A Case for Complex Aesthetics - from Cheryl Penn

[Marie Wintzer]

I knew Cheryl was working on this boekie and it kept me waiting in excitement. I wanted to see what the Arthur Rimbaud Symbolist School of Subtle Aesthetic Obscurity (now the School for Complex Aesthetics) was really about. I enrolled in the School quite a while ago, without knowing much about it, just because everything that is coming out of it has a very strong appeal to me.

Reading this book is a little bit like watching the master at work. We follow her into the studio and we learn how she works. When touching the cover, we imagine the meter(s) long painting, the picture shaping up layer after layer, and we see her cutting it up into pieces when it is dry (or not) :-)) (the cover is a piece from a large painting depicting Complexity, one of the Women Who Hold Up the World).

The building blocks of the School are all there, dissected out to the smallest word. Complexity is broken down and laid on the table. This to me is one of the essentials and basics of Cheryl's work. Getting to the bone of a concept, stripping it of its multiple layers. And then it's all hers. With those building blocks in hand, she can now re-do at will. 

Painting on maps or printing on paint are two examples of these processes. Maybe the easiest to understand and to apply? Chopping up huge paintings and thick, labor intensive artist books might be other examples. On the photos for this blog I have included two of Cheryl's cards (the orange ones) because I think they make an excellent Case for the School. They came with a note saying "This is a piece of large painting I cut up. I'm thinking about how we make decisions when we don't have all the facts, or when we think we understand what the situation is, but we don't know the full picture. When we only have a piece, we think we know the whole?". This is classic SSSAO, IMHO :-))

Do Aesthetics naturally derive from these processes? I'm not sure. They probably don't. Finding an interesting concept and extracting ideas from it is one thing. Building again and turning it into a piece of work that is also aesthetically pleasing is much more difficult. I know, because I am very often struggling with this part of the creative activity. But this is why we have schools, to learn from the masters!

On the same line of thought, can Simplicity derive from Complexity by the action of tearing down and re-capturing? I think this was mentioned on De Villo's blog about this same book, and I can't remember what we concluded, but it is definitely something I would like to put up for debate. Where to now? says the last page. Invert, Reverse, Back... in other words, restart, begin again. The Circuitous Nature of Aesthetics.
Thank you for this amazing book Cheryl, the essence of your work is all in there and I will go back to it very often!

[Marie Wintzer]

I'm sure chopping up an oak seed and re-building will be a piece of cake for you ;-))

[cheryl penn]

I'm making tickets available for my next voyage - you available?   It may only be the exploration of an oak seed - but MAN! There's a whole world in there :-))) X

[Marie Wintzer]

I hope it all makes cents ;-)

Cheryl Penn et les Liliputiens...

[De Villo Sloan]

Glad you added your two cents, CB. I think Cheryl's rants in the stream are approaching perpetual motion. "Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of Cheryl Penn..."

[Marie Wintzer]

Wow, look what happens when you leave a blog simmer over night :-)) Great! You three advanced so far in the discussion I feel I'll have to find my way through the semantic labyrinth again (my next piece, btw). It's still too early for me to think clearly, but the energy thread is interesting. Energy cannot be created "de novo", it is constant over time. So actually nothing new is ever created or destroyed as such. A certain energy can become a different energy, though. Transformation, and perpetual motion. Alright, I need more coffee....

[De Villo Sloan]

Um....wow....you pretty much said it in that last comment. May I quote that someplace?

[cheryl penn]

aaah - BUT - FACTS - they're the glue here - personal systems - they are illusionary - as long as one recognizes that - real to self, desperately perhaps unreal to others. Factually - the world is NOT flat - FACTUALLY - as we've discussed before - the oak seed holds ONLY the genetic material of a pure oak tree - so - YES - I'm stating it in public - I believe in the TRUTH of things - to differentiate? That is to create alternate, personal systems. I segregate the de - from de-construction to differentiate a little. Semantics maybe, but, thank you for liking my book :-) X

[De Villo Sloan]

Sure, definitely a process - that everything is fragmenting and dispersing. It's become more of a philosophy. Systems form but inevitably come apart. But is any of it true? Turns out, the world isn't flat. We're in the ether.

"Deconstruction" is so loaded - one definition is that unity is pretty much an illusion. Any work of art is really a construct of disordered and contradictory fragments. You need to put aside social and cultural blinders to "see" the truth.

Oh my, the ether. I do like your book.

[cheryl penn]

Do you think that entropy can also be the measure of  process – almost a directional narrative of process? I  understand entropy as an expression of disorder – or even randomness, but in and of itself it’s a process? De- construction uses the same sort of process – the tweak I suppose is in the re-creation – or re-assembling? Its also easy to keep personal systems of language/myth/symbology – spell chick has NEVER liked that one – alive. They are their own tiny  cosmos.  Like all things they require energy of course. Energy in the form of ideas – fragmentation of existing systems into personal visual language? 

[De Villo Sloan]

Right, but I think some of it is about how all these disparate things are brought together in forms.

Entropy and the "Big Bang" idea from physics have been adopted as a model in art a lot - a process of fragmentation and dispersion. Systems remain intact only as the result of a great deal of energy to keep them so. Your model seems a bit different.