JM Larkin
“I’m painting pictures of things I know about, and things I’ve felt, that the world just hasn’t had the chance to feel… I’m painting pictures of another plane of existence, you might say, of something that’s so far away that it seems to be nonexistent. I’m painting pictures of that, but it is a world of happiness which people have been looking for or say they wanted, but they haven’t been able to achieve it…I’m actually painting pictures of infinity with my music, and that’s why a lot of people can’t understand it.”
-Sun Ra
A significant bit of cherished understanding of time through things affected by people is indebted to contumelious disruption of the interned. The ethics of the display of ritually mummified humans in public spaces is obvious, but Space is indeed the Place when considering the attraction of certain things arranged in certain ways. The million-year development of the polysemous thinking required to understand that a thing might do something different when placed some other place grew alongside the grasping that there is someplace else to be. The creation of spaces specifically acknowledging the existence of death reveals a dimensionality severed but not lost when objects arranged funereally are exhibited ex situ; the cosmic nature persists without the morbidity.
The cosmic object is completely ordered and its context beyond the limits of the understanding of its maker is acknowledged. A vessel in its daily use provides incomplete insight into its cosmic reality, but a vessel left entombed for use in the hereafter recognizes a reality beyond the banality of corporality. Objects become cosmic when nothing is left out and in place of certainty is at least a colorful guess but at best an expression of humility (the greatest artists admit to not knowing exactly what it is they are doing, only that it is something beyond them). It is unlikely that those who built the tombs of the Pharaohs envisioned the eternal hereafter as a display under glass, but it is their contemplation of an unknown reality that transformed raw materials of antiquity into objects capable of eliciting cosmic feelings in the present, their concealment in a tomb swelled the object’s connection to the unseen over time.
The mere mention of objects from a different time and place is an ordering of things unseen, a recognition of the existence of something else and the urge to place it somewhere. A forgery of an ancient object is perhaps even more cosmic than the original, for without an understanding of the significance of the original form as well as a disregard for the emphasis on originality over substance the forgery would be incomplete. But the same cannot be said for a souvenir replica from a museum gift shop as it exists as a commercial memento from a visit to a place. Only through the artist’s intervention can the cosmic lustre of the souvenir be polished.
The forms of antiquity must be reunited with their material reality if they are to escape the clutches of historical caricature, when the conception of the object is removed enough from its physical nature to render both realities insignificant. The cult of uniqueness inspires pilgrimage to otherwise arbitrary things because of where they are, not what they are. Examination of the provenance of objects left stale in the gaze of museum goers may briefly reignite the cosmic nature of the object, but reproductions of the object’s form arranged with disparate materials offers a glimpse into a cosmic reality that is all here, there, and everywhere at once. A well positioned tomb will make its contents swell.
The arrangement of stones is one of the clearest and oldest displays of cosmic reality. The balance of large stones atop one another in the dolmen form is organization through great effort and when positioned either in relation to celestial bodies or dead bodies becomes cosmic to the greatest limits of its maker’s effort. An attempt to analytically describe this effect was taken by contemporary researchers who applied statistical methods used in cosmology to look for patterning in the positioning of the over ten-thousand tumuli, or quba, in Eastern Sudan’s Kassala region to find, not surprisingly, that their positioning relates to the availability of materials, arrangement around central, older tombs, and migratory patterns of people over time. This apparently obvious, though no less cosmic, discovery led to several publications freely linking the use of cosmological methods to galactic forms, calling the arrangement of the tombs across the desert “little galaxies”; both arrangements are products of physical reality and organization around a central body, even if the makers of the tombs were not directly considering the celestial cosmos that are strikingly visible in the night sky above the Nubian Desert. The cosmic connection is never for nothing, as explained by Stefano Costanzo, an archaeologist involved in the project: “To the naked eye, it was clear that the clustered tombs were conditioned by the environment, but deeper meaning may have been implied in their spatial arrangement. I think that eastern Sudan, as a whole, deserves more recognition in an official way, not just in a sense of protecting sites from gold-mining and the gold rush with guardians, but maybe even to be listed as an official heritage site. That would be a very, very big outcome for this kind of research.” For a space mired in complexity, a cosmic approach is welcome.
c. 1200, “the universe, the world”…, from Latinized form of Greek kosmos “order, good order, orderly arrangement,” …, The verb kosmein meant generally “to dispose, prepare,” but especially “to order and arrange (troops for battle), to set (an army) in array;” also “to establish (a government or regime);” “to deck, adorn, equip, dress” (especially of women). Thus kosmos had an important secondary sense of “ornaments of a woman’s dress, decoration” (compare kosmokomes “dressing the hair,” and cosmetic) as well as “the universe, the world.”
Pythagoras is said to have been the first to apply this word to “the universe,” perhaps originally meaning “the starry firmament,” but it later was extended to the whole physical world, including the earth…Kosmos also was used in Christian religious writing with a sense of “worldly life, this world (as opposed to the afterlife),”…
The word cosmos often suggested especially “the universe as an embodiment of order and harmony.”
-Online Etymology Dictionary
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