 1997 (April/March) in London, I wrote four sonnets (alled 'The Black Sun') on basis of this algorithm. It is based on permutation of elements in the columns, and the permutations can be applied recursively in various forms and levels. For the ones I wrote in 1997, it applied to lines of the sonnet, words and even phonology - with 16 lines, 64 words and 256 phonemes in each sonnet, of which 2 lines, 8 words and 32 phonemes would be tacit at the end. These levels were intertwined and would to a very large extent govern the contents of the sonnets as soon as one had settled on a few semantic and phonological features. The interesting part of this study was to see how far a sonnet could be generated from a few basic concepts. The poetic part of the job was to find the right concepts and map them with skill onto the phonological grid of the sonnet. I allowed for displacement of features within certain limits, such as within lines or sections of the sonnet, which leaves a little poetic freedom - not much but nevertheless a little. Among the four sonnets, the first sonnet went reasonably well off and was based on observations I had done in the preceding days. The next three sonnets would have their forms determined by the first. The result was not bad since the first sonnet went off reasonably well, but it can be seen that the sonnets deteriorate in poetic quality towards the end, for reasons of narrow grids and poetic exhaustion. It is about squeezing in a little poetry in a grid that is so hardpacked that you can hardly move the pen. In principle, the form is the same as the medieval sonnet was, only much more constrained. With computer tools, I suppose the new sonnetist will have about the same freedom as the medieval poet with pen and paper had. However, with only pen and paper and 256 phonemes with internal feature structure that must be matched with corresponding semantic features, it is quite a job to write such a poem while wriggling the poetic meaning into the narrow matrix of features. The resulting sonnet comes out constrained mainly by what is intended to be universals of cognition. The effect would be comparable to the discoveries which the Jews made when they had discovered the magic of the first alphabet.
I sent the poems to copyright registration in Washington in 1997, appended to the end of another document. Maybe they were not discovered there. I also sent them to Olga Sedakova, since there were certain links to her presence in London at that time (cp. also 'old gave his life' for the idea of Lenin as Jesus Christ). This was when Clinton was president.
However that be, the four sonnets received a remarkably precise representation in the exhibition 'Fast Forward' that opened in Hordaland Kunstnersenter in Bergen in the autumn 1998. The imitation of my sonnets is so precise that it cannot be explained in any other ways than 'transference of geometric pattern' by either telepathy or by swindle. The issue is interesting in either case - also since the exhibition seems to be a very clear answer to the comparable study I made of the exhibition 'Brudd' in Bergen 1996 and which I analyzed in my book "The theatre of the heart" after having received thorough confirmation that there was no knowledge of the elegy behind the composition of the exhibition. The question, as always with such 'sheepskin telepathy', is whether it would be fraud or not. Typically, one cannot determine on that beyond the words of the curators.
The issue with 'Fast Forward' is whether the organizers/jury had got a copy of my sonnets forwarded for creating a 'sheepskin telepathy' that could be pirated by political interesters out for pirating the concept of copyright beyond Beer Hall telepathy (leaving me behind with a nazi Beer Hall project), or whether the jury and the submitting artists had been tacitly guided by their inner voices to the interesting result. Clearly, if this is 'coincidences' and not fraud, the form of the exhibition relative to my sonnets should be interesting. The four sonnets had been attached to the end of the 'Pilot study for a poetic science' 1997 that I had sent to copyright registration in Washington: It was this study that contained the application which I had sent to the research council and which had been rejected by them in 1997 as well as in 1998, and in fact I got the third rejection letter from the research council for this project I think in the same morning (or perhaps a day or two before) as they came and drove me to the psychiatric hospital in 1999, on JFK assassination date 22 November. I had included the Pilot Study 1997 as a fourth element in my 5-volume sheepskin dissertation which I submitted to the university of Bergen in early December 1997, and which was rejected in letter dated in the very end of July 1998. This could have been a framework of some relevance for the story, for which reason it should be mentioned here.
Martin Larsson at Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen was the main organizer for this exhibition "Fast Forward" (the title of which, according to him, had been suggested already in January / February 1998). He sent an invitation to the students at the Schools for Art and Design in Bergen, in Stockholm (Sweden) and in Kolding (Denmark) on 24 April 1998. (I notice the relevance of 'Cole' in Kolding, but there are probably not many such relevant schools in Denmark). The invitation was sent to the schools and to some students' representatives. One should ideally assume that the invitation text contained no data which could indicate the contents of the sonnets - but there is of course a possible source of guiding for selection of material for submission in the wording of the invitation text, even if that could not be very exact unless the sonnets simply were printed there. 27 May was the last day of application. There were, according to the data I have got from Larsson, approximately 40 applicants with some 100 works altogether, submitted on slides. The number of submitted works is important when considering the correlations. Around the middle of June, Larsson juryed the submitted works together with another three jury members: Anne Bårdsgård, Birgit Brühl and Gunnar Thorsen, all in Bergen. These met in June and selected 31 works (one third of the submitted works) from 16 artists. It is clear that all members of the jury participated in the selection process - which consequently was not the product of a single mind. The process of selection from creation of work to exhibition was maximally distributed - on the students who made their artworks, on the submissions by application for participation, and on the selection process in the jury. This is a quite important point when evaluating the correlations with my unpublished sonnets (which the students could not have come across as published matter). The selection was settled on 26 June, when the plan for the exhibition was finished and the result of the selection was communicated to the students who had submitted works. The exhibition opened on 30 October 1998.
In the mean time, in the late summer or early autumn, which was after the jruy had finished the selection and communicated their decisions to the students, but it was probably before the works were arranged serially for the exhibition halls, I had self-published to legal deposit libraries the 2nd edition of "The Pilot" from Bergen, containing the four sonnets in "The Black Sun", but I don't think I had sent it to anybody in Norway. I sent it to the Poetry Library in London and to the legal deposit libraries in England. The Poetry Library returned the two copies I had sent to them because, as they said, the book of prose was too far outside the scope of the library.
When I came to see the exhibition in November, I found that it was a good parallel to my sonnets in The Black Sun. Every artwork in the exhibition had a quite precise correlate in the sonnets, and most fragments of the sonnets had precise correlates in the exhibition. Even the linear order in the sonnets was maintained. I talked with Larsson and two of the other curators, and all of them confirmed to me that they had no knowledge at all of the sonnets. I also spoke with a couple of students who had participated (Mydland and Wright), neither of whom had knowledge of the poems and they said they had not been guided to their selection.
The result is a mystery indeed if these people tell the truth.
I here present first the four sonnets and then the exhibition and its mapping onto the sonnets.
The Black Sun
I here traverse the exhibition in the order which is suggested by the corresponding sonnet fragments. There were three rooms: 1) The crypt under the house, 2) the main exhibition hall on the ground floor, and 3) the smaller room upstairs. The artworks were distributed among these rooms in a surprisingly orderly way relative to my sonnets:
The crypt:
The artwork elements are here enumerated according to the order of the corresponding elements in the sonnets. As is seen, there is a remarkably precise serial ordering in the exhibition which makes it follow the four sonnets from beginning to end, from the crypt through the ground floor up to the first floor, linearily through the rooms.
A rough sketch of the sonnet-exhibition mapping:
Sonnet 1: The crypt and one half of the main room.
The sequence starts in the CRYPT under the exhibition hall. This is a cave-like small and dark hall, giving the slightly gloomy impression which can make you look for water running down the stone walls (without stalactites and stalagmites, though). The mood of the place is perhaps the reason for the name of it.
The photos from the exhibition are my own.
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TITLE: No title
DESCRIPTION: A series of pictures on small oval clay, glass and porcellain tablets hung on the wall (without titles). Various motives - six of them on the left-hand wall have eyes. Most of the other ones are portraits of various kinds, reminiscent of old black-and-white photos, as memories from a remote time.
SONNET SEGMENT - from the 1st sonnet:
NAME: The name of the artist is in fact quite similar to the sonnet segment. If we do not count the 'soul' which belongs to the second line, the sum total of features in the first line adds almost exactly up to the sum total of features in the artist's name. This is not surprising, considering the formal structure of the sonnet.
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TITLE: Tilstedeværelse (= "Presence")
DESCRIPTION: A heap of white ceramic objects, in the shape of rounded stones with slits.
SONNET SEGMENT: soul better left alone
DISCUSSION: The title is perhaps enough in itself. If it had been 'absence', it would be after it was left alone, but as it is, it is 'present'. As I see it, this is a heap of those fourth elements in groups of fours which are omitted from a triadic significational structure, a kind of 'lekta'.
NAME: Just as for the previous element, the name contains almost exactly the set of phonological features which are found in the sonnet line. The only discrepancy left over is that [b] in the sonnet must map onto [mm] in the name - which is not much.
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TITLE: Absurdum I, II, III
DESCRIPTION: Three artworks on pedestals, container/cup-shaped objects which seem to have been subjected to pressure and have given in to it and been left partly in pieces.
SONNET SEGMENT:
to taste the bitter cup
DISCUSSION: This correlation is perhaps not optimal unless we read "to test the 'biter kopp'", where 'biter kopp' means 'pieces cup' or 'cup of pieces'. All these 'cups' seem to have been subjected to pressure from some unidentified object - 'some hitherto unknown force', as they say in those journals.
NAME: The name 'Sabine Popp' is so close to 'biter kopp' that we can take it as the rationale behind the three artworks. It gives of the sonnet segment: "To test Sabine Popp / of what is still unknown" - still a student, perhaps, with exam coming up. It may be observed also that the title 'Absurdum' is not so far from the artist's name. I have also considered replacing 'bitter' with 'sweeter'.
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TITLE: The Brick
DESCRIPTION: A white sofa-like piece of furniture (a sort of ottoman), two seats with cushions, without arms or back.
SONNET SEGMENT: Here's your sofa
DISCUSSION: The correlation is as optimal as can be. As I entered the exhibition hall without any expectations about recognizing my own texts, the first thing I saw was the sofa and immediately a voice said in my mind: "Here's your sofa...". Then the rest came by itself. Sitting on the sofa, one has a view to all the teabags on the floor, which gives way to the next element, number 5 - as if to make the discovery of the correlations as easy as possible.
NAME: It is reasonable short from 'Samir Fält' to '(here's) your sofa' - only [mit] is left in the name and [ou] in the sonnet segment.
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TITLE: Without title
DESCRIPTION: Two artworks, closely connected. The first hangs from the ceiling - it is a curtain in the form of a net in squares of some ethereal half-transparent material. The other artwork, or other half of the same aertwork, is lying on the floor underneath and in front of the curtain - it is of similar squareforms made out of used teabags sewn together in squares. In the centre on the floor, the squares lie ordered together as in the curtain hanging from the ceiling, but on the margins, the squares are detached from the ordered pattern and lie unordered and scattered around it, as if some principle of chaos has been imposed from outside. Or as if some story has fallen out from heaven.
SONNET SEGMENT: Tidy up / the filthy bag.
DISCUSSION: The relation between the two works gives the key here: The teabag pattern on the floor is a representation of the curtain of ordered squares hanging from the ceiling if one tidies up the filthy teabags and re-arrange them back into the ordered pattern they seem to have had initially. These two untitled works are therefore optimal representations of the sonnet lines, in particular when paired with the sofa in the preceding element. It is so precise that it cannot be better.
NAME: The sum of phonological features in the artist's name is very close to the sum of features in the sonnet segment. What is left after a pairing of these two is [eæ] in the sonnet segment as against [uu] in the name. In addition, three vocalic segments had to be paired against two taps [iii] --> [rrl], which can pass if these count as vocalic. A small distance, in other words.
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TITLE: "Souvenir", "Minne" (= 'memory')
DESCRIPTION: Two ceramic sculptures, mostly with mosaic surface. Both of them are attached with iron rods some centimeters over the mosaic-decorated blocks on the floor. Both sculptures have an atmosphere of memories about them. In particular the righthand one, which seems to be a man fallen into remembrances of something or somebody lost in the past.
SONNET SEGMENT:
The best
DISCUSSION: The feeling of remote time and reverential presence in the collective memory which these sculptures radiate represent well the line 'the best / of common sense piety'.
NAME: No immediate mapping from name to segment, but some (not prominent) similarity between name and titles.
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TITLE: Pakkerosetter (= decorative 'gift rosettas')
DESCRIPTION: A circle of 11 'gift rosettas' (as it is called in Norwegian) to be attached to well-wrapped gifts to decorate them. Each 'rosetta' is made of twisted / curled band of some sort, such as can be used for wrapping Christmas presents.
SONNET SEGMENT: Should horse or tiny pup
DISCUSSION: It is a little difficult to separate this element from the next if a semantic interpretation be sought: We must then think of this collar as something for a little pup who gets breathing difficulties under the weight of the collar. The reason is rather to be sought in the phonology:
NAME: 'horse or tiny pup' is extremely close to 'Caroline Grohp'. In fact only some minor adjustments must be made to reach the form. Move [h] up to [k] and move the [r] to [p-r-op], then shift [p] up to [g], and a few others. What is left of "horse or tiny pup" after some scrambling of the features is in fact "rose Caroline Grohp". Extremely precise. The movement of the relevant features resembles the sort of 'poetic licence' I admitted for myself when writing the sonnets.
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TITLE: No title (or just 'neck collar')
DESCRIPTION: A neck collar made of small pointed bottle-shaped glass objects in a collar form, spread out as to protect the inside of the collar, somewhat like barbed wire, but here of fragile glass.
SONNET SEGMENT: pant with poorer breast
DISCUSSION: If a semantic interpretation is sought, we can think of this fragile pointed glass as something which can make even a horse pant with poorer breast if it does not exhibit sufficient caution when wearing it. However, the interpretation is probably best when phono-logical even here:
NAME: "With poorer breast" is very close to the artist's name "Sissi Westerberg". Counting salient features, the two strings are virtually identical. What is left is 'pant': Now this is the word for empty bottles in Norwegian, those you can be bring back to the shop to have some return money for them. That is exactly what the neck collar is made of: Small 'pant' bottles of glass in a circle. Hence: 'Pant' Sissi Westerberg.
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TITLE: Quickblock
DESCRIPTION: A necklace made of silver. A silver chain made out of links.
SONNET SEGMENT: when the 'if' of life
DISCUSSION: As a silver chain made out of links, it consequently is not stronger than its weakest link. A quite good representation of "the if of 'life'". Also, the 'if' is embedded into the 'life'. Also, silver = s-IF-er, hence 'l-IF-e'.
NAME: [ida fors] --> [if a dors] --> [if ov laif]. Also, the 'silver' adds to this as if to adjust the interpretation.
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TITLE: ???
DESCRIPTION: Two bracelets, as it seems, of interlaced metal wire (as a coat of mail), with (as it seems) plastic elements attached. On one of them the plastic elements hang down, on the other, they point out in all directions. The downhanging one looks perhaps somewhat like a representation of element 7 (Grohp's 'rosettas') when compared with the other as a representation of element 8 (Westerberg's necklace).
SONNET SEGMENT: worsens?
DISCUSSION: This is the enigmatic element - no artist name, no title given in the exhibition. The fact that it is exhibited without name of artist or title of the work is telling of the weak role of the corresponding word in the sonnet. In fact I have many times considered changing this sonnet form (which I have made myself) wherein the eleventh line rhymes with the first, and rather let these two lines - 1 and 11 - be left unrhymed in the general form (giving ABCB CDEB CDF DED rather than ABCB CDEB CDA DED). There have been many cases where I have seen that this is a more appropriate solution. That also opens for a more optimistic end to this line as well: Not "worsens" rhyming with "person's", but something more positive ('is growing stronger' sounds good). I have speculated if this nice piece of art has something to do with the artist for the somewhat simpler artwork in element 8, but know nothing about this.
NAME: No artist name or title was given on the artwork, but 'Petra Schou' from Stockholm was suggested to me by Martin Larsson. 'Bedra show' means 'to cheat the show'. It is here about the 'turning' element. I recognize the name of Petter (Enok) Skau (Jakobsen) from Dröbak in this 'Petra Schou' from 'Stockholm' - in which case the 'turning' position of the element would be about 'Doebbels'. For the hypothesis that the exhibition could be due to fraud, this is in fact a supportive argument - unless Larsson is good at mind-reading and took it down there and then when I asked him. However, 'to cheat the show' with a 'turning' could also be the intended content of this work. 'Half-truths' = 'halv-sannheter' = 'halsband-heter' = 'necklace-name'.
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TITLE: No title given (just 'paper collar')
DESCRIPTION: Three collars made out of the little strip of paper you tear off from the top of the juice box along the perforated line when you open it. She has collected a lot of these and made three collars out of them. The three collars are in three colours: Red, green and blue.
SONNET SEGMENT: You can't fail the test / drawn up
DISCUSSION: I read the sonnet text: "You can't feel the taste drawn up...". In fact, this makes it swap with element 3 (Popp's three crushed cups), where 'taste' had to be read as 'test'. Here it is reversed: 'Test' should be read 'taste'. This makes for a mutual relationship between these two elements. One can read this way: You can't feel the taste drawn up - because the cup failed the test.
NAME: The role of the name seems less prominent here.
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TITLE: No title but '3 stools'
DESCRIPTION: Three stools with three legs each. The round surface of the stools is slightly convex, and the three metal legs are slanting slightly outwards. They are placed on the floor right underneath the three paper collars on the wall. The size of the round stool seats is approximately the size of the paper collars in the previous element.
SONNET SEGMENT: should the society / guard off your holy quest.
DISCUSSION: There is something about the sonnet segment which calls for association with 'get off, you hole-lick guest!', and this can perhaps be recognized in the stools by the upwards-curving convex surface of the seat. The close connection between the juice-box-strip-collars and the three stools also calls for the observation that since the cups of element 3 were broken for the juice in element 11, it may make some sense to speak of 'hole-licking' from the juice boxes as well.
NAME: No immediate connection.
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TITLE: Pause video / Performance
DESCRIPTION: The artwork consists of one performance on the opening of the exhibition and one video throughout the rest of the exhibition time, plus a bag of rice behind a curtain. The performance consisted in the artist tossing a bag of rice back and forth over her head behind a white curtain. The video is shown on a TV placed in a window niche in the exhibition hall. Leaning against the wall underneath and/or next to it, there is a bag of rice. A white curtain hangs from the ceiling in front of the TV and the bag of rice. In the TV video is shown the silhoutte of a person climbing in the ceiling of a small room criss-crossed through with ropes attached to the walls and the ceiling. The person is climbing quickly around in the room between the ropes, jerking back and forth under the ceiling like a hurrying spider or like the movements in a scene from a black-and-white upside-down silent movie in fast motion. The jerky movements is a prominent feature. That the person climbs like a fly under the ceiling is also noteworthy. There are in fact some quite strong cues to my name in both the performance and in the stationary artwork. I would also be able to recognize 'Condoleezza Rice' in the performance.
SONNET SEGMENT - from the 2nd sonnet:
The wind through the neural net
The brown lawn? That may be the white sheet, the curtain hanging from the ceiling in front of the TV and the bag of rice in this artwork.
If I should have made a guess for some element in the sonnets which I hardly would expect to find in such a complex, I would probably select precisely these lines from the beginning of sonnet 2. Quite impressive to find all of them so densely represented in this artwork.
NAME: There are some name-relation to contextual cues in London but not of immediate relevance for this artwork.
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TITLE: "Farmor" (= "father's mother").
DESCRIPTION: This artwork shows pictures printed on textile, various motives, somewhat more than 100 small pictures over the cloth, and with a margin to the right with some elements in it. Each picture shows a little excerpt from some reality, a small event fragment, a still life.
SONNET SEGMENT:
Old gods in the bamboo
DISCUSSION: In 1997, around the time when I was writing the sonnets, I was also concerned with the cuneiform script on clay tablets (which is the reason for its mention). Many of these tablets consist of such squares with sign groups in rows and columns. It was my idea that these sign groups refer to event fragments, and that they represent not primarily speech sounds but rather situation semantics elements - such as those kinds of elements which are depicted on the cloth in Raustein's work. It looks indeed like a perfect representation of a cuneiform clay tablet from that point of view, except that the cuneiform wedges are replaced with pictorial elements which ties the script up to an even yet older episteme in representation technology: The pictography which preceded the formalized cuneiform script. The 'old gods' which resided in these technologies are obviously represented by "father's mother". The situation semantics elements shown in the small squares are the 'modernity writing on a clay tablet'.
NAME: Again, there are some contextual cues to London but not of immediate relevance for the present artwork. Of possible relevance is also the short way from the form JOHN KÅRE RAUSTEIN to my full name JOHN BJARNE GROVER.
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TITLE: "Mor og far hos farmor" (= "Mother and father at father's mother").
DESCRIPTION: An old pillow case, it seems, on the wall, with a photograph printed on it. It shows two persons (I suppose it shows or is intended to show "mother and father") sitting at a table.
SONNET SEGMENT: Long gone that paternity.
DISCUSSION: The worn state of the cloth as an old pillow case may suggest that this 'paternity' is already 'long gone'.
NAME: As for element 14, but it may be added that the 'long gone' suggests even an address for the reference to England, to 'London'.
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TITLE: "Igjen og om igjen det samme" (= "Over and over again the same").
DESCRIPTION: One (kitchen) table and two chairs by it, a lamp hanging from the ceiling over the table. The table and the chairs as well as the floor around them are densely covered with vertically raised small porcellain cylinders, as tubes pointing upwards.
SONNET SEGMENT:
Our underground cars house
DISCUSSION: The 'box tube eternity' is well represented by this 'endlessness' of small 'box tubes' - and there is an endless 'train' of these 'box tubes'. The scene is in a 'house'. The tubes are underneath, on the ground.
NAME: The artist's name appears with a certain relation to my name in the following way: SIRISS = Norw. for CRICKET (the insect), a grasshopper, which can be taken to be a JUMPER. Moving the two 'S's and the 'N' gives SIRISSN EKK(e)R V-END-E. 'V-ENDE' can be taken to mean something like 'RØVER' in Norwegian, which produces JUMPER'n EKR-RØVER --> JOHN BJARNE GRØVER, my name in the Norwegian spelling I no longer use. One has to go the way via CRICKET = JUMPER and V-END = BEHIND = 'røver' to reach this interpretation.
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TITLE: "I want pearls I" (the last 'I' is Roman numeral)
DESCRIPTION: A photo of a naked woman who is dressed only in bits of that red jelly stuff ('pearl' size) one sometimes puts on cakes, on top of the whipped cream. The bits of cake jelly makes for the form of a short night gown or underskirt of some sort. Photo: Fredrik Hjerling.
SONNET SEGMENT - from the 3rd sonnet:
Out for the morning pub:
DISCUSSION: There are various possible readings. The JELLY STUFF has here a quite interesting representation in 'shell pale shame'. I also recognize the cake-jellies on the woman as related to the name Olga Sedakova, here as Olda See-cake-ova. Furthermore, the peculiar line "folk's Easter shell pale shame" is also strongly represented in the apparition in Ajmer in India on 27 March 2002, which was in the Easter that year.
NAME: There are some connections with 'skog' = 'wood/forest', but the name seems not to be a prominent cue here.
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TITLE: I want pearls II
DESCRIPTION: A photo of a naked man with pearls on his chest and penis. Photo: Fredrik Hjerling.
SONNET SEGMENT:
The sun's flittering gas
DISCUSSION: The sonnet gas must belong to the man's chest. As for the pub's beer grain, we must read the "pube's beer grain": Then the photo is an eminent representation when the pearls are the grain in the 'pube beer' region.
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TITLE: "With love, kysshalsbånd" (= "With love, kiss collar").
DESCRIPTION: A portrait (photo) of a woman with red kiss- or suck-marks around her throat. Photo: Fredrik Hjerling.
SONNET SEGMENT:
drinks the priestly wish
DISCUSSION: The only relevant traces of drinking in the photo are the marks from sucking around the woman's throat - indeed with a slight vampire ring about it, as if a vampire has drunk with 'the priestly wish' and left a 'swollen golden frame'.
NAME: No obvious connection.
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TITLE: "Navelskåda, navel gjennom måltavle" (= "Navel view, navel through target table").
DESCRIPTION: A photo of a woman's belly region, down to her hips and up to her breasts. She holds in her hands concentric rings which are centered on her belly-button, which then appears somewhat like a God's eye in the middle of the rings. There are three such concentric rings, which seem to be made out of some polished metal, reminding me of the rings intertwined at the end of Dante's Divina Commedia and the medal in Rue de Bac 140. This again points to the last line in one of my sonnets in the Pilot Study, paraphrasing the last line in the Divine Comedy, which is "the love that moves the sun and all the stars" - in the Pilot Study paraphrased into "the love that moves the moon and all the sea". This is, of course, again reminiscent of the "Black Sun". Photo: Fredrik Hjerling.
SONNET SEGMENT:
Between my feet in the bath
DISCUSSION: Is the belly-button on the water level in the tub? It may well be. What I saw in the deep night, there, at the end of the bath tub, was the dark water drain with a white shining halo around it. (The concentric rings also quite eminently represent a water drain). When I, as I saw this in London, woke up later in the night by the voice explaining that "the king had to abdicate because as much as 400 noblemen had fallen in a tournament" and once again saw the black sun with the white halo, I grasped for my notebook and wrote in it that "the black sun with the white halo around it is 'the sticker on the ridge of the front panel of the kitchen fridge'". The lines are from a sonnet I had written in Bergen and published in '32 sonnets' in London (number 18). My idea was tied up to the status of 'stickers' in early child semantics - based on reports of children's reference to stickers in the bathtub and on the fridge (which was the reason for my association). In sum, the artwork represents the sonnet fragment in an eminent manner. We only have to replace 'feet' by 'hands' to make it nearly optimal.
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TITLE: I want pearls III
DESCRIPTION: A photo of the dark back head of a man, almost shaven (or shaven not so long ago, so that the skin barely appears under the short-short hairs), covered with a line of pearls over his head and along his shoulders (and one on top of his left ear). Photo: Fredrik Hjerling.
SONNET SEGMENT:
Photographs print the brain,
DISCUSSION: "Photographs print the brain" - is easily recognized, since the photo prints what strongly calls forth associations of the brain. The drinking wet fish can be seen in the line of pearls along his head, looking like a line of underwater bubbles rising slowly up to the surface from a 'drinking fish'. At hindsight, I think I may rewrite the sonnet to end as follows: "as drinks the wet fish / the flowers in the rain".
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TITLE: Object
DESCRIPTION: A porcellain object with a little 'tube' bent in a ninety degrees angle.
SONNET SEGMENT: Seize the riches of the earth
DISCUSSION: The fourth sonnet seems to relate to the authorship. The porcellain object with a little tube bent in a ninety degrees angle is perhaps the only element among those left over which can be used to 'seize the riches of the earth'. The associations to a periscope are also prominent.
NAME: No obvious connection.
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TITLE: "Lille gul" (= "little yellow")
DESCRIPTION: The object is in the shape of a boat (on a footing) with a bony skeleton look.
SONNET SEGMENT:
On the bank, freeze and shiver
DISCUSSION: The artwork is an eminent representation of a boat setting over the river with defuncts.
NAME: No obvious connection.
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TITLE: Objects
DESCRIPTION: The two remaining porcellain objects on the table. These are porcellain objects of quite non-distinct forms. One of them has a red mark and a cavity in it, the other is of an amorphous shoe-like shape.
SONNET SEGMENT:
Across the birth of time, inter
DISCUSSION: No obvious connection - except perhaps one on the matter of authorship. However, the two objects represent with high pecision the name 'Owings Shriver' as encoding defining aspects of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 via 'Övings-sko-len'.
NAME: No obvious connection.
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TITLE: Jugs
DESCRIPTION: 3 jugs
SONNET SEGMENT:
As by Calais, or Dover,
DISCUSSION: See below. The milk inside the jugs may perhaps be love which was refused transfer to a poor cup. The poor cup was downstairs in the crypt (element 3 above). It could not stand against the pressure during the test-ing, and hence the love refused transfer to it.
NAME: The name is somewhat remiscent of the first line - "As by Calais or Dover", cp. "Inge Kejlberg Tornvig".
Far ahead you infer
Now all the artworks in the exhibition are represented. I suppose these last lines in the fourth sonnet may refer to the visitor who is leaving the gallery or looking out through the window - it sounds like a weather forecast. Or even the visitor(s) who decide(s) to go down again into the crypt to look for the poor cups, in the hope that the love can be transferred nevertheless - leading back to the beginning at element 1. One has to go outside and around the house to come back into the crypt, which may explain the relevance of the weather forecast here. Also, the fact that these are the three lines after the sonnet TURN gives some sense to the idea of turning to go out again and down to the crypt.
The correlations are impressive indeed and it is hard to believe that one can explain it with 'coincidences'. I make two observations: The first is that the sonnets seem to be about the essentials in the story of Lenin's death relative to my historic person. The second is that the phenomenon represents stage 3 in my model of 'poetic semiosis'.
© John Bjarne Grover
John Bjarne Grover
The issue is the notorious telepathy. My view is that 'telepathy' in the traditional sense of it hardly can lead to much more than bigbrother control of the minds, while the new millenium will have to develop a new poetic logic which is based on universals in cognition and work on the substance of copyright. It is doubtful whether that is the same as the 'dirty' sheepskin technology of Jacob in Laban's land. While that telepathy probably works by manipulations on the social interface, such as the sexual interface, the poetic logic has in principle nothing to do with that part of it. Rather, I think of the poetic logic as residing in the global social consciousness in a way which can be mapped onto the individual, and is not dependent on the social interface structure and the manipulations by political power on that.
Sonnet 1: Good Friday
Death regards your person's
soul better left alone
to taste the bitter cup
of what is still unknown.
Here's your sofa: Tidy up
the filthy bag. The best
of common sense piety
will raise a high tombstone.
Should horse or tiny pup
pant with poorer breast
when the 'if' of life worsens?
You can't fail the test
drawn up, should the society
guard off your holy quest.
28 March 1997
Sonnet 2: The London Underground
The wind through the neural net
is the strong hot muscle
fan-like branching through
the work of Bertrand Russell.
Think while you strew
salt out nocturnally,
the brown lawn to arouse:
You'll solve the pure puzzle.
Old gods in the bamboo
reed gave their modernity
writing on a clay tablet.
Long gone that paternity.
Our underground cars house
our train box tube eternity.
29 March 1997
Sonnet 3: The Black Sun
Out for the morning pub:
Folk's Easter shell pale shame
received the blessing as
poets meshed on a name.
The sun's flittering gas
in the pub's beer grain
drinks the priestly wish
in your swollen golden frame.
Between my feet in the bath
the water level drain:
A black sun in the tub.
Photographs print the brain,
as drinks the wet fish,
as flowers in the rain.
3 April 1997
Sonnet 4: The Crossing
Seize the riches of the earth:
On the bank, freeze and shiver
when the boat sets over
with the defunct, to deliver
them over on the clover.
Across the birth of time, inter
with Christmas flowers
who pulls across the river.
As by Calais, or Dover,
a love refused transfer
to a poor cup guarding our birth:
Far ahead you infer
from drizzling rain and shower
that you've been loving her.
6 April 1997
------------------------
| 1 |
| 2 1|
| 3 |
| door
| 3 3 |
|1 1 1|
------------------------
The main room, on the ground floor:
------------------------------------
| 11|
| 5 8 7 9 10 12 |
| 6 |
door 6 |
| 16 14|
| 4 |
| 13 15 |
------------------------------------
The upper room, on the first floor:
stairs ----------------------------
| 17 18 19 21 |
| |
| | 22 23 25 20|
| | 24 24 25 25 |
| | |
------------------------------------
Sonnet 2: The second half of the main room.
Sonnet 3: The photographs on the wall upstairs (17-21).
Sonnet 4: The objects on the table upstairs (22-25).
Element 1
ARTIST: Agnieszka Borkowska
Death regards your person
DISCUSSION: The tablets with eyes are obviously relevant to the sonnet segment and its mention of regarding. It is, though, interesting to notice that this first line originally was "Death believes your person's...". The four sonnets are subjected to strong phonological and semantic constraints which call for use of 'believes' rather than 'regards'. This has the interesting corollary that if the parallel to my sonnets is due to these constraints, then we should not expect to find 'regard' reflexed in the exhibition. But we do, by the series of eyes on the wall - which suggests that the role of the poetic structure is perhaps not so defining after all. It is also possible to consider the 'black-and-white photo' style works which are not on 'regarding' as representing aspects of belief, which then would fill in for the missing 'believes', in addition to the word 'regards' which was in the version I sent to Sedakova and had registered.
Element 2
ARTIST: Rita Helen Murstam
Element 3
ARTIST: Sabine Popp
of what is still unknown.
Element 4
ARTIST: Samir Fält
Element 5
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ARTIST: Solfrid Tormodsgard
Element 6
ARTIST: Anne-Helen Mydland
of common sense piety
will raise a high tombstone.
Element 7
ARTIST: Caroline Grohp
Element 8
ARTIST: Sissi Westerberg
Element 9
ARTIST: Ida Forss
Element 10
ARTIST: Petra Schou ???
Element 11
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ARTIST: Ida Forss
Element 12
ARTIST: Samir Fält
Element 13
ARTIST: Ingunn Wright
is the strong hot muscle
fan-like branching through
the work of Bertrand Russell.
Think while you strew
salt out nocturnally,
the brown lawn to arouse:
You'll solve the pure puzzle.
DISCUSSION: My impression is that this is an almost incredible mapping. This is the other extremely and surprisingly precise representation, along with the sofa and the filthy bags so strikingly precise that it strongly motivates the rest of the mapping and an interpretation in terms of a copying through the collective narrative of some sort. "The work of Bertrand Russell" comprises his mathematical logic which is a basis for syntactic theory in the XXth century. The ropes criss-crossing through the room as well as the jerky jumping and climbing with the strong muscles in the room relates to the neural net and to a grammar for a social space. The rapid pace gives reason to the idea that the strong-muscled person is 'the wind through the neural net' (where the logic is), and the very fact that this is represented on a TV screen can lead to the interpretation that it also is fan-like [by the high speed] branching through the work of Bertrand Russell. When I wrote these lines, I had a reasonably clear idea of what I meant by them, and they were intentionally formulated in such a way that it should be difficult to find an unambiguous concrete representation of it: They are intended to point to the grammatical structure rather than to the lexical content as a property of the London Underground in the framework of the full quartet. It is quite surprising to find an artwork which represents it as precisely as this one - I would say it should be very difficult, but it obviously isn't, as the artwork shows.However, the poem continues with even more surprising imagery: The strewing of salt, the brown lawn, the puzzle. One evening some three-four days before I came to see the exhibition, I was in a telephone box, calling the Register of copyright in Washington (where also my 'Black Sun' sonnets are registered), in order to inquire about a certification of the registering of certain works. When I called, it was a cold dark evening with lots of ice on the ground, and a man came down the staircase at the telephone box, strewing salt on it to make the slippery ice melt. He went up again, and after the talk was over, I discovered that he had taken up position outside the box to listen to my talk - as if to solve a pure puzzle. The puzzle would - of course - be precisely the present one: Is this precise mapping indeed possible? In the next day, I saw in a newspaper a photo of an orthodox priest strewing odorous stuff over the crowd during a church sermon - it looked as if he were throwing salt or rice over the congregation. Then two days later, this artwork with the TV performance and the bag of rice in the exhibition. - So there seems to be a slight connection between information technology and this strewing of salt or rice (white fine-grained stuff). That is also why Bertrand Russell may have something to do in the complex. In fact, DRYSSER is Norwegian for 'strews'. My own background for the inclusion of this name was that I had been reading Russell in a library before I went to Russell Square in London to take the underground home, and saw the connection there.
Element 14
ARTIST: John Kåre Raustein
reed gave their modernity
writing on a clay tablet.
Element 15
ARTIST: John Kåre Raustein
Element 16
ARTIST: Siri Ekker Svendsen
our train box tube eternity
Element 17
ARTIST: Åsa Skogberg
Folk's Easter shell pale shame
received the blessing as
poets meshed on a name.
Element 18
ARTIST: Åsa Skogberg
in the pub's beer grain
Element 19
ARTIST: Åsa Skogberg
in your swollen golden frame.
Element 20
ARTIST: Åsa Skogberg
the water level drain:
A black sun in the tub.
Element 21
ARTIST: Åsa Skogberg
as drinks the wet fish,
as flowers in the rain.
Element 22
ARTIST: Marianne Nielsen
Element 23
ARTIST: Louise Hindsgavl
when the boat sets over
with the defunct, to deliver
them over on the clover.
Element 24
ARTIST: Marianne Nielsen
with Christmas flowers
who pulls across the river.
Element 25
ARTIST: Inge Kejlberg Tornvig
a love refused transfer
to a poor cup guarding our birth
Element 26
SONNET SEGMENT:
from drizzling rain and shower
that you've been loving her.
Conclusion
On the web 23 April 2004.
Last updated 21 May 2004.
Layout updated 5 December 2007
