GLOSSY RED

GLOSSY RED GLOSSARY -

(thanks to Hall, Marcia (1992) Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting, Cambridge University Press: New York)

Bole – reddish earth used as the preparatory base under gold leaf in panel painting. P236

Cinnabar – a red mineral, mercuric sulfide, which when ground produces the pigment vermillion. P 237

Minium – red lead: an orangish red pigment. P 238

Ochre – an earth pigment ranging in color from yellowish to reddish to brownish tones suitable for fresco or easel painting. P 238

Realgar – a reddish orange pigment, related to orpiment and often used in conjunction with it. Also derived from arsenic and theefore poisonous. P 239

Sinopia – in fresco, the brush underdrawing applied, originally in the red earth sinoper, to the arriccio (layer of rough plaster) on which a second, smooth layer (intonaco) of plaster was applied for the final painting. P239

Venetian red – term used in the 17c and following to identify a red earth extracted from Badia di Calavena near Verona and used in cinquecento Venetian painting. P240

Vermillion – brilliant red pigment obtained from mercuric sulfide, with very good hiding power. P240

...many more to come

Essay by Alice Johnston focuses on Fierz-Davids 'ghostly bull-god'

an interesting review of Women’s Dionysian Initiation: The Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii by Linda Fierz-David found here ...

this is just a quote from the essay/review ... but it  highlights a part of the 'rite' that I didn't 'get' before ...

'Women are governed by the principle of relatedness, not because they want to be, but because it is their natural capacity to become enmeshed in people and things and experiences. Their tendency to build walls of animus opinions is an attempt to separate themselves from their over intrusive world. Yet opinions alone are insufficient; at best relatedness becomes negative. The alternative is indicated in the Villa of Mysteries:

The bellowing of the ghostly bull-god heralds the frightful necessity of rending all ties in themselves and giving up all relatedness in the world, in order to find relationship to the spirit and therewith also to themselves. Women must do this with the greatest vehemence ... This vehemence is necessary because subduing the worldly Eros surely means the heaviest sacrifice for every naturally womanly woman. She loses so much that she seems to herself like a ghost among ghosts. At this moment of development, a great deal hangs in the balance for every woman with an inner life, and it is a test, for no woman can know in advance whether she will lose forever the life which flows from relatedness or whether she will remain ghost-like. Only the god-spirit knows.

Just as the womanly woman needs to experience her separateness, the manly man, guided as he is by the Logos principle, needs to be initiated into relatedness.' 

initiation and thinking along the thread ...

Re initiation ... I have written an essay on Alice in Wonderland as a theorist of initiations, and here, the text itself is initiatory as well ... its called Inside Alice's Facets also this one on making which is also from the point of 'being in' initiation .... Grappled steps in the making ... and here's another one, Whoppers at Jouissant Play

Ariadne

Translations of original texts on her here ...

Good outline here ...

Plutarch, in his vita of Theseus, which treats him as a historical individual, reports that in the Naxos of his day, an earthly Ariadne was separate from a celestial one:

"Some of the Naxians also have a story of their own, that there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes, one of whom, they say, was married to Dionysos in Naxos and bore him Staphylos and his brother, and the other, of a later time, having been carried off by Theseus and then abandoned by him, came to Naxos, accompanied by a nurse named Korkyne, whose tomb they show; and that this Ariadne also died there."

Ariadne's thread

'Ariadne's thread, named for the legend of Ariadne, is the term used to describe the solving of a problem with multiple apparent means of proceeding - such as a physical maze, a logic puzzle, or an ethical dilemma - through an exhaustive application of logic to all available routes. It is the particular method used that is able to follow completely through to trace steps or take point by point a series of found truths in a contingent, ordered search that reaches a desired end position. This process can take the form of a mental record, a physical marking, or even a philosophical debate; it is the process itself that assumes the name.' wiki quote

Below are images from a collaborative project done in  2008 with Mela Fitzgibon and Susan Buret and myself  making   'the thread' ... all phrases, words,  sentences, notions, questions etc,  intuitively arose from the making and were stitched by hand,  The thread was made in parts and the parts were swapped between us  so that we picked up where each other had left off ... then the whole was stitched together ... it is very very long.


excert of thread ...

'... umbilical thread cut red rosso rouge . . . changing place changing time changing thoughts changing future tu moi manqué cloud threads tenuous hold aloft await clockwise re-arrive ----- undertow drags and swallows envelop me now whispering low to the lavender dusk sky remembered  weighing time too lightly shines from the mirror smeared . . . reflected secrets  oh blissful oblivion life on its way returns to a mist, its quickness is its quietness again : existence of this world of things and men renews their never needing to exist in emptiness . . . oh me oh my sigh lightly leaving perfumed trails musk frankincense and amber ~ haunting forgetful minds * threading mystic messages silenced tongues wagging truths and lil’ white lies unravel knots deceitful promises sing a mournful song in muffled tones her sorrow bleeds from flesh and heart alike euphoric blessing washing over pain memory fall in light entering flesh raw red wet space within holding stuck releasing heat shrouded in white sheet...'

by Majena Mafe
spinning the thread from the throat

Villa of the Mysteries, Dionysian Chamber
Pompeii Italy

Mount Vesuvius, Italy
(dormant volcano with a highly volatile history)


Red, as the colour of light,
was an important element of the interiors
of Roman religious buildings.

(John Gage, Color & Culture, 1993, p. 25).

James Turrell's Catso Red
Permanent installation at the Mattress Factory.

Roden Crater,
(dormant volcano in the Painted Desert, Arizona
and site for James Turrell's Roden Crater Project)

Other initiation stories ... to be added to

Red riding hood
Alice in wonderland goldilox and the three bears
Inanna  story

the cube thats not a cube

 

 ... we can remember here, that we are dealing with metaphorical and ritual space, and 'sacred space' in this  initiation 'event' which is probably not space at all ...  the cube has transparent walls,  things come in and pass through them going out. Our engaging with this here villa space. ('space' durrr words ...) can be post- dimensional...

 Lets just take it for granted that the fourth dimension here is not Einstein's ('time') but a space of immersion and dissolution, of the self and language, and that geometries and syntax's are the only pattern tracings of our limits of  understanding engagement ...

I'll write more soon ...

I dreamt of other red rooms last night- Bergman's cries and whispers

"I had had an image...for more than a year, I think. I had this image that kept coming back to me time and again. A strange image, and they're often forebodings of a film. One particular image. This image depicted a room that was completely red. The wallpaper was red, the carpet was red, and the furniture was in various shades of red. And in the back of the room there were four women. They wore dresses from the turn of the century, from before World War I. They were all dressed in white nightgowns. They spoke with each other, facing each other as they did. I stood far away from them. I saw them from far off in the room in this image. Far off in the room. This image persistently returned to me. One good way is to try to write about these women. It's always been the case whenever there's been an image. The best way is always to start writing. Because if it vanishes, then there's nothing more to it. One can abandon the project. But if these women persist, or the image persists, then one should continue writing. And so I did....Once I had realized who these women were...and had identified them and given them a background and ages and life circumstances, it all went very quickly...which was fun. Although the story is a very sad one....For me, Cries and Whispers is so much about music. 'Cries and whispers' is not my own phrase but comes from a review of a piano sonata by Mozart. I can't remember which one. It said that the slow movements were like cries and whispers, and I thought that fit very well. Because it is, in fact, a piece of music translated into images."

– Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd (2003)

 

"All my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay, I say that I have thought of the colour red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon everything was red."

– Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film

"I believe that the film–or whatever it is–consists of this poem: a human being dies but, as in a nightmare, gets stuck halfway through and pleads for tenderness, mercy, deliverance, something. Two other human beings are there, and their actions, their thoughts are in relation to the dead, not-dead, dead. The third person saves her by gently rocking, so she can find peace, by going with her part of the way."
– Ingmar Bergman, from his workbook for
Cries and Whispers (22 April 1971)

 

quotes from here

Bordering the other ... taking her jouissance

Dear Laurel ... some quotes to consider,

Kristeva - The border between the known and the otherness.  “A jouissance which breaks the symbolic chain, the taboo, the mastery. A marginal discourse, with regard to the science, religion and philosophy of the polis (witch. child, underdeveloped, not even a poet, at best his accomplice … Kristeva Reader (154)

Kristeva - If a woman cannot be part of the temporal symbolic order except by identifying with the father, it is clear that as soon as she shows any signs of which, in herself, escapes such identification and acts differently, resembling the dream of the maternal body, she evolves into this ‘truth’ in question. It is thus that female specifity defines itself in patri-linear society: woman is a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a bacchanalian, taking her jouissance in an anti-Apollonian, Dionysian orgy Kristeva Reader (154)

Cixous - The Laugh Of The Medusa.

“From afar, from always from “without” from the heath where witches are kept alive, from below, from “beyond” culture.” New French Feminisms  (247)

Irigaray –‘femininity has been deciphered as forbidden’ Speculum of the Other Woman (20)

‘Woman is philosophies ‘other’ so interested in outsiders in history the hysteric the witch the medieval mystic those that stand outside culture 

‘ex-stase’ meaning to stand outside –Irigaray’s word 

Dear Laurel ... we were wondering about the floor of the room ... and now its found ... its beautiful ...

 

 Ever since you mentioned the possibility of working together on a project surrounding  or impacted on by the red-read 'mystery room' at Pompeii, I've been thinking of the floor. It is always the ground of being the becoming space the becoming being of  possibilities for me and so it was appropriate last night that you asked me had I seen it, did I know what it was like ... strait away I thought it must be dirt, and I was imagining the underground caverns, tunneling into darkness breaking into it, connecting what is in 'the great below to the above' ... and when I searched through the French documentary, below, I found these photos ... and its all patterned in black and white tiles ... quite bathroom or french kitchen like, shockingly civilized in an un-civilizing space. The black and white point to  a melding of opposites though - in that way where patterns means something and is not just decoration  maybe (or am I reading into this?)  I have started in on this 'floor' through starting to think of the minotaur and the impossible places in my writing, ones that I try to push past,  those of giving up and of shying away from the job ... and exposing supposition and then making  the new ... Looking for a minotaur image I was surprised that in the end the one I chose, that was right for me, (the second- the first was too smooth, to aesthetically pleasing) was a combination of Picasso's 'bull', from his etchings and then 'Guernica's screamings' - the whole painting is the bull (Picasso's voice)  (voice - always the sound of the voice) ... and then what came to mind was the images of the throat's own vocal cords which I have pasted for you to see ... they are out of focus slightly because I wanted them to appear extra large, because they are large in my 'room'  and because that place in me is like the red room, they are my initiate site, my becoming place, my floor, and thats always the way with spotting the challenges they always go in and out of focus. Working on this project with you though will be a returning for me, it already has the feeling of that pull, towards the 'other' ... that space that is so nourishing... where the chords vibrate. I've put some of my voice sound pieces a few films and a text piece from Dante there too, it seemed appropriate. And I realize I really don't know the  bull myth story itself, ( I know it from Ariadne's side) rather than always making up my own stories ... today I will start reading a bit about it ... I've put a links box on the floor page and started to put links to  sites away from the room that are  possible connections to it for me/us... I am very happy to be doing this with you Laurel curious to where it will take us ... X Jena 

PS ... I have just put Kristeva and Clements exploration 'The Feminine and the Sacred' book (from AAARG) in a link box on the home page, theirs is a similar project to ours, letters, questions, possibilities...

welcome ... where we are ... where we are not