walking//mapping project

This is the "map" for my process and evidence class. It's really just a start of something--I've done a lot but have a lot of directions I'd like to push this in further. I'll let you know again when I've updated it significantly.

mots du jour

même

I posted this as a response to one of Adam's posts regarding staking your territory and being different as an artist, but then realized it's something I've been thinking a lot about lately--especially after Venice--and wanted to expand on further.

do we really have to always be making something different?

do we have to try at all to make things different? aren't we all just saying the same things in different ways, passing them through our own internal strainers, filtering out what doesn't resonate, and passing on what does?

what would happen if we started trying to say the same thing as others instead of a different thing? why not try it and see what happens? could a community of differences be born from aiming for the same?

honestly, an experience where everything is different all the time is so tiring (take this last week visiting Biennales as an example). as a society, I think we could do with a little more of la même chose.

(même//same//meme//mime//even)

meme- (According to Wikipedia) A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"^[1]) is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. (The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimema for "something imitated".)^[2] Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.^[3]

More on how this relates to my biennale response later...

The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin (William S. Burroughs)

Barry gave us this reading for our Process and Evidence class by William S. Burroughs who speaks about painter and writer, Brion Gyson's "Cut-Up Method" where you take a piece of writing you like and you cut it up (however you like, he suggests into four pieces) and then you pull words and arrange them at random to create a new piece of writing. Burroughs argues that "all writing is in fact cut-ups." He would probably laugh at me for using quotes. Ironically, this is sort of the point that I've gotten to, that I just want to be able to use someone else's words as my own, because I've begun to live them already (see my post on Terry Tempest Williams).

This method is a "surrealist" way to come up with new meanings out of the same material. I must agree with Burroughs and argue that it's not "surreal." It's simply what we do on a day-to day basis, only in doing physical cut-ups, we are doing it more directly.

Ironically, Terry Tempest Williams (the writer whose words I've begun to live in) quotes so many people, making their words her own, more or less, cutting their words into her writing. In our day and age, we must cite all these quotations, or else it is considered plagiarism, stealing, so that is what she does. But Burroughs is right, at what point do "someone else's words" become our own? At what point are we able to take that on as a part of ourselves?

Jay echos this mentality pretty clearly when he says that "great artists steal." And this is true, we are always learning from those we are influenced by--here I note that several of my last posts have been about artists whose work I like, from whom I'm "stealing" a visual language and ideas. I prefer to say that I'm relating my work to theirs or that their work resonates with me, but at what point is it relating or stealing?

In contemporary art there are individuals who have photographed others' photographs and called them their own work, arguing that the copying and difference in time and space and context changed the photograph's meaning. It is so easy today to reproduce another's work and so the copy has become the norm, but should homage be payed to those who gave us the idea or material to work from? To steal, word for word, someone else's writing or someone else's artwork, and not show thanks or gratitude for those thoughts, that is a wrong against that person. It's like gaining supernatural powers through ancestor worship, then claiming you have no ancestors. Or learning yoga and becoming a yogi then claiming that no one ever showed you a single pose or meditation practice. Not that you don't learn somethings by your own practice, but not honoring outside influence seems dishonest somehow.

I guess I'm wondering, how do I show those thanks? Do I make citations, like Terry Tempest Williams? Do I simply mention writers and artists in my statements? How do we mediate the line between stealing another's work and giving someone else all the credit for something we've added to? How do I make those connections known in a graceful yet unobtrusive way?

I don't really know the answers to these questions, but will continue to think about them and work them out within my work, of course. And for fun, here's my cut-up of Terry Tempest William's writings I quoted earlier:

(cut into eight)

Jump-started by beauty, rising and falling beauty, fallen trees. We too can dance on the floors of wide-open joy singing on the sage flats, faith of falcons, peregrine falcons appear indifference, the greatest sin is the sin of it can be hidden, all this is hidden, until the midair, drop and break through a haze of indifference, and I will balance this die on my head and say to Hell right here on earth and yes there are times you hear, I hear that fresh, fertile cadence. Dive past our sluggish hearts and we are our native pulse restored, coming out of the forest, dancing on trees, decaying wood. Can you hear, I hear, that meadow lark, meadow vole, hidden. The inquisitors, yes there are times I inhabit, I inhabit Heaven right here on earth. Can.




(cut into phrases and then edited to be made somewhat sensical.)

Why or whereabouts? No one would know the world where we are one. We are going. We come from the color of perhaps the most emotion inside.

I am certain, I do not I walk. My identity is afforded no movement. The buildings are grey. I honestly don't know is seeping Hell again. The sky is grey is the place if I were to die, I don't know how to percieve beauty. To feel the Great Forgetting where are can no longer meaning...attached to no one. outside.

Say to remember. Nothing makes motion.

Dissolve. El Bosco's Hell, the mood is grey.

Profound, what moves us: anonymous, faceless, misery boundaries. Retreat is grey. Nothing has meaning.

I honestly--
These streets. Teachings. We cast a shadow. I can find no barometer for beauty. Hell is dissolve--is when and where we did sense.



(cut into nine)

The ladder. I want out. I want down. Strangler, our own. I cannot breathe, noxious smells must surely--
they do. Hell, all of them in Hell, my mind is in go aware, go away.

Of strings, in my head I feel a tightening of strings, strings of a harp like a crucifix. I have to wait my turn. Turn. The millstone turns...The tightening there, a woman hangs from the Father forgive them for they do not know what--
Leave me in peace with my own contemplations. It is Hell to know the devil is the intimate family.

I do not know what to do.

They are standing in Hell, they are tromping all over this landscape of the dark near faraway stranger anxiety I embody when feats, feet, these--
There are others climbing, this is clear.

This nausea I am feeling is the I cannot breathe in this crowd of too many passing.

eva hesse and judy pfaff

(Judy Pfaff, Round Hole Square Peg, 1997)

(Eva Hesse, Ohne Titel, 1966)

(Eva Hesse, Right After, 1969)

(Eva Hesse, No Title, 1970)

After hardly thinking of Eva Hesse or Judy Pfaff for about eight months, their work is once more resonating with me very strongly. (I'm just turning and turning in circles.)

The other night, my iPod changed at random to a clarinet duet I wrote in response to Hesse's Right After for a Music and Art class a few years ago. Though I listen to the recording fairly often, it struck me that this was a response to Hesse's work, and that I had just written about a gossamer web. I immediately remembered her No Title work that mirrors Right After but looks as though it is decaying, and realized that this is the duality that I want to create within the same work--light against dark, life against decay--and also the sense of relationship and reliance of the part on the whole. Looking up Hesse's work further I re-found her mandala series, which I've thought a lot about, but never really directly wanted to incorporate into my work until a the last couple weeks. Like Hesse, Judy Pfaff's room and print installations also use geometric mandala forms//structures cast against organic forms of plants and landscapes, and evoke both life and decay at once. Both artists are interested in immersing//engulfing the viewer in an experience, and this has been a goal of mine as well. I'm getting so excited because the installation work I'm starting to bring together seems to be a synthesis of all of these interests I've had for so long.

order//chaos
structure//deviation
singularity//multiplicity
universal//specific

HOLY COW VELLUM!!

Yet again, I have found a highly applicable material for creating translucency (see photos in the corner between the wall and window). I really like that it provides another way to layer on top of photos//drawings and then draw more on top of them potentially. Also, I'm finding that going back and forth between a real installation and a computer is working well. I can't do it all in one go in either place, but working with them against each other helps me to get further along (thanks for the suggestion, Barry). (who would have thought, balancing material//immaterial, sensed//thought...)

word map

1. Get a piece of paper, writing utensil, and french//english dictionary.
2. With your eyes closed open the dictionary to a random page and put your finger down.
3. Copy the word and it's translation onto the paper.
4. Continue choosing random pages and words until your paper is full enough.
5. Draw links between words that have related meanings.
6. Do whatever you like with it.

living in terry tempest williams' words

I have been living in Terry Tempest Williams' words (Leap) for the last few days. no, few months. I breathe them, I think them, I hear them, I write them over and over so that I can see them, read them. They are in my steps, my downward-facing dog, my cooking, my heart, my mind. They are becoming my voice (for I have always had trouble with words of my own, but these words are becoming me, or I am becoming them. I am living them--I have always lived them--and so they are my voice. I am going to start to speak them now).

"I walk these streets of Madrid anonymous, faceless, attached to no one. I do not cast a shadow. If I were to die, no one would know my identity or whereabouts. The sky is grey. The buildings are grey. The mood is grey. The color of retreat is grey. Nothing has meaning. I can find no meaning...Boundaries dissolve. Teachings dissolve. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? I honestly don't know. Say it again, I honestly don't know. Nothing makes sense. El Bosco's Hell is seeping into the world...Hell, I am certain, is the place wehre one is afforded no movement. Motion. Emotion. To remember what moves us, inside, outside. Perhaps the most profound barometer for misery is when we can no longer percieve beauty. To feel beauty. Hell is the Great Forgetting..."

The last several days have been embodied by this for me. The color of retreat is grey. I am grey. The sky is grey. We are all grey. We are all too mixed up. I am too mixed up. There is so much that it is all running together--all the colors and forms and ideas together come out as grey, a wall of grey. I am paralyzed. I am blocked, I am afforded no movement in all of this grey dissolution.

And then I was painting and found the deliciousness of paint, gobs of paint (I have never used gobs of paint), and then there was zinc white, oh it is too big for words. Things started to move again. It was like sunbeams and rainbows, (says Mr. Fox). It was the first time since April that painting has felt good, right. I could feel my lungs coming back to life. Just the first few breaths clearing out the old air, enough to unparalyze me, to be able to communicate something. Now I know that I need to get to this:

"There are others climbing the ladder. I want out. I want down. I have to wait my turn. Turn. The millstone turns...The tightening of strings, in my head I feel a tightening of strings. There, a woman hangs from the strings of a harp like a crucifix. Father forgive them for they do not know what they do. I do not know what to do...they are standing in Hell, all of them in Hell, my mind is in Hell, they are tromping all over this landscape, go aware, go away. Leave me in peace with my own contemplations of the Dark. It is Hell to know the Devil is the intimate near faraway stranger, strangler, our own family, this is clear, this nausea I am feeling is the anxiety I embody when I cannot breathe, I cannot breathe in this crowd of too many feats, feet, these noxious smells must surely pass."

I have not forgotten this, but I have forgotten how to express it. I have edited myself down to never speaking of the obsessive dark. I am afraid to speak of it. More than ever now, I must say it somehow. Because hell is next to the earthly delights. ("I will balance this die on my head and say to the inquisitors, yes there are times I inhabit Hell right here on earth and yes there are times I inhabit Heaven right here on earth. Can you hear, I hear that fresh, fertile cadence coming out of the forest, dancing on trees, fallen trees. We too can dance on the floors of decaying wood. Can you hear, I hear, that wide-open joy singing on the sage flats, meadow lark, meadow vole, hidden, it can be hidden, all this is hidden, until the faith of falcons, peregrine falcons appear midair, drop and break through a haze of indifference, the greatest sin is the sin of indifference, and dive past our sluggish hearts and we are jump-started by beauty, rising and falling beauty, our native pulse restored.")

HOLY COW ZINC WHITE!

opposites

I was looking up some artists that people have mentioned to me and was especially struck by Terry Winters' works where he juxtaposes bones with abstract forms. The abstract forms are very basal and remind me of artist-naturalist Ernst Haeckel's work with radiolarians. But if Haeckel's images are a meditation on the spiritual luminescence of tiny creatures from the dark, unknown waters of the sea, then Winters' forms are the opposite. They are more like voids or dark vacuums, far from being luminescent, they speak of death and an absence of light. This is a quality I have been missing in my work, and want to reconnect with. I'm interested in pushing the void and absence up against the life and luminescence, abstraction against representation, past against present and future. It's the pushing together of opposites that is so intriguing, (like Terry Tempest Williams' writing, too).

what happens when we mix abstraction with representation? when poetry and science come together? when the literal is joined with the metaphorical?


more importantly, why is this so satisfying to me?

drawing//derive

On Sunday, I did a drawing exercise to loosen up. I've seemed to have gotten in a rut of being extremely careful with my drawings, and it's not that I don't appreciate their delicacy, but I wanted to get back to a more gestural mark. I drew for five and a half hours without stopping: an hour of one-minute drawings, an hour of three-minute drawings, six-minute, fifteen-minute, and finally finished one drawing for the last hour. It could be called a drawing derive because I didn't know where I was going, just drew whatever I saw or thought of or a random picture from my computer, and stopped and moved on when the bell rang every so often. It was a good exercise in scratching for a few subjects I've been thinking about lately and needed to draw more, such as moths and water, and also in re-finding some abstract forms.

I was totally strung out and loopy afterwards. As Jay said, "I'd worked myself through." Figuring this was an interesting mental state and feeling like I needed to get outside, I went on an "acutal" derive. I found a place where many of the little ferns I've seen were growing on the same wall, saw grasses blowing in the wind, and eventually came to my street in a round-about way. I honestly don't recall much else of the walk--it was hard for me to take anything in at that point--only that my lower body was at once very heavy and my torso and head were very light, like I was in a strung out mountain pose.

thoughts (towards a potential artist statement)..from Thursday or thereabout

gather, gather. to bring together.

in my left hand I gather all the pieces, the fragments, remains of my past. I find the strands, invite them in, in, slide along one another, these spider’s web strands, the dew coming together, giving off momentary bursts of luminescence as the sun shines through, and all the liquid darkness of the sea as they are enveloped in shadow. in my left hand, in my left hand, I gather you here. in my right hand I gather all the could- and would-be’s of what is to come. I gather those strands, too. sliding them along eachother, a deep vaccum of possibilities, empty spaces of light and dark, filling and emptying one another, the tides shift in and out, in and out, all the breaths to come. in out, in you come. in my right hand, my right hand, I gather you here. I bring my hands together. I hold this gossamer web of light and shadow, my past and future, my mother’s past and future, my father’s, and mer’s knee, mary’s bright eyes, our home and my grandmother on the beach, a morning dove, mourning dove. a thousand moments forgotten unknown, all of time resting between my hands. I open my eyes. here. ça va. (it goes.)

enchantée. enchanted. I am chanted, chanter. sung. I am being sung, flowed along this river. a river is flowing me. a song is singing me.

sound, sound, resound. I am being sung by this harmony and dissonance. I am being sung by this I do not know where it is going what it is but it is breathing me and now I cannot help but follow, follow, I lie fallow, unable to sound, to speak, please please, let go of my throat, let me breathe my own breath that is your breath that is feeding me.

rural psychogeography//richard long

Looking around for things on rural psychogeography, I found a blog entry on Richard Long (an artist who Barry mentioned in class). It actually didn't talk a whole lot about what has been done in terms of rural psychogeography, but gave a great description of Long's work, which is based around taking an extended walk outside and creating some sort of verbal, sculptural, or photographic work that relates his particular aim and/or response (here for Long's website).

The comments at the end of the blog are interesting, mostly related to how Long has done a couple walks where he drew a line across a map and then followed it. Many said that this is going against the notion of the derive, and I must say that these seem more like mental derives than physical ones, since the route is planned out before-hand. The purpose changes when the route is a regular or pre-determined thing (like my morning walks) because then it is about what you notice along the way. If the same walk is repeated over time the walk becomes about how your relationship to the same place and sequence of experience changes over time, how our minds connect with and beyond their regular environment. This is what I'm interested in--running our hands over and over the same ruts, but they are not the same, they're different because they are changing slowly and because our minds take them in differently.

blogging? what's that?

It's not that I haven't been doing anything this last week, I'm just not used to posting it. And so the following posts are an update as to this last week.

invisible cities (italo calvino)

I was taken by the metaphorical power of many of the cities that Italo Calvino describes. This is an excellent reading in order to see how you see because each world is a sort of archetype in and of itself, and though all of the stories were interesting, some resonated more than others. The thing about archetypes is that the ones that resonate more for each of us are closer to our experience of the world, and so can reflect back to us the way we see. Some ideas throughout that were interesting were: life//death as same, a lack of air//only earth, repetition, and mirrored actions. Below I'll go into more detail on two of the worlds that especially resonated with me.

The city of Olinda deserves special mention because it is how I experience time. In Olinda, there is a single point from which continually blossoms a new Olinda. In Olinda, birth is also death, and the present is a joining of past and future. In both these things there is balance. In fact, Olinda is all about experience as balance. I have this same need for balance, and a desire to join past with future in the present.

The story that resonated most for me was the second to last "Trading Cities: 4" on page 76, and I'll go into the most detail on it. It is about the region of Ersilia in which people constantly create a web of strings of relationship//connection between houses, but when there are too many strings, the city becomes unlivable//unmovable because there is no space, so the people must go somewhere else. This means the people of Ersilia are always on the move, and so they may never truly settle. The abandoned cities lose their form and become ruins where only the webs remain.

When I read this, I felt like Calvino was writing about me, about my world specifically. It is certainly akin to my art practice. I can't count the number of times I have abandoned a process when it got too full and figured out--when there was no space to move anymore--and moved onto something else, often completely different. This is very akin to the element of water, which, when it's container becomes full, must run elsewhere until it pools again in another basin, only to overflow that one as well (the Great Salt Lake and oceans being exceptions--only evaporation occurs there). The practice of forming webs is also what water does--it has extremely high cohesion and surface tension on micro-scale, so it can form webs that remain connected, which becomes important in it's web-forming abilities on an organismal-scale for example in the human body and in trees, and then rivers, estuaries, aquifers and oceans link all the bodies of water in the world creating macro-scale webs.

This city's life resonates because this is how I live--I am always forming webs of relationships within myself (see above: "This very akin to...") and sharing links with others when they're interested. This is also why I like Judy Pfaff--her work forms webs of interconnection through all the levels, joining them together.

What I wonder is: Wouldn't the strands finally start connecting between the ruined cities in Ersilia? If it is a region, it must have boundaries, and the webs must have points of overlap, so what happens when there is no more space but only web? Can this happen? Is it just the overall view--the ability to see micro, mid and macro levels at once? Is this what is happening for me now? Are my webs where physical cities once stood beginning to connect? For I have abandoned my last city, but it is still within me, all of them are still within me. And I can see how many of them meet up, where they slide along eachother and resonate, but I am not sure that I can quite see the whole.

psychogeography

Why I have never come across anything on psychogeography before is beyond me. It seems like something that might have come up in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (a book by David Abram on phenomonology--how our experiences are linked to our surroundings). Perhaps I wasn't quite ready to put it all together, but this definitely helps me do just that. For the longest time I've been interested in time and place and memory and our circuitous experiences, the webs of time and space that slide together and apart in each of us at every moment, inextricably linking our inner worlds to our surroundings. And landscape painting seemed the most natural place for me to start expressing my experiences, but it honestly never felt quite true enough because it was not wide enough in scope. My landscape paintings do not in and of themselves call up the links that go off in my mind--memories, intellectual knowledge--though they can communicate emotion and a sense of place. This is what I want to start communicating--these links, the webs that I am pulling together.

What floors me is that all of this is based on urban rather than rural explorations. I have a tendency to wander, but almost always in a rural place, and this brings up a fundamentally different experience. While a flaneur is able to claim anonymity, (and therefore a lack of responsibility for his actions) because of the mass of people within a city, wandering about the countryside is a very different experience. When in the woods or walking by fields, I am often the only one there, and therefore a degree of self-awareness is involved. There is nowhere to hide, and I become responsible for my actions. My actions have meaning for my surroundings whether I want them to or not. In terms of modernism//post-modernism this is an ironic division. The concept of the wandering flaneur who claimed anonymity became a popular thing to explore in a time when the avant garde was very important--when individuals were meant to make a difference and be overthrowing the norm. In my rural wanderings, I am exposed and aware of the effects of my actions--I cannot help but affect my surroundings--and this is in a time when anyone can say anything in art (and elsewhere, such as here on the internet), and so we have nearly lost our capacity to create meaning and affect anyone as a result.


Here are a few key quotes that resonated with me from Wikipedia's entry, "Psychogeography":

"The sectors of a city…are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents". -Guy Debord, A Critique of Separation (1961)

Perhaps I'm interested in starting to document some of this web of experience in order to share the truths of what I have lived and am living.



"People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty." -Marx, quoted by Guy Debord

A truth--that we can only experience life from within ourselves, and yet we are made up of everything that is outside of us. Time and space are singing us as much as we are singing them.



“In discovering a small world we discover the whole world.” -Bill Humber

macrocosm//microcosm
universal laws//personal narratives