Holding It Together

Meaning & Membranes

“Soap Bubbles,” Berenice Abbott, 1946, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The potency and potential of membranes to create charge and sustain generative separation fills my mind this week…. Apertures. Cocoons. Boundaries...questions of what’s let in, what’s held, and what’s kept out, and how… As you think about your own envelop(ing), some inspiration tracing ideas of separation, the origins of life and bubbles within bubbles.

Originating Membranes

“Volvox 1984,” Bruce Lacey, Tate Modern, London.

Scientific researcher Nick Lane argues persuasively that life on Earth first emerged in the ocean’s mineral dense hydrothermal vents with the advent of cellular ion pumps, proteins able to regulate a flow of ions across a cell membrane, separating what’s inside from the outside world for the first time. The differential in the ion gradient on either side of the membrane would allow a cell to store up ATP, vital life energy inside the vents, where hydrogen-saturated alkaline water meets a iron-and-sulfur rich environment which could have supported the construction of the first carbon-containing molecules. We are a series of membranes encased within membranes. At another scale, and on another plane, Lane asks, “how does the firing of neurons generate a ‘feeling’ of anything? How do calcium ions rushing through a membrane generate the sensation of red, or fear, or anger, or love?“

Bundling as Human

The Honeycomb Vase "Made by Bees," Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny, 2006, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Building their comb on a structural form, his piece took 40,000 bees one week to make.

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all.” Ursula LeGuin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986.

Membrane of the Skin

“Soap Bubbles Floated, They Floated into Outer Space,” Koichi Sato, 1989 Museum of Modern Art, New York

The body is holey. Despite cultural ideas around its finite boundedness, the skin includes two to four million pores that make us, ultimately, permeable. We dwell between inside and outside. Like a flower, opening and closing its petals with the sun, the skin’s stratum corneum alters with the body’s circadian rhythms, increasing its permeability in the evening and through the night.

Pericardium as a Palace

The point Pericardium 8 is found at the place where you touch your middle finger to your palm. Press gently as you envision yourself inside a red, protective dome, like the bud of a poppy, Lorie Dechar says.

The pericardium, the heart’s supportive membrane, is a site of actual and metaphorical potency in traditional Chinese medicine. Acupunctural alchemist Lorie Eve Dechar, who describes the point Pericardium 8, Palace of Weariness, found in the center of the palm, as “a ruby-colored dome of protection around the soul.” “It is also a place of convalescence, where you can heal after betrayal, exhaustion, or loss, a place of preparation where you can gather your energies before moving out into the world,” she writes in The Alchemy of Inner Work. “The point’s wisdom forms a protective, semi-permeable membrane, a shield around the heart that allows positive energies and love to enter the chamber of the Heart while effortlessly deflecting toxic or negative influences.”

World as Cell

film still from “Évolution,” 2015, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic

"When the earth came alive it began constructing its own membrane, for the general purpose of editing the sun...I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is a no go…The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell." —Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, 1974.

Bubbles Within Bubbles

“The Bubble,” Clarence H. White, 1898, Museum of Modern Art, New York. The concept of homo bulla, describing the way humans live in a liminal space, like the bubble, between water and air, ground and sky, inflation and bursting, was well established in the ancient world. “The foam which is made up of bubbles? The tiny ones break and vanish immediately…That’s what man’s life is like,” Lucian of Samosata explained in 2nd c BCE.

“Soap Bubble Set,” Joseph Cornell, 1948. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Cornell included objects that alluded to soap bubbles in a long series of collage works, equating these symbols with the mystery of the cosmos. “The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets—a connotation of moon and tides—the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea-foam and billowy cloud crystalized in a pipe of fancy…” he wrote in 1948.

Resor House project, Jackson Hole, WY, interior perspective from the living room through the North glass wall, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, c 1937-1941. “This is skin-and-bones architecture,” van der Rohe explained, describing his radically minimalist perspective.

“Spatial Concept: Expectation,” Lucio Fontana, 1960, Museum of Modern Art. The artist’s violently slashed canvas challenged the divide between painting and sculpture.

“It's not the bullet that kills you—it's the hole,” Laurie Anderson, 1977, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anderson’s song was dedicated to Chris Burden, the performance artist who arranged for a friend to shoot him in the upper arm with a rifle as part of an artwork in 1971. The friend stood 15 feet away. The idea was that the bullet would just graze his arm. It did, and Burden was taken to the hospital, where he told the police it was an accident. The piece was about “giving you the illusion that you can control fate,” he later explained.