| The Ocean as work of art | |
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Santa Monica 12-26-01 Loews Ocean Hotel The ocean as a medium for art. What does that mean? We stop in Los Angeles en route to Fiji in the South Pacific, arriving Christmas Day. This side of the Pacific Rim is mellow, affluent, self-entertaining. The stop makes the trip feel a bit like an expedition, plus it gives us time to visit the Getty museum. I'm reading Colette, The Pure and The Impure, and thinking about how an art historian might write about the ocean realm. The book dealer in Ithaca agrees that Colette isn't very popular any longer, but I had read (in Philippe Diole's lovely book The Undersea Adventure, written in 1953) that her style would be appropriate to the undersea realm. For example, when I'm diving my senses seem to fuse into the ocean medium. Colette writes (p.25): "The senses? Why not the sense. That would offend no one and would suffice. The sense, dominating the five inferior senses, for let them venture far from it and they will be called back with a jerk--like those delicate and stinging ribbons, part weed, part arm, delegated by a deep sea creature to..."
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December 26, 2001 Water as a medium for the artist: The Robert Irwin garden and streams at the Getty Museum. The water originates in a small carved stone basin, flows through a sculpted trough, and drops and rambles within highly contrived stone conduits until it reaches the large basin (at left) where it surrounds a maze of planted bushes. This creation is opposite to what we will be exploring in Fiji. Here, contrived. There, wild. |
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Saturday, December 29, 2002 We board the Nai'a, our platform for exploring within the ocean realm. I have a small Fijian dictionary that contains these words: wasawasa ocean iloilo anything that reflects (glass, water, mirrors) savamarini submarine titobu deep, of water profound, of thought |
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The zodiacs that we dive from appear as orange dots far from the Nai'a, their divers in the ocean near the island of Gau, where the sharks are. |
