Paradise and My Upside-Down Education

How interesting to spend my whole life learning first hand, self taught, exploring inner and outer worlds and then to go to school instead of the other way around. A lifetime of extraordinary experiences, gleaned insights, foraged knowledge and loosely related fragments of understanding are suddenly given a framework to hold them all together. I can barely describe the experience - but all I can say is I have these odd moments of utter revelation - like this morning doing my History of Photography reading. Amazing.

All of my life, people have told me to narrow my energy and attention to one specific field, or focus on one specific project or idea within that field. And that is often necessary to get anything done at all. But something about that approach to life has always been antithetical to my nature. I don't like to put on blinders. I don't like exclusion. I resent having to limit my sights. I think it's dangerous.

And now I am beginning to think that only art and, more than that an art education, might be broad enough to begin to encompass all the different lifetimes I have led, the different journeys of my heart and mind...

Strange to end up here.... Damn - I might have to change from this diploma degree to a bfa, wouldn't that be funny!

Today, I was going through my photographs to collect a few for my landscape photo class, and inevitably I settled on my photographs of Guatemala. I wrote this to one of my closest friends an artist who lives there: "Am missing Guatemala, it really is my idea of paradise, I must say - the volcanoes rising out of the mist awaken some deep archetypal image in my soul..." Then I opened my History of Photography reading and this was the first thing I read: "We are bewitched by visions of the faraway and the fantastic because dreams of these Edens, of the overseas worlds of beauty and oddness and pleasure, seem to make life bearable. So our fantasies are sustained by a murmuring imagery of yearning." Nice when your school reading is relevant! 
Or how bout this, a fragment from another early morning email to a classmate, Heisue Chung, who had sent me her Photo History paper on Photography and Colonization - Powers of Possession  This is what I wrote:"It is painful to me to study history and see the trail of destruction wrought by the dominance of the white 'race' over the past centuries. Even the word race is another construct of white western men - so it is hard to even talk about without using their language of oppression. This too is a subject which I have spent a good deal of my life suffering about, and trying to understand. I think the subject of my paper perhaps is a psychological clue as to why....I also think we are at the end of it. Our way of life - based on that kind of rape and exploitation of people and the land is at its end. I fear the reaping of what we have sown...." And my history reading went on to address these very themes.
 

A Newly discovered God!

Emmet Gowin

Went to see him today at MassArt. He was amazing - a true elder, speaking with such a deep tenderness and reverence for all life. It was inspiring. I tried to write down a few things he talked about, but mostly I was too absorbed with the beauty of his images and his speaking. There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the way he talked. The wine of life distilled to its' essence.

Not exact quotes, but close:

 

 

"Art is the sensuous apprehension of what you don't yet understand"

 

"The unknown is friendlier than you think"

 

"The thoughts we have are answered by unknowns"

"The greatest journey you can ever make is to come back to where you already are"

The lure of the Orient

In our Core class, we went to the Essex Peabody museum in Salem, and saw some of the treasures brought back from the Orient to that seaport town.

This weekend I went to Newport with my mom and my sister, who is here for a few days from Afghanistan. In addition to long walks by the ocean, beer for lunch and dinner, we did some retail therapy to clear her mind and help her relax and regenerate.
We wandered into a little antique consignment shop, and the reality of a seaport town was brought home to me...
Of course all the treasures meant so much more to me because of our studies!

Just Beauty?

We were talking about art (what else?) in Core yesterday and Michelle said something about a work of art not being about "just beauty". I understand what she meant of course, but it brought into focus one of the themes that I have been chewing on as I think about art.

Just beauty?

How can those two words be part of the same phrase? To me beauty is something so fleeting, so fragile and so precious. Beauty is what feeds my soul and gives meaning to my life.

My definition of the word beauty is quite broad, perhaps broad enough to be encompassed by anything that moves me - reaches inside and touches me deeply. So to me beauty really is never a matter of just. But it seems gotten a dirty name in the art world. To me this image by Lalla Essaydi, that we saw today in Core,  is beautiful.

This week in Landscape class we looked at books that examined the idea of paradise - not the same thing as beauty, but can't help but explore some of the same themes. I was struck by the work of Terri Weifenbach in her book Lana and how she is not afraid to celebrate  beauty in the landscapes she is surrounded by.  Listen to me - "afraid to celebrate beauty". Something is just not right about that kind of mindset, the art lens that puts those words together. Here is what one reviewer wrote about her: “Weifenbach has never shied from the beautiful; her images celebrate natural color and through the use of selective focus she distills scenes and plants to their essential aspects. She embodies the ideal role of the artist working in nature, allowing the manifold of sensory perceptions to filter through her mind, translating this materia prima into her own graceful language."

History of Photography

Always fascinating!

Krzysztof Wodiczko and the meaning of art

So last night I went to Krzysztof Wodiczko's show at the ICA - Out of here - The Veteran's Project. So worth seeing. Afterwards he talked with veterans including someone from the SMFA. I have never seen a more humble or sensitive artist. I guess he would have to be to do the kind of work he does. It was very moving.

I don't have enough time to really talk about it here, but one thing he said really spoke to me and to my last post about the responsibility of an artist. He said something. He talked about how it is up to an artist to heal us from numbness. Wow... that is part of what I was trying to get at!

Being Judgemental

I am kind of horrified by how judgmental I am coming off in this blog. I guess this actually is the way I am, but I think I am more this way about art than anything else.

And of course that makes me ask the question why?

And I think the answer has something to do with the fact that to me, being able to make art is such a privilege. And I guess it is ingrained in me - with privilege comes responsibility. I can almost say I feel art is like a sacred trust between the artist and society. The world needs art to touch something in us we might not otherwise have found, to awake something perhaps dormant, to open our eyes and allow us to see freshly, to move us in all the many senses of the word. And when art becomes irrelevant to non artists, when it becomes merely a closed circle - an internecine conversation, then I feel that trust is betrayed, and it makes me surprisingly angry. Because frankly as a world as a country we NEED art to remind us of our own humanity.

I feel that way about going to Art School as well. It is a privilege, and I cannot believe how that privilege is abused. Today three quarters of one of my classes didn't show up. I guess they hadn't done the work. It is demoralizing to both the teacher, and to the rest of the class. It pisses me off. I hate to even be late - it's just so inconsiderate. And I am horrified to have to miss a class because what I am getting is so precious.

Carl Jung and Victorian Fetishes?!?!!

When I started school 2 months ago, the reading from my History of Photography class made me cry. I couldn't understand a word. It was like reading another language. If I didn't take detailed notes, I couldn't even remember the subject matter after I finished reading.Today I sat at my computer all day and wrote my midterm paper. 

I can't believe the subject I chose - I must be completely out of my mind! My paper was on C.G. Jung's Theory of the shadow as expressed in 19th Century photography. Yes, I am sure I have lost my mind, why did I ever pick such an obscure and academic subject. What's worse, I actually enjoyed it!

And I actually think I wrote a pretty interesting paper. At least I was interested in it. But then that's not really the point is it?

Or maybe it is, if I want to become one of those totally self referential artists like  Moyra Davey, the photographer who talked to us on Thursday. But I don't. In fact she is the type of artist that makes me hate art. Her talk, her movie in particular, struck me as a personal conversation with herself that excluded the rest of us. I couldn't relate. 

OK - I am ashamed to be so snobby about the whole thing. Just cause I didn't like her work, is there any reason to be offended? Yes, goddammit there is. There's too much going on in the world for me to watch somebody blowing dust off their books in slow motion and take it too seriously. It gave me asthma. I think it is an example of why the Art World is so often a closed circle that excludes anyone who is outside of itself. It pisses me off.


OK, ok, I have no right to have this attitude. It is my shadow self coming out! The part I try to suppress with my open-mind, give-everybody-the benefit-of-the-doubt approach. And I really did get alot out of it - like the way she grouped her photographs together on the wall of the Fog - if only they had been about something.... oh God, here I go again. I hope she doesn't see this....

Damien Hirst, Diamonds and Zimbabwe

A couple of weeks ago we looked at Damien Hirst's Diamond skull which sold for something insane like 100 million dollars. I am outraged that this diamond encrusted piece of crap can be discussed as art without talking about the consequences of the lust for diamonds we have here in the West. We can read Said and turn up our nose at the quaint 19th century ideas about orientalism. But are we willing to face the incredible destruction and human rights abuses that are funded by our lust for diamonds.

Here is the latest example, sent to me by AVAAZ.org, which is an amazing global organization along the lines of moveon.org:
"Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe has sent his brutal army to seize control of his country's diamond fields. 200 civilians have been murdered and profits from our wedding rings are used to fuel violent political conflict.
Official diamond regulators meeting in Namibia this week will decide whether to suspend Zimbabwe and stop Mugabe selling his blood diamonds on the world market.
We have just 24 hours to persuade these countries to act - let's get a massive petition together and deliver it directly to the meeting in Namibia. Sign the petition below and then spread the word to anyone who doesn't want our gifts of love to finance hate."
Petition to global diamond regulator, the Kimberley Process:
Zimbabwe diamonds do not comply with Kimberley standards, nor can they be certified as "conflict-free". We urge you to suspend Zimbabwe from the global diamond trade until the army pulls out of Marange, violence ends, abuses are investigated and Kimberley controls are upheld. Otherwise the Kimberley Process's public credibility will be tarnished and the whole diamond industry will lose. 

sign the petition