The things that contradict one another in the realm of consistent narrative or rational sense, cohere in the painting, and also in such a sequence of paintings in which it is the constellation and reconstellation of array that creates meaning rather than the linear pathways of plot sequencing or of defensible argument. This factor, and the nonlocality, nonsequentiality it suggests, fit into Bohm's model of the explicate/implicate order complex. The unreliable or inconsistent, but nevertheless coherent, are principles that appear in both Bohm and Maturana/Varela, in which inconsistency and unreliability are merely expressions of inadequate apprehension. Gordon Pask's model, based on conversation, always included mystery as a necessary ingredient, and stood, "Against reliability and repeatability," which I find to be consistent also with Herbert Brun's dictum:"There is no repetition, only insistence." These cyberneticians have influenced my work in their decision to allow for proliferation of interpretations, points of view, and even "realities." Thus, Maturana's "multiversa" or aggregate of all posited universes, is the background - identical to Bohm's - against which the actions and stylistic shifts of LVT:apv take place. The shifting of "constellating and reconstellating" array is a reconfiguring, like Varela's view of evolutionary development as "tinkering" in search of fit.
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| Central Park 1965, 68 x 72, 1994-95 |
Further, it suggests Michael Geoghegan's view of the "new chemistry" as oriented toward fit rather than force and heat as agents of gross change out of which, the desired is one of many products, by products and waste products. This process, in my paintings, is also an outgrowth of Maturana's "structural drift," in which organization is conserved by way of structural responsiveness to its medium, whether this medium be the totality of the imaginative structure, the problems of day to day life, or the puzzle of professional or academic success, in a dynamic milieu. In the paintings of LVT:apv the organization is conserved by changing the structure, including the configuration and sequencing of elements. Successive paintings include The Fit. In this painting the lighter figure on the left is an Asian woman. She is Nancy N., my student and studio assistant of the time, whose hair had been dyed a cinnamon color- thus crossing over into the West to which she has physically immigrated from Korea. She is wearing a formal dress, a costume suggesting nineteenth century America or Europe. The dark woman to Nancy's right is very much darker by degrees, and is in fact the naked, ash-colored and skeletal Kali. She holds up her boney hand toward Nancy, bending it at the wrist. Nancy raises her hand to cup Kali's - there is a small space between the fit of the two hands. This, the "fit" of the title is also the gesturel of the shift from old chemistry, as exemplified by Michelangelo's "God creating Adam" about which this painting makes commentary through contrast: One painting is large and public; the other small and intimate.
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Wissahicken,
72 x 48, 1994-95
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One painting is of two males, the other of two females. One shows God as Creator; the other shows goddess as inevitable "destroyer." One shows divine power transferred to anticipating matter, the other shows a mating of human and divine in sacred bond of agreement, "fit," cooperation. In the La Vista Totale: a partial view series the narrative unfolds very slowly. In the narrative, the dark woman assesses the other ( LVT:apv: The Fit ), even threatens the other LVT:apv: Ceremony in the Forest); overall an underground force is activated as an ouroubouros gives birth to snakes that ascend to claim an imperial orb being transferred from the dark woman to the light woman. In the most recent painting of the series, the light woman (X) has shifted to the position of the dark woman, and the dark woman has "ascended" into the persona of Our Lady of Guadalupe, while the supplicant is now a young man (Noah), a pilgrim with a walking stick and a companion coyote. The narrative is not necessarily linear. The whole collection of images (dark woman, light woman, Indian pipe, water threshold, orb, ourobouros, etc.) is an array, or constellation that reconfigures as it cycles around a narrative core.
LVT:apv VI Central Park, 1965
The figures are seen through an autistic consciousness: active brightly-colored
cells of color are surge-units sweeping through experience-of-reality.
Pattern frees itself from fabric. To consensual consciousness this transverbal
condition looks like a hallucinatory state. LVT:apv VII Between Amherst
and Delphi is the most elaborate and complex painting of the set.
As to the iconography: The two models were best friends. As they pose
they hold hands and sing to each other. The floral pattern on the dress
is inspired by a painting of St Catherine of Alexandria by a Flemish
artist and is exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In this painting
(as in the psychedelic version described above ) she has a green flame
above her head. Indian pipe (corpseplant) grows from the earth between
the two figures indicating that someone is buried on this site. Corpseplant
is favored by Emily Dickenson, and an engraving of this "pseudo flower" is
the only decoration in her study at Amherst. In Emily's poem, "The Place"Indian
pipe is mentioned: Tis Whiter than an Indian Pipe Tis dimmer than a
lace; No stature has it, like a fog When you approach the place. Not any
voice denotes it here, Or intimates it there; A spirit, how doth it accost?
What customs hath the air? This limitless hyberbole Each one of us shall
be; Tis drama if (hypothesis) It be not tragedy! - The spring: water
flows from a spring between the two women. Around the source of the spring
are pebbles that resemble jewels, as if the jeweled web of Indra has fallen
to earth. Ourobouros - Beneath the earth a snake is giving birth. 
This
snake is an ourobouros, she is biting her tail. My ourbouros is in the
shape of an infinity symbol rotated and observed until its lines no longer
crossed - thus, to me, "an alternative view of infinity". Newborn snakes
climb toward the surface of the earth. They represent mythic feminism:
This is its 'moment in time' as coinciding with the making of this painting.
One of the little snakes even ascends to the orb that is being transferred
from the-one-who-knows to the supplicant, who has become, at this time
in the narrative, an initiate. The baby snake entwines the monarchic cross
that is placed onto the orb itself as indicator of the king as god, king
as god's steward, patriarchal dominant etc - showing that in this point
in time the female symbol (the snake) has conquered the male crucifix.
Medallions, each containing an alternate reality as if each is an opening
to another context. Later, the mica paintings of 1999 were to repeat this
form and shape frequently. Cartouches: Two cartouches appear at the bottom
left and bottom right of the lower panel of this painting. The lower left
cartouche is "Amherst," the lower right is Delphi.
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