PART 3
Leigh Bridges and Robert Hengeveld

May 20-22, 2005

 

On Climate and Metabolism


Four humours govern our existence. A color, a climate, an organ, and a temperament distinguish one from the next. A yellowish-green colour is associated with the phlegmatic character. The phlegmatic climate is cold and moist. In it, the lungs are acerbated by phlegm to produce a sluggish, pallid and cowardly temperament. Maybe you know this person.

Black is associated with melancholia. Brown and grey are akin to black, like a dead tree. The climate here is cold and dry. The melancholic humor universally beset gall bladders with flat black bile, producing an introspective, sentimental temperament. A beautiful blood red informs the sanguine humour. The sanguine character is red-cheeked and corpulent. Realistically happy, the sanguine humour is amorous and optimistic in hot, moist atmospheres.

Climates with dry heat encourage choleric temperaments. Perhaps ou know a place like this, where yellow is associated with the spleen. Choleric humours provide the cornerstone for two sets of prose on modern life. "Stop spleening me!" opens JS Foers first novel a century after Baudelaire organized his thoughts under the title, Spleen and Ideal. The choleric character is Baudelaire's favorite. Violent. Vengeful. Short-tempered, and ambitious.

Negotiating the four humours requires vigor. Who among us is unaware of their nature! Genius depends on dry air, clean skies- that is, on a rapid metabolism1. Maintaining the ambiguity between artistic models requires a similar kind of tenacity. Two hobos set up camp in a gravel mountain range beyond my deck. The sites' shifting configuration presents no problem for the drifters. Their movements represent a timeless formal problem: one of proximity. "Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world2..."


Lucy Pullen

______________

1 Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzche, Vintage Books, Random House:
New York, p 240
2 …ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl" Joe Strummer,
Death or Glory, The Clash, Epic Records: 1979

Lucy Pullen is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where she researches the practical and philosophical implications of conceptual art and sculpture.

 

> Next Show

  

Leigh Bridges. Roughing It paintings.

Robert Hengeveld. 85:100. Paint, MDF. 2005