11 July 2023
27 December 2024
ponder
I think of water as the ultimate form of androgyny.
– Roni Horn*
avant! collapse in
the poetics of the world’s physique
(we’re not about Atlas here
we’re about everything might be quantum but gravity –
that is, love
in all her abundance blurring
the keys the
vibrations, um, volitions, hey
we’re stringing you along here
ask why the equation-filled
blackboard can effect
what anything fancier can’t?
postgrads and prof alike leave
last week’s constellations untouched
each in turn erases a central elliptical space
in the simulated wasteland of tendentials
and puts there now thoughts in
a new form like
spinning trumpets
and a likewise brass cacophony
of instruments falling
down a brute black sky
euphoniums
euphoria
a trombone’s
long swoon gone)
but what has this got to do
with water?
why is it always so
un-familiar?
* My gaze alights on the water – on some spot (this spot) on the river. And as my gaze alights it feels as though I am seeing something I’ve never seen before. How does water remain so unfamiliar? … I think of water as the ultimate form of androgyny.
– Roni Horn, concerning her work Still Water (The River Thames, For Example), 1999 in TATE ETC 1 MAY 2007: ‘The master chameleon: Water’ at https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-10-summer-2007/master-chameleon accessed 11 July 2023