influence tracking #4: costuming
{image from Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects by Joan Simon, Gregory R. Miller & Company (November 15, 2006)}
I just ran across this tiny little image in a book about one of my pervasive favorites, Ann Hamilton. It’s a hat and veil that were made to be part of a performance piece, aloud, in which costumed volunteers hand-cranked wind machines. (This was performed at the Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm, Sweden 2004) Characteristically, Hamilton lit a fire in a spot of my brain I’d been wanting to warm. I don’t love everything she’s ever done, but the poetry she achieves with elemental symbols is so often a hit with me. Like her toothpick suit, which she built as a graduate student at Yale, these wool costumes have a nonspecific, but potent mythological effect. The ubiquitous red cross of medical dress is traded for a perfect thick circle that echoes the silent mouth. Maybe partly because of the coy look of this particular volunteer, it works as a symbol that seems to fall between medical protection and religious ceremony– an air of calm adherence to a prescribed role.
If you’ve read my blog for any period of time, you probably know that I also have an artistic crush on Nick Cave, the visual artist. He exemplifies an approach that I am drawn to again and again through the years– a fascination with costuming and fanciful extensions of the body. I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately, and wondering what is under all this fabric. Maybe it’s an inkling that our bodies are limited pictures of what I/we feel like internally? Are our physical borders more permeable than they appear? It also stretches whatever symbolic intent the parts of the body might have… to lift the dome of the head into a tall pile is to overwhelm the intellect, to lengthen the tongue is to emphasize a wicked way with words.
Filed under: inspiration | Leave a Comment
another praxis
It’s no secret that I have a preoccupation with understanding the creative process in other artists whose work I admire. There are practical crossovers in the work of making music and writing and film and many other disciplines. While we wrestle with different material and limitations, the mind is still our workspace, especially where the mind connects to the hands. (Maria Montessori argues that the hands are the seat of the intellect). Here is a poet’s version:
Self-Portrait by Adam Zagajewski (Translated by Clare Cavanagh)
Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers–but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields, waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that–so far– belongs to me.
Filed under: inspiration | Leave a Comment
feasting and foraging
(photo via Miss Manitach)
There are countless indepth blogs about food, in every direction, of course, but my life has been intersecting with food in new ways lately, so I thought I’d slip a post in. The trouble is, the more I think about food, the more there is to think about.
A week or so ago, I was treated to not one, but two extravagant dinners that certainly jumped the usual pattern of our lives. At this point, because of budget and pragmatics, we rarely splurge on amazing meals out– something that both Zack and I have a confessed weakness for. (If you’ve ever taken small children to restaurants, or arranged babysitters for bedtime, you know the drawbacks begin to outweigh the benefits.) Instead, Zack has been making the lion’s share of our dinners at home (and they’re fantastic…more on this in a minute). So when Joey Veltkamp invited me to be an artist at the second New Guard dinner, I was pleased as punch (how pleased is Punch?) to say yes, and to take food-lover Zack along on the day after his birthday. The entire event was so magical– a candle-fire lit room above bustling Pike street, lots of wine and great conversation with people who began the night as strangers, a stunning array of dishes rolled out by Eliot Guthrie family style, and the crooning of Kate Tucker. The very next night held another birthday gift for Zack; my parents took us to a dinner inspired by the wines of local boutique winery William Church, designed by culinary arts faculty and students at Lake Washington Technical College, where my mom is an administrator and teacher. The atmosphere was more pedestrian than the New Guard, but the tears shining in the corners of students’ eyes as they were given a standing ovation for the meal were priceless. Having the winemakers in attendance, and providing introductions for each wine, was a great treat as well.
Every culture seems to know that celebration works best with food. But what of the every day? As we sat down to dinner the other night, my oldest son told us he just wanted to smell the piece of pizza that had just been set in front of him. Zack had made pizza dough out of a no-knead sourdough bread recipe, and topped it with potatoes, greens, carmelized onions and cheese, and it was, truly, a beautiful fragrance and sight. We talked about how cool food is– that it’s a treat for your sense of taste, but also your senses of smell and sight and touch. To top it all, eating can be a profoundly social act, a real love gift, which is something we experience almost every day from Zack’s hands. Left to my own devices, even though I’m a devoted appreciator of food, I can slip into a more pragmatic habit, thawing frozen edamame and chomping leftover peanut butter and jelly crusts just to get some protein in and get on with the day.
Another side of things that is revolutionizing my idea of food is the benefit of local ingredients. It’s one of those topics that is an obvious “ought to” when you think about the transportation of food from all over the earth in terms of carbon footprint. But there are so many “ought to”s in our lives that we can’t keep up with them. This summer, we signed up for a weekly CSA (community supported agriculture) share, and just totally got spoiled by beautiful, fresh local vegetables fruits and herbs. My guilty conscience has turned into a strong preference for food that is seasonal and freshly picked. It’s no accident that we have to eat living things to keep living– a constant shift of life source from one creature to another. Even vegans take in the life of plants to support their own lives. And the closer we can get to the healthy living thing, the better. We have a few boxes of greens planted outside our back door, and I love taking a leaf right off of a plant and eating it. I swear its goodness is mainlined to my system. Talk about local. And then there’s Zack’s new obsession with foraging… but I’m already long-winded on a topic that others are far more eloquently covering.
(I’ve realized lately, with some sheepishness, that I’m not a purist… on almost anything, actually… but I love when logic and wisdom intersect with a life lived, and I’m always in pursuit of that type of inspiration. I guess I’m much better at acting out of convictions that are rooted in actualities than cerebral suggestions or guilt-induced resolutions for right-living.)
Filed under: events, exhibitions, food, inspiration, kids | 3 Comments
half/dozen treats
I have a post about food brewing, but in the meantime, I wanted to get up to speed on the awesome work that Half/Dozen Gallery has going on in Portland. First, between shows, they have started H/D +Projects:
H/D +Projects is an ongoing series of projects running alongside the monthly exhibition program at Half/Dozen Gallery. Every month we will have a different artist create a movement project, installation or performance piece for a one-night-only event. H/D +Projects hopes to serve as a conversation in experiential and performance art while broadening the scope of the gallery and enriching the larger art community.
The first was a Bonnie Green movement piece, Pace: Repeat:
Next up is a show after my own heart, Antler Necklace, curated by New York-based Amber Vilas.
Valerie Hegarty Branch with Frame, 2008
Succinctly, the show is “a group exhibition exploring the tension between nature and culture in our modern world.” Well, alright. I can get behind that. More here.
Finalement, (I’ll post about this again when the items are available) a catalog is being printed for the New City show I had there in October, and 50 c-prints of the piece below (Spillage/Slippage):
The catalogs are really lovely, and I can’t wait to have a book in print! I’m sure you can pre-order, but expect the release within the next month or so. Cheers!
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments
blindspots
{Tim Hawkinson Blindspot, 1991 Photomontage Collection of Tony and Gail Ganz Photograph courtesy Ace Gallery via}
I’ve seen this piece by Tim Hawkinson before, and have chuckled at its cleverness, but somehow missed the fuller profundity of it until recently. The artist tracked down the parts of his body that he couldn’t see directly… his back, his face, the documentation of which is an eerie skinned animal effect. Grotesque and honest. (I couldn’t find a larger image, unfortunately.)
His simple description:
BLIND SPOTS The areas of my body which I could not directly see were defined by tracing the inner periphery of my visual field. The areas within these boundaries were assembled into a map of my body’s blind spots.
But it just became something totally transformative to me when I thought about it in terms of our fixed perspectives. In an almost claustrophobic way, I was able, through Hawkinson’s illustration, to conceive of the ways that each of us our trapped in our own bodies… we’ll never see our own faces unless indirectly– a reflection in a mirror, a photograph. If you peel it back a little further, even our “direct” sight is a highly mediated experience. Our eyes pull in the reflected rays, translating the projection on the backs of our eyeballs into a complex set of neurological symbols. In any case, it’s a picture to me of our limited perspective. A physical, almost tangible way to admit to our blindspots in every area of life.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
The response is never nonchalant when I tell people I have three boys under five years old. It might be a sympathetic sigh, a knowing grin, a shocked cringe or a mocking chuckle. “You have your hands full,” can be said in a host of tones, and I think I’ve heard them all. It can even be accusatory… a ”how-could-you-let-this-happen?” lurking behind the spoken phrase. More positive versions marvel at the work that we are able to do in this time (both my husband and I are working artists). The truth is that we live in a constant struggle against complete chaos, and we’re always working. Always. Working. It’s a piecemeal, half-distracted sort of work, unless we pay someone in order to allow us to focus, or organize each other into longer stints of solo child care. The other side of the coin is that we’re always playing. Always. Playing. Since that’s the work demanded of you as a mother or father, and also the best part of the work of being an artist.
Today I read that one of my enduring favorite artists, Louise Bourgeois, also had/has three sons (image above found here). I was pretty excited until I also discovered that she didn’t really start producing as an artist until after she’d raised them. I’ve always loved that she has stayed fresh and active for so so long, though, so she remains a role model. And I think there’s something to be said of the emotional complexity that comes from raising kids– not superior, of course, but different. I tend to run out of time and energy before material. It pours out of the cracks. I cup my hands to grab a little before it disappears. In reality, this means grabbing a pencil or the corner of this blog, in between the Sisyphus-like exertion of dishes and laundry, board games, playgrounds and toilet disasters.
One of the only and best releases of the tension that we live under is laughter. If I forget to laugh, I’m in bad shape. So are my sons, of course. Luckily, they are often catalysts, and remind me to lighten up. So the tension shivers apart as we get a glimpse at exactly how absurd this set of jobs can be…
(The shape of this space, this blog, is often under my own scrutiny for how public and private intersect, how my professional life and domestic life converge and diverge. One lodestar that I use to determine content is whether it would be useful to anyone else. In addition to just getting some news out about shows and whatnot, it has long served me, and hopefully others, as a place to think out loud about the joys and challenges of the balancing act that is my life. So I think about other parents and other artists, how I’ve totally been buoyed by reading about someone else’s experience along the way. Hopefully it can meet someone else in this way.)
Filed under: kids | 16 Comments
she works hard for the money
The title of this post is also the name of the piece above. The song name (and tune) kept sneaking into my head while I was making the drawing, and I just couldn’t avoid calling it that. It’s a sort of personification of architecture-as-ideal, and she does, indeed, work hard. I’m so attracted to the idea of architecture as a tool toward the achievement of Utopia, even if the actual application of those principles through time tends to fail in a spectrum of extremes. You know– like Utopian political ideas or intentional communities. Anyone who has visited a celebrated building can attest to the tension between the transcendent and the pedestrian. Richard Meier’s buildings are lovely, white, clean things, but if you visit them in person, you’ll see that crane flies especially like to camp out on the reflective surfaces. Dirt flecks and grass clippings defame the exterior at human scale. Having been part of a couple of human community experiments, the latest of which is my own growing family, I can also attest to the real-life strain of working out life against ideals of peace, love and understanding. (What’s so funny?)
So the building is also me, in a sense. I’m enough of a romantic to enter into the challenge of building under the constraints of aesthetics and pragmatics with the lofty goal of achieving a harmonious finish. And I’m enough of a realist to know that when you add people to the mix, and wily old nature, things fall apart. May they be beautiful messes.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
{image: Wikimedia Commons}
A side note post as I continue to write about influences and inspiration. It happens now and then that you see work that echoes another artist’s work so strongly that you have to wrinkle your nose and shake your head, especially when you know who’s rhyme came first. A small number of times, I’ve seen work that looks a lot like mine, and then, depending on how close it is, the stunned connection is tinged with a feeling of betrayal and a string of questions… Has this artist seen my work? Was this conscious? Accidental? Is it possible to come to such similar forms without having seen anything from me at all? A magical product of the zeitgeist? In any of these cases, even though there’s a bit of a startle involved, I tend to take this sort of thing lightly, mostly because of two things I hold to be true.
1) Art is, at its base, a product of copying. Nothing, as it has been said of old, is new under the sun. But each human being is unique, and so as the world of raw material meets each new set of eyes and hands, it has unforeseen possibilities for combinations of all the old tricks. I think people can either reformulate what comes to them lazily, which looks like thievery, or brilliantly, which looks like all the best art on the planet. And then there’s everything in between. It all comes out in the wash because…
2) I believe that the most original re-mixers will stick around, while those who are “derivative and lack conviction” (a favorite phrase from an old professor of mine) will fade out. If you look at any art movement in history, there are people who push the edges and innovate and people who hold the center, making a style or approach indelible. It could even be argued that the center-holders might be an important component in historical structuring. Like the medics camped out away from the front lines in order to treat those who are wounded at the Avant Garde.
There’s a whole world of law surrounding this of course– intellectual property (what an amazing concept!) and copyright, etc. And it becomes a different story when someone makes money off of someone else’s ideas. But mostly we all have kind of a sensor for detecting whether someone’s heart is in what they do, and whether they are struggling to be originators. What I always tell my students is to diversify their influences. It’s possible to love one artist so much that you start to mimic him or her accidentally. I’ve had plenty of times that I start to use a symbol or approach that I’m not consciously borrowing, only to later make the dotted line to something I’ve recently admired. And that’s okay… I’m a sponge, we’re sponges. The trick is to sponge up a lot of different things so that your soup is fresh. (And you know when I tell students these things, I’m telling myself as well…)
Filed under: inspiration | 2 Comments
I came across Robert Fontenot’s Recycle LACMA project through the superb weatherspoon and am, again, contemplating the art-version of reduce/reuse/recycle. In projects like the one pictured below, and in the one we just finished for the Madison Park Window Project, Zack and I have used handmade quilts that we found at the Goodwill “bins”– the last stop for clothing and other donated objects before the landfill, as far as I understand it. Even though we know we are using them one last (?) time, it’s still difficult to take the scissors to these wonders of antique fabric in resplendently awkward color combinations, knowing that there was a set of hands at the other end, and a set of eyes, that would likely balk at the severity of its reuse. So it is with the LACMA project. Artist Robert Fontenot bought up a slew of Los Angeles Museum County of Art’s castoffs from their textile and costume department, and is carefully working to reuse these gems that hail from every corner of the earth only to end up in a cultural recycling bin. Some of the ways that Fontenot is reusing them bring delight and satisfaction (some of my favorites: boxing gloves, wastebasket, bathroom awning), while some are more painful, depending on the beauty of the original object or the silliness of the new one. But the project is a great idea, and allows viewers to think about the way that we feel certain objects are more sacred than others because of their hand-crafted originality, their beauty, their rarity, their exotic appeal. It keeps us thinking about trash, about limits, about time folding in on itself, the ubiquity of fabric, the often artless art that we wear compared to the garb of other times and places…
{Zack and Gala Bent: Overprotective Home}
Filed under: collaboration, inspiration, recycling | 3 Comments
the waves have it
Hail, much-needed too-short vacation. It didn’t take long to be washed brainclean by the sound of real ocean waves. As much as I adore Puget Sound, she’s just not the same as the Oregon coast’s vigorous roll of wave-on-wave. I can try to describe it, but the main thing is its own wordlessness. I can muse about the generations of human beings who have spent time staring into these same shore’s waves– always the same, always changing, but the presence of the sea itself (or being present by its side) is an immersive picture of ageless timeless. And boy is that awesome for remembering your size in the scheme of things. That’s what vacations are for, oh ye who think you are indispensable to whatever work has you by its throat (guilty, here).
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Recent Entries
- influence tracking #4: costuming
- another praxis
- feasting and foraging
- half/dozen treats
- blindspots
- extreme tension that breaks into laughter
- she works hard for the money
- influence tracking #3: the blurry lines between inspiration, zeitgeist and thievery
- dear plastic, don’t imitate anything…
- the waves have it
- Art Club
Categories
- art for sale (1)
- collaboration (2)
- events (1)
- exhibitions (4)
- food (1)
- inspiration (6)
- kids (2)
- recycling (1)
- Uncategorized (9)
