If you want to say that something behaves a certain way or even exists, the observation is only valid in the context of the experiment in which it was performed. To see how it would behave under different conditions, we must perform a different experiment.
These are my latest experiments. They are untitled - I’m attempting to insert one of the images here, hoping it appears less washed out than on the Picasa site! I’m not sure where I stand with these…they are units, they have a progression, there is a certain mystery about them in actuality that doesn’t come through here. At least one of them is overworked and beyond repair…sometimes too many marks is too many marks!
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat
Everything in the universe, except
the system, is known as
surroundings. Noticed from the street,
is my kitchen window and I’m preparing
a dinner,
for two, maybe
three or four— variability
is the charm of stories.
The system is separated from
the remainder of the universe by
a boundary. Wedged in
a small triangle
of space, between
stove, sink, refrigerator,
I’m balancing on the most exquisite
clay feet.
For closed systems, boundaries are real.
For open systems, boundaries are often
imaginary. I am waiting
on the porch; it’s much brighter
out here than I expected. Why do I
remember the arrow of time
more often as raining, when it was summer
twilight? With our quiet evening voices
and fireflies, whirling
like particles of lust
in the slanting light.
The possible exchanges of work, heat,
or matter take place across
a boundary. Darkness is delivered
to the ground: it could not be stopped.
Headlights pass my driveway, turn
down the street; someone passing by,
on their way to contentment
or disappointment.
The potential energy of a hairspring
works in any state of oscillation.
Tap/up/tap/down, I’m standing here
long after the view has changed,
attached to a linear spring.
If love is to be done
at a finite rate, free energy is subject
to an irreversible loss. There’s nothing
here that I don’t already
know, like vivid snapshots
waiting to be taken.
As time passes in an isolated
system, internal differences
tend to even out.
One weird little horn blare
happens for half a second—
ice melts, diluting
the water in my glass—
sliding on a rough surface, slowing
down rather than speeding up—
are measures of how far along
this evening-out process has progressed.
A certain amount of light is required
for the demon to "know"
the whereabouts of all the
particles in the system. In the noise
of crickets and a wobbly ceiling fan,
our molecules combined. Left alone,
they won’t separate out again.
The curves of my body press
into the strength of his, rolled together
like a set of plans.
Quantum, in Latin, means how great?
Or how much? There’s the curve of his back,
bent over to lace up his boots. I think
over time, ignoring the effects
of self-gravity, differences in
temperature, pressure, and density
I’d be forgiven.
*title based on an 1824 book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power, by French physicist Sadi Carnot, a preliminary outline of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
This poem consumed most of my 3 week packet venture. It’s meant to bring the language of science into poetry. I studied some of the thermodynamic laws for this -on a VERY limited basis- in order to combine some of the mechanical properties of science with the metaphysical and emotional qualities of a love affair.
I am writing poetry but it’s an addendum; the challenge of using words is a mental exercise. It IS important to my visual artwork, as an alternate encounter with images and ideas that require only paper and pen. Poets and writers who write about their craft, inspire my visual practice. I experimented with digital images and poetry last semester, but could go no further because I was committed to a deadline for my exhibit. I have not given up on this, but I know I can’t afford the costs of the print production.
My concepts for creating a book of poetry siphon through my practice of using found materials, although traditional printing methods might be considered at some point. Yes, I can imagine reading my poetry in public (I have) in the same space with my visual work.
An Interview with Myself
Do you have an interest in the relationship between art and society?
In a theoretical way, no. In a grand scale way, there’s too much responsibility for me. I am one woman making art one day at a time. On an intimate, person to person level- YES.
Working as a carpenter, I spent 8 – 12 hours a day with one or a handful of people- who were/are very supportive and interested in what I do. We ALL made something each day and could account for our presence. Sometimes, in some of the construction work, there was an artistry, a gain in the work itself, not outside of it. In that way, my co-workers had an understanding of what I do when I make art.
Last year, I decided it was time to get out of the construction industry; at 47 the winters felt longer and harder to work in. I re-entered the workday world through big-box retail. Suddenly, I was in the middle of nowhere/everywhere. I greet, smile, pass by hundreds of people each week. In the environment of retail, we move things and concepts around, but we don’t actually ‘make’ anything. Even the money is intangible- sales numbers on a chart, consumers paying with credit cards; an idea of money you are obligated to commit to some time in the future, transferring it from one place to another without actually visiting those places or touching the money you’re exchanging. This is always weird and impossible to me, like philosophy and theory; I love texture and touching things.
I work among 100 associates. Now, I’ve gotten to know more of them. Many of them know I’m an artist and some bring me materials and objects they think I might want to use. These are people who don't usually think about artists; I am overwhelmed, grateful, and inspired every time that happens- I feel connected to them in a way- there is a recognition of craving. They see this crazy woman, with a pile in the back of her Jeep of torn up luan, blown-out tire, cardboard packing, broken lug wrenches, throwing herself into these art works and whether they like the work or not, they are happy to participate in this process. It’s terrible when I forget— I get to wondering, “why am I wasting my time with this?” and then people respond.
Do you think art has a job to do in our culture? If so, what is it?
Most days I believe there is a job or purpose for art in our culture, but I don’t think it’s an experience of reality. Zen talks about the illusion of the world. Western philosophy presents us with ideology. Richard Dawkins, ethologist, evolutionary biologist, wrote the book The Selfish Gene, based on a gene-centered view evolution with phenotypes that extend beyond the organism into the environment and including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins first introduced the term meme. A ‘meme’ is a unit of cultural evolution that ensures its own selfish survival by passing from host to host like a virus, evolving and mutating along the way according to its host’s ability to imitate it. Memes manifest themselves as catchy songs, catchphrases, logos, fashions and trends. Archetypes might be memes and I utilize them constantly in work. That’s scary.
Art refers to an act, emotion, memory, a space. In a way it’s a form of consciousness, an awareness. I know I can’t live without making it. But, science has been studying consciousness most intensively in the past 20 years, aided by PET scans, MRIs etc. and we still don’t know what it is or how it functions. Is it just a sophisticated mechanical system of parallel and affective functions, is it a soul? both?
I love a good paradox. Here’s Bonini’s: "As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable. Alternatively, as a model grows more realistic, it also becomes just as difficult to understand as the real-world processes it represents" Named after Charles Bonini, a Stanford university business professor, the paradox was articulated by John M. Dutton and William H. Starbuck, (Computer Simulation of Human Behaviour, 1971).
This paradox may be used by researchers to explain why complete models of the human brain and thinking processes have not been created and will undoubtedly remain difficult for years to come.
This same paradox was observed earlier from a quote by Paul Valéry, "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable." (Notre destin et les lettres, 1937)
What is the process for you? What is the finished piece?
I want to get somewhere and learn something. Often, I am amazed and excited by what I’ve put together. I have been making art for 25 years—not always consistently— some of it painting, some of it sculptural, some of it poetry, some of it wearable, and I still approach it cold, like a beginner- In the Japanese language, shiroto means amateur, with a secondary signification of emptiness. In Western language, amateur signifies passion. I am like a beginner in the sense that there is no game plan, but I have an innate practice at this point.
I have to keep coming back everyday, and keep solving problems. The work looks organic, but there’s a lot of piecing and fitting and composing going on. There is a discipline, a rigor and a stubborn insistence that most people probably won’t notice in a single work, and I don’t believe the audience should find it there.
Structurally, my current paintings and prints carry forward aspects of last year’s work. I’m still using the tin can material, but now it’s just the lids becoming a dominant component. I use it as a tool for mark-making. They have become a metaphor for the vagina which is also a pathway for creation, pleasure, pain; a guardian of the center. My substrate continues with plywood in some cases, paper and canvas which I haven’t used in years. I’m still uncomfortable with the blank expanse of paper and canvas, compared with the frottage expression of the plywood grain.
Poet, essayist and lecturer, Paul Valery wrote, "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death", and more famously, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned". The ‘finished’ piece always feels likes support/verification/signal/data/bridge of what I’ve been thinking about or exposed to.
What is seen represents only a part of what actually took place, so you know people can miss a lot of what is there for you.
In quantum physics there is a paradox: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. It is impossible to measure simultaneously both position and velocity of a microscopic particle with any degree of accuracy or certainty. This is not a statement about limitations, but rather about the nature of the system itself and an expression of the universe.
Physical things are relative to one another. I’m sitting in a chair at my desk, writing in a notebook on the desk, hand grasping pen, pen on paper, my arm nudging aside the books and laptop, the window framing a view of blooming rhododendron and my dog, barking at the neighborhood kids playing ball in front of their house, with its living room windows, curtains open, and someone is passing from one room to the next, while yards between us, at the same moment I’m writing this down. But in art, the relationship is invisible, a relationship to something, that even in its making and its object, doesn’t exist. No matter what you see there, it belongs to you. It’s an escape from the world of relative things to invisible things. Art can be the vehicle.
I have been looking at the work of Richard Tuttle. I watched the DVD, Richard Tuttle: Never Not An Artist. Read interviews, including the one with Molly Donovan. In the late ‘60s and ‘70s his work was revolutionary; small when everything else was big, less is more, site specific. Would you look at his work in any other circumstance other than a designated art context? Most work is easily identifiable as art even out in the parking lot, a field, on the beach.
Tuttle’s materials are excruciatingly common, with a crummy, arbitrariness. I was irritated (and still am) by his intentional displacement of the ‘craft’ of the thing: splintered edges of cut plywood seem careless, masking tape around tinfoil is loosely attached and the application of paint appears to be sloppy. On an intellectual level, I get the point that these objects could easily be lost to preciousness. I try to get beyond the aesthetics—which he wants us to do—and focus on the condition of mortality, which we all share, the active participation of viewing, engaged perception and heightened sensitivity. Tuttle emphasizes three-dimensional objects in space, but his work stands in relation to the wall, as painting does. What I share with Tuttle is a search for the essence of life and experience. He distills it, cuts to the chase, brings us the final moment from the outside in and I tend towards layering/building it up, recording the moments one on the other, compressing it in on itself.
In your current work most of your forms look organic, look strongly related to life; is there something going on around that?
I have a curiosity about science and the structure of things, even if I don’t understand it. I absorb ideas looking at books, images, hearing music; I get strength from outside sources when they support where I’ve come to and inspiration for where I might go next. There are cycles in life and art.
There’s a difference between thinking and theorizing. As artists, I think we need to be devoted to thinking and contemplation. It tends to be done up high- in the head, but I see it more as basement level- subterranean need, the empty space inside of the foundation; I keep returning to Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching:
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
Tao Te Ching
Written by Lao-tzu
From a translation by S. Mitchell
The proactive part is putting myself in the path of information. There is both a sense of anticipation and arrival. In the open-ended search for things to paint or paint with or affix, they make themselves known to me and then known to the viewer. The process of painting is a record of how I moved that day.
I am not wholly painter, collagist, poet, but rather an artist who pursues questions, asks questions preferring them to answers. Among Carl Jung’s archetypes there is a thinker, who struggles to reconcile the need to explain and tell with the desire to make the viewer feel.
My early life had so few family stories passed down or along to root me in a family history; only two years ago did I find out that part of my family originated in Minsk, Belarus. I think I’m trying to build stories for myself in my art work.
Without Limitations: How many marks does it take? How deep?
Like many others, much of my life functions in a variety of realms- saleswoman/cashier, domestic (I clean house for a 91 year old friend), student, teacher, artist, member of a family…the listing is familiar. However, sorting through many of the roles, there are so few where I feel accomplished enough to be satisfied with my results, or even the efforts. I realize, this is sort of neurotic; the anxiety and stress from years of trying to cover as many bases as I can. The “why would I do that?” question is mostly answered with, “for practical reasons”. The rest is for psychotherapy. But here’s the dilemma: With my varied experiences, I know enough to get by, but not enough to be masterful. This is pulled under the spotlight when I make art in specific mediums. Time and space are dimensions I battle with. There is never enough or there is too much, as in: never enough time to read, learn and make all the art I have ideas for and too much time by myself. Never enough space to stretch out and explore the art work I might be capable of, and too much space that I own to just let go of it.
I make the art that I make right now because of limited time, financial resources and workspace. I make every effort to transcend or transform these boundaries. More importantly, I need to have mastery of this. I want to understand it and get down into it as deeply as I can before I spread it out; and I trust that I will when it is time.
Look at these works on paper by Judy Pfaff, I look at them and her installations all the time. Look at the space she works in, the sizes she can manifest…She is one of my art heroes. I’d love to meet her, but I’m struck dumb.
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