Loom

When we left HERE to go to Woodstock and the Byrdcliffe, we lost access to a large screen that we had rented from the theater.  Joel and I were exhausted and had one week to find a new solution.  I returned to ideas of using Op-Art techniques to create a dislocation of environment, seeing as Op-Art has no real point of focus.  I found this image by Bruno Munari and started making diagrams for a large screen made of red, blue and yellow string.  It would be a large loom, a reference to one of the lines of the play and to Robert's idea of books and writing as weaving images, thoughts, and dreams.  Robert's American 'Loom' not only means to weave but has the sinister dual reference, looming, as in death or other undesirables.  Robert wrote this book with the Janus-like name of creation and doom when he was thirty, an age I am slowly coming up to with my own time.  Now you, reader, know something about my body if that makes you feel closer with me.  I asked Robert to read from his book at the HERE Cafe a week before we opened as kind of a blessing for the show.

From 'Oedipus after Colonus'

It turns out

I spent too long in the dark

where I could see nothing

but the Masters of the World

busy at their work,

our makers and unmakers,

the evil weavers, the so-called gods.

I watched until I thought I was one of them

and could weave at the same loom

with them, and spill reality out

from my fingers as they seem to do.

 

 From 'Book from the Sky'

Jack should have felt disappointed to have a book, of all things, loom on what had seemed an amorous horizon.