Hydra: Heritage and Associations

altamira_cave_bison_drawing

古池や蛙飛こむ水のおと

Old Pond/Frog Jumps In/Splash!

-Basho, 1686

An artist begins with a sketch, or at least a line, and builds on it–obligated to it, constrained by it, and not infrequently doomed to it. Sometimes someone comes after and attends to the doom, as if it were a work of art, relating to the artist at a remove. And sometimes another somebody comes after and disentangles a lifeforce from inside the work, a lifeforce independent of the artist, but somehow still very much theirs. Of these two methods, the first keeps the artist at a remove (paradoxically generating a distance by trying to get near a person in absentia), while the second watches for the substance, the stuff of the thing, for the vital possibility of reaching into the air and grabbing it–it–a tissue of life in the body of thought. But what’s this tissue? And what’s this thought? And inn’t that stuff arredy in the line anywaaay?

After a few meetings (sometimes less!), a pair knows if they’re fit to be lovers. After a few more, whether their love has fallen flat upon the floor or spread like the sun into the compounds of melanin, a tissue of life in the body of… Here at Hydra, we’ve now had 60 encounters with you, our audience, and after 60 meetings we are surely quite in love and ready for 60 more (and 60 after that, and so forth). But before we get ahead of ourselves, we think a look at the stuff of our magazine (our maxhazan–from the Arabic xhazana–a collection of things) might serve as a statement of our terms and technique, the project and its evolution; our perspective on this tissue and this body.

(I have recently been informed that this is called a DTR, or DTRing, or having a DTR–well, here we go.)

We can’t a start a drawing without our pencil or crayon or hematite in hand. In consideration of our tools, we develop techniques. In developing techniques, we build aesthetics. We couldn’t, for example, imagine encaustics while dwelling in the caves–but once we had pigmented the beeswax, the technique was installed in our aesthetic storehouse. We have access to it as long as somebody knows where to look. Sight, in other words, isn’t a right–it’s a responsibility. Leaping forward to the here and now, the conditions of this magazine’s production have given it a perspective from the most elemental vantage on how a style of writing about arts activates those arts. Or, at least, demonstrates the activity of art in such a way that the writing becomes an art, with its own aesthetic and access to the lifeforce.

fayum_mummy_portrait_in_beeswax

Like Addison’s Mr. Spectator, we consider ourselves entrusted with the means by which to make arts meaningful. Anybody can stitch together a meaning–certainly! propitiously! even beautifully!–but putting a perspective into the social fabric is a different thing. Such a perspective has to cover more. Indeed, it has to be able to cover anything, and possibly everything! It must, in other words, be ready and game to go anywhere, anytime. This nebulous perspective, which many have perceived, we must now discern. I will outline it with three points, three principles of this magazine’s method.

The first of these three principles is a total ease among media shifts. There is no need to state it: The work of art shares something with other works across media, and looking upon this shareability is a way of accessing the lifeforce within the individual things. What a discrete object has to offer is embedded in it, but the bed is big and its sleepers are of an unjealous temperament: rap can lay with the animals, hyperfiction with Ezra Pound and the tweets of Jurgen Habermas, Avatar with Umberto Eco and Resident Evil, Darger with the Devil and Daniel Johnston, rebetiko with Robert Johnson, Caruso, or Kerouac, and God with Crumb and Philip K. Dick. The bed has always been vastly shareable, but the advent of online technologies have allowed us to bring these sleepers into conversation–a video says something about a song, which says something about an image, which says something about a poem–talking up dreams, pulling a dreamy empyrean together for an audience.

The second point is related to the first as a kind of result of it, or an adaptation to the conditions of the phenomenon. Multimedia fields grow extraordinary flora; though taxonomies are lacking, samples often failing to give rise to phylogenetic units. In order to generate some kind of classifying principle, we have to look through the media, observing shared conditions of growth. Such recursive definition based on the identification of fractals, self-similarity and the whole, has shown us the offspring of New Order’s relationship with T.S. Eliot, in addition to Sun Ra’s many extraterrestrial children, and Fritz Lang’s outcast, cyborg, neo-soul brood. In a way, multimedia makes us keener at reading fractals; an online magazine would inevitably find itself tracing out patterns through complex aggregations of music, (moving) image and text.

But what do they amount to? These groupings, genealogies, and techniques? Coalescence occurs with the life of the materials. These things couldn’t speak to each other if they weren’t alive. The livingness of the stuff is activated in new combinations, arrangements, extensions, but inversely these combinations, arrangements and extensions demonstrate the heritage (the extraction!) of the stuff. What thou lovest well, indeed, remains. What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage. The lifeforce exists; these are its tissue.

kahlo_moses_(nucleus_of_creation)

This article has been the statement of a condition and the rise of a aesthetic from that condition. It has also been a study of this magazine to date; its developments, tendencies, movements. Bringing the statement about by means of the study, this article has aspired to outline our style. Hydra magazine will continue to grow, transform and generate new genealogies for itself, but the groundwork is laid, the field has been discerned, the style is here. Its purpose to bring out the lifeforce. Any reading writers who have felt that here and would like to participate in the project, contact thehydra@googlegroups.com. We welcome writers of all sorts, ready to tangle with creation from manifold perspective.

Alison

February 9th, 2010 at 18:46

As a writer, what greater pleasure exists than to overhear conversations between texts, images, and music–then to participate in the very conversations that you observe?

Funnily enough, your article reminded me a bit of Milton’s Areopagitica–different subject, of course, but some echoes nonetheless. My favorite part of Milton’s piece: the parable of Truth, the loveliest and most perfect being imaginable, who is torn limb from limb into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. Truth, according to Milton, is found in fractals–each facet a shaded glass that reflects and illuminates another. He writes: The light which we have gain’d, was giv’n us, not to be ever staring on [it], but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.”

Man, that line is SO GOOD. While Milton may have meant “religious truth,” I think the thought extends to all things. And, in a weird way, it relates to your project, too. How else can we get to the substance of a matter–that “it,” that lifeforce—without using other texts, images, songs to illuminate its hidden order? And then, when we find that shred of magic, we march in its light towards the next facet, and on, and on. Extending, revising, untangling its glistening line.

Thanks for writing. Looking forward to continuing the conversation, via reading and writing.

Michael Krimper

February 9th, 2010 at 20:41

What is an art work if not the product of the artist’s own transparent intentions and personal vision? We have a whole new archaeology to build in order to interpret the life force submerged in the art work, unveiling glimmers and quivers and reflexes of meaning and yes, that substance, that spirit stuff of life.