The Artist's Frustration

In many ways this has been a challenging semester, and one of the ways I have been dealing with the frustration is to work out my problems in art. It is an odd sort of thing, working out ones frustrations in art, primarily because I so often think of art as decoration, something to be enjoyed and appreciated, not to do anything. After all it is not in the nature of art to do anything. It entertains us I suppose, and the best art can impress one sufficiently as to enlighten and inform, but it is difficult to quantify how much work art is doing. After all, most art is an acquired taste, like fine wine, where even the experts seldom agree.

I showed my piece on frustration to one professor and told her that the work was about my frustration in graduate school. That I felt I worked ceaselessly without result, which is why the paintings were stacked and turned upside down. Her response was simply “I don’t see frustration.”

I never know when someone says something like that if they are being the devil’s advocates. I asked her what she did see and she responded that she saw a pile of paintings that probably represented the work of the artist but that the viewer had no access to this work that is they couldn’t see it because it was turned upside down. So I said “wouldn’t that frustrate you.” And she smiled sheepishly and says yes that it probably would but that the idea of frustration was not immediate.

This is what I am talking about. This is what makes me crazy. Even when I spell it out for them and get people to admit that yes, this is what they see, for some reason they still want to deny that they have seen it. It is crazy making. I suppose I could continue making more art about how I am not making any art, but that is nonsense. How can you make are about not making art? So I retreated back into my older pieces from pre-midterm and began to work out some of my ideas on balance.

The other day I had one more thought that might bear fruit on this idea of frustration. What if you make art, and then tear it up, and then make something new with the shreds? Is it still about frustration? If you make something that you know you are just going to throw away it seems that isn’t frustration, it is artifice, and it is why, ultimately I didn’t think the pile of paintings worked the way I wanted it to, but it did make me feel better while I was making it (and showing it around) and so ultimately art did its job: it entertains, enlivens and informs.

Final note- an independent juror picked this work to be a part of the annual juried student art show.

Finding the Balance

With my final on Friday, I have decided to use this weeks blogs entries to help organize my thoughts. Though on looking back at my first attempt, “Kitsch and Art,” I was struck by how unorganized my thoughts seem, this late in the game. So Today I have decided to look back and think about what I have been working on in the recent past and how it connects to the work I am doing this week.

This week is the May Final review. Graduate students have two reviews, one at midterm, and another at final, in which graduate students present their work. What work do we present is a question of some debate. Should we have completed two distinct groups of art, one for midterm, one for final? Is the midterm work a preview of the final or should it be separate and complete. At any rate, once you have decided what to show, your work goes before the entire faculty, and there are additional hurdles to overcome. The main one being candidacy, where the graduate students work is deemed acceptable to form the nucleus of a thesis body of work. Once candidacy is completed the graduate student is theoretically invited to work towards the completion of the MFA degree.

Midterm can be a very frustrating experience, and my March midterm review was even more so because I had decided to try for candidacy, which was rejected. The exact reasons for rejection are usually spelled out in forms provided to the graduate student.



My midterm works dealt with forms that simplify the objective reality of painting in order to reveal the immediate geometries underneath. The strong linear and geometric elements recall movements Like De Stijl and Constructivism, However these similarities differ in that, De Stijl while once drawing its inspiration from the natural world, ultimately turned it back on nature, and Constructivism based their works on mathematical and mechanical models, while I seek to explore the meditative, if not precarious balancing act reflective of the psychological chaos and rational order inherent in making art, and not an ascetic sensibility bent upon a machine idiom, but one capable of inventive, even playful, variations with clearly articulated parts. Nevertheless, these works are largely experimental, and I will often move through several forms before settling on a single iteration. In short, I see the freedom from mathematical certainty and spontaneity of nature resident in each piece.

Working with the material building block of art, the line and the surface, is as open and dynamic as nature itself, "Imperfections" in nature's creations are not mistakes, they're fundamental to her process. They are how she does her work-- if not for errors in the replication of DNA we wouldn't even exist. Attempts to quantify nature defy us, as there are significant aspects of reality that will never be adequately described by any formal symbolic system. Hence I avoid any direct reference to representation, and work with simple materials and imperfect construction. Thus my work, like nature, is open-ended-- driven by process, not by goals or events.

Alas the work was deemed “too minimal” for most and my defense was criticized as being “too defensive.” But the interesting thing about the work was the element of balance, and it was the part of the work that I found both intriguing one the one hand, and needing further examination, which ultimately gave rise to the pipes that hover in air (see my blog entry on Kitsch and art)

Kitsch and Art

So I was talking to one of my professors the other day, showing him a piece I was going to use as the basis for my final and he asked me if all I was doing was some kind of trickery. To understand the question I suppose I should explain the piece. A metal cylinder, floating horizontally in space, suspended on one end by a black ribbon tied to the ceiling. It is cool because the ribbon is tied to the end, and not in the middle, as you might expect, so the cylinder seems to defy gravity and hovers in space until you realize that a system of counterbalances based on the math of the Archimedes' lever has been employed.

It is kind of like the Matrix. The world we experience does not create an exact image of reality; instead it is a virtual reality generated from sense data filtered through our experience, knowledge, emotion, theories, associations and so on. This is not to say that nothing is real, just that we can never experience reality directly. Still, Our natural instinct to make sense of our perceptions - the desire for order - can be so strong that the obvious can be obscured and the mundane made mysterious, magnifying conjecture into astounding fact. The metal rod seems to float.

(I should add that the work is shown here, as it was to my professor, as "in progress." And that the final work will include and installation of such pieces in a sort of dialog with one another)

This is fertile ground for artist. But one in which we must proceed with caution. It is kitsch to deceive the effects of sensory experience, and still another thing altogether to marry those effects of illusion with the content of the artist’s ideas. Kitsch and art aren’t supposed to go together, at least that is what the famous critic Clement Greenburg insisted in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Greenburg championed the idea of removing kitsch from art because he saw cultural movement like socialism co-opting art, and so he sought to save us, but his paper served mostly to alienate the public from avant-garde art by trying to rid art of anything that smacked of popular culture, artifice or commercialism.

Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" of 1964 tried to reunify kitsch and art by tying kitsch to camp, and suggests the spirit in which we view camp involves seeing the world in terms of its "degree of artifice, of stylization." With its love of exaggeration, of "a seriousness that fails," it often seeks out things that are "old-fashioned, out-of-date, or démodé.” The camp "sensibility" offered a mode of appreciating both kitsch an avant-garde art because of its excessiveness, its role-playing, its overt decoration. Individuals with camp sensibilities could ultimately become sophisticated in the ways of understanding of kitsch and peer through Greenberg's elite group of artists and viewers.

Sontag’s work sounds like and apology to me, one that tries to meet Greenburg half way, and presupposes a critical highbrow point of view in which to exploit kitsch, one must stand at some remove to it. This kind of thinking has kept art divided for some time. I get so tired of hearing people talk about what is high art, what is low, what is fine art, what is craft. What is smart art and what is mere decoration. At some point art is art, and if we are ever to escape the effects of the Enlightenment on art, one that continually seeks to categorize it and refine it, artist are going to have to accept a kind of art that is capable of ravishing the eye, even as it exposes the means by which the ravishment occurs.

(FYI my other cool "eye candy" bit of art involves magnets)

Wake up Cracker!

So the word “cracker” has begun to appear. Jenny found it first when she shared a post with me by the author Heather Havrilesky, and since then it has popped up in casual conversation, in blogs, and even on the radio (though, to be fair they were talking about a Christmas cracker, and not a white “cracker”, and it was a podcast of a radio program so I heard it on my ipod)

I am sure there are a couple of questions here. First, I was thinking about Homer Simpson’s gripe to John Waters:

Homer: They're embarrassing me... they're embarrassing America! 
They turned the navy into a floating joke! They ruined all our best 
names like Bruce and Lance and Julian... those were the toughest 
names we had. Now they're just, uh....
John Waters: Queer? 

Homer: Yeah... and that's another thing. I resent you people using 
that word! That's our word for making fun of you! We NEED it!

This debate points to the idea that if we co-opt a term we ultimately take the power out of it. But, do we need it. I always assumed that the word “cracker” was short for “wise-cracker,” a buffoon with limited formal education who used mockery and derision as a form of humor. Though in hindsight I don’t know where I might have pick up that notion, and it doesn’t really account for the full definition of the word. "Cracker", sometimes "white cracker", is a usually pejorative term for a white person, mainly used in the Southern United States, pejorative because the person is assumed to mean, poor and uneducated.

A quick Google search revealed that “cracker” might be associated with the cracking of whips by white slave owners. That would certainly account for the meanness, and what about the proverbial Jimmy, who whiled away the hours cracking corn while I don’t care? Is a cracker someone who takes a low paying job, the equivalent of the migrant farm worker? That would account for the poor and perhaps even the uneducated, I don't thinnk of migrant workers as having the benefits of good education, but I really don't know. Interestingly, it isn’t really what the word even means anymore; nowadays a cracker is basically another word for a hacker, someone who enters a target computer system without permission either with malice or curiosity. So perhaps the great co-opting of the word has begun. Though I doubt it.

My father, admittedly not from the south, was unfamiliar with either definition of the word. But many more do, and from what I have seen, its pejorative use is still widely understood. Still, I like the idea of co-opting the word. In a world of foodies and fashion models, where Americans are becoming poor living high on credit in houses they can’t afford, maybe it is time to reevaluate the our opinion of ourselves, and in the process become more sensible. Maybe I am a cracker, a damn fool living beyond his means looking for get rich quick schemes in real estate and lottery tickets and breakfast burritos.

I know it is a stretch, but from one cracker to another, maybe its time for a little more humility, humble livin’ that is. Take as an example the American diet. Americans want their tomatoes and their broccoli on the table 365 days of the year, a demand that increases the use of gas, fertilizer, waste water and the like, and for what? Bland vegetables that sit unripened, in warehouses, only to be shipped once again to your neighborhood superstore. Wake up cracker.

Finally, I can’t help but thing about J. K. Rowling character Hermione Granger, who bravely quotes Dumbledore that “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.” There are a lot of ugly words in the world. We have come up with so many that we lose count, and then they linger in the fringe of obscurity only to resurface and remind us of whom we were and whom we might still be. There seems a danger here, because oftentimes in forgetting the origins of things we never learn the lessons of the past, and so we pass them on to our children without meaning to. Better yet, by looking at them we can learn something valuable about ourselves, and maybe pass those lessons down to our children because ultimately, the things we teach our children are a reflection of how we want the world to be.

Earth Day or how I learned to stop fearing a tree and love the world.

Happy Earth Day, though I am afraid all of my liberal friends are about to abandon me. I have to admit I am a little confused about Earth Day. Well, first it was Earth Hour. Lets all turn our lights off for an hour and show the world that we can… survive without light for one hour? Stick it to the big power companies (a.k.a. the man)? Show how, by turning off a few lights people can make a difference. Probably. Though most people tell me that turning off your computer when you are done using it, along with your VCR/DVD player, stereo, ceiling fan, kitchen electronics, etc. you could do as much or more for your power bill and, ultimately, the environment.

Now we have earth day festivals, Green living solutions dressed up as celebrations to mother earth, which according to the Toronto Star “promote a finite number of energy-saving tips – using cold water for laundry, buying locally grown food and using transit. Earth Day's current raison d'être shares the same tips found on every other energy-saving website.”

But a festival, now that sounds more interesting. How about a celebration to Gaia, to the archetype of Mother earth. Frankly I think it would be more successful if you made Earth Day a pagan festival rather than a solar-powered, daylong event filled with music, food, film and celebrities to raise public awareness. Why, because Earth Day is about control, the same way the corporations are. And people will never respond to systems of control unless you show them how big their piece of the pie is. It is never enough to say it is in their best interest, or how it will ultimately empower them as well. Strange and sad, but true.

But a celebration to the archetype of Mother Earth is exactly about the release of that control, for, as Jung points out, since Archetypes are not under conscious control, we may tend to fear them and deny their existence through repression. This has been a marked tendency in Modern Man, the man created by the French Revolution, the man who seeks to lead a life that is totally rational and under conscious control. I think it is that fear of any release of control that is exactly what is keeping people from making the world a healthier , happier place. So, Let's celbrate it and take the power out of our collective fear and get motivate.

Jung found the archetypal patterns and images in every culture and in every time period of human history. The value in using archetypal characters such as that of Mother Earth, the Anima of the world, derives from the fact that people are able to unconsciously recognize the archetype, and thus the motivations, behind the character's behavior forming a connection with it.

I remember the recycling movement of the 1980’s. I still recycle virtually everything with a little triangle on it along with cardboard and paper. Still, I think Dallas could have a more organized and comprehensive recycling program, and only have to look as far as Ft. Worth to see what I am talking about. Still, I am mystified by images of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean covering an area larger than the United States, and feel that these programs are failing.

I remember further back to the 1970’s slogan, “give a hoot, don’t pollute” by woodsy the owl not to be confused with the lollipop stealing owl of tootsie roll fame. Woodsy hangs around with smoky the bear and the crying Sicilian, Iron Eyes Cody, dressed like a Cherokee. Lets dust off these archetypes, along with Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan (well maybe not Paul Bunyan) Now there would be a revival concert.

But perhaps my oldest memory is that of Arbor Day. What the Hell happened to Arbor Day? Now there was a good idea. In 1970, President Richard Nixon proclaimed the last Friday in April as National Arbor Day. Arbor Day is also now celebrated in other countries including Australia. Variations are celebrated as 'Greening Week' of Japan, 'The New Year's Days of Trees' in Israel, 'The Tree-loving Week' of Korea, 'The Reforestation Week' of Yugoslavia, 'The Students' Afforestation Day' of Iceland and 'The National Festival of Tree Planting' in India. Julius Sterling Morton, the original founder of the Arbor Day movement, would be proud.

Why is it special? Because Arbor Day is a celebration of the future, rather than the past or the present. It isn’t about the mistakes of the past or how we feel now, it is about how we are going to make a difference in the future, making it different from most holidays. Planting a tree is an act for the future when the tree will reach its full potential. Mature trees provide beauty as well as wood products, erosion control, habitat for wildlife, and shelter. Perhaps most importantly, Arbor Day plantings signifies the commitment of those present to care for the tree as it grows, and that is the kind of control of a better environment, in my opinion, we all want to foster.

the tough get happy

I was talking to one of my best friends in the world the other night, a friend of some twenty years, whom I have known in greatest joy and most terrible tragedy, recounting to me the details of how his mother has months to live and, at the same time, how his marriage is on the brink of its most difficult trial yet. This conversation was hard, and then he uttered a phrase of such poetic poignancy that I have been unable to shake the words. He whispered “I thought I had the most perfect life, Man, I thought my life was perfect.”

I know this feeling, I know this trap. I have been there so many times, without even trying. Because, frankly, I build up expectations without even a second glance. I suppose it is how I am hard wired. Congratulations, you have been accepted into graduate school. Congratulations you are a father. Congratulations you are married. And, Congratulations you get the job. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. I get so caught up in the how my life is going to be, and what is it going to be like, that the reality of it often smacks me in the face. It is scary how the fantasy will seemingly play itself out before me only to be suddenly, abruptly halted, forcing me into the real world, where I discover I have been absent for some time.

And so it goes. I feel like I have been experiencing these frustrations over and over again. That we form these ideas about life only to discover that real life is often very different from the one we imagined. Someone once told me the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. I guess that makes me crazy.

Jenny faced this a similar situation recently, when we discovered at her ultrasound that she has marginal placenta previa, meaning there might be unforeseen complications with this pregnancy, and that, ultimately, she might have to undergo extended bed rest and even have a caesarian with this baby, which goes against everything we have ever experienced in the birth of our other children. It was an incredible shock, but one in which she found the realization that she had formed certain expectations about the pregnancy: that it was a boy; that we were going to move into this house she had fallen in love with and made an offer on, and how we were going to have this beautiful home birth there.

Jenny’s friend wrote this beautiful piece on the difference between static and dynamic wishing in her post, which reminded me of the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna's conception of duty. He tells his friend Arjuna that we typically approach action in the wrong way. We are often too desirous, too self-seeking, and too emotionally needy for the results that we want when we act.

For myself I struggle with these thoughts constantly. Whether in my relationship, or just trying to get through Graduate school. I remember riding across the Arizona desert with my friend Adrian in his 1958 Willies truck the summer Jenny and I were separated reading the Bhagavad-Gita, and being struck by the passage “you have a right to your actions, but never the fruits of your actions” wondering where the Hell I had gone wrong and why, even if the fruits of my action were not my own, and that even if my actions must be selfless, why was it my life still seemed so horribly off track. But before I would succumb to helplessness and despair the Gita also offered this: “Therefore with the sword of wisdom cut off this doubt in your heart; follow the path of selfless action; Stand up, Arjuna.”

It reminds me of this segment I saw the other night on Professor Randy Pausch. If you haven’t seen his lecture on utube, and are feeling a little low, this guy is the caffeine in St. John’s wort. Dying of cancer, and leaving behind wife and children, he delivered his last lecture as a series of parting thoughts of wisdom on what to say when you are about to die.

The part that struck me was, to paraphrase Pausch and the Gita, “When the going gets tough, the tough get happy.” That life throws you challenges, and that these things are never easy. In fact, most of the time, they are impossibly hard, but that, if the challenges weren’t hard, if the people who didn’t challenge you didn’t give a damn about your success, if life didn’t throw you curve balls, then it was as if you had already failed. Stand up, Arjuna, this is your test, designed by your master to bring out the strength latent within you, and who, like the loving midwife, is there to see you through.

Arjuna stands before the field of battle, confronted on both sides by family and friends, to go into battle means that he must suffer terrible loss, and yet in this moment of grief he finds clarity in the voice of Krishna who unfolds the universe before him and shows Arjuna the way to right action. The meaning within the Bhagavad-Gita is that the battle represents Arjuna's inner struggle as he encounters various obstacles on the spiritual path.

So we go through the process of grieving and letting go of our ideas of how the world should be, and when that happens we give up our (emotional) attachment to results in the world, and are free to reorient ourselves around our idea God, or spiritual truth, or whatever, rather than around the fleeting shadows of what we think ought to happen. Finally, all our strivings, as results of our individual desires and intentions begin to melt away into a greater flow of engagement with our own life, we are able to let go and go on, and the universe unfolds God's will for us.

Are you ready for the challenge?

So I began the process of applying for scholarships next year, which for me chiefly involves writing a letter to the nameless faces of some committee explaining to them how I am basically broke, can’t afford school, much less anything else, and how their money will continue to subsidize my education for another semester. It is an easy letter to write this year, gas prices are up, which, in turn, means just about everything else in the world is more expensive… including food.

Americans have an interesting relationship with food: on the one hand we have our foodies, gourmands searching for the next underwater delicacy to eat with their sushi, the next succulent berry to garnish their ice cream, and even coffee beans that pass through the digestive system of a cat, only to be pooped out and ground up and served at $100/cup. That with the epidemic of obesity on the other hand, most likely the product of, well, of corn. High fructose corn syrup is in everything from soda pop to pasta sauce. It is in the bread we eat, the cereal we have for breakfast. It is even in our meat. Yes meat. Corn fed beef. Most American who have never supped on a buffalo burger have never had beef that wasn’t corn fed, and corn fed beef is 5 times as fatty as beef raised on grass. Additionally cattle consume 70 percent of all the antibiotics used in this country because 90 days after you start feeding a cow corn, its stomach rots out with ulcers and they begin to get massive infections. Cows don’t like corn.

And neither, it turns out do I. My earliest memories of eating corn involve my requesting a sharp knife so that I could cut it from the cob, lacerate it and spread it around the plate in a vain attempt to conceal the fact that I hated the way the gooey stuff gets caught in your teeth, not to mention the fact that corn has no substantive nutritional value anymore, now that the protein has all been bred from it in order to produce a more sugary, starchy corn that is good for cows and soda pop.

Time to fess up. I am a twenty-year vegetarian who doesn’t like corn. But I am going to take this message to the masses by suggesting something even more radical. I propose that the most effective way to lower your carbon foot print for a week… it to consume nothing that has corn in it. No corn syrup, no gasoline, and definitely no McDonald’s where the soda is corn syrup, the beef is corn fed and the fries are deep friend in corn oil.

(I used to joke that McDonald’s menu items all tasted the same and probably all came from the same hose that sprayed grey goop into moulds that transformed it into soda, burger or fries, I just didn’t know then that what I was actually describing was corn.)

Are you ready for the challenge?

FYI for those that want to learn more, check out:
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Pollan
or
King Corn on your local PBS television station

Thoughts on race- Pt. I

In 1996 I was working in a Barnes and Nobel in Sioux Falls S.D. One day, while working behind the cash register, a customer approached me and asked, matter-of-factly, if we carried “that book, you know, the one that proved that white people were smarter than blacks”. I stared at him in total disbelief, not sure what to say, and finally stammered, “I… I don’t think so.” The customer shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Later, when I told my manager about the incident, he told me that the customer was probably referring to The Bell Curve, by Richard HernStein.

For those unfamiliar with this book, its central point is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than socioeconomic status or even education. The controversial assertion, the part that my customer was interested in, concerned Chapters 13 and 14, in which the authors wrote that intelligence broke down along racial differences, arguing that IQ differences are genetic.

In retrospect I believe my stunned silence to be a product of my naivete and incredulity that overt racism still existed and that people continue to publish books justifying these divisions. Incredulous that The Bell Curve had as many supporters as it did critics. Set aside arguments for a moment that the findings of books like this are nothing more than scientific justification for racism and ask a deeper question. What is race?

Senator Obama brought this question to the forefront in a recent speech on race and racism, made in the wake of the release of comments about race made by Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which were widely viewed as inflammatory. Obama said "unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."

In this statement, Obama seems to be getting to the heart of his definition of race. Race is, after all, a concept based on the assumption that we can divide people into groups based on a subjective set of categories, typically visual characteristics like skin color, hair texture, or self-identification. (i.e. please check the box that best describes your race: white, black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian) and include environmental, social and cultural factors. Still, I would argue that these notions of race are arbitrary, imprecise, or based on historical fallacies, while books like the Bell Curve argue that these observed differences vary to a degree in ability and achievement that can be categorized on the basis of a product of inherited (i.e. genetic) traits. Genes, it seems are the latest scientific trend, used to justify what, in my mind seems to be nothing more than a Xenophobic intolerance of others.

While the notion of race may be a myth, racism, it seems, is very real. Interestingly, in a recent National Geographic Magazine article on the reign of Black Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt, Author Robert Draper discusses how for 75 years, from 730 to 655 BCE Nubian kings ruled over Egypt, reunifying the country rebuilding the Egyptian empire. Draper makes the interesting claim that “The ancient world was devoid of racism. At the time of [the pharaoh] Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubian’s skin, to uncharitable effect. ”Draper seems to be espousing a similar belief of ancient Egypt that Obama set forth in his speech, namely “we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction.”

Not that the ancient world was entirely devoid of racism. Both the 5th Century BCE author Hippocrates, and the 2nd Century BCE author Vitruvius depict dark skinned people as cowards. Still, in our own time, it seems we like to think about how far we have come; how different we are from our ancestors who were a backward thinking, prejudiced lot and how, having a black man and a white women as presidential candidates proves that we Americans are a more enlightened people, when in truth the fact that these issues continually arise, are questioned, and have to be justified, speak equally about how far we have yet to go.