Kalendarium

In our technologically fueled, frenzied attempt to better understand and control the material universe, our present culture has strayed so far from simplicity and beauty that we are often startled when it reveals itself. The modern system of ideas that is our technocracy has dispensed with the Poetic and broadly fails to see the subtle connecting strands of meaning woven into the web of life and the cycles of Time. Technology is shackled to Commerce, which is also blind to such things, and thus we have the “blind leading the blind”. Contemporary Calendric models erroneously try to mark the linear forward progression of time. We are able to chart our plans for the future in little boxes. The calendars found in our homes and offices are typically a succession of boxes; and boxes within boxes.

Today almost everyone takes the precision of our calendars for granted, unaware of the long threads spooling out from our clocks and watches backward in time, running through virtually every major revolution in human endeavour, have their origin in the Calendar as a Sacred construction. The Sun, the brilliant fiery star at the heart of our Solar System, controls not only Night and Day, but also the length of the Seasons and one way of our measurement of Time. (The other is the Moon). It is little wonder that the Sun was so important to the ancients, who celebrated its daily and annual motions in countless and various types of sacred architecture around the world.

Greenfield’s photographs for this calendar refer to that poetic cosmology that lies within the cycles of the Sun and Moon, as seen from Earth. Using a combination of dime store props, Bron strobes as both illumination and prop, and the complex ensemble of the movement and gestures of the performers, Greenfield creates Calendric emblems that are metaphors for the harmonies of the orbits of the Moon around the Earth, and both around the Sun.

Both our organs of perception and phenomenal world we perceive seem to be best understood as systems of pure pattern, or as geometric structures of form and proportion. Therefore, when many ancient cultures chose to examine reality throughout he metaphors of Geometry and Music (music IS geometry in Time), they were already very close to the position of our most contemporary science. The cyclical geometry of the calendar as a projection of terrestrial and lunar motions is what these Greenfield images symbolize. The nesting of dancer’s pose, the various props, and light are metaphors for the nesting of the rhythms of Terrestrial and Lunar bodies in relation to the Sun.

From the macroscopic world of the Solar system and beyond, through our apparent world, to the subatomic, all forms are only envelopes for geometric patterns, intervals and relationships. The Kalendarium, and these Greenfield photographs are a testament to that reality.

Henry Jesionka,
Artist