Grabbing the Shopping Cart: A Cover Letter
You do not notice a shopping cart, so much as use it. Unless it refuses to uncouple, clutching its cohort in the queue. Or the bent wheels squeal and chatter, skittering away from your forward push. Serpentine! Serpentine! You force the cart through the aisles, as if avoiding the strafe of sniper bullets.
Driving home from Goddard, it was clear to me I had not been noticing my life, so much as using it. Lacunae of intention and a shotgun flat of compartments; life as art/art as life was the room all the way in the back. So, I began unraveling and reorienting by reading suggested books and authors, studying artist’s works and watching Art21 interviews. My lined notebook is filled with journal entries and notes, asterisks, and question marks. I’ve begun new poems and paintings.
When shopping carts consort in the choice parking spaces, I push them aside to park. They nose together, avoiding my impatience. I pull one from the huddle, removing someone’s discarded shopping list. Nothing I want. I toss it in the garbage and push on to fill the cart with my own devices. Empty. Fill. Empty. Pull. Push.
Activations / Observations / Puzzles: Would we buy less if the carts were smaller? Why do we try to fill up empty space? Can I be a crisis counselor, empathetic and able to witness the story without feeding negativity? Is “street art” a form I can use? I am passionate about writing the questions and then making the answers. Does my magpie aesthetic require overarching concepts to contextualize every work? Can I use the word stiction in everyday conversation? What is a cultural certainty? Gestalt Theory vs. Provocative Operation. Is philosophizing an excuse not to take action? What am I hungry for? Ritual is a way of combating routine. What defines artist? Is there a Schedule C IRS code? When my head fills with the articulate, confident voices of other artists, why is it so hard to hear my own? What are my fears and where do they come from?
My concentration these past 3 weeks has been to grow in this new form of process and practice. I might be a tree: Roots below the surface growing down while above the surface grows upward. Or I might be algae: growing through cell division or fragmentation. Then I can consider whether I want to be oogamous or isogamous....OKOK. I am focused on this 1st packet as a tool to express myself. Frustrated by my own foolish benchmarks, I gave myself permission to be awkward. Empty. Fill. Empty. Pull. Push.
Documentation Excerpts:
A thought generated by Linka’s email re: she’s building a symbol library. Because I utilize symbols in my own work, what does this mean exactly? Not referring to zodiac signs or logos, what are the levels of association? Example: When I use rusted dog can lids repetitively, it becomes symbol? I add another relationship and utilize the existing circle references.
I’ve been looking at Basquiat paintings. His symbols and his tag, SAMO, become a claim of space, physically, literally and metaphorically. Mostly they refer to negative stereotypes of “blackness”, consumption and urban cadence. I’m working out what mine are. I have empathy for triangles, circles and odd numbers.
I am considering the concept of “street art” too. Basquiat, Keith Haring and Banksy brought theirs inside, carried in on the back of gallery business that want to profit from it. That’s an obvious and simplistic description of recognition and art economics, but it’s a valid component of context. Can my work enter this realm?
Basquiat and Haring both used tarps as substrates. Because of the link to commonplace, utilitarian material and rawness, I’ve been collecting some used tarps to try out for myself.
I’ve mostly declined to add text inside my paintings because I want to create space for interaction.
The art enthusiasts who want convenience are not my audience. I want you to access the work, to invite you into that space; the texture, color and busy work on the surface of my paintings offers that. Once you are there, I don’t want to tell you how to think. My audience wants to make the leap to engage with the art. I use the titles or text-titles to add to the riddle and encourage questions instead of providing the answers.
25+ years ago, I studied creative writing in college with the poet Brian Swann who consistently marked up my poems with warnings: too melodramatic! Stop banging me over the head with your message! Allow ME!
Being in the realm of the art – people go to see it, observe it. You pay the price of admission or enter the threshold of the gallery space and behold the art but that’s not being in the realm. In ART21, James Turrell describes this anecdotally:
With a novel, “you enter the realm”—pay the price of admission—when you buy the book. When you’re sitting on a park bench, reading, involved in the story to the extent that the world around you with all it’s sounds, smells and distractions evaporate, you are no longer beholding the art, but seeing it and experiencing it.
I refer to those lessons for my paintings. My Haiku research resonates here.
(John Brandi Essay from The Unswept Path)
- R.H. Blyth – “what we know all the time but did not know we knew”
- Basho’s frog gets dirty – his frog is going to disappear from all those frog poems that have been with us too long
- A cup of tea and 2 tangerines
Should these reflections, contemplations, raptures (!) speculations be this much fun? Like finger painting with Ragu? Is this work of scholarly nature?
- The mind defines, categorizes, empirical analysis, make sense GESTALT order
- prajna intuition – a singular moment, at once, receiving naturally, unhindered; like we don’t stop to analyze each breath
- Experience is primary, intellectual size up is residue
- Do not impose yourself on the object
The Essential Haiku – Robert Hass
- Haiku – a human place in the rituals and cycles movement and the world – transience – movement – (change and sameness)
- 1st level located in nature, 2nd level implied Buddhist reflection on nature
- Christian sensibility=nature is fallen, in Buddhism its not. There’s no creator- being in Buddhism cosmology, no higher plane of meaning to which nature refers. 3 ideas at the core about natural theory – transiency / contingency / suffering.
- Quality of actuality – moment seized, rendered purely – singular in the experience eludes traditional images of nature or ideas about it
This is one of the contexts I want to explore and visually address in my paintings. My poetry, is based on imagery of a specific event to allude to something “other”, spiritual. So in my poem Frogs, what happens when I remove the words about what I am doing and just describe the doing? Does it expand the poem for other possibilities?
- Rhythm – stress, no rhythms in Japanese- all the same pitch. Phrase flow and pauses create the rhythm. Kireji – cutting word, becomes the ; and/or —
- Ideograms of Chinese characters (Kanji) and phonetic signs create visual allusive echoing. Revisions to haiku could be suggested on changing the visual of the word instead of meaning of word.
- Haiku’s “breach of meaning” acts as a deconstruction, subverting cultural certainty.
What is a cultural certainty??
- Haiku is subjective – personality of the writer is evident – sink into the particular human consciousness and get to the mystery anyway.
- Kasumi – lightness – like looking at a shallow river with a sandy bed
Art21: Season 1, Episode 1: Place
Interview with Ann Hamilton-
The skin is a receptor organism; what do we receive and what are we aware of when we cross every threshold? Community- each thread is an individual, it can be seen in the weaving and it becomes a whole.
Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, as in Gestalt Theory? The theory that our brains organize like this, need to see the connections, discard unnecessary info and make associations, create neural networks historically, group and theme; always this structuring. We are taught to learn our lessons from the past. Redo what works. Experience makes associations. If we have to communicate, we need associations, those commonalities.
Does creativity require a diversion from these habitual associations to blank the screen, be in the moment and re-form the experience? Is this ‘thinking outside of the box?’ What does that mean in practice? I’m trying to make sense and an explanation – is that counterintuitive to the spiritual sense of ‘being’?
Hamilton makes new connections to /with existing places: Lateral thinking is moving from one idea to create a new one. Critical thinking is judging truth value and seeing errors. I am in awe of the concepts she generates; these leaps into physical manifestation of ideas come from a simple concept. Threads- sewing-line-words as material-mouth-open-inventing pinhole cameras for her mouth.
Reality check: I am only seeing the ideas that worked.
I'm excited by these new thresholds, but I am happier asking pages of questions and trying ways of ‘making’ the answers. I’ve been chewing on the lateral thinking. Provocative Observation (PO) is letting go the assumptions of our associations and generating new solutions. Is the Gestalt Theory I impress on my Graphic design students, in-every-single-class, antithetical to these Zen and Buddhist concepts of letting go the subjective ego to be re-formed by the world and not informed by it?
Art is life. James Turrell loses marriages and relationships in the pursuit of his vision, paying the price in time and money. Ann Hamilton has the support of her mother and father nearby, who are engaged in her process; she is not alone. Sally Mann’s children and husband are involved; she is not alone.
These artists dig back into their childhoods and have events or traditions that inform their concepts:
Ann Hamilton = sewing/textile arts
Richard Serra = drawing to be loved and attended to
John Feodorov = summers on the reservation and native culture
James Turrell = Quaker grandmother and light
Sally Mann = atheist father, facts, evidence, no sentimentality
Shahzia Sikander = Islam and Pakistan tradition and Hindu world
Pepon Osario = black, Hispanic, Latino culture
What are mine? What are the touchstones? Do I need them? I seem to be happier with the questions than the answers, but I am so filled with other voices I’m not hearing my own…
ART 21 – Season 1 Episode 3: Identity
Bruce Nauman doesn’t consider the larger audience. He asks, “Who would I want to show this to?” If it meets that criteria, then people would like to see the work. Talking about the work, saying it aloud, makes sure the artist is clear and then the work is available.
For Maya Lin, everything you’ve ever known and done percolates up through the work. She uses inside worlds and outside worlds to capture the landscape. She needs to refer back to a body of work to see the evolution and development as an artist. I tend to agree. Just starting out on this roadtrip, I see many of my former paintings waving at me in the rearview mirror. I've also been reviewing my poetry, slashing and burning with new insight.
Louise Bourgeois: “I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.” “All we have to open the past are the 5 senses and memory.” “The magic mystery and drama of childhood is never lost.” “A work of art doesn’t need to be explained. If it doesn’t touch you, I have failed.”
All the books state the same thing in different words. Writers write. Dancers dance. Visual artists draw and paint and sculpt. They make this a part of Everyday. I start and stop. This is not a new diet or quit smoking program. What is that pebble in my flip flop? Sometimes, I behave like I’m a superhero; I jump into the studio or the desk chair, tear off my disguise of being mild-mannered and ordinary, and go to work saving the world one painting or poem at a time. I rescue the ideas and images endangered by the evils of ambivalence, prejudice and obliviousness.
Why would I do that? Its clear in every beautifully, spiritually, passionately, or pedantically written essay. Concentration and practice. Awareness. Experience. Evolution. Keep running, idling, simmering. But simmering is a good prescriptive. It requires time and melding of the human flavors and scents. I’ll keep that close.
I’ve committed myself to this road trip. I’m making all the noises. I practice intending. I will go to sleep at night and wake up earlier to begin. Again and forever. Hah!
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