Over the past few years, I have been collecting different ways of thinking.
What I first intended with them was a Summer lecture, for Birkbeck students. Now I’ve left, and that can’t happen any more, I’m going to record them here.
I’ll do that less formally, more by way of examining them for myself. I think they’re a way of realising how much space there is for being unconventional, for being original.
The latest I’ve collected is Magdalena Abakanowicz, Polish artist, whose works were recently up (high up and dangling down) in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern.
An accompanying feature about her, in Tate Etc. magazine, had her saying —
I see fibre as the basic element of constructing the organic world on our planet, as the greatest mystery of our environment. It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissues of plants, leaves and ourselves. Our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles. We are fibrous structures. Our heart is surrounded by the coronary plexus, the plexus of most vital threads.
She made this statement, Marysia Lewandowska’s article affirms, during the 1978 Fibreworks Symposium in Oakland, California.
Think about it for more than a minute.
A way of looking at everything as basically fibrous.
Isn’t this as convincing as that quantum physical view of everything as energy vibration, or that geeky-philosophical view of everything as information?
Both vibration and information need to come together in forms of some sort — if they were just free floating dots, they couldn’t cohere into atomic structures.
Couldn’t fibres be seen as operating on this fundamental level, too?
Strings form threads and threads form fibres and fibres are the basis of us.
And Magdalena Abakanowicz makes fibrous artworks, but equally we could think about a short story or novels that viewed human relations as fibres.
Or fibers, if you were American.
How would they work? Is it worth trying one?
Thank you!