Weekly Digest: July 21

Anthony Metivier of the Magnetic Memory Method talks with Rick on the podcast, a look at Henri Matisse's changing styles, and Alan Kaprow writes about seeing art in the everyday.

Bathers by a River by Henri Matisse

Art Which Can’t Be Art by Alan Kaprow

It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been located in activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, for example, in the morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of my elbow moving up and down...

The practice of such an art, which isn’t perceived as art, is not so much a contradiction as a paradox. Why this is so requires some background.

Continue reading at Tetragrammaton.com…

The trick is called the Holy Grail. A spectator names any card and any number — say, the seven of clubs, position thirty-two — and it’s there. The deck has to be memorized. Completely. In order.

Anthony Metivier didn’t think he could do it. He tried anyway. Fifteen minutes later, the deck was in his head. “It just gave me this weird light,” he shares on the podcast.

He’s been living inside that light ever since.

Anthony is a memory expert and the founder of the Magnetic Memory Method — a system built on one of humanity’s oldest tools, the memory palace. The technique predates writing. The Aboriginal Australians used songlines to navigate drought, to remember which food would heal and which would poison. The Luba people of central Africa encoded knowledge into carved wooden objects strung with beads and shells. Giordano Bruno mapped the infinite universe onto the structure of the mind itself — and was burned at the stake in 1600 for it.

The memory palace, at its simplest, is a location you already know. A grocery store. An old apartment. A childhood street. You walk through it in your mind and leave things there. Anthony once memorized a passage from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus by placing Anthony Hopkins — who played the role on film — inside a Woolworths in Australia, moving aisle to aisle, each strange encounter encoding another word. He can recite it forward and backward.

Numbers become people. Letters become images. Abstract ideas find bodies. “Everything is a list,” he says. A speech is a list of paragraphs. A paragraph is a list of sentences. Once you see that, the palace opens up in every direction.

Listen to the conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or subscribers can listen ad-free here.

Dive deeper at Tetragrammaton.com.