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31 December 2008

First Day Issue / Postalo Vleeptron / Happy New Year 2009! / the Shape of Time!


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Ach! Why didn't I study piano, like my brother? Why didn't I study art, like you?

Talentless, undisciplined, ignorant and lazy are No Way to go through Life!

But anyway, Happy New Year from Vleeptron and our neighboring planets Hoon, Yobbo, Mollyringwald, and the recently discovered planet Bjorkgudmundsdottir. The real name of the planet is in Icelandic and has all kinds of diacriticals and Funny Letters, but if an e-mail miracle happens, it really looks like this:

Björkguðmundsdóttir

This is a jazz-up of a design I zipped out last New Year, my typical snatch-and-grab 20-minute collage of web images. But another Real Artist Pal of mine liked it, so I looked at the basic elements a second time and wondered if I could recycle it and make it look less Trailer-Parky.

Time, it turns out, has a Shape, you can draw it and see it and even use cardboard and scissors and tape to make a Solid Thing out of it, and put it on your nick-nack shelf. The shape is a tip-to-tip pair of inverted ice-cream cones.

The blue plane is called the Hypersurface of the Present. We're stuck on it inescapably. It moves straight up and takes us with it.

The point where the cones meet is Now or Right Now or This Instant. We have all of us floated to it up the Past Cone, and having touched this Point, then float above it into the Future Cone.

Everything outside these Cones -- well, actually, it doesn't exist, Nothing is there, or if Something is there, we don't yet have the brains to perceive it or describe it. All perceivable existence -- including our fuzzy memories and our hazy skills at prophesy -- lies within the two cones. (The angle is a nice perfect simple 45 degrees.)

Last year I was trying to find images to say Happy New Year, but I hate inevitable obligatory cliches; I went looking for a way to say

Past --> Now --> Future

that wasn't one of those cliches. Well, this is Not A Cliche, that is all I can claim for it.

Except for the Light Cone itself, every image is filched. The perforation dingbats are the work of the art student Adina Weinand at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, where I think she majors in Print Paper Book [production and design?]. The dingbats (there are three more motif blocks) were an assignment to illustrate: Balance, Texture or Pattern, Rhythm, Tension.

My Artist Pal (& equally ancient army buddy) was wholly innocent of Mail Art, but I kept sending him my crappy stamps, and Donald Evans images (he was already a big Saul Steinberg fan), and now the poor man is bigtime Contaminated with Mail Art, he is just grinding out them faux stamps like there was no tomorrow.

Wishing you a wonderful year ahead in the Future Cone, and for all of us everywhere Peace.

Bob

P.S. did you recognize the crazy Ape Stamp as Beardsley's illustration of Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue"? I'd really like to see all his illustrations for Poe.


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