Having first been inspired by Honea’s slight bending of the rules (see his most recent collection) by including a wedding band in his SHA pieces, the world of Symmetrical Hand Arrangement has found itself a new bad boy. Gordon Palm, yes that is his real name, has decided to buck the system and has been keeping the SHA community on its toes…or fingers, as it were. Palm sent the community abuzz with his most recent exhibition in which all of the pieces were deliberately asymmetrical. While some call it genius and others call it heresy, one thing is certain: whatever is decided will radically change what can be called SHA.
Some samples from the exhibition:
Look! An Elephant!!!
Seriously.
Knock yourself out Gordon. Interesting, but rather obviously is a differentiated pursuit. I’m quite certain his hands remain asymmetrical in any number of pursuits, but SHA, by its very definition cannot be one of them.
Gordon Palm was a failure at school, too, never made the rugby team, much less the SHASA. Always attempting—and failing with—SHA in company. Pitiful. It pains me to see him trying to gain admittance to the mysteries in this way. Unfortunately, society as a whole today is so completely unsure of the basic structures of hand symmetricality that he may very well fool some of the general populace into believing that his feeble attempt is a direct, perhaps “easier” link, to the rigors of SHA.
Those of us who experienced an early call to the visual dimension as a welcoming realm of potential activity and vocation can also remember the equally profound infantile joy accompanying our first inkling of that obdurate thing referred to as asymmetry. It immediately glowed as a heretical rival doctrine. The Parthenon collapsed under the weight of its own Classicist Orthodoxy. The “unbalanced” fueled our most rudimentary notions of rebellion. Just around the corner was the “Romantic Agony” of the differentiated Genius posing atop the art world’s precocious pedestal of exceptionalism. Here Palm set up shop and stayed.–Kenneth Clark, “Palm Reading,” The Times Literary Supplement, Apr. 14, 1953.
Palm’s stuff on that wooden table of his. Always looked like mutton shanks on a chopping block. If I had been there with a meat cleaver, I’d have spared the world some misery.–Henry Moore, 1963 interview.