Time: transitory by definition and Networks: old school and new
Albuquerque show p. 7
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Harris had made
the sun speak from the other side, back lighting the symbols she
imposed on translucent paper and hung from stripped branches in the
windows of the exhibition hall. But why, Usmar, wondered, had Harris
carried 400 pounds of sand, bucket by bucket, to fill the frame
constructed in the middle of the other end of Naxi scrolls? For
Harris, installing "the sandbox" was as essential a part of our
response to Gao's contemporary art in response to the ancient Naxi
Dongbas as my tent or her sun lit petroglyphs. For American children,
and probably children everywhere, the sandbox is a favorite place for
free creative play. And people on many continents, the Navajos in New
Mexico, the Rangoli in Australia, Hindus and Buddhists, still practice
the art of creating elaborate sand paintings, which according to
sacred tradition, must be blown or sifted away before the next day.
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| 8 Gao Feng scrolls with sand box for viewers to trace images of Dongba, Egyptian, and Native American pictographs |
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Harris insisted
on installing the sandbox to give everyone who came to the exhibition,
who may never be able to find even Yunnan on a map, the experience of
inscribing their own pictograms with the bamboo sylus and broom she
laid in the sandbox. She gave me beautiful stiff paper and told me to
copy some of Gao's new Dongba pictographs for children and some of the
pictographs the German-Egyptian Archeologists believe the earliest
human writing, that I had used on the tent. These she placed on a
small table in a corner for children, and adults, who did not prefer to
create their own, to copy. "The point of the sandbox," said Harris,
"is to emphasize the transient nature of us all and all we do, --
except that transitory something we transmit by connecting to one
another -- across space and time.
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| 4 scrolls of Gao Feng's Worship Heaven with Dongba, Egyptian and Native American images for viewers to trace in sand |
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And so it has been across space and time that Hu Ying, Professor Guo, and Gao Feng have achieved a transference and creation of traditional Naxi culture through modern and global processes. Following is a graph from the perspective of one node: mine in Atlanta. Taking
Kumming as the hub, and imaginarily imposing all the additional
connections from the nodes each of you represent, we have a pretty good
picture of the influence of the Dongba at the present moment.
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