looking for art about nuanced perspective

November 1, 2011 4:48 PM

I am looking for a specific sort of birthday gift for a friend. He would like to be reminded of the fact that reality is not binary, that What Is does not always neatly fall into one of two opposite extremes.

I need your help, creatively inclined Mefites! I seek a visual representation of this truth-gradient concept.

Something like this: a (reproduced) existing work of art, a symbol/image that I can have made (or stencil myself), or lines of relevant poetry/prose that I can incorporate into a collage.

He is a runner and an engineer, with something of a Buddhist belief system, if that helps at all.

Any and all suggestions appreciated!

posted by parapluie to Human Relations (9 answers total)

I've been actively reading a lot of Hunter S. Thompson, and thinking a lot about Gonzo (not the muppet... though kind of, I guess) as a commentary on the plastic nature of truth and how that relates to personality and storytelling, thus making the Gonzo fist and increasingly powerful symbol of this kind of thing.
posted by cmoj at 5:18 PM on November 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Best answer: A series of yin/yang stencils, starting out with the usual black & white combo, then slowly adding white to the black and black to the white to make a sort of gradient of light and dark grey yin/yang symbols each slowly getting more and more like the other colour ending in a solid grey circle. I have wanted to make something like this for ages but suck at stenciling, I wanted it to remind me that not everything is black and white.
posted by wwax at 5:19 PM on November 1, 2011

That is a major theme of Discordianism, explained pretty well on pages 56 and 57 of the Principia Discordia. The Holy Chao, is a symbol which means, essentially, precisely that.
posted by Garm at 5:21 PM on November 1, 2011

Best answer: You could probably find some lovely non-dualist quotes in Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi). A lot of his philosophy shows up in Zen Buddhism too. This is one of my absolute favorite quotes from the Mair translation (though it might be too long or too explicitly Taoist for your purposes):

The Great Clod emits a vital breath called the wind. If it doesn't blow, nothing happens. Once it starts to blow, however, myriad hollows begin to howl. Have you not heard its moaning? The clefts and crevasses of the towering mountains, the hollows and cavities of huge trees a hundred spans around: they are like nostrils, like mouths, like ears, like sockets, like cups, like mortars, or like the depressions that form puddles and pools. The wind blowing over them makes the sound of rushing water, whizzing arrows, shouting, breathing, calling, crying, laughing, gnashing. The wind in front sings aiee and the wind that follows sings wouu. A light breeze evokes a small response; a powerful gale brings forth a mighty chorus. When the blast dies down, then all the hollows are silent. Have you not seen the leaves that quiver with tingling reverberations? ...

Pleasure and anger; sorrow and joy; worry and regret; vacillation and trepidation; diffidence and abandon; openness and affectedness. These are all like musical sounds from empty tubes, like fungi produced from mere vapors. Day and night they alternate within us, but no one knows whence they arise. Enough! Enough! The instant one grasps this, one understands whence they arise!

posted by dialetheia at 6:08 PM on November 1, 2011

Best answer: I immediately thought of Escher's drawings, and also a mobius strip.

Thinking more about it, how about the old woman / young woman drawing, which can be used to illustrate a gestalt shift?

Or perhaps Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit?

These illustrations demonstrate more than one reality and they're fun to boot!
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:52 PM on November 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My first thought was a wave machine.

I find them kind of peaceful, and they continuously move from one 'extreme' to the other... Without ever actually being extreme. No matter what, the wave is in constant flow, and there's always at least a little bit of it on each side at any given time.
posted by meese at 7:51 PM on November 1, 2011

Perhaps a "Dharma Wheel" image, especially the version with 31 spokes representing 31 realms of existence (11 realms of desire, 16 realms of form and 4 realms of formlessness).
posted by mauvest at 8:06 PM on November 1, 2011

my memory isn't 100% but i remember a batman the animated series that involved two-face. the climactic scene involved batman making each face of the coin look the same. thus, two-face was forced to confront the world not in a binary sense, but in a way that he had to choose among a spectrum of actions.

so, super glue two quarters together so that the new "coin" has either two heads or two tails faces. maybe this will remind him that the world is what it is, no mater what it is (specifically).
posted by cupcake1337 at 9:23 PM on November 1, 2011

what kind of engineer?
posted by at at 5:12 PM on November 2, 2011