Getting your Woo-Woo on

I was talking to one of my professors last night "Your main problem, when talking about your art, is all the woo-woo."

I stared at him for a minute. "Woo-woo?"

"Yeah." he continued. "When ever I visit my brother in law in Austin, we end up going to his transcendental meditation retreat. When I come back home, my wife says, I can feel the woo-woo walking in the door with you."

I thought about it for a moment and said "So, woo-woo is a good? thing."

"Well, it is more like a spiritual thing."

Of course I knew what he meant. One of the hardest things for me is to talk about art and not begin to wax philosophical or (worse) poetic. The language of art, after all has its roots in formalism. I know this. I just spent four week s telling my students about this. Beating into them the language of art: The Elements and Principles of Design. The elements form the basic vocabulary of visual design, (line, color, shape) while the principles constitute the broader structural aspects of the composition. (unity, variety, balance, proportion) Content and Context are extra.

Alas, this is not the way I am hard wired. I am an Artist dambit! I have the soul of a poet yearning to be free. I can't be tied down to the Man's rules.

"no slave's unlife shall murder me
for i will freely die"

Talking to this man I finally understood why so many people had said "How you talk about your work is paramount." Not TALKING about your work, but talking. It suddenly occurred to me what my part in the insanity of Graduate school was. I have been so busy getting my woo-woo on that I have sort of missed some important footnotes in the graduate school process: namely that the context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is secondary. (which isn't to say it isn't there)

Alas, I understand now why talking about the grand themes can be a bit of a dead end. Everyone knows that injustice is wrong and Justice is great. Rolling them out in the middle of a critique isn't exactly helpful. It's noise. Beautiful, stirring, wondrous, even moving noise, that has nothing to do with anything except getting your woo-woo on.

("No more flow!" says the Un-) It is the plight of being both artist and teacher. The part of me that really gets this stuff doesn't exactly communicate with the part of me that is floating around in the ether being all Rumi and Gita and Socrates and Buddha.

Ugh.
"When did I become so sophomoric?" says the brain

"Quiet You!" the soul replies "I am an artist Damnit!"