A silence breaks out in heaven for half an hour

November 14, 2024 11:24 AM

Here sonic absence is visualized, and it is yellow
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

That is absolutely breathtaking. I love this.
posted by phooky at 1:47 PM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

There's something profound about this. The writer is attempting to make the intangible, tangible. And I think they kind of succeeded.

I love that the article notes that this silence may have been 'read' aloud.
posted by Phreesh at 3:04 PM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Rather than claiming that the Silos Apocalypse prefigures works like Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow (1956) or Yves Klein’s “Untitled Yellow Monochrome” (1956), it would be more productive (and interesting) to ask how those modern investigators of the chromosphere approached a type of representation that converged with medieval forms of contemplation

"Nature of Abstract Art" (1937) explores this:

The two are not completely opposed, however, in their premises, and will appear to be related if compared with the taste of religious arts with a supernatural content. Both realism and abstraction affirm the sovereignty of the artist's mind, the first, in the capacity to recreate the world minutely in a narrow, intimate field by series of abstract calculations of perspective and gradation of color, the other in the capacity to impose new forms on nature, to manipulate the abstracted elements of line and color freely, or to create shapes corresponding to subtle states of mind. [Meyer Schapiro, via oncurating (pdf)]

Schapiro later publishes "From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos" (1939, also meeting with Walter Benjamin)

thank you, chavenet, for this highlight

previously
posted by HearHere at 3:12 PM on November 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

Contemplation…I was in NYC MOMA years back where they had this signature blue painting, just blue, by Yves Klein. I was familiar with his work, but standing a few feet in front of it and just looking at it I was struck by the intensity of the color. IT WAS BLUE!!!!!!!!!!! I had never seen color as alive. I could have stared at it for an hour, just awash in its blueness. A few minutes before, I had a similar experience with the exact opposite of Klein, a huge Jackson Pollock. Again I knew his stuff but standing alone in the room filling my field of view with the painting, it too became alive. It was a rare day at MOMA, hardly anyone was there.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:02 PM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]