dirt and texture

Disliking purity as much as they do, let me begin with the words of three others:

The praise of purity which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity which gives rise to changes, in other words to life. I discarded the first . . . and I lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed.
Primo Levi 1

. . .
Impure and all intermingled,
hardly divisible,
living holds me: I am creature.
I accept
my human condition,
make myself at home
thanks to superhuman favours.
The world is more than man.
. . .
Jorge Guillén 2

The web of the spider, beautiful and sterile, exhibiting a useless perfection,
becomes meaningful “. . . only when broken by the entangled fly.” 3

1 Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984): 37.
2 Jorge Guillén, “Living,” in Horses in the Air and Other Poems, trans. Cola Franzen (San Fransisco: City Lights Books, 1987): 25.
3 Bruno Monguzzi relating a statement by Antonio Boggeri in Franc Nunoo-Quercoo, “A Poet of Form and Function,” in Bruno Monguzzi: A Designers Perspective (Baltimore: the Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, 1998): 41-42.


Disliking purity, liking mess, enjoying the ability to orchestrate it somewhat . . . to play with its texture:

The texture of a thing holds it together.
The sum of its parts, if they are truly parts of it, accepting it as the whole they contribute to, comprise the total texture by being interrelated all with each other . . . everything being within, without, beside, above and below.
They offer a multitude of potential ‘takes’ upon their self-determined order; a multitude of experiential perspectives, uses, understandings and ways within and about locations which can be inhabited across a range of practices.
No absoloute orientations can be taken to rule the totality.
It is out of control.
Instead, it is multi-figural; a landscape of complex incompleteness.