Community

Thursday’s Tile: Delayed But That’s OK

I have no idea if anyone really waits up for me to get around to publishing Thursday’s Tile on Thursdays. If you do, you can go to bed now…. 

Technical photo problems, a dead camera battery, a really weird photo upload link on “Blogger in Draft”…one I have never seen, which will not let me Browse my own photos (?!?!?!) and definitely not enough time to solve these things AND write of the awesome news that arrived just today.

So, it’s fine to wait another week. I’ll keep you in suspense.

In the meantime, enjoy this single photo of the insides of the Five Senses Bench being built by the sculpture class seven years ago. After seven years, we can wait seven days.

See you for the rousing Finale next Thursday.

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: A Matter of Taste

Here at soon-to-end Thursday’s Tile, we’re exploring the world of sensation tile by tile as depicted on the Five Senses Bench. You can see the whole bench in person installed in the new Visual and Performing Arts complex at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA. Please do if you’re in the area!

Today we have a tasty photo essay of tiles from the Taste Area.

Let’s start with that graphic tile up above about things gone wrong: as in, taste so bad the spoon is refused, reversed and sticking out of the down-turned mouth by the handle. How odd.

Our tongue has taste buds that sense sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savory (or umami.) And apparently they have just discovered another — my favorite — fat! But whether we enjoy these flavors or not has to do more with smell. (And I do tip my hat to the fact that actual eating enjoyment might include texture and temperature, etc.)

We’ve talked about a few possibly reviling Tastes in past posts: the grubs, raw meat and blood lust of the hunt come to mind. The following two tiles enjoy a wide range of gustatory opinion: Sardines and Okra.

I personally enjoy these two sometimes. Fresh sardines are wonderful, and stir-fried, heat-seared okra is not slimy. It might be a matter of preparation and the fine micro-flavors that professional tasters of every kind are sensitive to. I know those nuances exist because ground coffee smells like tuna to me. Same esters or something.

Now fried eggs have a gag-me factor –it’s that runny yoke more than the flavor — but the two in this tile are SO beautifully done and are a perfect example of one artist influencing another. The eggs were already completed and attached when, a semester or two later, along comes the next artist who felt some bacon was needed. She even fashioned the bacon to fit a very tight and specific triangular space. When one tile is purposely placed next to another to create narrative articulation, the whole truly becomes greater than its parts.

Here are the label tiles for Taste, made by the thoroughly into it all and unsung, DP.

Notice the surround of beet, watermelon, avocado, candy corn and snickerdoodle cookie on the bottom right!

The Taste Area is nearly as big a Hearing, Smell and Touch put together, but it was the hands-down easiest to make tiles for. I would merely have to say to all those classes made primarily of young adults, “What are you hungry for? Make that!” and it happened. One semester all four classes worked on Taste tiles only, that side of the bench was SO expansive.

Here’s another melange of melt-in-your-mouth goodies, a complex passage found on the left front curve.

Find these: gummi fish, chocolate kisses, olives, black-eyed peas, more candy corn, pink marshmallow peeps, mushrooms, wrapped candies, a tea bag and Cheetos. Oh, and what about that asparagus and cantaloupe and french bread?

Contrarians abound, and one of them thought a Don’t Eat sign on a bench full of food was funny. And it is.

So quit dripping your snack on your keyboard and come along now as we move to our last Taste tile. It references both a comestible and artistic taste: the Campbell’s Soup Can(s) made more famous as art than food by the infamous Andy Warhol.

We have an example of (biased) Bad Taste…at least as greeted in 1962. It is truly from an era that ushered in a new sensibility and many were just not ready for it. But Warhol persisted (and how) and here we have one absolute icon of Pop Art, which might seem derivative and even a bit pedestrian today. Tastes change! But we knew that.

So this is a wrap on the photo essays for each sense area of the bench. If you started with this one, but are curious about the other four, click on Hearing, Smell, Touch or Sight.

Next week, to conclude Thursday’s Tile: what happens to public art in use, an up close examination and summation.

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: I Spy With My Little Eye

And if you have an eye like this bloodshot mutant double-wide, maybe you only need one! What follows is a look at a few of the tiles on the Sight Area of the Five Senses Bench, the only completely flat side of the project and the one you can most easily take in in a glance. It hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage here at Thursday’s Tile, for some reason. A few of the other posts about tiles from this area are of the purple cow, the braille tiles, a holiday essay and one of the body parts of each sense area.

It is natural that there are a lot of eyes in the Sight Area, just as there were a lot of hands on the Touch Area. But just as Touch morphed into Feeling, Sight morphs quickly into Insight and the Mind’s Eye. It comes from imagination (like the purple cow or the doubled eyeball) and inner vision, like SR’s lovely rendition of the third eye below. Many of the rest of the eyes are Buddha’s or the Eye of Horus. Inner eye awake and aware; person meditating, dreaming, seeing inside.

Below are DP’s label tiles for Sight, and at their bottom is a glimpse of Superman, the Man of Steel with the X-ray Vision. But wait, he has many vision powers: “x-ray, heat-emitting, telescopic, infrared and microscopic.” I did not know that and bet you did not either.

Maybe Superman’s heat-emitting vision melted the clock tile to fit the top curve. Regardless, it is a take-off on Salvador Dali’s most famous work, The Persistence of Memory,

which just so happens to be one of those images that “once seen cannot be unseen,” and functions as a largely recognized cultural reference, much like Munch’s The Scream. I just can’t tell if the hands read 10 after 6 or 2:30….and the correct time probably does not matter in the slightest if your clock is limp and drooling.

Above we have RJ’s nearly famous hand, forming the modern-day hand sign for PEACE — or is that “Make it two beers?” It was originally planned for the Touch area, joining all the other hands, but even the maker did not notice it had six fingers until it was glazed and ready to be attached. We laughed long and hard about that and put it on the Sight side, both as a reference to all kinds of sign language and as a visual pun on ourselves and anyone else who really sees what they’re looking at.

The next three tiles have to do with noticing how the world has changed in even the relatively short time since this bench was conceived (2003), worked on with concerted effort (2005) and finished (2007.) In that time, we have transitioned from using film in cameras to all digital. Film is now exotic stuff, for photog students or….film-makers! But here’s a lovely travel series of a sunset somewhere, nonetheless. What used to be a symbol of taking pictures is now a smartly framed quadtych.

And then there is the old incandescent light bulb, symbol of the bright idea. Will the cool white spiral CF bulb ever quite do that, even though it is the brighter idea of the two? (And those teeny holiday lights are now all LEDs!)

And while the shape of TVs has morphed to the high def flat screen, and satellite/cable is the norm over rabbit ears/antennae, at least the broadcast nonsense is still just as colorfully effervescent as this tile.

But here is something that has not gone away, even though there were dire predictions with the advent of VCRs and DVD players: the movie theater. This tile is a nostalgic rendition of the actual marquee of the Surf Theater on Irving Street in San Francisco, which operated for almost 60 years in some capacity and wound up being an important refuge for seekers of art films and even employment for some of us. If you think about it, the movies engage so many of our senses, including those of imagination and feeling (emotional senses!) How about gratitude? Thanks Surf Theater! Thanks KM for this tile and ES for the silver stars and full moon around it. Thanks.

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: A Little Touchy, Are We?

This month, we’re pulling into the station, on our final descent, on the last leg of Thursday’s Tile. Our March Victory Lap is consisting of photo essays focused on each of the five areas of the Five Senses Bench, with one concluding column planned at month’s end. Click on Hearing or Smell to read those photo essays from the last two weeks.

Let’s look at some Touch tiles. There is a lot to see, including some works that show how one tile leads to another. How about life-giving touch? Up top are the famous hands from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam fresco from the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome. Yesterday a friend commented that what makes this work powerful is the enormous tension created because the hands are NOT touching. We feel that spark of life rather than see it.

And here is ET the Extra Terrestrial’s glowing finger, the one that heals Elliott’s ouchie and the one that he touches to Elliott’s forehead when he leaves saying, “Be Good.” The movie poster openly riffed on Michelangelo’s work as you can see. I love this kind of resonance, myself.

As we learned in the Thursday’s Tile post about the Homunculus, our hands give us the most sensorial information of any part of us, save maybe our lips and tongue. There are many, many hands represented in Touch. There’s this giant 7″ fingerprint, too. I have been wondering who first noticed that none of our fingerprints were the same. Apparently it happened in ancient times. The forensic use of fingerprints is only about 100 years old, though, and nearly all other forms of personal identification are referred to as “fingerprinting,” such as digital fingerprinting (a humorously self-referencing term?!?!) or acoustic or genetic fingerprinting.

Hand tracings are also an ancient form of decoration, universally found in prehistoric caves, petroglyphs and pictographs. They were also the first tiles made representing this area of the bench. The hand tiles are life-size and contain raised decorations, making them fun to touch. Note the tactility of the pineapple near the top hand and the slug and thistle near the bottom two.

Speaking of hard-to-impossible things to touch, above we have HOT LAVA, as well as some cactus. Have you ever cleaned nopales? If so, you know how insidiously painful one invisible micro-spine can be. Even the pre-cleaned ones are capable of stabbing the cook.

And, thinking of stabbing, here is a cuddly porcupine! Not. They hold their barbed quills flat for mating, but raise them when feeling challenged, so curious dogs get muzzle-fulls quite commonly. Porcupines apparently are good eating, and those quills are used in the embroidery unique to Native Americans, presumably after the “spiny pig” is dead and motionless.

One of our last images is a treacherous trio: a round sawblade, some poison oak leaves and a knife that is glazed so convincingly as to constantly catch me offguard.  I startle and think, “Who left that knife sitting there?????” and realize I have been duped again. (Ooooh, and more cactus!)

All these sharp and painful images share this side of the bench with the Braille sign “Please Touch.” Kinda ironic. (The Braille “Do Not Touch” is on the Sight side.)

But there is another kind of Touch besides physical: the feelings that touch us. One of my first posts on Thursday’s Tile was about KB’s lips and her suggestions for adding these kinds of images to touch: angels, purple heart tiles, soft cats. I just re-read that post and it brings a tear to my eye too, like this last photo: Sad Eye with Tear. You might think it belongs on Sight, but it is exactly the right crossover tile, made specifically for this area, its narrative adapting to its placement and expanding our experience. A little Touchy, are we? That’s good!

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: Yee Gawd, What’s that Smell????

Let us now turn our attention to the Smell Area of the Five Senses Bench and perform a photo examination of something besides the pleasant smells of sweet peas and petrichor, coffee beans and stargazer lilies. (Or even all that yummy food round the other side in the ginormous Taste Area.)

Yee Gawd, what’s that awful smell? There is a disproportionate number of reviling tiles in this sense area than in nearly all the other senses combined.

I know a few reasons why. One is that Smell apparently connects right to our reptilian brains, giving us primal and non-cognitive information. Our whole beings react to smells on experiential levels we can hardly even perceive. We know our parents and siblings by smell: it’s a proven fact, even if we never needed to ID them that way. No thinking needed.

The other reason I know why there are so many stinky tiles is because of the couple of fun afternoons I sat on the bench-in-progress, notepad in hand, and took down every free association for Smell that GN and PMcN threw at me. They were moving around the outdoor work area one-upping each other with grossness. It is absolutely the BEST way to get good ideas: Get your body in motion and just start speaking everything that comes to mind. Have a sympatico partner to play the game with and someone or something else recording it all.

So let’s take a look at some of their excellent collaboration results.

The next two shots are the same basic location, low on the seat back, just above and below the SMELL label tiles made by the aesthetically opinionated and industrious DP. They form a tableau of bad smells and possible remedies: air freshener and clothespin-on-the-nose (does anyone really do that, or is it just a fun image?)

Ya got yer skunks, your cigarettes and burnt matches. If you think about it, I bet you can recall each smell clearly enough to want to use a clothespin yourself. If you get enough skunky odor, it will make you retch. Bet you don’t want to try, either.

A word about that broken and falling evergreen tree. It is funny next to the pine air freshener, no? And yes, the tile broke in the making, but it strengthened the narrative relating to Smell because then it became an example of John Muir’s description of the 7.4 magnitude Owens Valley earthquake as he experienced it on the West side of the Sierras in Yosemite Valley in 1872. He wrote this: “…and the air was loaded with the odor of crushed Douglas Spruces, from a grove that had been mowed down and mashed like weeds.” Think: Gigantic Christmas Tree lot, bowled over! (And thank you forever for your glorious writings, John Muir.)

Above we have one example of several kinds of flowers, Arum genus, I believe, that can smell like rotting flesh, when they bloom. Some are insanely huge, too.
MMMMMMmmmmmmmmm……..MMMMMMM!!!!!!

You see that outhouse tile just below the Arum Amorphophallus flower? Here come the bodily emissions!

Our little man is burning a hole in his pants emitting that green cloud with a few odd chunky areas in it. Can air be chunky? Need we say more?

Well, GN and PMcN outdid themselves. P got such a clear image of “a soft-serve pile of poo” he made it himself. That’s some great shit, P! If I recall, it’s dog poo. Watch your step, it smells worse on the beach between your barefoot toes. Ask me. I know.

Does anyone sweat freely by choice any more? Let’s completely block those sweat glands with a giant swipe of aluminum chlorhydrate.And there’s the hairy armpit with one nipple to accentuate the message.

The stinky sneakers look almost genteel. But what about toxic fumes? Chemicals? Smog? Methane gas? Carbon Dioxide? We end with the whole world wearing a heavy duty gas mask to prevent it from smelling…..itself? “Fumes may cause death.” Indeed. You have been notified.

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: Altered Hearing and Inner Ears


This post is the beginning of the end for the Thursday’s Tile blog posts. I plan five photo essays for each of the senses on the Five Senses Bench and then a summation post, with everything ending in late March, after six months of Thursdays.

Many of the tiles on the Five Senses Bench are there because they express the opposite of what might be expected for that particular Sense. They might be another take on it, an anti-view or an out-of-the-bench tangential, thoughtful observation. Gosh darn those Artists!

Even though some of these tiles physically wound up applied on other areas because they could pass for two or even three senses, this grouping includes those that call to us to take the indirect route to even the things we could never hear.

Up above is a rendition of the main figure from The Scream by Edvard Munch, an image which strikes to the core of modern angst even though it was painted a hundred years ago. Munch painted several versions over almost 20 years, starting in 1892. Sometimes he titled it The Cry of Nature. Our Inner Ears hear this shrieking skeletal spectre and we come away wanting to cover our own ears and scream as well.

 

Next up we have words for sounds and two critters. If we could not read, would we even hear these animals? Does it matter that bunnies are some of the most silent creatures out there, only screaming in pain or ecstasy? And why oh why would a bunny be saying D’oh!? And, if we had never heard D’oh! spoken would we even understand what that speech bubble meant? Anyhow, the bunny says D’oh! because it was a placement opportunity sight gag that just came up and we took it.

The dog in the last photo reminded me that we only hear within a certain range and other creatures hear things beyond, or, in the case of bats, do things differently with sound. Bats, the only mammals that truly fly, navigate by echolocation, playing a sophisticated form of Marco Polo every night.

And what about communicating soundlessly, as this mime does? This tile is a good example of one that was suitable for both Hearing and Sight and wound up on the latter.

Below is a series of tiles that has to do with ear applications: ear plugs, ear protection – or is it old school headphones? – and a hearing aid. This is a grouping that represents things we do with and for and near our ears to enhance, deny, amplify or mitigate sound.

 

 

Do you know the old joke about the man with carrots in his ears, who, when told about it said, “I can’t hear you, I have carrots in my ears!” Well, you know it now. Dumb, yes, but a perfect example of things we can choose to do, since we do not have ‘earlids.’

So, that’s a tour of the Hearing area that involves silence, sound imagination by our inner ears, extra-human sensations, as well as hearing modifications.

Once again, here are that area’s title tiles, suggested and made by the ever-involved DP. And here’s another sight gag based on the word ring.

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: In Praise of Entomophagy

Right above the vanilla orchid on the Five Senses Bench, right there on the pointy knee of the Taste area, are two tile testimonials to the fact that millions of people enjoy larvae and insects as a daily source of crunchy, savory protein.

We here in North America typically consider Entomophagy a survivalist curiosity, a lollipop novelty or a Triple Dog Dare suitable for reality TV. The plain motivation for including this Sago Palm grub (on the left) and the mess o’ fried mealworm (on the right) was the Gag Factor and frisson of repulsion they induced.

Every one of us working on these particular tiles (it grew into a group effort) started out like that and yet our researching, while not turning us into aficianados or grub-o-philes, did gain us a wider appreciation of all that the human palate and gastro-intestinal system are capable of.

Spit-roasted or raw? Deep fried on buttered toast? Here’s one recipe from ehow. I still would not choose this food, just as I don’t choose snails, rattlesnake or tripe, even though I have eaten them in the past.

It is important to note that I have a choice, just as the ever-insightful Michael Pollan explores in his wonderful books from The Omnivore’s Dilemma to Food Rules. I’m guessing if the choice is gummi or sago palm worms, Mr. Pollan would always advise the latter as being Real Food. Either can be delicious or repugnant according to custom, expectation and the like. Add in the knowledge that processed edibles, no matter how cute and appealing, are Not Especially Good for Us, and that choice sharpens.

Another small takeaway here is that the notion of Taste pretty quickly broadens from direct physical sensation to those cultural realms and choices. We could not capture Taste-as-Aesthetics directly in our tiles, either. The notion of Good Taste might not be translatable into an object, only a sign for it.

We can, however, take an object and call it Beautiful as we see it. Here are these tiles -all of them, this whole bench -all of it, working towards that end. Better still, DP took a mold off the Sago Palm Grub and remade a solid version of it as a brooch! I like her Taste: it made a beautiful personal decoration in a deliciously gross kind of way, and I won’t ever have to eat it!

Share this: