Had the Spaniards not come

On the first Crocodile Day of the year of Quetzal, that is somewhere at the end of fifteen hundreds, Ptleoatlatl, the elusive God of Anonymity was chewing dreamingly a fresh batch of coca leaves brought from some place the other side of the Andes. The batch was not bad at all. Different. Special. It that made you feel more lightheaded than the regular stuff priests would leave for him on the altars.
He was sitting where he usually sat at this time of the day, by the Sea of the Carribes wandering if there was anything else beyond those crappy islands just beyond the horizon. Yeah, he was kind of a God but somehow he was condemned to a terrestrial existence like everybody else; or almost. The "almost" being that pesky bag of recycled feathers named Quetzalcoatl doing showy jumps from one tree to another, well yeah and sometimes kind of skipping a few of them. Anyway, it even wasn't really such a big deal 'cause the pompous pest could not keep it up for more than the distance between two low rank pyramids in Tenochtitlan. It was annoying that Huitzilopotchli always favored that good for nothing. All he did was just hang out with priests and rich merchants and break winds pretending they're transgressions between Earth and Sky. As for himself, what could he do - he was the God of Anonymity, The God of your every day regular Atl, the pyramid builder, gazillions of them and the damned fools didn't even know about his existence. And why should anyone do? Wasn't he the Bloody God of Anonymity?  Strike that - the bloody one was Huitzilopotchli! Ptleoatlatl himself was just sweaty. Yeah, just listen how that sounds - The Sweaty Almighty God of Anonymity! Hilarious! How the hell should anyone know about him. However, there was a trickle of mercy coming his way from the Great All Merciful Sun. A group of lower rank priests in desperate need of justifying their ceremonial scheduling built him some sort of makeshift altar where he would occasionally find some goodies. Of course it was mostly crap like stone-dry nuts, over-ripe fruit, the ubiquitous barbequed bat with nothing left on his bones but his pathetic shadow... Fortunately, sometimes a nice surprise awaited him, like the other day. That nice little a bag of tender coca leaves, picked at the peak of their season. Yeah, wouldn't it be great to have that every day! ...or at least once a week! ..or once a month, for heaven's sake....
As Ptleoatlatl was sitting, dreaming and chewing, maybe not necessarily in that order, a sudden burst of wind hit him in the face with something like a wave of sand. TEZCATLIPOCA!!! This was the first thing that came to his mind. The bloody trickster - this one bloody for sure! And as he was gasping for air with his mouth wide open he got another mouthful of both - some air and lots of sand. Under normal circumstances it shouldn't have been a problem. Just spit and rinse a few times and maybe keep a handful of ptlotyetl sand-eating worms in the mouth during the siesta. Unfortunately this time he had that exquisite batch of coca leaves all moistened and softened that now turned into a disgusting crunchy paste grinding between his teeth. The freak... this Tezcatlipoca was the scourge of the world and damned Head of the Household of Gods on top of everything else. Head of the House, my ass! Is there any other place in this pitiful world were the Clown is the King? Hold on, maybe I'm rushing judgement here. How on Earth he got himself  up there is anybody's guess. Everybody hated him! That's for sure, Quetzalcoatl being on the top of the list.  Ptleoatlatl kept chewing for a while hoping that his strong teeth will prove stronger than the sand but to no avail. There was so much more sand than coca paste that he felt as if he was chewing on a soft brick. It was intolerable! Tezcatlipoca  he couldn't think of anybody else playing a prank like this on him. But what could he do? To whom to complain? ...and to make the joke worse the source of the prank looked totally anonymous  Reluctantly Ptleoatlatl spat the concoction into the palm of his hand, took another look as if saying farewell, squeezed it regretfully into some kind of ugly blob and tossed it into the next wave. The shapeless mass made a noisy contact with the water and then ...just floated! Yeah, a real load of sand and spit and yeah, some leaves ...true they float .. but they were just a few!!!  This was dumb! That blob was definitely heavier than water. That much even Ptleoatlatl knew. Look at that, it floats barely touching the water! said to himself  the stunned deity picking the blob out of the water. The bag with the coca leaves was more than half full. He gave it another try this time deliberately filling his mouth with sand and shells and a few leaves and chewed on it until everything was thoroughly bound together. By the end of the day he had a nice pyramid-like pile of blobs floating a couple of palms above the ground. While rinsing his mouth, all Ptleoatlatl could think of was promotion.

On the third Jaguar Day, fifty eighth straight moon years later the first pyramid sailed away toward the East. It was named Eastern Moon and it was five times higher than the Notre Dame de Paris. Ptleotlatl was standing on the top platform performing a routine ritual of Vegan sacrifice. Mostly over-ripe tomatoes and red chilli peppers. Tezcatlipoca was down inside the sweaty quarters of the Giant Rowing Chambers of the Moon Pyramid playing, by all accounts, pranks on himself. Quetzalcoatl was dared to go on a scouting mission during the open sea trials and never came back. Life is great, thought Ptleoatlatl!

In less than a month the Portuguese were to get a terrible shock at the site of a huge floating mountain of stone approaching their shores...

Sasha Meret

October 2013, New York

This is the first story generated by the painting from the series Had The Spaniards Not Come - a hypothetical new Art History where I explore What If  scenarios about how art evolved had certain events not turn the way we know.

The painting is :

"Had The Spaniards Not Come #1" 

Sasha Meret  

Oil and metallic oil paint on canvas;

 2006-2013;  

8' x 3'

Armando Romero 

on Transcendental Wit

There is a hidden little fact written in the secret "Artchemy Codex on How to Make Serious Art Fun", buried somewhere under one of the Yacata pyramids of Tzitzuntzan. It mentions that Hermes was there on several occasions at the traditional Graffiti Residencies hosted by the local goggle-eyed god Tlaloc. Hermes known also as the Trickster, god of transitions and boundaries, traveler between the worlds, bored out of his wits by his classical upbringing was planning one of his stunts on his fellow Olympians. His Temporeal visas mandatory for any time travelling trip show a series of surprising outings with Tlaloc and a third party, an art teacher from Michoacan. They crashed an anniversary celebration of a certain Hyeronimus near s'-Herthogenbosch in The Netherlands. Also, noted was a disturbance at a Spanish Royal Court painting sitting in Madrid in the company of a certain Francisco, A police report of a break in at the  Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles listed one black duck missing a shooting, and a summons from NYPD was issued for vandalism in Brooklyn, New York. A little out of the way the same three suspects were recorded by a Star Wars long range scanner soliciting favours from a rather unsavory character named Vader or something at a facility on the planet Naboo. The transcripts of  their visits, also mandatory in time travelling conjecture include some other unexpected names like Garfield, Pokemon, Mighty Mouse just to name a few. Getting a little more serious It is also mentionable their stop over at Gottingen for an intensive class of Transcendental Phenomenology that might have disbanded the party. On each occasion the were seen carrying rolled canvases in spite of strict "No Luggage" regulation. Currently, and we have no idea what that really means when one time-travels The GTA (for Global Time-travelling Agency has them under investigation. The charge is - interfering with their designated timeline.

The naughty trio split after the the German escapade And the GTA agent are working 24/7 to trace the culprits. The main lead were a series of similar graffiti freshly sprayed  on the Moon Pyramid in Teotihuacan, in Plaka on the walls of Acropolis and in Miami on several canvases by a Mexican Artist Armando Romero waiting to be exhibited  at the Gala Kavachnina Gallery. The Graffiti controversy continues to transcend time and one can always guess a trickster hidden behind this manifestation of eclecticism. 

There is no real evidence of Armando Romero being the third party mentioned in the above transcripts. His layering technique may suggest an unusual ease of switching between time periods making him a suspect for GTA prosecution. On the other hand his rich cultural background could justify the fertile cultural grounds revealed in his visual explorations. He is boldly questioning of the long term effects on moral values of radically different cultural juxtapositions. His imagery could stand as trophies of an archeology of the moment where Sin coexists with Irony and his language is made universal through familiar quotations from the History of Art  His references come full circle from line drawings that could have easily been traced by a shaman in a prehistorical cave to explosive calligraphy of graffiti on the walls in a modern metropolis. However, there is a strange synchronicity between the methods described in the Artchemy Codex and the reductionist methods in Romero's neoeclectic compositions where his visual quotations have the tendency to let his imagery floating in pure wit. It is notable that his canvases could also be a serious lessons of how to make art fun thus opening the time-traveling Agency to some degree of leniency.

Sasha Meret

October 2013, New York  , http://kavachnina.com/exhibitions/past/

Clouds of Probabilities

WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 2010

Clouds of Probabilities

Right before The Big Bang an ethereal humming was lingering in this so called Improbable Plane.
It could have been the echo of a previous failed attempt at Creation or the residue from a defective muffler from Multiverse X15, or something similar. Fact is that a while later, somewhere in Long Island City, Queens clusters of notes from that improbable source materialized on several sheets of Fabriano paper and a number of sizes of stretched Belgian linen and plywood panels. It was no accident, just another confirmation of Godel's Theory of Incompleteness, this time with pigments, alkyds and mineral spirits. The alchemist in charge, Massimo Kaufman armed with a set of flat brushes and eyedroppers released the elusive harmonies from their immaterial condition to the delight of privileged eyes. Entropy, marching orchestras, stellar ecosystems, Zappa's histrionics converge in a new Braille alphabet for the forbidden pleasures. We are looking at a multiple-layered map where intuition meets control and chemistry and physics blend with poetry. It looks as if an imaginary conversation with a mesmerized audience has been taking place. The audience is asking Massimo to add more and more of the magical dots to his canvas. But he knows better when to stop. One droplet in excess and the whole order of the universe might become disrupted.

Nicholas Veg
May 2010, New York

Mystical Neo-Realism

It may sound New Agey, it may look like a subliminal contradiction, but when four shamans congregate to address the notion of what is real and how to deal with it, this looks like serious business.

The shamania is here to challenge the legality of the laws of physics: how can a gesture become Now-for-Ever an echo; how museums preserve materialized echoes. The shamania collect all the thinkable ideas all the way to an Event Horizon and sometimes even stop for a blink on that hypothetical edge to watch the birth of a star in another Universe. Then they thread a mesh of all the forgotten wishes and desires since time immemorial into a tangible fabric named Freedom.

To be more specific, let's say one of them freezes the staccato of a hypothetical Babylon into the slow moving particles rhythm of a metal plate. Another one catches the bouncing light from it onto a Silicon chip and dips it into a mystical developer that keeps all the possibilities open.

From there it is retrieved by a third one, The Sound Master, who then sets the luminous echoes free to mingle with real Babylon.

Now comes the crazy one who's tracing bits and pieces of dissipated echoes and molds them into a totemic gathering of artifacts reminiscent of the original plate. All this may resonate with Berdyaev's Apokatástasis - that is universal salvation through restoration to the original or primordial condition, with the difference that our metaphysical quadrumvirate is restoring what we call reality to the original pre-Divine form through their exuberant Art. 

There is a long tradition of mysticism in art, if one were to think as far back as the cave paintings of Altamira or Lascaux way up to Brueghel, Caravaggio, Picasso, Dalí or Andrew Wyeth. The difference is that those were only local manifestations of the mystical in a fragmented reality. The Now Mysticism is happening more and more as Global Reality. The concept of Now is present everywhere we can reach with our minds and true Art is the ideal vehicle.

Mirolevich, Vishnyakov, Molochevski and Meret – the aforementioned Neo-Mystics and members of the shamania – gather their bits, pixels and all the particles that can afford a name, into voluptuous clouds of probabilities, which need only an open minded public to become a tangible vibrant Reality.

Now this is one hell of a trip to take on and you're invited! You can call it The Mystical Neo-Realist Tour!

A Short Hronomian History

These are excerpts from Nicholas Veh's notes about one of his momentous intersections with the Hronomian Timeline discovered while uploading a posting to his Facebook page.

It was his first contact with Chian Kai that set it up, when he got his invite  to become friends on FaceBook.  Veh was always doing a routine checkup on any uninvited solicitation coming from the web. He would just check the "about" entries, mutual friends, eventually Google the name, etc. As it often happens, he draw a blank but hey, that was nothing unusual. However, the name, for sentimental reasons if not for anything else made him accept the invite. The resemblance with the name of the former Chinese leader and the night spent in Chiang Kai-shek's bedroom at the general's summer residence during one of his trips in Taiwan made Veh give it a try. From the very beginning Chin Kai was enthusiastic about Veh's art related postings. His comments seemed educated but the choice of words was at least strange. They started exchanging messages and with the increasing interest on both sides switched to chatting. What hit Nicholas most of all was Chian's incredible ignorance in history issues. Any reference of that kind would draw a blank. Again that wasn't exactly unusual,  especially in America, but when an obviously Asian person never heard of Kamikaze ...

Later on he found out that in the Hronomian timeline Kublai Khan attacked Japan a month earlier and the weather was marvelous for a landing...

...

It is commonly accepted among the Hronomian caste of shamans that, with the assumption of a divine intervention the first moment of The Genesis was preceded by a so called Delta Delay. The term imply that all signaling of a beginning be it "Fiat Lux" or whatever, occur with an infinitesimal delay. Technically for a divine maker a delta delay would not be measurable unit, but from a  practical perspective one would equate a delta delay with the smallest time unit one could measure. In contemporary Terrestrial terms that would be a femtoseond added to the beginning of the universe.  In the Hronomian Time Line it is called The Moment and it is the product of the ultimate quanta that is perpendicular on the unique reference point known as NOW. (A footnote in Veh's entry pointed to the traditional representation in a certain Terestrial religion of God's eye enclosed in a Delta sign.)

...

In the early eight hundreds (that is Hronim Time that starts in 1155 our timeline - the assumed date of birth of Genghis Khan) the Hronomians developed the concept of Momenteternity - an intensive exploration of the wave patterns in the widely common Hronomian practice of Total Dynamic Stillness. It was a kind of creatively induced mindfulness that would focus on the unfathomable aspects of a Moment.

The discipline of TDS allowed a vertical probing into a designated moment using the regressive tendency of a basic brain wave towards initial alter-state - the primordial particle. It is something like the opposite of the accelerated expansion of the universe, at a subatomic scale..

...

The Hronomians are a Temporeal culture  That means they manifest a tendency to shift the coordinates of their existence preferably  towards dwelling in a Time-Space continuum, where the manifestation of Time is physically prevalent and Space tends to recede into abstraction. They strive to develop a tri-directional time frame where in addition to past and future they would  focus on exploring the depth of the moment.

One of the most common practices was to bring oneself to such a creative frenzy that the intensity of the basic string vibrations would obliterate any connection with the common reference points of a conventional Terestrial  existence. The past and the future become irrelevant . Any time residue outside the Moment is devoured by the Hronovore covering the surrounding virtual space.

...

...Nicholas Veh, The Hrononaut discovered the point of entry into that enhanced Creative State of Mind that transforms the concept of exit into an entry =  a beginning,  point where from our Newtonian perspective the time stands still. The process of attaining that involves practices as non-referential mindfulness, catatonic event distinction and abepelaid interval constriction ( don't even bother asking what it means). 

...

Initially the Hronomians coexist in both Space-time and Time-space Continuums. 

The Ultimate Quest is to find the Personal Sublime Moment where any deed can be augmented to Cosmic proportions. The trove of a Sublime Moment is confirmed in a ceremonial custom named A-temporal Bridal Communion.  According to Nicholas Veh the courtship ritual for the Hronomians requires the capture of the Hronovore Beast that is inevitably lurking in the vicinity of any moment and use its hide as a part of the ceremonial outfit for the Bridal Ceremony. A successful hunter would be honored with the title Magister Momento - Master of the Moment and would have absolute control over the influence of his past or future in defining the intensity of his chosen Sublime Moment.

The ultimate accomplishment for a Hronomian is defining The Beginning of a Chosen Moment when his or hers physical presence is removed from the current Space-Time Continuum. A reminiscence of his Space related existence is displayed and celebrated by placing a Ceremonial Idol in The Shrine of Hronim. The Idol would be adorned with the hunting outfit worn at the time of The Ultimate Hunt and a slightly tridimensional replica of the captured Hronovore hide that is encoding the hunter's original history and possible futures.              

As expected,there isn't any accurate account of the actual time transgressions . The bits and pieces gathered in the Shrine's database are mostly notes left by Nicholas Veh.

Magister Momento stands beyond the equivalent of an Event Horizon - the all-absorbing moment acting as a Black Hole. Time loses all connection with any physical manifestations and reverts to the pure intelligence  of the very beginning that thought of it, the one preceding the Delta Delay.

Tempore Manducans Bestiae is a creature, for lack of a better word, known only in Time-Space Continuum. It is the only species listed under Hronovores, although that is strongly debatable in the Space-Time alternative. It's territory of activity is in the immediate vicinity of the Moment's Event Horizon. However there are known cases of territorial overlap in the presence of time-compression occurrences associated with Singularities.  The Hronovore confrontations are brutal and instant. There is no time value to the confrontation - not even a Delta Delay. In simpler terms it's a merger. Surprisingly the smaller specimen is usually taking over allegedly due to the creature's anatomy. The grid-like structures with powerful spiral patterns have been identified as similar the ones found in the human Cortex when nano layering it. The mirror finish of the Hronovore structure makes the hunting extremely difficult especially as their presence being detectable only through a parallel mirror device.

Nicholas Veh 

New York, October 2013

The Dream Converter

Dreams remain an unfathomable enigma as far as their provenance or manner of controlling them.  Most likely a brand of subtle energy,  they touch our minds in unpredictable  ways with potentially dire consequences. However they are vital for our mental sanity and in high demand in the diverse aspects of our culture.  For such a reason there is a special caste of individuals capable of harnessing them and giving them a physical presence. They are the so called "dream converters" and one could find them active from Tasmania, Down Under all the way to Minsk, Belarus. Actually one of them - Artem Mirolevich is from Minsk and is currently churning dreams of every imaginable kind in the citadel of all dreams, New York City, where their density can mislead you to believe them for real.
What makes the Mirolevich brand of "dream converting"special is his quest for grandiose visions of almost apocalyptic intensity that are rendered with hallucinating detail. His uniqueness  relies in his capacity of exorcising evil from the most dramatic compositions replacing it with a dash if wit and humor.  Even his gigantic shark roaming above a submerged city  is having a mesmerizing attractive  effect on the viewer.
The real "Dream Converters" are a rare breed. If you find one keep close and share his vision.
The importance of what they are doing is such that no matter of how much they would be paid it still would seem they are working "pro bono".

Sasha Meret, New York, July 2013

Old Ship - Artem Mirolevich

Litho-harmonies in Languedoc

There is an ageless white haired sage dwelling in the heart of Languedoc who's chiseling incessantly a magical formula for capturing time into the crystalline structure of stone. It is a ruthless endeavor  for time can be quite a nefarious foe and actually very few can boast with a definite.result in this kind of quest. One of them named Ariel Moscovici is a long time practitioner of this so called Hrono-Lithography, a practice as ancient as the first gesture of a prehistoric shaman. He inhabits a space where history is in a perpetual echo stasis, so tactile that simple blinking of the eyes seems to leave traces on one's surroundings. His expertise is in capturing time traveling crystalline structures careless enough to pause briefly,inside his sanctuary. He tempers them with his brand of esthetics although he would deny it, maintaining that esthetics to him would be what Ornithology is to birds. Time with an array of multidimensional nuances can be a mesmerizing site and Moscovici, an exquisite tuner of litho-harmonies is placing them at the most auspicious conjectures to increase their resonance. Several time units ago he managed to place a eight-part formula in the proximity of the tallest structure built on the Northern shore of the island of Formosa - four split bubbles of pure marble time traveling from Palumbrian to an unknown destination. There is a debate going on about the symbology revealed and the long term effect it may have on the viewers. But there have been accounts that it is just enough to slant your eyes at the right angle and you can glimpse into an age when a nameless ocean was trying to mimic the sky.

Sasha Meret, New York, September 2013

 

Life After...

Paul opened his eyes as the first sun rays hit the framed poster hanging on the wall. Facing it was a narrow window, a little to the left, behind an old fashioned bed occupying almost half of the room. The stream of light that left the sun precisely eight minutes ago would travel the last eight feet of its voyage apparently unaware of the life-giving magic  that it was about to perform.  Paul, the consequential creation of that magical act gained awareness of the moment as the first wave of photons crossed the room. The effect triggered by the reflection wouldn’t last long, but by now it became a morning ritual when the bouncing light would land on Karen’s retina, making the pastel colors of the hanging print the first thing she would see opening her eyes. “Castle and Sun” was the title -  a world filled with dreams, music and poetry. ”A mysterious concoction of Surreal blended with Cubist elements, seducing the eye with a child’s playful exuberance”…  – at least that’s how it was described in the Sotheby’s catalog where she first spotted it. Paul knew about it because the catalog has been lying on the night table for weeks after Karen decided to order on line the print. However, the image in the catalog has been enough to bring him around again and again and introduce him gradually into the private world of his new life-giver. His presence in Karen’s room was hard to define in plain words. He was kind of all over the place but his vision was carried by his hostess’ eyes so his trajectories were linked to her routines. This morning the light was brilliant and vibrant and Paul managed to get closer to see better the delicate lines and the subtle color combinations that made his painting so appealing. He was stunned by the quality of the prints these days. Details could be seen down to an almost tactile perception. The intricate composition was probably the reason Karen picked up this particular piece for the bedroom. Often her gaze would wander in a dream-like state through the endless imaginary rooms of the Castle, inhabited by deep colors and hues, a labyrinth where light gets lost and forgets its unperishable nature. She installed one of those special lamps to  look at this surreal  world even after the rest of the house was drowned in darkness. She would doze off while the bouncing messages loaded with myriads of stories dissimulated into colors would travel down from the print on the wall through the barely open eye lashes to find coherence under her eyelids. Paul remembered how in the same dream-like state, facing a similar narrow window overlooking the forever gray skyline of his adoptive city, he traced the first lines of his imaginary castle.  Munich was one of those
 choices that come to you on a silver tray, but without a weather forecast. The teaching job allowed him to experiment, methodically with a wide range of painting techniques and materials. Looking at it closer Paul could recall the penetrating smell of the India ink, the noise made by the steel nib on the textured paper, the smooth gliding of the brush spreading the eager to impress pigments onto the fields of carefully drawn rectangles. He has painted it after his visit to Tunisia and became smitten with the color and light his whole being absorbed there. The long walks with his friend August in “the luminous Kingdom of Light”, how he used to call it, mades color a stronger part of his new sense of perception (understanding). Color became a subtle underlining to his thoughts, a new dimension to his inner world where previously a mono-chrome vision was reigning. In contrast with the drab autumn colors in Munich, his work looked like an attempt to escape from the gray reality surrounding him, a refuge from the memories of the war years when he had to paint endlessly the monotone camouflage patterns on the Kaiser’s airplanes.

 Paul enjoyed the brief moments spent in Karen’s crammed apartment. Her nearly religious morning greeting, her thoughts of him often lingering into the time of departure for work, allowed Paul to discover surprising aspects of her personality. He could tell that on a cloudy day she would become meditative and think of her sad years back in Belgium, or that listening to Bach’s music would make her cry and crave for strawberry lintzer. However he still couldn't find out what was her line of work, what was she doing when out of that heavy squeaky door.  Strange, one would assume, but not to Paul, at least not anymore. During these frugal bits of existence he had the choice to be anywhere his mind would take him, but the comfort of Karen’s joy, when looking at the image of his painting made him stay there, content and unaware of time or purpose. His idealist metaphysics seemed to have found a fertile ground around her luminous psyche. The vivid mosaic of washes had always an uplifting effect on Karen and her first thought of the day would invariably go to Paul. It was just a poster, easy to find on E-bay for $15.99, but it did the trick – he was “in” for another brief interlude, collecting dividends .
The list  of  his "regular life-givers" was huge but there were a few  favorites like the jovial new-yorker Peter Casper the owner of a print of “Southern Gardens”, Mattia Duval from Milan who inherited “Dream City” from his uncle Giorgio together with his wit or the refined Nakao Myabi from Kyoto who had one of his early drawings. These were characters  that would stay with Paul long enough to become something like an extended family. Or little Mabel Williams from Athens, Tennessee, who was using a reproduction of his painting “Two Heads” as an orientation map for her mental journeys, while her father would lecture her about  the virtues of punctuality.  Paul often remembered when Norton bought the original and gave him one of the footholds in the universe of the rich and famous.  Now the painting, hanging in the museum he has founded, was bringing Paul a long stream of Californian “time shares”. Like most “museum time” as he chose to name it, these intervals were used for chores, for making order in his own thoughts, in developing his new persona away from the physical world. It was not what one would call “quality time”. There were just bits and pieces of an amorphous mass of thoughts, never enough to get to know someone, and used to search for a reason to exist. He could never remember much from those brief encounters – a kaleidoscope of beauty and triviality mixed together into a painful noise.

“Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses; the history of the training of this most fundamental and elusive of human powers will plunge us into deep waters.” Said Francis Yates in his “The Art of Memory”, one of Paul’s favorite readings. He was often wondering if the after-death journeys would take place within the space of one’s mind or if it would extend  through other connected minds into the outer space.

“I wonder how much she really knows about me..” was his thought while feeling the nearing void. There was always a slow down in his awareness before the imminent interruption. He could never manage to go through with the guessing game about his so called “hosts”. He had little time to look around Karen’s messy interior. His legendary pedantry made him cringe when trying to snoop into the piles of unopened mail, books, newspapers, sometimes even paper plates with leftovers from previous night’s TV dinner. For Paul, who was writing down how many times he would sharpen his pens it was a completly alien world. He couldn’t understand how she managed to live there, but it didn’t take to be a private eye to see loneliness written al over Karen’s life. He often felt overwhelmed with waves of sympathy and sorrow for her. Now, after decades of practice, he could feel an intimate kinship with those who didn’t seem to belong anywhere. Loneliness was his only constant  and paradox companion, one could say. Oh, how he missed now Lily! Before fading away, Paul recalled the words, his devoted wife, engraved on his tombstone – “I belong not only to this life. I live as well with the dead, as with those not born. Nearer to the heart of creation than others, but still too far.” Paul Klee 1879 – 1940.



Sasha Meret, Long Island, 2008



…death is a harbor with invisible piers….

The Shrine of Hronim

                                        Fragmednt of the installation "The Shrine of Hronim" by Sasha Meret

The Shrine of Hronim - The Time Particle

(an alternative history)

Welcome to The Shrine of Hronim - The Time Particle, a space for worshiping Creative Time!

The year is still 2013, but it is the Age of Hronim - The Time Particle, a place from the realm of Platonia, home of all the other possible realities.
In this time-line The Mongol Empire flourished to a total global expansion continuing Genghis Khan's unprecedentedly brutal but surprisingly progressive social policies. The split from our timeline happens in 1258 when at the siege of Baghdad  the Caliph Al-Musta'sim  accepts the terms of surrender demanded by the Great Khan Mongke.This way the great libraries of the Caliphate including the famous House of Wisdom survive the Mongol conquest and the highly sophisticated Abbasid civilisation is absorbed more or less peacefully into the Mongol global empire. Applying efficient meritocracy, forbidding any manifestation of nationalism or institutionalized religion and encouraging advanced creative thinking brings the people of the Global empire into a higher state of mind with a strong emphasis on positive pragmatism. In a few generations the Mongol rulers were assimilated and any form of individual creativity is channeled  into activities that augment the quality of life. With the elimination of the major causes of conflict the competitiveness and aggressiveness of the human nature is expressed primarily in poetry, visual arts, music and encouragement of scientific research. Based of the knowledge accumulated in the libraries of the Caliphate the research branches of genetics and theoretical physics make spectacular advances. The Philosophical studies are are primarily preoccupied with perception of reality and defining the concept of time.
 Religious thinking is free but confined to the privacy of one's home.
The dominant individual practice is The Cult of Hronim -The Time Particle, a derivative form of Buddhism  and early Gnosticism

The focus of the cult is the worship of the multiple aspects of Hronim - the Time Divinity manifested predominantly through  the relentless metamorphosis of Fashion.

Time is divided in Positive(Creative) Time and Negative Time (everything else). 

Keeping a Positive Time balance is draconically enforced. There is an IRS type of institution that audits periodically the citizens of the Global empire.  Fashion becomes the most popular creative practice for keeping  Positive Time balance sheets and wearable art is  the main form of courtship.

Hroni-Mongol early Mythology :
The Legend of Hronim (fragment)

Before anything else there was the Ocean. It was everywhere and nowhere because there where no names or anything . Then there was this feeling of something, of somthing just the same but separate.  That feeling  created the first wave - yes, Wave that is how Aquim named it, because being something it needed a name to separate it from himself. And then is when the Ocean realized that it had a name - yes, Aquim! Aquim! Where did it come from?... and why? Then the first memory just popped up - the Other! That first feeling! The Other just the same but separate. And every new thought created a new wave. And waves got bigger and more frequent and with every wave Aquim felt that it was diminishing which meant the it wasn't endless anymore . And every wave it counted was unforgettable and had a name.
...and then after the last wave, there was no more Ocean - just The Steppe and no more Aquim. But the Steppe wasn't just a name and it wasn't empty at all.  All the counted waves where still there with all their remembered names - and it was the Other Ocean all over again. And its name was Hronim.

http://www.pipoli.com/panos/sasha_meret/06/

Two Sorcerers, No Apprentice

Two Sorcerers, No Apprentice

One evening, around the Summer Solstice, 2013, at an artsy gathering in Midtown Manhattan, Ella Averbukh, a magician in her own right, approached Meret, whom she was seeing for the first time. She looked him in the eyes and said, “You are a sorcerer!”. Mirolevich was a few feet away, but she already knew him. A couple of centuries ago, a public statement like that would have gotten them in trouble. However, in twenty first-century New Babylon (or New York, as its name is disguised in Anglo-Saxon), sorcerers Meret and Mirolevich are flexing their imagination to the delight of those ready to surrender to a roller-coaster of cross-cultural references. The two grab the impossible and make it visible; then add to it the three basic ingredients of good art: mystery, surprise and fun.

The Mirolevich/Meret blend of magic is interdisciplinary (right, as if this big word could fit sorcery in any way). The younger Mirolevich is using more of the classical tools like drawing, painting, printmaking, although he’s not shying away from bold experiment.  His meta-mental constructions seem to be designed to belittle one and each to humble subatomic beginnings. Yet, this intimidating transgression is handled skillfully by Mirolevich: it makes one coming back for more!
 Meret, on the other hand, tends to get wild as he manipulates almost anything from the surroundings that can be suspected of carrying esthetic value. Anything of that sort  can be incorporated in his playful, conceptually intense sculpture/assemblages. His new series, “Témoignage from a distant Dimension,”   offers the viewer a set of ceremonial objects and artifacts from the intriguingly familiar KonSummerist culture rampant in the Lower Hudson Valley at the turn of the 21st century. If one bends his/her head in a slightly contempoparallel way, and allows just for a touch of  spelling  readjustment, it suddenly becomes crystal-clear where it all came from.

This June the Moon was eighteen % bigger than normal. Italo Calvino's recipe has it that such a time is propitious for Moon mana harvesting. Our two sorcerers they are in the middle of this ritual.
Join us at ARTHAMPTONS for some samples!

Nicolas Veh
June 2013
New York