Being contradictory
and nonsynchronous, 1 and 2
“There is nothing more unexpected, nothing more dangerous than this power of being at once fiery and puny, contradicting and nonsynchronous. The workers are no longer alone with themselves and the bosses. Many earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between.”
In his 1935 Heritage of our Times, Ernst Bloch wrote on the existence of a “Now” that must “carry earlier things.” He wrote about a kind of “multispatial” and “polyphonous” dialectic, complicated by its relationship to different space-times.
The past, present, and future tumble along the spiral of a “contradicting and nonsynchronous” struggle. As they get close to one another on their orbit, they multiply each other—the force of past struggle enters the present, the force of the present, the future.
These sculptures of such spirals and tumbling balls were made using clay, glaze, and Detroit River sand—a material itself weathered from being a city past to a shore of the present and into a sculpture of the future.
The first was made for the A-B Projects 2025 Fundraiser and the second, for the Potters for Palestine 2025 Fundraiser.