hecho poetico

Fashion of the Veil, 2009

2011-11-07T10:32:00.001-08:00

Burned Trees

2010-04-12T14:27:00.001-07:00

Studio Visit

2010-03-31T19:30:00.000-07:00

http://funnelpages.com/?p=2667

1 Image 1 Minute

2010-03-25T00:29:00.001-07:00

Seventh grade at Alavi High School, Tehran, Iran, (on the far right)

(Excerpt from my Ghost Stories)

Upon Beatrice leaving, childhood ended. She was seen chasing trains, running down concrete steps in high heels, and occasionally breaking one. Her presents were stored in a suitcase in the basement. He was beautiful when young. His volumes were fatal poetry, never ending, and in the end were lost. She never came back to him. Merely a child, chanting Koranic verses, running animals on projectors. He fell to angels not long after capturing these blurry faces—seventh year and twelve? With Beatrice, set sail by way of a lone wind, avoiding scrutiny and inquiry of his stunning locks and her ether. Fierceness in Rejection, Growless Rejecting.

HK Zamani
2010

AlterMODERN  MANIFESTO

2009-06-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

ALTERMODERN  MANIFESTO
POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD

A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture  
Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live   
Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe  
Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture  
This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing  
Today's art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves  
Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.  
The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain presents a collective discussion around this premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity. 

Extended text
Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.
More generally, our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.
Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal.
The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.
If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities.
We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing. Today's art explores the bonds that text and image weave between themselves. Artists traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.
The artist becomes 'homo viator', the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time.
Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives rise to practices which might be referred to as 'time-specific', in response to the 'site-specific' work of the 1960s. Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space.
The Tate Triennial 2009 presents itself as a collective discussion around this hypothesis of the end of postmodernism, and the emergence of a global altermodernity.

Nicolas Bourriaud

Samuel Beckett

2009-05-21T22:47:00.001-07:00

But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such tidbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morsels of gristle, and we brought them also birds’ eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings. Sensible of these attentions, they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouserlegs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative.
It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God.
–Watt

Rene Daumal

2009-05-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

Poetry by Rene Daumal - Last Letter to his Wife

I am dead because I lack desire,
I lack desire because I think I possess.
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.

Erased

2009-05-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

For the Erased exhibit

Time split in springs and gears and stained its musty raft. She missed her and he missed her and they tore the last of it, and found the fief of vapor in barren requiem fields, and pushed musty wheels of Xerxes delicately stitched to the folds in his cloak and hands.

HK Zamani
May 2009

Reckoner

2009-04-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

Ode to a Star by Neruda

2009-03-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

Appearing at night
on the terrace
of a bitter and very high skyscraper,
I could touch the nocturnal dome
and in an act of extraordinary love
I seized a sky-blue star.

The night was black
and I slipped along
the street
with the stolen star in my pocket.
Of tremulous crystal
it seemed,
and suddenly
it was
as if I was carrying
a package of ice,
or an archangel’s sword at my belt.

Fearful,
I kept it
under the bed
so nobody would discover it,
but its light
first pierced through
the woolen mattress,
then
the tiles,
the roof of my house.

The most private needs
became
uncomfortable
for me.

Always with that light
of astral acetylene
flashing like it wanted
to return to the night,
I couldn’t tend to all
my duties,
and so I forgot to pay my bills
and wound up without bread or provisions.

Meanwhile, in the street,
passerby milled around,
worldly
vendors
doubtless attracted
by the unusual brilliance
they saw coming from my window.

Then
I picked up
my star again,
carefully
wrapped it in my handkerchief,
and disguised among the crowd
I could pass unrecognized.

I went west,
to the Green River,
for there under the willows
it was calm.

I took the star of the cold night
and gently
cast it unto the waters.

And I wasn’t surprised
that it floated away
like an insoluble fish
moving
in the night of the river
its diamond body.

(Thank you Marcy!)

Iva Bittova

2009-02-22T21:32:00.000-08:00

Poster Show

2009-02-22T20:14:00.000-08:00

http://seattletehran.com/Posters.htm

The Rose

2009-01-19T23:56:00.000-08:00

The rose is without reason; it blooms because it blooms; it considers nothing of itself, asks not, whether one sees it.
from Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, 1675--the opening quotation to Gerald Giamportone's catalogue.

Robert Irwin

2009-01-18T09:36:00.000-08:00

Primaries

Christmas Buddha

2008-12-22T17:40:00.000-08:00

Poetry

2008-12-21T11:05:00.000-08:00

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song. (Borges)

Untitled

2008-12-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

The hand of the day opens
Three clouds
And these few words
(Octavio Paz)

Impasse/In the Veil 2001

2008-12-18T23:46:00.000-08:00

Seduction of a Blossom

2008-12-17T11:36:00.000-08:00

Faust is an alchemical drama from beginning to end, claims C.G. Jung. Goethe worked for most of his life on this masterwork. The original figure in the Faust legend was a seeker of forbidden knowledge. His true identity is not known, but he claimed to be an astrologer, expert in magic, and an alchemist. This legend attracted Christopher Marlowe, who offered in his play a psychological study of the battle between good and evil. Marlowe's drama ends with the protagonist's damnation. Faust's lust for knowledge is limitless and he makes a contract with Mephistopheles. Faust wants to enjoy his highest moment in this life. In Goethe’s version the blind Faust is finally satisfied. However, Mephistopheles loses his victory, when angels take Faust to heaven.

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.” (Marlowe)

One of the play's central themes is the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center stage. Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist explicitly rejects the medieval model. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power. It is tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers have—a hero of the new modern world, a world free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus's pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.

Ruskin

2008-12-14T17:11:00.000-08:00

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one. ( John Ruskin)

Once In A Lifetime

2008-12-12T18:37:00.000-08:00

Robert Gober

2008-12-09T22:52:00.000-08:00

Magritte

2008-12-08T11:25:00.000-08:00

I painted Flight #1 and 2 to look like the dome was not only floating against the cloudy background but in front of the painting in the physical space, viewer's space, just like floating objects in some Margritte paintings.

(Flight #1, 2008)

Fountain, 1996

2008-12-07T10:36:00.000-08:00

Redon

2008-12-06T15:50:00.000-08:00

If the artist compares himself with others in order to judge them, it is only by a very awkward and difficult operation-- the more difficult because he must remove his own eyeglasses in order to see clearly the work of others, and yet does not have the benefit of theirs. He can speak well only of himself, his own adventures, of his unique situation, joyous or tragic, in which destiny has placed him.
For myself, I believe that I have produced an expressive, suggestive, and indeterminate art. Suggestive art is the irradiation of sublime plastic elements, drawn together and combined with the purpose of evoking visions which it illuminates and exalts, meanwhile inciting thought. (Odilon Redon)

"Return of the Native"

2008-12-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

Rock, juniper, and wind,
And seagull sitting still--
All these of one mind.
He who finds will
To come home
Will surely find old faith made new again,
And lavish welcome.
(Marsden Hartley)

Shelter from the Storm, 2008

2008-12-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm"

2008-12-03T20:08:00.000-08:00

Flying Dome

2008-12-02T22:26:00.001-08:00

still from flash animation Flying Dome,
exhibit Shelter from the Storm

Like a Hurricane

2008-12-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

Chess and Art

2008-12-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.
(Marcel Duchamp)

Stella(r) #6

2008-11-30T23:38:00.000-08:00

The subject matter for the Dome and Tent paintings is a dysfunctional architectural form.
Chrome paintings are DeLorian, futuristic, shiny, protected against decay and corrosion. Their geodesic tent subject matter is now a constellation. Once groundless is now celestial as we look on through the portholes of our vessel.
(HK Zamani, November 2007)

2008-11-30T09:02:00.000-08:00

Don't look at your form, however ugly or beautiful.
Look at love and at the aim of your quest. ...
O you whose lips are parched, keep looking for water.
Those parched lips are proof that eventually you will reach the source."
(Rumi)

Famous Blue Raincoat

2008-11-29T08:15:00.000-08:00

Patty Faure, 2005

2008-11-28T18:15:00.001-08:00

Voltaic Pile

2008-11-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

A voltaic pile is a set of individual Galvanic cells placed in series. The voltaic pile, invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800, was the first electric battery. Building on Galvani's 1780s discovery of how a circuit of two metals and a frog's leg can cause the frog's leg to respond, in 1791 Volta demonstrated that when two metals and brine-soaked cloth or cardboard are arranged in a circuit they produce an electric current. In 1800 Volta literally piled up several pairs of alternating copper (or silver) and zinc discs (electrodes) separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in brine (electrolyte) to increase the electrolyte conductivity. When the top and bottom contacts were connected by a wire, an electric current flowed through the voltaic pile and the connecting wire. The strength of the pile is expressed in terms of its electromotive force, or emf, given in volts. Volta characterized the emf of a pair of metals in terms of the difference in their voltages, which he could measure. His theory of contact tension considered that the emf, which drives the electric current through a circuit containing a voltaic cell, occurs at the contact between the two metals.

The Lounge Lizards

2008-11-26T18:26:00.000-08:00

The Lounge Lizards (Berlin 1981) - Dutch Schultz

Take Five

2008-11-25T23:05:00.000-08:00

Koan

2008-11-25T09:27:00.000-08:00

Koan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet may be accessible to intuition. A famous Koan is: "two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?" (Oral tradition, attributed to Hakuin Ekadu, 1685-1768, considered a reviver of the Koan traditon in Japan).

The Uses of Not

2008-11-24T21:29:00.000-08:00

The Taoist philosopher Lao Tse wrote extensively on the concept of "Ma" including his poem "The Uses of Not":

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,

but the empty spaces between them

is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty between it

is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the house.

Elements

2008-11-23T20:41:00.000-08:00

Elements can nurture us, and can destroy us. It's their inherent power and their dichotomy that intrigues me: fire for its conflagration, earth for its solidity and water for its fluidity.

Conflict seems to be an essential component of our lives. Without it and its resolution growth is an impossibility.

The more specific a film is, the more universal it becomes.

(Deepa Mehta)

Kant to Adorno

2008-11-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

We must move from Kant to Adorno, where we find the subject/spectator standing not outside the work, but deeply embedded within it, and therefore as incapable of a detached emotional response to the work as artists are of producing it in a detached way. (Beuys)

The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. (Adorno)

Work on understanding the issues affecting the making of artworks and you will reinvent society. (Beuys)

Change

2008-11-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
(The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Vesicle in Collusion with Vehicle

2008-11-16T20:30:00.000-08:00

Both

2008-11-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.

We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain

and what cures pain, both. We are

the sweet cold water and the jar that pours it. (Rumi)

Form First

2008-11-15T11:31:00.001-08:00

The work is more responsive to its form-making than to anything else. It has to be inventive as form first; form generates its own meaning and doesn't need the application of other attributes. (Richard Serra)

In the Lodi Gardens

2008-11-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

The black, pensive, dense
domes of the mausoleums
suddenly shot birds
into the unanimous blue
(Octavio Paz)

Ice Cream

2008-11-13T17:35:00.001-08:00

Seven Breaths

2008-11-12T19:43:00.000-08:00

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through the other side. (from Ghost Dog)

Notes from Schlemmer

2008-11-11T07:58:00.000-08:00

To Avoid to much socialization I choose isolation. Artist creates out of disbelief, doubt that leads to or elicits production. Artists are gripped by the spontaneity with which children express themselves. (Oskar Schlemmer)

Miriam Makeba

2008-11-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

May she rest in peace.

Between

2008-11-09T14:33:00.000-08:00

"Tout est entre." (Jean-Luc Godard) -- Everything is between.
"... N'etre qu'entre..." (Camille Bryen) -- Only between.
"At certain times I have preferred walking that is to say walking with my feet to talking that is to say walking with my mouth--but at the end it's the same thing." (Serge Daney in Perseverance)

"Ma"

2008-11-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

In Japanese there were (are) no words for Time or Space—there is only “Ma.” The direct meaning of “Ma” is the in-between, the space between object and object, and at the same time the silence between sound and sound.

radiohead street spirit

2007-10-25T20:43:00.001-07:00

2007-10-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

Jorge Luis Borges

2007-10-22T23:12:00.000-07:00

from Borges' lecture on Metaphor:

Anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down.

The woods are lovely
dark and deep
but I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep.
(Robert Frost)

Untitled painting

2007-10-21T23:35:00.001-07:00

The Duende (continues)

2007-10-20T09:42:00.000-07:00

Duende, The
American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1999 by Hirsch, Edward
I wish I'd been in Buenos Aires on October zo, 1933, when Federico Garcia Lorca invoked the Dionysian spirit of art and delivered a lecture which he called "Juego y teoria del duende." Lorca was testifying to his own poetic universe, as his biographer Ian Gibson has recognized. It would have been electrifying to hear him because on that night, addressing the members of the Friends of Art Club, the spirit of artistic mystery entered the room. It moved at the speed of Lorca's voice and burned like incense in the rich air. It was palpable to the audience, as if Lorca had thrown open the windows so that everyone present could hear the primitive wing beats shuddering in the darkness outside. The floor shifted a little under everyone's feet. The lamps trembled. Thinking about it now, 66 years later, I can still see the stammering flames coming off the typescript of Lorca's talk. I feel the ancient heat.

The Old Desk

2007-10-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Duende

2007-10-18T23:50:00.000-07:00

Duende (art), a difficult-to-define phrase in the Spanish arts that connotes emotion and authenticity.

PJ Harvey - This Is Love

2007-10-18T23:43:00.001-07:00

Manhole 69

2007-10-17T23:25:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Manhole 69 by J.G. Ballard:
Lang nodded. "I was thinking of something else. Tell me, has it ever occurred to you how completely death-oriented the psyche is?"
Morley smiled. "Now and then," he said, wondering where this led.
"It's curious," Lang went on reflectively. " The pleasure-pain principle, the whole survival-compulsion apparatus of sex, the superego's obsession with tomorrow--most of the time the psyche can't see farther than its own tombstone. Now why has it got this strange fixation? For one very obvious reason." He tapped the air with his forefinger. "Because every night it's given a pretty convincing reminder of the fate in store for it."
You mean the black hole," Morley suggested wryly. "Sleep?"

2007-10-17T18:37:00.001-07:00

Chance Event

2007-10-17T00:25:00.000-07:00

Chance Event went successfully--a nice exhibition of artwork by the artists in the building and one guest.
Staying up for 48 hours was a shock to my system, and its positive effects are noticeable.
Logically, one is also able to get much done.
Manhole 69 by J.G. Ballard encouraged this last minute organized event at non-space called 48-hours.