Packet 3: Turning a Brick Wall Into Dust Motes

The Colander and The Calendar

Light over the stove shines through an empty colander in the drying rack, constellating on the fake slate countertop. There’s a Hunter’s Moon in tonight’s sky. And according to the calendar nearby, I’m X’d out of packet days.

Thoughts about teaching commandeered this packet. Today was week 6 of the semester and the room feels right.

Observing and identifying: the difference between the function of being an artist and the role of being an artist. The function of being an artist and creating tangible objects that may or may not survive without me. The function of letting them go.

Poetry. Punctuation. Judgment. Taken out of context from The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden: To judge a critic’s judgments, we must know first, “what is the critic’s dream of Eden?” I think I should be more aware of what my personal vision is day to day.

Lots of books with pictures: George Baselitz, Joseph Cornell, Ida Appelbroog, Primitivism in 20^th Century Art and Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Artists.

Paintings are all in working phase, no completed work. Mental state: strained and chasing its tail. Quit smoking- day one.

Suffixlessness

What I neglected in my reference to the “knowing” (packet 2) was the “ness”. 3 consonants, 1 vowel, a world of difference.  The “knowingness” theory began with the chapter, Attention Please, in Diane Ackerman’s book, An Alchemy of Mind. She describes the brain’s mechanisms of perceiving change: Learn something or someone new and we are avalanched with details, our senses detonated. But once the brain perceives something, its primed to recognize it faster each time, switching to mental shorthand. We notice less; an unconscious boredom. Unless things change or we choose to revive our attention. Ackerman tells us about a class of (young) writing students whose work was, to her surprise, jaded and featureless. “Where was the texture of life?...Most of the students weren’t even twenty-five; how could life already have bored them?”  She asked them to stand at the classroom window, observing the world outside for 15 minutes as preparation for an assignment.

Following that, was Geek Lessons, an article in the 9.21.08 New York Times Sunday Magazine, by Mark Edmundson. He writes: “Good teachers know that now, in what’s called the civilized world, the great enemy of knowledge isn’t ignorance, though ignorance will do in a pinch. The great enemy of knowledge is knowingness. It’s the feeling encouraged by TV and movies and the Internet that you’re on top of things and in charge. You’re hip and always know what’s up. Cool — James Dean-style cool — was once the sign of the rebel. But the tables have turned: conformity and cool have merged. The cool character now is the knowing one; even when he’s unconventional, he’s never surprising — and most of all, he’s never surprised. Good teachers, by contrast, are constantly fighting against knowingness by asking questions, creating difficulties, raising perplexities.” (Article from this issue here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

In my perfect world, I want to inspire them all to succeed in my class. I am not delusional. There are factors beyond my effect. But my vision isn’t to teach to the data and percentages and hope for one student I can help. 

I’m feeling as if I’m diluting my capacities. I like to believe that I can do it all. I want ALL of my work to be authentic and meaningful and accomplished. I am frustrated with my poetry. I’m not intending to dump out of writing poetry. But working the poetry has a process that doesn’t feel like it’s flowing with my painting. I don’t write out of the air of experiences anymore. Similarly, I don’t paint out of the “air”. The compositions and materials begin with the language of the materials I collect, from the substrate to the mediums to the collaged elements. The visual poetry I’ve been working on feels more synchronized with my painting methods; awareness of words visually, poems hiding in advertisements or journalistic narrative, imagery from sources meant to be thrown away (or recycled to be p.c.).

The visual poetry process could be transferred to journaling or recording awareness of moments to describe—sharing what Rick describes as “threads”— but my time constraints interfere with developing another method or ritual. I intend to pursue the poetry at a slower pace for now. Along with the paintings, the visual poems will be printed for my gallery shows. I have a wall to fill in November (?— that was an October email from the BlueStone Gallery) and an entire gallery to fill at end of February. It seems odd to be painting up an inventory, but there it is.

Punctuation in poetry: Should there be actual sentences with reasonable punctuation. I’ve been trying to avoid fragments. I’ve been wondering if I typeset the words over the imagery in my “found” poems, whether I’d lose the concept and intention to the point where it becomes less meaningful. Does that make any sense at all?!?!

Dodge Poetry Festival: 9.30.08

My first Dodge Poetry Festival was September 1996. I was living on my own, for the first time in my life, with an 8 year old daughter and a much needed divorce. The Dodge PF was something I’d never imagined attending on my own; I sustained a lot of damage to my sense of self and needed to repair and evolve out of the person I was. I didn’t know anyone else who liked poetry, so I had to go alone. I worked out a method to get myself there; I’d act it. While I didn’t feel very courageous, I’d pretend I was. Strangers became fellow fairgoers…What a day! I even got up and read my own work in a circle of open mike readings. I heard Allen Ginsberg and Yehuda Amichai. My college writing teacher, Brian Swann, was there in a side tent reading. The day was healing and enlightening for me.

         I’ve been to 2006 and now 2008. Each time, I attend by myself- a personal pilgrimage. I am so sensitized when there, I have to move my seat if someone’s breath is funky. This year, the woman next to me annotated every poetic phrase with ohs and ahhs to the point I couldn’t follow my own joy in the listening. I got up and moved to the side, sitting among the blind and deaf. Engaged and silently wondrous. As for the poets, I heard all the featured readers- some twice that Saturday. I realized I prefer their performance of reading the poetry, more than my reading to myself. I am a fan of the spectacle!

 

Photoshop® + Visual Poetry

The visual poetry is digitally scanned and manipulated with Adobe Photoshop CS3.  What I do is play, taking advantage of discovery and happy accidents. Most of what you see is the result of filter effects. Other digital changes result from manipulating the algorithms of the color channels. That’s a fancy way to describe moving a center baseline around while previewing the changes;  I am not opposed to the technology for my work, just “slickness”. I would like to maintain the balance of elegance and unsophisticated materials and words.

Art Objects

A painting becomes Object. Artifact. Precious. But is it mine? As artists, we talk about paintings and poems taking on a life of their own, and being able to honor and recognize when work shows its form and direction. I am anticipating the opportunity to show and sell my work for the first time in many years. This is work I respect. The “precious” aspect is most disconcerting; I’ve become attached to paintings! Prints have editions and poems can be read at will. I can’t keep the painting when I sell it.