Anonymous Stellar Ravines
New York: Granary Books, 2024
Writing about Anonymous Stellar Ravines, the newly published collaboration between artist Byron Baker and poet Will Alexander, inspires extravagant language to meet the spirit of their work. This collection of prints draws on their shared Surrealist tendencies, but also demonstrates the ongoing vitality of the techniques of automatism and belief in animism central to that tradition.
Byron Baker, “Code as Buddhist Darkening,” (left) and “Enraptured Succubus,” (right) India ink and white pen, 2024.
Baker’s drawings strike the eye immediately with their graphic energy. Even at a distance in the clean light room where they are neatly hung in a line, the images appear like living glyphs, each pulsing with dynamism. The sheer inventiveness of the ink and pen drawings creates multiple contrasts and connections among them. Their inkblot suggestivity calls forth associations from their shape-shifting forms, some resembling intricate cosmological machines and others expressive of psycho-physical events. Some swirl and crush, some have the complexity of elaborate machines, others are sheer organic gesture and dance. They are non-representational, non-figurative, with calligraphic gestural qualities, wash and depth, detailed lines and biomorphic passages. All are distinctive and play against each other, calling attention to their individual differences and coherence as a group. The more one looks, the more one sees. Though they are clearly part of a single coherent vision, they are a remarkable exploration of graphic possibilities in the suggestive space between abstraction and expression, reference and representation. In short, these are virtuousic drawings, highly articulated, that exercise real fascination on the viewer.
They could easily stand alone, as can the texts of poet Will Alexander. But together the two augment each other in ways that open whole new dimensions. The visual-verbal dialogic intersections are almost refractive, each faceting the other the way a prism deconstructs visible light into a spectrum. Such metaphoric language suffuses the texts themselves, drawing on Alexander’s deep convictions and highly developed personal cosmology, itself synthesized from the realms of Afro-Islamic-mystical philosophy that have long informed his writing in Refractive Africa (2021), Spectral Hieroglyphics (2016) and other volumes.
Alexander’s engagement with the power of poetic language to be transformative has been central to his work for decades. As a writer, he is singularly receptive to the living force of words as drivers, engines of mutation, reinvention, and revelation. In Alexander’s world, the language of occult and alchemical practices is integral to his process, not merely a source for esoteric themes. No clichés here, no kitsch appropriation. Instead, for Alexander the concept of alchemy embodies a set of beliefs about the transmutable vibrancy of language, its capacity to shift meaning through condensation and distillation. Other associations come quickly to mind in response to the vocabulary the poet himself uses: “autoignition,” “telepathic eruptions,” and “sempiternal lightning.” In Alexander’s lexicon, these are names for compositional practices, not obscure concepts. His engagement with metaphysics is central to the channeling of energies through which he captures the activity of language.
This sophisticated, erudite poem-texts in Anonymous Stellar Ravines distill his principles to their essence and not a word is wasted in the densely compact verses. To reiterate, Alexander’s short texts resonate with this densely rich vein of Symbolist-Surrealist poetics. His belief in the dynamic potency of language as life form saturates his vision of a universe in which everything is animate, even sentient, but in accord with its own systems, structures, and time scales.
The physical scale of Baker’s work could easily expand to larger format and Alexander’s texts would still hold. But being able to see the two together on a page reinforces their connections and the value of the collaborative aspect of this project. The drawings and poems illuminate rather than simply complement each other. The images do not illustrate the poems and the poetic works do not describe or reference the vastly suggestive inventory of forms in the drawings. Instead, they manage to make the viewer aware of the specificity of each other’s highly articulate expressions. Both are infused with a living cosmology and belief in the animate potency of language, image, line, and form as an investigation of the metaphysics of the world. Baker produced more than three hundred drawings across three months, spread them out for Alexander to see, and then the poet wrote in a spirit of automatic channeling, his responses immediate, unedited, and replete.
As noted above, Baker and Alexander share a connection to the lineage of Surrealism understood as a sensibility, not a style. Still, some stylistic precedents are evident. The drawings have a connection to the organic imagery in Joan Miro, André Masson, Yves Tanguy and others while the poems hark back to the transmutations of Comte de Lautréamont, the rich symbolism of Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephen Mallarmé as well as, of course, the Surrealists themselves, particularly André Breton and Phillipe Soupault. The 20th century figure most directly connected to Alexander and Baker was Philip Lamantia, the wunderkind poet who was anointed by the older generation of Surrealists and forged a link with a receptive community in San Francisco.
Thus their commitment to Surrealism is not with its familiar dream imagery or glib eroticism, but with its profound well-springs where the infusion of insight and imagination into the realms of the real gains traction. True surrealism was the reimagining of the real, not a turn away from it. It included a recognition of the marvelous, as Lamantia emphasized, the awakening to the wonder of what is. Surrealism might seem to be among the more eclipsed of 20th century aesthetics, associated with the melting watches in Salvador Dali’s art, the shock effects of Luis Bunuel’s films, and dream worlds found in Giorgio de Chirico’s canvases. But this dismissive characterization leaves aside several crucial facets of Surrealism, in particular the use of automatism and the reliance on oneiric suggestion. Both are important for the two collaborators on this project The hidden dimensions of the real, that which is present beyond it, that is where the “sur” of Surrealism inheres.
The titles of Alexander’s verses are almost spring-loaded in their intensity: “Concussive Smearing,” “Etched Miraculous Shifting,” and “Spontaneous Complication” are representative examples. The texts are equally compressed and explosive. Take, for instance, the text of “Concussive Smearing”:
Concussive Smearing
The manner in which storms appear. Lightning reacts
as instantaneous solar field possibly akin to squared
Saturnalian nebulae.
The accompanying painting has a strong figurative suggestion. The curved arc on the right might be spine or flame that flows down. The round form above, where the ink thins out into a luminous wash, might be a head with hair or spines. Another dark gestural stroke rises from the spinal curve to base of the “head” and its silhouette might read as a hand with extended forefinger and thumb. But the strokes can also be read as gestural traces of action, and forces coming into contact under pressure. Expansion and contraction are doubly present, each a possible explanation of the movement in the drawing. Is this, then, the “manner in which storms appear”? A micro or macro scale rendering of cosmic events in which “nebulae” can be “squared”? What does it mean to imagine a geometric progression applied to a mass of cosmic gas coming into form and being?
Over and over in the texts, the phrases jump levels, perform their quantum pivots, and enact their participle functions: “diagrammatic as cipher” “possessed as they are by angled starlight,” “their fever apocalyptic ether.” Those are phrases taken from another poem in the collection, "Etched Miraculous Shifting" which are accompanied by drawings suggesting machines and other human-made devices stitched and grommeted together. The mechanical forms are finished with white pen strokes whose top notes shine against the depth of ink wash. Given their dense complexity, the title of one drawing, "Intricate as Expansion," could provide an accurate exposition of the whole project, as could another, “Spontaneous Complication” in which the text contains the phrase: “Never allowing itself to address its power […]”.
Byron Baker and Will Alexander, in exhibit Anonymous Stellar Ravines. March 8, 2024 Photo by Brad Freeman.
The project is an exemplary collaboration on aesthetic as well as intellectual grounds. A suite of digitally reproduced drawings and poems printed on unbound sheets in a clamshell box, published by Granary Books in New York, the publication reflects its excellent pedigree in the care given to every detail of production. Spread out to view, the individual sheets are free to breathe, unbound, dispersing their isotopic molecular thought forms into the air. The virtue of this work is that it is not at all precious, but instead, exquisite.
On view, Himalaya Club, 1109 North LaBrea, Inglewood, California, March 2024.
https://www.granarybooks.com/pages/books/3645/will-alexander-byron-baker/anonymous-stellar-ravines
Thanks for bringing me up to date about what's happening in the world of graphic art. Musing now on the distinction between "style and sensibility." All that I know about "sensibility" comes from Jane Austen.