BOX DESCRIPTION

Hear first the four roots of all things: Shining Zeus [fire] and life-bringing Hera [air] and Aidoneus [earth] and Nestis [water] who with her tears moistens mortal Springs
Empedocles



The elements that comprise SLOW THE EYE in this Box /Book are generated from three disparate cultural, geographical and disciplinary occurrences.

Martin Knuesel (Bern/Berlin) offers the corpus of the city with all of its attendant left-over miracles of modernity: manhole covers, discarded radiators, power lines, the under belly of freeway bridges and abandoned hubcaps congregate at the threshold of the page and absorb the poem’s text, slowly feeding its psychological universe. Here, in this architectural swamp, there is no picture plane, no indicators of orientation, and little hint of Desire. There is no measurement. The city is no longer place. It is the negative force of speeding memories, here slowed down with precision in Knuesel’s images. Despite its content, the poem vanishes as if liquid to vapor and hangs there in the floating, gaseous debris of human invention, prosecuting the city’s abuse of light.

Conversely, the continued investigation of the human interior, its processes, its cognitive solitude, its constant search and restless research, is illuminated by the energy of Detlef Gunther’s voyage into the psyche, the source of poetic language itself, both its structure and its content. If 21st century Desire is bereft of locatable beauty, the sense of exploration extant in his images provides a doorway to utilizable possibilities of beauty within each of us. As with Knuesel, time loses its identity as structural device, as the rudder of our navigation through the temporal domain and condensates to mist. This mist thereby intensifies the light, as in the sparkling light of Venice hovering over the Adriatic Sea and allows him to render his examination of objects of the social mind in a clearer reality and in the context of the beautiful. It slows the eye.

Andre Breton and Wifredo Lam created the Fata Morgana, Aime Cesaire and Pablo Picasso, Corpse Purdu, Matisse/Eluard, Catlett/Brown, all influenced sadiq bey regarding the working relationship of poet and artist. However, what they produced, albeit enduring beauty, was merely poem with illustration and was immediate for the parents of these three collaborators. bey has insisted that the poems in this book be integrated into the “text” of the image, not just superimposed on its surface. In another space not so much anti book, bey has resisted the notion of the book of poetry for over twenty years and is active in the “live” aspect of the word (performance, recording, etc.). In fact, he feels that the entirety of the universe is the living Word, even in biblical terms. He considers the twelve pieces of SLOW THE EYE as poem objects circulating in the milieu of object d’art, who’s ultimate goal is permanent, 3-D poem objects the size of Arc de Triomphe. Due to stasis, the poem becomes thing,” as long as it actively pursues beauty,” he says. He has selected these twelve poems from four manuscripts written over a twenty-year expanse.


12 POEM OBJECTS

There are 12 poem objects contained in this box/book, accompanied by 12 plain text cover sheets. These objects are generated from digital photographs, shot by the artists (some of which are photographs of photographs). Each object contains no less than 100 photo-elements, enlarged, condensed, expanded, contracted and exploded then constructed as a single image. It is then transferred to the hand-cut, hand-printed silkscreen process. It is the logical extension of traditional photomontage using digital media.

The collaborators arrived at the decision to inaugurate this on-going series with black and white images for a number of reasons: the primal presence/absence of all color; honoring the black and white photograph; chiaroscuro; positive/negative polarity and so on.

The second step in this three-step, on-going series of SLOW THE EYE, is color images on mounted canvas using the photo emulsion process, in a limited edition box/book.

This is a limited, 1st addition of twenty-four box/books, signed by all three and numbered and dated.

twosuns.de