Tips (the ends of things)
A visual essay concerning objects that come to an end. A work-in-progress.
Random Ideas 2
added feb 13, 2003
I was wondering if tips have anything to do with desire. It seems as if some kind of yearning is implicit in a tip but I am not sure that this is central or a helpful path to pursue. More important is that tips infer a relationship. I am not sure what the right word is - "make", "create", "require" "force" - but where there is a tip there is a relationship.
(Of course you can say this about anything but it seems to me a matter of degree, a matter whether relation-making is a necessary, central, unavoidable quality of a tip or not). A tip is never singular or separate, despite the fact that it stands out (is there such a thing as a demure tip), but comes in pairs, always paired with its environment. Whether tender or violent a tip reaches towards the "outside world". Beckoning or threatening or exploring or... the tip is different than the box or the wall (Richard Serra) for which division and seperation are central. Tips link or join - the steeple to the sky, the knife to the heart, fingers tto... almost everything.
Tips are breakable. The finials on the posts at the beginning of stairways throughout New York are frequently broken off or mended back together.
"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) “Talking,” A Lover’s Discourse (1977, trans. 1978).
"What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment."
Virginia Woolf The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, entry for Aug. 21, 1927
The idea that the tip is an analogy for the brain. An elaboration on the end of a stem that is both different and continuous with the stem, both receptive and aggressive towards the outside (its surroundings) taking in the world, probing the world, penetrating the world.
Protection. Threatening. Not just aggressive. Maybe defensive.
Reminds me of the colloquialism "His brain is in his penis."
But analogously I am kind of saying that the "brain" of the church is the steeple. The "brain" of the bed post, newell post, stairway is the finial.
(Added March 4, 2004) I noticed an homology between the diagram of the spinal cord/brain and a cross. I wonder what the cross and tips share as abstract categories. There is potentially something similar about them - simple to spot, simple physical configurations, common, basic, found in the body, nature, manmade object, can connect diverse things with a formal category. However one cannot escape the meaning of the cross, burdened with great cultural weight. So ultimately the "cross" and "tips" are essentially different. The cross is a symbol. Inescapably. It stands for Christ, Christianity, the Cruxifixion and if I am not mistaken, the Resurrection. Aside for the "plus" sign (+), the cross is identified with these meanings. The meaning of the Cross does not change with context - it is always Christianity (the meaning of Christianity may change with context... and people's attitudes toward Christianity may change but the Cross as symbol does not change. (Except, of course that everything is contextual. It is just the context of the Cross is global and over 2000 years.)) The meaning to a "tip" though, is contextual. The tip of a knife at your throat means something different to you than a stamen to a bee, a nipple to an infant, the welcoming finial at the bottom of the stairs. And so, perhaps, as tools for thought "tips" and the "cross" are on opposite sides of the spectrum. "Cross" is fixed and singular and "tips" is flexible and multiple. And that is both the pleasure and the usefulness of exploring "tips". I remember, in Art Forum, in the heyday of high abstraction someone writing on the "cross" - its appearance in abstraction, its use, and meaning and _____ with little consideration of its symbolism of its inevitable reference. Perhaps it was easier to play with symbols, to empty them of their oft-used meanings, and play with them but that does not seem possible today. And that is the point, you (I) can play with "tips" conceptually and otherwise, while you cannot really play with the Cross. Well, I suppose you can, but then you are playing with Christianity, which seems quite the task. No matter how irreverent or heretical or _______ you are how is it play?