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The Glass House: Histrionics, Acceleration and The Diagram as a Plot Device (Book One in Trilogy)

Recently I found myself in a dust storm. There were signs. Stopping in a one road town for gas simultaneously myself and the gas station clerk got the ear splitting iphone alert of a possible tornado. It was a roundabout two hour drive to my cousin's graduation and google begged to take back roads. Suddenly deep in the pastures the sky went a deep brown both really ugly and weirdly comforting. Dust, dirt and debris rocked the car. Visibility was reduced to nothing but ambient sunlight. There was no option for forward and none for back. On both sides empty fields supplying the dust soon to be corn blocked me in. There was nothing to do but sit. Helplessly in the most 21st century way possible the only obvious thing to do was record. Video on video on video.

There was a certain excitement. The moment the camera possesses the arm is less of a choice and more of a logical conclusion. A break of the fourth wall when enough is too much. The urge to document is indicative of helplessness. It’s the helplessness that might have resulted in a classic novel. Or a painting. It is the moment where all the aesthetic elements of a place cumulate, accelerated to the point of an exaggeration where you might just throw your hands up surrendering to the poetic nature of the whole thing. Dust, fields, tornadoes, flat horizons stretching miles past your destination. F150’s barreling forward with a confidence I didn’t have. Graduation in a college town. The American road trip. Fragments accumulate into a place through feeling. It could be scientific. The right elements in some misunderstood alchemy. Broken down and tamed in semiotic fright. Or it could be chalked up to chance. A moment that harnesses a certain gestalt that can only last for moments.

None of this is particularly new. Few things have been excavated more than the pastoral American experience. The instinct to bottle a feeling existed before glass. What feels important is the glass of the lens. A bottle in the pocket of the populace allowing for the acceleration and in turn decontextualization of the moment. Nothing is lost like in the labour and choice of a painting or in the words of a paragraph. Nothing beautiful is created either. There is no author. There is a passivity present in the lens. The arms and fingers tapping record are possessed by the speed of the moment. There is no time for intervention. Just the subtle tap and a resignation to the speed of the aesthetics. Style so sleek it moves too fast to capture without the camera.

There is nothing revolutionary about this process. Art has always existed as a diagrammatic process where the artist bottle is the medium or structure. A painter’s brush strokes create the rules of the world. The process of the artist diagraming a place, emotion or scene into a structure in some way building out the mechanics and logic of an image. The artist's interpretation building the beams or foundations of the structure. The artist is in charge of the rules of their world and its metaphysics. The barn in the distance is built on this painstakingly rendered. Increasingly however I feel an overwhelming feeling that my barn is a glass house. That the bottle in my pocket has been overfilled so much that it’s taken the shape of a structure that keeps growing rooms and stairs and stairs and stairs.

In the glass house you can see the stars. Or a dust storm. The glass house is a lense. The glass house is a performance and it records. It records a reaction. At the speed of light there is nothing to do but react. Inside it keeps getting messy with feelings and symbols and each time it gets too cluttered the mess gets thrown in another suddenly appearing closet. Ironically it is glass and those on the outside can see the overwhelming mess. The labour is performative too, the cleaning rendered nothing but a practice. I wish the house had big wooden walls. A moment gets lost in the clutter with things misplaced until nothing is left but the bones of a feeling. Filled to the brim eventually the mess becomes the sum of its parts. A mass. The mess becomes a Franksteins monster, this time named after an artwork. These frozen aesthetic bits are sometimes trash but sometimes they become the beams. They become the pipes and the wiring. New closets. Closets become rooms. There is an irony in the whole thing and it resembles a sitcom live taping. I throw stones inside but nothing breaks. You can see through not just the windows but the floor and the ceiling. Outside can be seen at every angle and while I can see outside, you can’t hear me trying to tell you about what happened. The refraction is the reaction and thus while I talk you see only the output. The gestalt. What was hyperrealism painstakingly rendered becomes looking at a place through a funhouse mirror. That’s what an aesthetic is here in this house. I wish I was the architect of a beautiful farm house with blueprint paper organized neatly in a flat file. Instead I try to catch lightning in my place of living.

The glass house is drawing its own schematics and it’s really annoying because I can’t find the kitchen and I left my phone in there.

#lost to the drafts folder unseen now unearthed #writing #liam shaw