Breaking Through
Quote from CohentheWriter on 8. May 2022, 22:52Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/permanent-collection?collection=0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756&token=19292&page=3
Source Link: https://makersplace.com/0xd9FF1Fbd68e910392dc404F8df0FCD23a64921c3/breaking-through-1-of-1-22432/
Date Minted: April 6, 2020
Artist Description: An adult reminisces on a simpler time, back to childhood, when a marble could inspire a whole universe of wonder. Remember pressing your eye to the marble, aimed towards the sun...? Remember imagining the universe contained within...? Remember thinking, “Everything we know could be inside a single marble...being looked at by another child...In another universe...” That was your first breakthrough. As is above, so is below... Namasté.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
“An adult reminisces on a simpler time, back to childhood, when a marble could inspire a whole universe of wonder.” I don’t always think it’s necessary to begin an analysis of a given artwork with the Artist Description, but in certain cases, like here with Anonymous Nobody’s Breaking Through, the description completely directs and focuses our interpretation of the piece. As we look upon as abstract and kaleidoscopic a piece as Breaking Through, quite possibly becoming overwhelmed by the sheer amount of changing visual information presented to us, we must be grateful for Anonymous Nobody providing us with something so grounding. Colors, shapes, movement. Presented to us without context, it’s easy to get lost in it. Presented with context, however, and Breaking Through appears a quite moving reflection of a child’s world, while perhaps alluding to how that childishness is the ironic apex of mentality and spirituality that should be aspired to.
When I talk about how overwhelming the composition is, what I mean is that we’re really bereft of any specific visual information to cling onto, to build a meaning outward from. We are presented initially with a marble, or a pearl, or a marble painted in Mother-of-Pearl hues, iridescent and glowing a ghostly green/white. Around it, a slight black border, as if we’re looking not at a marble but at a close-up portrait of the moon. Breaking Through is a video, and suddenly the marble quickly comes close to the camera, which means close to us, or close to the screen, but only for half-a-second before imploding. Now the image is awash in psychedelic hues of red and blue, like oil slicks interweaving with each other, bubbled and pockmarked, and strange shapes start to emerge: a glob of blue that looks like a leaping horse, all sorts of criss-crossing lines of white and red and blue, the dust-cloud shapes of faraway nebulae as if captured by the Hubble Telescope. We can just begin to make out the silhouette of the initial marble behind the red-and-blue screen before it. Slowly, the marble moves closer to us, and we can anticipate that soon it will take its initial position, beginning the loop anew. But before it can get close, the film in front of it completely transcends itself, turning silky and stringy, as pinks and whites and greens cavort with lines of yellow and purple and red, the entire composition seeming to have been dunked in a Salt-Water Taffy dispenser. The marble comes closer. The background starts to even out. It's red. No, blue. No, purple. No, black. The marble is here. But only for a moment. And then, another explosion.
What I mean when I say it’s hard to grasp onto anything here is that there’s so much going on between the colors and the movements, and it all changes so quickly, that we’re disoriented. Not unpleased, just disoriented. But let’s see Breaking Through via the lens Anonymous Nobody has provided us. “Remember pressing your eye to the marble, aimed towards the sun...? Remember imagining the universe contained within...? Remember thinking, ‘Everything we know could be inside a single marble...being looked at by another child...In another universe…’” That disorientation is purposeful. We are asked to look at this image as a child looks at the world, as perhaps random and overwhelming, as perhaps overstimulating, but so full of wonder and possibility and peace! I remember myself as a child, driving home from New York City with my parents and passing through the industrial wasteland that is Northeast Jersey between New York and Newark, and seeing smokestacks, power plants, faraway bridges and hundreds of cars, crossing my eyes so that the headlights became fuzzy in my vision, fuzzy and looking like fireworks, and now here was the world before me: full of fireworks exploding in every direction. I didn’t notice the smell of sulfur. I didn’t understand that the smoke plumes rushing from the smokestacks were cancerous. I knew only that I could turn the lights into fireworks, and the whole world was reduced to that feeling.
That may be the greatest strength Breaking Through possesses. Not in what it presents to us, necessarily, but the associations it helps us to make. I do not see my childish mind reflected in Breaking Through, but the piece brings the childish mind back to the forefront of my thought, and via that juxtaposition, the piece is instilled with a new and very unique kind of life. I never played much with marbles when I was younger, but as a motif for something banal that a child can instill with wonder, it’s perhaps unbeatable, and also quite creative. We can feel the artist’s own childhood, their own childishness pulsing behind the composition. It brings us into the artist’s own space, into their own head, into their own history. And that kind of association is hard to come by. It’s special, and it’s present here.
Source Link: https://makersplace.com/0xd9FF1Fbd68e910392dc404F8df0FCD23a64921c3/breaking-through-1-of-1-22432/
Date Minted: April 6, 2020
Artist Description: An adult reminisces on a simpler time, back to childhood, when a marble could inspire a whole universe of wonder. Remember pressing your eye to the marble, aimed towards the sun...? Remember imagining the universe contained within...? Remember thinking, “Everything we know could be inside a single marble...being looked at by another child...In another universe...” That was your first breakthrough. As is above, so is below... Namasté.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
“An adult reminisces on a simpler time, back to childhood, when a marble could inspire a whole universe of wonder.” I don’t always think it’s necessary to begin an analysis of a given artwork with the Artist Description, but in certain cases, like here with Anonymous Nobody’s Breaking Through, the description completely directs and focuses our interpretation of the piece. As we look upon as abstract and kaleidoscopic a piece as Breaking Through, quite possibly becoming overwhelmed by the sheer amount of changing visual information presented to us, we must be grateful for Anonymous Nobody providing us with something so grounding. Colors, shapes, movement. Presented to us without context, it’s easy to get lost in it. Presented with context, however, and Breaking Through appears a quite moving reflection of a child’s world, while perhaps alluding to how that childishness is the ironic apex of mentality and spirituality that should be aspired to.
When I talk about how overwhelming the composition is, what I mean is that we’re really bereft of any specific visual information to cling onto, to build a meaning outward from. We are presented initially with a marble, or a pearl, or a marble painted in Mother-of-Pearl hues, iridescent and glowing a ghostly green/white. Around it, a slight black border, as if we’re looking not at a marble but at a close-up portrait of the moon. Breaking Through is a video, and suddenly the marble quickly comes close to the camera, which means close to us, or close to the screen, but only for half-a-second before imploding. Now the image is awash in psychedelic hues of red and blue, like oil slicks interweaving with each other, bubbled and pockmarked, and strange shapes start to emerge: a glob of blue that looks like a leaping horse, all sorts of criss-crossing lines of white and red and blue, the dust-cloud shapes of faraway nebulae as if captured by the Hubble Telescope. We can just begin to make out the silhouette of the initial marble behind the red-and-blue screen before it. Slowly, the marble moves closer to us, and we can anticipate that soon it will take its initial position, beginning the loop anew. But before it can get close, the film in front of it completely transcends itself, turning silky and stringy, as pinks and whites and greens cavort with lines of yellow and purple and red, the entire composition seeming to have been dunked in a Salt-Water Taffy dispenser. The marble comes closer. The background starts to even out. It's red. No, blue. No, purple. No, black. The marble is here. But only for a moment. And then, another explosion.
What I mean when I say it’s hard to grasp onto anything here is that there’s so much going on between the colors and the movements, and it all changes so quickly, that we’re disoriented. Not unpleased, just disoriented. But let’s see Breaking Through via the lens Anonymous Nobody has provided us. “Remember pressing your eye to the marble, aimed towards the sun...? Remember imagining the universe contained within...? Remember thinking, ‘Everything we know could be inside a single marble...being looked at by another child...In another universe…’” That disorientation is purposeful. We are asked to look at this image as a child looks at the world, as perhaps random and overwhelming, as perhaps overstimulating, but so full of wonder and possibility and peace! I remember myself as a child, driving home from New York City with my parents and passing through the industrial wasteland that is Northeast Jersey between New York and Newark, and seeing smokestacks, power plants, faraway bridges and hundreds of cars, crossing my eyes so that the headlights became fuzzy in my vision, fuzzy and looking like fireworks, and now here was the world before me: full of fireworks exploding in every direction. I didn’t notice the smell of sulfur. I didn’t understand that the smoke plumes rushing from the smokestacks were cancerous. I knew only that I could turn the lights into fireworks, and the whole world was reduced to that feeling.
That may be the greatest strength Breaking Through possesses. Not in what it presents to us, necessarily, but the associations it helps us to make. I do not see my childish mind reflected in Breaking Through, but the piece brings the childish mind back to the forefront of my thought, and via that juxtaposition, the piece is instilled with a new and very unique kind of life. I never played much with marbles when I was younger, but as a motif for something banal that a child can instill with wonder, it’s perhaps unbeatable, and also quite creative. We can feel the artist’s own childhood, their own childishness pulsing behind the composition. It brings us into the artist’s own space, into their own head, into their own history. And that kind of association is hard to come by. It’s special, and it’s present here.