Cleveland Centre Mural ProjectDaniel Rothenfeld Mural Art In Cleveland Ohio

Here you can browse the core information and imagery of the Cleveland Centre Project.

History

Village of Cleveland –Iroquois – Real Estate Cleveland – Characteristics of the 18th Century – The Erie Canal and it’s Relations to the City of New York – Ohio and Erie Canal – St Mary on the Flats – Cleveland 1800 Events –History of Equation of Time – Rise of Modern Nation State – Infrastructure –Fall of 20-10 –National Geographic, Back to Nature – The Mariner’s Astrolabe –Anaphoric Star Disk History – The Time Scale – Tower of the Winds – Shore of Lake Erie – 1818  – Native American views of sacred geography

Science

Einstein’s Gravity – 2nd Law of Motion – Neuroscience  – Geometry – Greeks on Platonic Solids – Equation of Time – Universality of Gravity – Navigational Astronomy – What is the Fibonacci Sequence – Unique Properties – James Turrell – Earth Golden Ratio – Can Consciousness affect Quantum Mechanics?

Mathematics 

Quadrants and Octants – Celestial Sphere – Exponential Function – Astrolabe – The Torquetum – The Pentagon – The Ancient Secret of Life – The Golden Section –Street Scale – Civil Engineering –  Da Vinci Divine Proportion – The Phi Ratio

Philosophy

Civilizations are not static conditions of societies but dynamic movements of an evolutionary kind…

…Tangent from Saving Civilization: Carl Jung and Arnold Toynbee point the way; Parabola winter 2018

~ Syncronicity~ acausal, meaningful coincidences~ that demonstrate an unknown but intimate connection between inner and outer events. Those that flourish are able to respond to challenges while others cannot, and this difference is due to “a creative minority” who are able to recognize what is needed at a given time.’ ~Toynabee

~ Toynabee’s creative individual, “is the fulcrum of societal stamina… solving the issue of interiority…and then communicates the solution to the social group as a whole, adding, “when we are challenged beyond our comfort or ability, we must meet it with active response, or fall back into loss.”

~ “It is always single individuals who are moved by the collective problem and who are called upon to respond and contribute to its solution”… Jung

Cleveland Centre: Its not Economics, the Meaning is about Relationship!

~ Paraphrased from David Ulrich,

Parabola, Fall 2017, To Honor the Sacred

~ We recognize certain locations on Earth, within our own spheres of activity, as special and consider them sacred by virtue of a resonance that suggests a living intelligence. We often long for contact with these places that have the capacity to help us return to ourselves…places where energy is integrated in the land itself, regions of power and grace…they remind us of the fortitude and unquenchable desire of the human spirit-for relationship with the otherness of life…

~ God-Man: The Word Made Flesh  by George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry

~ The ‘tree of life” philosophy research; The Tree of Knowledge,  Alvin Boyd Kuhn

~ Storied places are a profound source of energy and inspiration for those fortunate enough to experience them…an echo of the song of the world… Devastated by industrial technology & modern attitudes… this was not an artistic project per se. The importance of the sacredness of the land, required that we go beyond artistic intent, using our talents to achieve a tenuous balance to allow meaning to emerge out of direct experience- to listen and see, stay in the moment, remaining receptive to the collective meaning invested in the sites and land itself…

~ To stand humbly in service of a larger purpose makes its way through us, we are the vehicle, not the destination…on a cellular level, our linkages arise from within… the Earth is no different in this respect from you and me.

“There are two endless directions, In and Out” ~  Agnes Martin

A Hierarchy of Understanding – Aboriginal Wisdom and Advanced Physics – Synchronicity of Matter & Psyche – Mary Oliver ~ The Poets Voice – Magdalena Tulli Dreams & Stones – Towards a Scientific Phenomenology – Political Science – Natural History – Paintings of Turner – Visual Appearance – What is Enlightenment

Irwin-Smithson Quotes

Litt Comments and Letters

here is the article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer from Steven Litt

Project Plates

Imagery

Quotes

The Search for Meaning~ Meaning & Orientation 

We are meaning oriented beings, and we long for meaning. If we struggle, we will become better if we find something meaningful that fills the “existential vacuum…” The most affluent societies have al their basic needs met, but they lack something to live for… it’s not about having what you need to live but asking, “what am I living for?” It’s the “higher” needs (i.e., meanings, love, and values) that proved to be much more relevant to their chance of survival… if you give it time and look close enough… If you don’t see a meaning, the meaning of the hour is to go find one, seek, be on a quest, make it a priority … then the meaning of the hour becomes to at least stay alive so that you will be around when meaning again becomes visible. ~ Viktor Frankl

Only the inhabitants of a city built according to the design of the Star are never faced with the necessity of choice. They are obliged to move around in straight lines, yet in a certain sense all straight lines there are parallel. In every place only one appropriate road meets the eye. And so the calm pedestrians look directly ahead, which gives them an expression of infinite patience. The main streets there lead radially to the most important point, which marks the true center. In it is situated the heart of the city. From here the whole city is clearly visible; in the twinkling of an eye one can see right through it along with all its interiors… It contains within itself a lasting record of the order of the world to which it belongs and an invaluable ready outline of the values that will be assigned to the things it contains. The gravitational force of objects placed in the scales will depend not only on their mass but above all on their estimated worth… ~ Magdalena Tulli

“Standing before the Miamisburg mound, or walking inside the Fort Ancient and Newark earthworks, surrounded by these simple walls made of mud, one is confounded by a multiplicity of sensations…here is the self-evident nature of the artistic act, its utter simplicity. There are no subjects-nothing that can be shown in a museum or even photographed; [it is] a work of art that cannot even be seen, so it is something that must be experienced there on the spot. The feeling [is] that here is the space~ the dramatic landscape looking out over the bridge one hundred feet high, the falling land, the chasms, the rivers, the farmlands and far-off hills are just picture postcards, suddenly one realizes that the sensation is not of space or [of] an object in space. The sensation is the sensation of time- and all other multiple feelings vanish like the outside landscape. Only time can be felt in private, time is personal, a private experience.” ~ Barnett Newman

“To rediscover the past is to move forward. There is no surcease when we constantly destroy what we have built. The future is carved with the implements we created before it was. The past offers the different roads, all converging towards the present. Today’s present…it’s dangerous not to know.” ~ Mark Tobey

“Faulkner once opined that the past is not dead; it is not even past. Forgetting presence of the past, we may live still in Shakespeare’s unconscious prisons… No freedom is possible, no authentic choice, where consciousness is lacking.” ~ James Hollis

“Objects as contemplation and, in contemplation, as sources of values which judge the world the spectator brings to them…those of our acquisitive mass Western civilization… evidence for the social perhaps even biological necessity for contemplation, is, in these apocalyptic hours, all too obvious. Civilizations endure when they can hold life in total vision… the revelation of reality in process, permanence in change, the place of value in a world of facts. The activities of men endure and have meaning as long as they emanate from a core of transcendental calm. The contemplative, the mystic, assuming moral responsibility for the distracted, tries to keep his gaze fixed on the core. When it is lost sight of, society perishes. The united act of contemplation and shaping of reality is in its essence the truest and fullest human deed.” ~ Kenneth Rexroth

“…The culture of determined relations has begun.” ~Piet Mondrian

“…Relativity” in science and “Modernism” constitute histories of radical change. Only two hundred years ago we were deeply committed to the truth of a highly sophisticated, and quite beautiful, pictorial reality. In this relatively short period of time, we have witnessed the loss of the belief in a transcendent content and its replacement first by terrestrial subject, and in its turn by the commonplace…we can now question how it might be otherwise.”

“…Therefore what we have witnessed is the de-structuring of meaning, not as a measure of the ideas or activity per se, but a sort of functionalized historic summery; here we are confronted with our logic and how logic has structured our perception of the world. Here we also find the openness to look again… ~Robert Irwin

“We left the Flagstaff airport just before sunrise in the clear desert air. As we reached altitude, we faced the huge full moon sitting on the horizon directly in front of us. Jim began to make the plane circle and when we were 180 degrees around, we were facing the brilliant rising sun as it rested on the other horizon. Jim continued to circle as the images of the sun and moon continued to appear in a rotating pattern of bright hotness and cool reflection. After several revolutions, Jim straightened the plane and never said a word about it. He didn’t have to. I sat there awestruck the rest of the way to California.” ~James Turrell

“To use concealment as a way of getting people to look again at something they know so well they no longer know it at all, is a very witty, and healthy, process for any artist who grew up in a dictatorship where the truth was rationed.”

“So for Newton, the force of gravity acting between the earth and any other object is directly proportional to the mass of the earth, directly proportional to the mass of the object, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates the centers of the earth and the object.”

“Go out in the world. Get inspired. Bring it home. That’s a Continental concept.” ~ John Ross, War on the Run

“Cleveland Centre 1833~ a Wonderous achievement~ “A parabola structure has a crucial property, all the “beams” of energy that strike a parabolas face converge at a single point. This point is called the focus _one of the timeless themes_the arc of a spritual quest_even though it is far reaching_it also returns to source. WE are part of the Earth, so we need to Cleave to it by following the seasons as they manifest within us, our own seasons of life.” ~ DR Parabola Magazine Exerpt

“Cities are built for humans.

But if you look at the layout of most of them, it looks like they’re made for cars.

Especially in the world’s most populated places. In São Paulo, Brazil — which boasts more than 10 million residents — a third of the people travel by car, another third takes public transit, and another walks. Yet cars take up a majority of the roads and public spaces.

Seeing that, a Brazilian urban planning collective called Urb-i set out to demonstrate that imbalance and show off examples of more people-friendly design. They scoured Google Street View images to find the most stunning public space transformations from around the world.

The results give us hope that our cities are becoming more beautiful places to live.”

C. S. Lewis explains how his close friend, Owen Barfield, demolished his “chronological snobbery.” Lewis defined chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”

“This instrument, shaped like a quarter of a circle, measured the angle from the vertical – not horizontal – and the line of sight to the body. It was suspended from a ring and had a weighted line hanging down, which crossed one of the angle numbers marked on the ring. Columbus used one, but after trying it, it’s hard to imagine how it was held stable!”

“the Flats were the place Moses Cleaveland first landed when he founded the city. It was also the location of some of the earliest populations of Cleveland.”

“The transmitter of life attracting a new American spirit, a different wilderness way that stretched to the setting sun, down which a power mighty could master the entire continent…the horizon was cosmopolitan”                         ~ John Ross, War on the Run

“He had bought a large map representing the sea, without the least vestige of land: And The crew were much pleased when they found it to be a map they could all understand.”      ~Lewis Carroll

“Art: Purpose Function” ~ The Psychobiological Evolutionary Account

So, those of us who have either the prudence or the inquisitiveness to deal with a life situation of total relativity in space and time can safely proceed. There are no boundaries to our interconnectedness with limitless dimensions and universes. And there are no limits to our continuity or development, bad or good. A very powerful commitment- to ameliorate the situation in which we find ourselves along with others- arises from the understanding of the inevitability of being situated in infinite relativity and continuity. The abandonment of any reification of nothingness leaves us with an absolute preoccupation with the quality of relative situations. This preoccupation demands that we use every means at our disposal to improve them.

“The first significant number of Catholics in Cleveland were German and especially Irish immigrants who came in the late 1820s and 1830s to construct and maintain the OHIO AND ERIE CANAL and to work in developing businesses.”

Refuge, Evocation, Invitation

“Visualize in the space before you the refuge field, in the fabulous realms in the limits of space – Never abandoning till my total enlightenment,   I reverently go for refuge! From the vast and fabulous deep of the reality realm, Emanating bodies of wisdom, art and compassion, Please come here for the sake of all beings! In this pure wisdom sphere of apparent possibility, on suns and moons of flawless art and wisdom, please sit with uncontaminated great pleasure!”
Liberation in the Between ~ Translated by Robert Thurman

Project Detail Pages: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.