honestly don't know (soundscape)

honestly don't know from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

what did I do? what was I trying to do?

I listened to sounds. I noticed how I listen to sound, what I choose to listen to, when I want music, when I don't. I listened to songs on once repeat, which is normal. I listened to my breath, which is normal. I listened to cars from my studio, and cringed as they passed, which is normal.

I looked up roots of words, thought about The Spell of the Sensuous, thought about Leap, translated between french and english, found roots in both. I breathed, I listened. I took pictures of my lung x-ray. I looked at the sumac outside my window.

I cut up the words of Terry Tempest Williams, Nervous but Excited, T.S. Eliot, Patty Larkin, Allen Ginsberg and Mary Oliver into perhaps a thousand pieces, and pulled them one at a time out of a pile, stringing them back together. I saw what was there, and started to play with it. I moved things, cut it down, recorded myself speaking it.

I played on a guitar. I experienced making harmonics with strings for the first time. I listened to right after, my song I play on clarinet, on once repeat. I recorded some basic guitar.

I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded Latin, French, English. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice my breath. Irecordedmyvoicemybreath. I honestly don't know.

I came back to the cut up. I chose. I recorded my voice, my breath.

I put together a video of photographs of a sumac tree and an x-ray of my lungs, my window at home.

What did I want to do? I’m honestly not really sure. I suppose this is a meditation on death and life, and the ambiguity between those. Can we experience death in life? Can we experience life in death? Do we ever really know where we are? Do we ever really know whether we’re alive or dead?

I had to find the sound that was right for the video, to set the tone, guide the viewer's thoughts towards our bodies, impermanence, quietness, death//life, fractures, joy, shyness, hesitancy, being on a border, being the same as another and different from another, being in multiple places at once, and I'm not really sure what else. A huge long cut up was too much, instrumental music was too abstract, and going between breath to Latin to English to Latin to breath was too literal a progression and too abstract//conceptual. I wanted to push the viewer in some kind of direction with the words and my breath, and the quietness, but also leave room for openness.

Perhaps I’m not all that interested in making a piece about sound, but using it in tandem with my images. It's not about one or the other, both support each other. And now I just want to make more.

cut up

I did a cut-up of a lot of different writings//lyrics I was reading and listening to this summer--all of them were incredibly resonant at the time, and still are. I then edited it down and recorded myself reading it. I'm not sure that I like it as a sound piece, perhaps because it's strange for me to listen to my own voice. So while there are some interesting themes running through it, and I really like the repetative, obsessive quality of it, I'm not sure that this is the best form for it. I've thought about putting parts of this to images in a video, but it seems like it might take away from the video footage, or be too explicit. It's not like the hair piece where the words came along with the images. And it's really long, too, so I don't know that anyone would make it all the way through since it's so free-flowing and there's hardly a place to grab on. I need to keep trying some other things with it, I guess.

I also did this recording of me fooling around on guitar, sort of similar to the song I wrote//have been continually improvising with on clarinet, but I don't actually know guitar, so this is a lot harder//more elementary and thus even more repetative. Again, it is obsessive.

One major thing is, I need to figure out what sound goes with my videos, if any. I feel like something should, but I don't know what. This is why I did these two experiments, but they're not right for the video, nor are they completed sound pieces in themselves.

I guess I have a lot of different ways that I appreciate sound, so this is a hard project for me to approach. I have played clarinet for 12 years, so have quite a bit of a formal//classical background in music. I love French music especially--Debussy, Saint-Saens, Poulenc, Jeanjean--pretty much anything rhapsodic, with a tendency towards slower and darker pieces.

In terms of listening to music, I tend to listen to songs obsessively, often preferring hearing a single song to hearing anything else for days, sometimes weeks. I don't know why this is, other than that I simply crave those sounds. And far more often than not, it is the sounds I crave--the harmony and the rhythm--rather than the lyrics. In the last year I have finally started to barely catch and sometimes listen to lyrics, but it is not what I hear first by any means.

In terms of sounds I make with my body, I like listening//feeling the sound of my heart and my breath. I like the rhythm of walking, and the feel, but sometimes don't notice the sound. I like humming and absolutely love reading aloud for the vibrations. I often read aloud to Emma and Jacob, the kids that I have babysat for about 8 years, for an hour or so at a time. I love being with them, and I love reading, and sharing an enjoyment of books with them, but there is also just something very calming and comforting to feel my own (or someone else's) voice run through my body, and to be sharing that with others. My mom read to us as kids, and I think my own satisfaction in this sense of vibration probably comes from that. In this way, recorded sound almost seems like a cop-out because your body isn't actually penetrated by the sound, so it is a strange experience. And yet recordings are the only thing that allow me to listen to the same song//sounds for literally days on end.

I also have an interest in harmonics (and dissonance) as related to quantum physics, schumann resonance, biological receptor molecules, and the fifth chakra//meditation, which all meet up in the back somewhere. I don't really want to make artwork about that. But let's just say, anything that deals with sound deals with all of them in some form or another.

If I were to share anything about sound, it would be the satisfaction of vibration. What about asking everyone to stand in a circle and hum with everyone's hand on the other's back? What about having the group read something? What about engaging a group with live ambient sounds rather than recorded sound? (Recorded sound is technically live, but resonates differently). If I were to use sound convey something, it would be to put to my videos that I'm working on, but I don't know what I want to do with that right now. I don't know what I need to say. I don't know if what I need to say is in words or in sounds or in music I play. I do know that I miss my clarinet, and that I need to go to bed.

the art of noise // Frank J. Oteri and Paul D. Miller interview

These readings (for process and evidence) go right back to the idea of modernism//postmodernism for me.

In The Art of Noise, Russolo puts forward a futurist manifesto, promoting the acceptance of noise as music. I somewhat agree with him--we should be more engaged with the sounds we make--but don't really like his attitude so much, which is very insistent and focused on dominance and the "man-made" being better than the "natural". This is a very nice complement for the visual art that was going on at the time in terms of re-evaluating what art (painting, espeically) could and should be. Like art, noise is now accepted as music as with noise bands. In an epoch of post-modernism, anything is art (whether it be visual or aural).

I found it interesting in the interview that one of the people said that we are at a point today of "information overload." If anything can qualify as music (or art), then my response is:

we must choose. we must choose what information we put into the world. we must choose what images we put into the world. we must choose what sounds we put into the world. we must take responsibility for our effect on the world, which means we must choose.

I personally have a lot of trouble with choice--choosing sounds and images--because there are so many. Multiplicity is almost too easy to achieve now a days, but making meaning out of that multiplicity requires choice. I also don't have trouble choosing some things. Sometimes I'll listen to the same song for literally days or weeks. Sometimes I choose to not listen to any music for periods of time as well. I repeat words in my head that way. I crave visual images that way, too.

My own interests in sound run along lines of language (how different sounds convey different meanings, and how these are universally accepted across cultures in many cases), and ideas of resonance and string theory (harmonics and dissonance), which is related to how we make meaning out of sounds. I found it really interesting in the interview that one person said that noise is anything de-coherent, a signal that is decayed or something non-understandable. We do understand sound though in a physical and instinctual way, and language is based off of that. An unpleasant noise stems from it being related to a warning, of not joining with, of dissonance, of stay away from that. A pleasant noise stems from something being okay, of wanting to join with, of harmony, of being comfortable. We can train ourselves to be comfortable with anything, even dissonance, as Russolo has shown us.

post-bac critique thoughts

rhythm. time. sense of movement. pattern.
the rhythm of an experience. how to communicate stability and movement (bound and flowing).

oriented//disoriented.

how do I ride the line of abstraction and representation? how do I ride the line of literal and metaphorical? how do I ride the line of illustrating and initiating ideas?

direct//removed or vicarious experiences. issues of translation. issues of boundaries.

when people can't understand the relationships between the subjects of a work, it becomes about the act and process of translation (my abstract paintings from the spring). I don't think this is about me processing things, though that's a totally valid thing. I do want to communicate something. (is it about artistic practice and thought, or is it actually about the subjects and their relationships?). though now that I write that, it is also about my processing. it isn't only about the woods and it isn't only about my thoughts, what I've read, the sounds that come back to me over and over. it's about both together. the process of experience and the environment. because they are dependent on eachother. they need eachother in order to exist at all. (and I'm back to phenomonology or buddhism or whatever you want to call it. I'm back to togetherness.)

acquisition (to take on, appropriate). I do this so easily with some things.
abnegative (to choose, to edit out, to manipulate). I have so much trouble with this.
purposive. (to have meaning, purpose. to have something that matters.) I want this but I doubt it.

My work is making meaning for me. my rain project especially. potentially my videos//paintings together. I hope it is making meaning for others. I can guess at how it might do that for you, but I can't really say what that is for you or anyone else. I can't really say what a chicken or a bee feels. I can guess. I can guess by my interactions with them, by my experience of a mutual relationship with them. I can guess a lot, but never really know. I can make an artwork and understand it to a certain degree, but never really know how it is communicating to others. this would be impossible. and terribly boring. terribly bound.

once again comes space. openness. room to move. (within the bounds of our experiences. within the bounds of my experiences.) an implicit body. a me//we.

accessiblility. this all deals with accessibility.

words

capable--from capabilis (receptive) // capax (able to hold much) // capere (to take grasp, lay hold, catch, undertake, be large enough for, comprehend) // kap- (to grasp)

reciprocal--from reciprocus (returning the same way, alternating) // reco-proco- // recus- (backward) procus (forward)

reflection--from reflexionem (a reflection, a bending back) // reflex- // reflectere (back, to bend)

control--to check, verify, regulate; from contreroller (exert authority) // contrarotulus (a counter, register) // contra- (against) rotulus, rota (wheel, roll) from medieval method of checking accounts by duplicate register

should--from shall // sceal (I owe/he owes, will have to, ought to, must) // sculan // skal- or skul- (to owe, be under obligation) // scyld (guilt) // skeleti (to be guilty) // skilti (to get into debt)

passive--from passivus (capable of feeling or suffering) // pass- // pati (to suffer)

active--from act // actus (a doing) // acactum (a thing done) // agere (to do, set in motion, drive, urge, chase, stir up) // ag- (to drive, draw out or forth, move); ag-riculture

post-critique and post-dinner 'huh'

I was going to just go straight home after dinner, but I needed to write some of this down first.

As for the critique, the question came up if I felt like I was finished with the mushrooms//spore prints. I said no, but in truth, I don't want to do more. I didn't even like doing them in the first place very much because I felt I was just messing with this beautiful and intricate thing that I have no right to mess with, that was more beautiful than any representation or manipulation of it could be. And worst, I was messing with it for no reason, and couldn't make anything happen.

In fact, I can't make anything do anything it seems. And now I'm remembering a comment of Liz's that my landscape paintings were feminine in their passivity as compared to plein air painters--can I make a masculine, active, dare I even speak the word--dominating--landscape? I don't think so. Manipulation does not come naturally to me, which is not to say it's not an important thing. Making active decisions to change something in a particular way is important, and I need to learn how to do it better. Choosing and acting are the problems I've been having in my artwork, and in my life lately. I can look at a landscape (or a slug) and put it back out, having mediated it in some small way, processed it somehow so that one part of it becomes more apparent, but hell if I can make mushrooms grow a certain way. I don't even want to try to do that. I felt ugly and mean doing what I did, but also a little curious, and that's what kept me going. If it hadn't been an assignment, I never would have done the spore prints, but might have done the slug video, or something like it. And that should tell me something...

At dinner, the conversation about farming and land use and how we make things work for us (biologically) and enslavement and veganism came up. Through farming, I have come to see our use of our surroundings differently. For a while, I couldn't stand the idea that I cause other things to suffer or manipulate them to benefit myself, and indeed, I realize that this is often subconsciously driving me to act as I do--extremely passively. For a while I couldn't stand harvesting because of the harm it caused to the plants, but farming is good for me because it has made me come to terms with doing things actively in order to nourish myself and others, but not without forgetting the plant or animal I am forming a relationship with. And it is that farming isn't just about that active manipulation, but about reciprocity--about forming a relationship of both give and take (and many other things) with the world.

Again comes that word relationship.

Something strange is going on here, though, because I feel like I just don't know how to act at all. I don't know how to communicate (an active thing). I find myself interruping others a lot, which I don't like. Why is what I want to say so important? I also can't seem to say important things, I find myself often babbling, and when I have something definite to say, I can't communicate it clearly in precise language. I am able to take in and process things, but my circuitry in terms of what comes back out is all messed up.

I am experiencing a major problem with mediation and also editing here.
What do I need to say? What don't I need to say?

'What is essential?'

This is the thought I had while reading Kuo Hsi's words on Chinese landscape painting, "an artist should concentrate his spirit upon the essential nature of his work. If he fails to get at the essential, he will fail to present the soul of his theme. Discipline should give his picture dignitiy. Without dignity, depth is impossible. Diligence and reverence will make his work complete."

If I babble, there is no reverence, no respect, nothing with which to form relationships, nothing with which to communicate. (If there's so much art, none of it makes meaning). If I'm silent, I deny my own existence, that I have thoughts that are meaningful and valid.

What I really need is some discipline. I need to find what is essential. For the sound project, I am thinking now that I may spend a day in silence and then a day only saying what I feel is essential. I don't know where the art object is in that, but it's something I need to do. I also want to see what meanings I can find using more cut-up method trials with passages of writing that mean a lot to me (that I have actively chosen, and passively processed), and (actively) editing them down. My next thought: I am going to see where it goes.

I am always seeing where it goes. That's not the hard part. The hard part is the structure, the deciding, the discipline. Okay, enough for tonight.

work in-progress

I haven't posted anything this last week because I was working (instead of being on the internet), so here is an update, en masse.

soutenir, sentir, sembler
(explorations of meanings between french and english)

rain//hair project with translation into french and an in-between.
two beginnings of tree mandalas

and this. (biology?)

slugs

slugs from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

These are the slugs,


who liked the spore prints










































of a mushroom from the woods.






















(Kingdom: Fungus, Class: Basidiomycete, Order: Agricales; Genus: either Pluteus, Entolomas, or Clitocybe)

rain

it rained. i got wet.
it made me think of dancing in the rain with you.
(we're always dancing in the rain together.)

feet wet, splash. splash. splash. drops on our tongues,
falling from the sky, landing on leaves,
on grass, on bodies and roads.
drops making rivers, drops growing plants
growing us. growing our feetonthesoil
onthepavement tap taptap taptap.

rain in my hair. on the palms of my hands.
rain between my toes. under my fingernails.
rain down my neck. alldownmyback.
rain in my mouth and through my heart.
rain in my eyes, seeping into my skin.

there is something to feeling the rain.
because we forget our skin is breathing. our skin is thin.
there is so little between us and the sky, the night air.


And then I think you laugh at me. I ought to grow up, forget my thin skin. No dignified adult dances in the rain. Perhaps I ought to roll up my pants, wait for a lull, and hurry home. Perhaps I ought not to laugh. Perhaps I ought to be quiet. Perhaps I ought to buy an umbrella. Perhaps I ought to forget the rain.
I remember a voice, when did we stop singing? when did we stop dancing?

Pense pense pense

Je ne veux point penser. no more leaky holes in your brain and no false doubt.

holes and holes. your--no penser. more holes, false doubt. more point.

diversity//unity (making worlds, we're all making our own little worlds)

Coming back to this:

To be surrounded by so much contemporary art at the Venice Biennale was an amazing experience, but it was also incredibly overwhelming and exhausting to look at so much.

After going to MACVAL gallery in Paris, and in Venice: the Guggenheim, two huge Biennale sites, Academia Museum, and the two sites for the Mapping the Studio contemporary art exhibition, then the Lyon Biennale on the way home to Pont-Aven, we all said that we couldn't look at any more art. We were totally exhausted. We all hit this point (or wall) repeatedly each day after several hours of being at galleries, which is a pretty normal art-viewing phenomenon, but it started to strike me that this is a pretty strange thing.

What really made me start thinking about this was the difference between my experiences at all the contemporary sites compared to that of Academia. After the Biennale, it was honestly a relief to go to Academia and be able to walk through rooms and not have to enter and entirely new world every two minutes. At Academia, it was a relief to be able to sit and look at a work for longer than a few minutes and to draw it, to spend time with it and come to really understand how just one image is working. It was a relief to see how many artists had gone about communicating their own views of the same subject matters--Madonna and Child, the Annunciation, Adam and Eve--and yet they had come up with works that spoke about these same things in very different ways. I was tired physically from drawing after going to Academia, but not nearly so mentally strung out. I could find some overall reason and meaning from what I'd seen. Call me traditional, or whatever you want, but Adam and Eve by Jacopo Robusti detto Tintoretto (c. 1500's) was one of my favorite things I saw in Venice, and Academia might have been my favorite place we went.

It's not that I don't like or appreciate contemporary art, I really enjoy making work about the things I'm interested in and finding artists who I like and relating to their work, but that's sort of just it, too. Today, we're all just finding the things we like, what we want, creating our little niche that's great for each of us, and then telling people about that. If we're all telling people about our own little world, what we say starts to lose meaning amidst all the people chattering. What I say or you say becomes insignificant. This experience of going to see artwork and trying to listen to so many disparate voices is, honestly, getting a little old. I'm always expecting something new and different within a gallery and it's tiring to have to experience so much plurality, so much so that seeing more of the same thing actually sounds really really good. A little more cohesion would be so wonderful.

At the Biennale, the works within each country were different enough from each other, you would think that at least people from the same culture might be speaking about similar things. But it seems we've lost our local cultures in favor of individual interests in x or y. Venice was like reading all of these chapters out of a the same book, but they don't make sense as a whole, there's no theme, nothing to keep them together other than that each chapter is it's own little world. I just realized that this is starting to sound like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (I posted on it a few weeks ago), yet his book was held together by being actual descriptions of physical worlds and their laws of being. At Venice, the theme was Making Worlds, and while some artists took that more literally than others, the works were so vastly diverse that if there was an overall interweaving I certainly couldn't make sense of it.

Isn't that a little sad? Isn't there something we can all start to gather around once more other than how great it is to be able to have our own individual interests? Not that we all should start painting again or making work about the Madonna and Child--that's not relevant anymore. The thing is, I don't know what is relevant to us all. Is there anything we can start to share and build more of a community around? What happens when culture and art loose all sense of cohesion? With having such a globalized world, is that at all possible? And does anyone else want more cohesion, or is it just me? Am I just the crazy one?

Venice Biennale (Valerio Berruti)

Another video work I found very engaging was an animation installation entitled La Figlia di Isacco by Valerio Berruti. Here's a page from his website that shows some stills of his process. When I first came into the large room that held this among many other works, I was captivated by the music I heard and wanted to know which piece it "belonged" to. When I walked around the box, which was about ten or twelve feet high//wide, I enjoyed the drawings and knowing that the music was related to them, but when I turned the last corner and saw the animation going on inside, I stopped. I was simply mesmerized watching this little girl turn in her highchair, and couldn't help but identify with her, feel it was me turning in the chair. The experience immediately recalled memories of being a child and feeling a fear of being alone, as well as feelings of helplessness and dependence--what it felt like to be put somewhere and not be able to get down or move from it until someone comes to help you. I was struck by the feeling of smallness and vulnerability. I didn't understand the title when I was there, but it translates as The Daughter of Isaac. Because I have never known the bible very well, so when I came home I looked up the story of Isaac, who it turns out did not have a daughter. The fictional nature of this adds another layer to the piece because the girl becomes the one who was forgotten, who was never spoken of, not written about or remembered and this adds to her loneliness and sense of abandonment.

Formally, Berruti took a simple idea and carried it out with only a red crayon, white gesso, and the brown paper in just a few spare contours and painted white background to make what turns out to be a quite-complex animation of a little girl's movements. I found myself thinking of how many hundreds of drawings it must have taken to make this, which is even clearer from the stills on his website. The small shifts between his drawn frames contributes to the child-like quality, and the limited materials speak to many children's books (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Swimmy, or books by Eric Carl, for example). If this had just been a video of a girl moving around in a chair with the same music it would not have had the same effect. The translation into drawings is essential here because it focuses our attention on her movement, which Berruti captured with a lot of truth--they are the movements of any curious child who is sitting in one place for a while, generalizing her as "a girl" rather than being so specific as belonging only to the girl who he watched to do them. The animation would have also not been the same without the music behind it. The music is nostalgic, repetative, meditative, quiet, slow, and never quite feels complete, which brings on a sense that we must stay here until there is more resolution. The simplicity//complexity of the animation coupled with the repetitive, leading music just held me. Standing there, I realized that I didn't mind feeling small, that Berruti had made it okay to feel small and vulnerable. This is an amazing thing these days; very few artists seem to want to help their audiences be okay with their insecurities and smallness, but Berruti has done just that here. I could have stayed and watched forever, and I noticed that almost everyone who came around the corner had a similar reaction--we were simply captivated.

Venice Biennale (Fiona Tan)

A few buildings over from Miquel Barcelò's work, I found an exhibition of videos entitled disorient by Fiona Tan, which I found very thoughtful and engaging. In the large room in the back was a video installation with one video of many fine traded goods from all over the world on shelves in a storeroom on one wall and on the opposite wall was a video of contemporary lives of people from the various countries being described by a narrator. It turns out the narration were of a man reading Marco Polo's writings from his journals while traveling. He speaks about all these luxurious goods and how wonderful they are, yet is very demeaning towards the people who make them, treating them as sub-human. The video of these people show the bad conditions in which they live and work, a lot of hardship, and through this juxtaposition of past and present, we understand that not much has changed since Marco Polo sailed the world in the 1200's. This piece deals a lot with natural history and exploration in terms of how we document societies and cultures, and plays on both objective and subjective realities. While this video was very socially oriented and related strongly to Venice's history (through Marco Polo), there were much more personal works of Tan's in the front spaces of the building.

There was a series of videos taken in a vertical format and in black and white (or limited color so it was nearly black and white), that had very slow motions of people, and with slow pans so that they looked more like photographs. I thought this created an interesting dialogue between the photographic and video in terms of what a motion-picture means and how motion in an image affects our understanding and later memory of a subject. That they were in black and white made further references to photography, and also changed my sense of time, though because they are videos, it is almost like they are stories of past and present. Old photographs are in black and white, yet so are newspapers, and these videos felt like they existed in black and white in order to be in that ambiguous space where we don't know whether we are in a time that has long passed or this present one.

There was one other work, which was projected onto two large vertical screens that were hanging next to one another. On the left screen came images of an elderly woman, and on the right screen came correspondant images of her younger self in similar situations. Sometimes the screens would both come to the same place and time, such as the old woman lying in bed, or a waterfall, and sometimes they would be aligned, but often they were temporally displaced by just a second or two. That there were two screens that showed different parts and that they were aligned vertically made the videos feel like fragements, which further emphasized that they were about memory and the act of remembering. The work was very quiet and contemplative, exploring how we come to know ourselves through time. I found the metaphors that she drew out between the women and movements of water--over a waterfall, the fall of rain, in the bath and shower--very compelling, and very much related to the idea of Tao. For a little while, we were awash with this woman in her thoughts and memories, growing and dying with her, falling right over the edge of rock and not knowing what we have forgotten. We were on her river, moving with her.

Venice Biennale (Miquel Barcelò)

After a week's rest and distance, it's time to write a bit about our trip to Venice last week.

To be surrounded by so much contemporary art at the Venice Biennale was an amazing experience, but it was also incredibly overwhelming and exhausting to look at so much (I'll return to this topic later after I talk about some specific works that really resonated for me).

The first thing I saw here were paintings and sculptures by Miquel Barceló. I liked his paintings a lot--very large, nearly abstract canvases that were depictions of ocean waves and tides, a few of gorillas, and then some of seashells. They all had a certain physicality of the material, and in some the canvas was actually hairy, like fur, which was painted in layers to resemble waves. Barceló is clearly interested in having a conversation with the abstract expressionists regarding abstraction, representation, and flatness, and is making paintings that are very provocative in that sense because he's seeming to be of that tradition, but in fact is denying it. Yet while it seemed like he was really denying abstract expressionist values in terms of actual abstraction and flatness of the picture plane, I felt his relationship with the physical work and towards the feminine was very much of that era. There were a few sculptures shaped like very large clay pots in the first room of women's curved bodies but lacking any suggestion of their heads, being cut off at the shoulders and they were essentially menstruating as he painted dark stains coming from their crotches. They were beautiful forms, and many people didn't realize that they were depictions of women's bodies because they were so abstract. There were also pots that were simply ovular, but then were painted on, depicting women and donkeys//mules//asses, both of which shared nearly the same form. This was not okay with me--an essential equation of the woman being the mule as well as the headless muse who's only delight is the shape of her body. The seashell paintings definately shared formal characteristics with the vagina, which is something that is valid--the forms are very similar--but given the context of the sculptures present, I was a little revolted at the use of a vagina-seashell as a way to delight in the feminine form without acknowledgement of women as people who are more than just their mere bodies. We have minds and hearts and come in more shapes and sizes and have different interests, Barceló. We are humans, thank you, and far more complex than the image that you have given in your work. What disturbed me most was the video that he showed of himself and another man making a clay wall work--essentially tearing at it with their hands, gouging out holes with big shovel-like instruments, throwing mud at it. It looked a lot like the videos of men carving up and disemboweling whales in the early 1900's. The act was so violent and disrespectful, I felt sorry that the clay had to put up with that, and knowing about the violence of this process made me feel wary of the other clay pots, etc. in the exhibition just due to the material being the same. Moreso, his pots depict women, and if this is what he feels towards women's flesh, I'd like to get as far away from it as possible. This is sort of sad because these aspects of the work in a way prevent me from enjoying the conversation he's having with abstract expressionism on a formal level.

photos (of Venice and in general)

In trying to sync my hard drive with my flash drive, I accidentally deleted all of my photos from Venice. Yes, every last one, plus the ones from earlier this week including a few of mosses that I took on a morning walk on Tuesday after we had returned home.

My initial response: I am dissapointed--I hadn't even looked at them again since the trip last week. And yet, my next response is that this is really funny. I had taken so many photos, had wanted to collect so many images to use as artwork material, as well as to show to friends, and now there's no way to get them back. There's no need to argue with it, the past is now the past. Ironically, this is how it would have been if I didn't have a camera at all in the first place, which puts all of this into an interesting perspective. In terms of deriving and just being a tourist in general, it is really a memory map that I have left now, with no "objective" traces to help me reconstruct my experiences.

This also makes me think about the act of taking pictures differently. I spent so much time collecting things I saw with a camera that I wonder whether my experience in Venice was more about experiencing Venice or about trying to remember it while I was still there. And that's just funny. It's something I was very aware of in, say, India, when I knew I didn't want to be behind a camera all the time, but Venice was a little different--it's almost as though it's so filled with tourists I didn't question taking photos at all. In a way, it makes me think, poor Venice. To be a city where people just come and take photos of your beautiful buildings and canals and light, then leave, not staying around to know you better, just get a dose of Venetian beauty, take it, collect it, preserve it so you can say "oh look at this beautiful canal, do you remember when we were in beautiful Venice?" and go--how it must feel to be stolen (in a sense) like that.

Now what I'm left with are my memories and drawings, which in a way feel more meaningful to me now. Pictures are nice, but they don't capture what happened on our derives, not really because what happened happened in me and between me and the other derivers and between us and the city. No photograph can capture what it felt like to weave in and out, follow the flow of the group (because we did flow, like a river, down the alleyways and then ebb when we had to choose a new direction, only to flow once more, mirroring a river's movements). After not looking at the photos for a week after the trip, I realize that I hardly remember what any of them were of, but I do remember a lot of what I saw, and whether the two would have matched up or not, I do not know. I do know that my memory would have been reshaped by the photos because they would remind me of things that I'm sure I have forgotten--be that a good or a bad thing, I don't really know. In a way, it is freeing to not have them anymore. I just don't have to worry about them. They're gone. Time to move on.

So. moving on.

mot du jour

trefoil
-three-leaved as in gothic arches with the above forms, also pertaining to three-leaved plants such as clover and lotus.
it is a symbol of the balance between three (in the church: Father Son and Holy Spirit)

especially used in the contexts of botany and religion

tre//trois//three
foil//feuille//leaf