Michele Tagliaferri: Grass That Came From Nothing

GRASS#14

 

How did Beuys explain the horror of natural beauty and art to a dead hare between concrete walls, his feet never touching the blades of grass that would rupture the crevices between his toes?

 

“I come from rock that came from nothing…
So here I scream in
coincidence, and there you listen without hearing a
word…
Still it took me a year to hear a thing. Have
patience as the combination waits to form one ounce of
trust, and your faith the same”.
-Coalesce “Have Patience”

 

By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, August 2015

I came from rock. That came from nothing. Where do we go from here? There is an organic dissonance, a screeching reverberation that punctures my eardrums into an untenable and organic fractal. In the human menagerie, one has but to clip its wings to really fly. Whitman, Thoreau, the Uni-bomber, David Koresh… nature appeals to those in abrogated ascension, harmonic to their environment.

How did Beuys explain the horror of natural beauty and art to a dead hare between concrete walls, his feet never touching the blades of grass that would rupture the crevices between his toes? He was not that of a conduit to the sublimity inherent to the people born of mud, he became a conduit of war-torn and blistered concrete, absorbed in history’s mad folly of innumerable tragedy. There is nothing but forgiveness and rest.

In the same way, how do I explain to my children not yet born, the significance of looking up at a sky and the importance of its fractal canopy? The mirror, the separation an re-combination of sameness eludes young irises not yet hardened to the earth’s creaking rotation, the sound of an un-greased axel wavering, a carousel aorta pumping, bulging, oscillating weakly on a fragile system of Pythagorean rotation. I cannot even being to speak of the eye of a horse, the taxonomy of hair, or to interpret that of Homo sapiens; a species that cannot think but to ride, employ, or possibly eat such an equine trophy… we are all spinning in such a preposterously fragile manner.

 

GRASS_COVER

 

 

I cannot even being to speak of the eye of a horse, the taxonomy of hair, or to interpret that of Homo sapiens; a species that cannot think but to ride, employ, or possibly eat such an equine trophy… we are all spinning in such a preposterously fragile manner.

 

Born of flood, mud, or flame…nothing exceeds like excess until it begins the fast, but sure process of auto-cannibalization. The observation platforms dotting the grand canyon, the alps, the diminished return of the dolomites given way to tract housing and plastic manufacturing…where did the disconnect begin? We now see where it will end. In the midst of this chaos, I will still blow smoke back towards celestial and heavenly bodies while pulling cephalopods from their azure homes, reconciling again, how something so brilliant and alien can be eaten. This is also the same sea that harvests and regurgitates migrant bodies along its shores from a collapsing chasm of another war–torn world that Beuys never saw, nor never predicted while looking into that hare’s lazy dead eye. Prickled flesh, dirty hands, impossible contours of bloated water-logged lungs…those black hands…crab infested bellies, somehow more noble in death than in the collusion of its genus in “life”.

 

 

 

 

 

Michelle Tagliaferri’s “Grass” is book of natural gravity and beauty. That is to put it simply. There are fragments of the natural world juxtaposed by the occasional plane wing and disco ball. Outside of those elements and perhaps a brick wall, the book is a serene cogitation on the natural world and the human experience of sensory capability within it. There is the color of the book, with its green fore-edge coloring, which gives it a feel of being light. When I mean light, it does not sit on my desk like a behemoth of self-interest. It sits there somehow desiring to be picked up, even if one cannot explain or read it the same way twice. There is a pervasive and alluring quality to the images within that re-direct my mindset into a wanderlust through rolling valleys and the hills I see in old chromo-litho post cards, whose extension of hyper color appeals to my sense of sight like a fruit coloured gem. I desire within it, a nostalgia that is not necessary present, but one that I do long for. In practical terms, the book is gorgeous in production and the thematic elements, metaphors aside, coalesce into something quite special. It is a book for slow rumination and it is highly recommended!

 

 

 

Michele Tagliaferri
Grass
Dalpine

(All rights reserved. Text @ Brad Feuerhelm. Images @ Michele Tagliaferri.)

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