The Unbearable Lightness of Art

It's been quite a hiatus from posting; we had an extended rough patch dealing with illness from late December on.  Getting back to it now, preparing for a show in Monterey in March and starting to write again.  More on this soon.  In the meantime, here's a link to a great article on e-flux by Dieter Roelstraete on the nature of making art in our modern world.

On the Unbearable Lightness of Art

Christmas Journey

Four images of Jesus' wanderings during his life created by Alicia and Paloma.
Ink on Paper, 11x14 each.

 

"Think of her courage, her bravery, her stamina and her
faith. No wonder the Lord choose this young teenage girl
to be the virgin vessel of the King of Kings. No wonder
the Lord choose her, for He knew her heart and that
despite hardships and even walking to Bethlehem, she
would go on.”

 

I recently ran across the above quote and had a rather unorthodox thought in response.  It seemed interesting to me that when we imagine Mary’s and Joseph’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem it is always accompanied by a great deal of pathos and sentimentality.  We see her slumped over on her donkey, Joseph leading her with heavy shoulders and bowed head, both of them shivering from the cold.  Then, of course, we imagine the lowly stable that they found rest in.

Thinking about her journey in more depth, I came up with a different picture, one that encouraged me quite a bit.  First, that Mary might have accompanied her father and brothers on the three annual festivals to Jerusalem and that walking was always the primary mode of transportation. Walking these distances to us are unimaginable, but to Mary and Joseph it might of been quite normal.  I also realized that in her first trimester she walked to Elizabeth’s dwelling in Judea, as long a journey as to Bethlehem, and back. Did she make this journey alone?  Did she have morning sickness?  Of course we don’t know, but my thought is that being very young she probably had quite an easy pregnancy.

I’ve read in quite a few places that Jesus’ birth could have very likely been in September or October in connection with the Festival of Lights.  Two thoughts came to mind here.  First, Israel’s weather would have still be summer-like during this time.  Secondly, the roads to Jerusalem would have been packed.  I read that annual pilgrimages were times of great community.  This might explain why there was no room in the inn.  And, perhaps after sleeping on the road for the week’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph were actually excited to get a place in a stable.

These aren’t scholarly thoughts, and I’m not comparing my faith to Mary’s.  But I like thinking of Mary and Joseph as ordinary Jews.  Rather than being extraordinary vessels of bravery and courage, they had been prepared by God throughout their lives for this most important of their many journeys to and from Nazareth.  (By the way, Mary and Joseph walked 400 miles to Egypt with a two-year old son!  Nazareth to Bethlehem is only 70 miles.)

I will rejoice and be glad in your steadfast love,
because you have seen my affliction;
you have known the distress of my soul,
and you have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy;
you have set my feet in a broad place.
Psalm  31:7

-Alicia Laumann

Life from Little

Driving around our little town this summer I started to notice the quirkiest little urban gardens.  "Quirky," probably isn't even the right word; these gardens were ugly.  There is nothing idyllic about them at all.  One of them is my dad's who grew tomatoes all summer long in this dry, weed-overrun lot behind his house.  I wish I had taken a picture of it because at one point there was a neighbor's sofa and a kid's pink inflatable pool unceremoniously discarded behind it.  My dad, ever the one for efficiency over beauty, had taken Safeway plastic bags to tie up the vines to the tomato cages.  I saw another such quirky garden planted in the tiny dirt space next to the front door in a large apartment complex.  I don't remember any of the details about this garden except that there was an entire row of corn growing in it!  And our neighboring apartment complex has a little community garden set up behind a row of dumpsters in the parking lot.  

Through the days of feeling sorry for myself this summer because of yet another transition occupying all of my time, these gardens reminded me of how life can happen even in the most inhospitable of environments.

MUSINGS: Artistic Homelessness and Sense of Place

In the Rhythm Section I wrote this month about the blessedness of homelessness (not, of course, minimizing the hardship of literal homelessness).  In writing this, I began to consider my time as a dancer in Germany.  I was happy "keeping busy" artistically while in Germany, but after pondering more deeply the idea of "artistic homelessness," I feel even more thankful for my time there.  As a dance teacher and choreographer working traditionally, I am so dependent on outside resources.  To teach and choreograph as I normally have done, I need students, space, dancers, costumes, lighting designers, etc. etc.  I've always envied Scott in that he is never dependent on anything or anyone but himself for his productivity, though he would quickly point out the shortcomings of this approach.

 Now I see that I experienced a kind of artistic homelessness.  Scott and I knew pretty quickly that we would not be in Germany long-term, so the thought of trying to get started as I normally would have never even occurred to me.  The totality of the change of "context" for me gave me the opportunity to flush out/ process many ideas that I've actually had for a long, long time.  Before moving to Germany, I kept busy doing what I was comfortable with and never worked out my frustrations and dilemmas with the concert/ institutional dance
world.  

I feel miles away from that world now.  And, since I've realized the benefit of this homelessness I want to remain slow to re-imagine the future.  Since I see our artistic futures dependent upon a collaborative company of artists, the future is even more unpredictable.  I only scraped the surface of what I was thinking and reading about; I just hope that I can continue to press deeper.  I'm excited and ready to get working again - without a roof over my head.

- Alicia Laumann

Musings: Conversation Pieces

 I am half way through a fascinating read: Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, by Grant Kester.  In the first chapter, "The Eyes of the Vulgar," Kester traces the history of avant-garde art from the particular view point of this tradition's assigning of value to the "intelligibility of the work of art."  He summarizes his thoughts as follows: "Thus we encounter in the modern avant-garde a series of strategies designed to anchor the meaning of the work of art so thoroughly in the recalcitrant individuality of the artist, and to frustrate existing norms and expectations so completely, as to render it utterly unpalatable to the appropriate powers of consumer culture.  The act of semantic resistance gradually becomes an end in itself and one of the defining characteristics of avant-garde art."  His description of the evolution of modern avant-garde art from this perspective is what I found really interesting.  (His point in laying this theoretical framework in this chapter is to later talk about process art as art work that creates a place for "discursive exchange and negotiation.") 

What I was thinking about as it relates to this chapter is that so much of the art and dance that I've seen over the last 10 years doesn't, in my opinion, obstinately resist intelligibility nor does it exactly open up a discursive space.  It is somewhere dreadfully down the middle.  

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.  
~Pablo Picasso

Musings : A Sense of Place

"Errance, desert, exile, the outside.  How can we conquer the loss of ourselves and go to the heart of the anonymous dispersion, indefinite, albeit never negligent, how can we enter into a space without place, in a time without begetting, in 'the proximity of that which flees unity,' in an 'experience of that which is without harmony and without accord?"  

        - Peter Pal Pelbart

Over the last few months I have been working through UCLA Art Professor Miwon Kwon's book, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity.  The book takes a historical look at site-specific work from right after the wake of Minimalism in the 1960s to the present day site-oriented art practices.  In her conclusion she makes the argument that while the freeing up of art objects or events from being inexorably attached to their sites (such as Richard Serra's infamous Tilted Arc) is a welcome change, the current incarnation of such practices where artists fly from biennial to biennial and whose work bears little or no attachment to the site is problematic as well.  She writes, "Not only is the art work not bound to the physical conditions of a place anymore, but the artist-subject is 'liberated' from any enduring ties to local circumstances.  Qualities of permanence, continuity, certainty, groundedness (physical or otherwise) are politically suspect in this context." (160) She offers the suggestion of "double mediation," of practices that don't necessarily choose sides between space and place - between "nomadism and sedentariness" - but rather deal and live in the tension between these two poles.  She suggests, as best as I can decipher, that this spacio/psychic zone between the two poles can be relationally continual by seeing the multitudinous facets on our lives as being next to one another not coming after one another.  "Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks - so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life's traversal does not become generalized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another."

As a TCK (third culture kid), a Christian, a post-modern American and having been forced into or chosen to move 25 times in 38 years and now living abroad, thoughts about my sense of place or my "locational identity" have been really weighing on me.  I feel these thoughts coalescing slowly into ideas for art work but I can't yet articulate them.  Right now I am wondering what my transient life would have looked like if I had held the various places, people, thoughts and fragments of my life next to one another and not dismissed them down the conveyor belt of time?  What fabric could have been woven; what places of potential might have opened up?  Experiencing the pastness of events in my present experience by seeing them next to each other and not after one another creates a "proposition."  Propositions are a tool used by choreographer William Forysythe as a way to generate new material for improvisation. Erin Manning, describing Forsythe's process writes this: "[a proposition] creates the conditions for tapping into this intensive interval of the between.  It inflects the occasion, creating a relational matrix that transforms the singular elements into a network of potential."   I can't write about propositions for myself yet but I like the idea of how my past and my present - by seeing these events as adjacent and not sequencial - can unleash potential for contrast, for something different, for something new and undiscovered.

- Alicia Laumann

* Manning, Erin. Propositions for the Verge: William Forsythe's Choreographic Objects.

Musings : Visual Cues

I am realizing that a foreign environment causes one to rely more heavily on visual stimuli and surrounding markers. I cannot read signs or menus or train tickets.  It's the sensation of one sense being dulled which heightens the others.  It is allowing me to see things that I may have overlooked previously. 

Musings: John Dewey

Over a year ago I began reading John Dewey’s “Art as Experience.” As best as I could tell in the first fifty pages, Dewey feels that art has lost its vitality. His basic thesis seems to be that he feels that art has lost its importance because it is no longer connected nor springs forth from daily life. He says that there exists a great chasm between the esthetic experience of art and our ordinary experience of daily life.

Dewey puts forth the following explanation for the forces (as evidenced through our modern day museums) that came together to create this chasm:

· The rise of nationalism and imperialism: every capital city must have its own museum for the exhibiting of the greatness of its artistic past and for exhibiting the loot gathered by the conquering monarch.

. The growth of capitalism: As people, governments and other institutions began to acquire wealth, they began to amass fine art as evidence of good standing in higher culture.

· The growth of economic cosmopolitanism: Mobility of trade and populations weakened the connection between works of art and the genius loci of which they were once a natural expression. The works become specimens of fine art and nothing else, the production of which is influenced by the economic patronage of wealthy individuals.

· Changes in industrial conditions: Artists are pushed aside to make way for the mechanized process of production and as a result must workout an isolated means (apart from the realities of daily life) of self-expression.

Dewey says that before this “art of for art’s sake” would not have even been understood. He writes: “The forces at work are those that have removed religion as well as fine art from the scope of the common or community life. The forces have historically produced so many of the dislocations and divisions of modern life and thought that art could not escape their influence.”

For the last several years, everything I read gets filtered through the following screen – “what has this got to do with my understanding of the Church?” Scott and I long ago felt a chasm between our aesthetic experience in church and the actual experience of our daily lives. Sunday church experiences were like walking into a museum, oohing and ahhing over the artwork that meant little to us and leaving the building completely unchanged because it had no connection with our daily lives.

Of course, in reading those 50 pages, I couldn’t help but ask a few questions: Are our church buildings meant to exhibit the greatness of our past and “monarchically” collected “loot”? Do we amass (property, people, money, etc.) for evidence of good standing in higher culture? These are topics for another time…

But Dewey writes: “These things [the amassing of art and the buildings that display them] reflect and establish superior cultural status, while their segregation from the common life reflects the fact that they are not a part of a native and spontaneous culture.”

Something spoke to me in those words – native and spontaneous culture. Native – belonging to a person by birth. Reflecting back on this idea of Christendom made up of scattered seed, it seems that if the seed is to germinate and grow there must be a Something - a Substance - that is native to us and allows us to grow no matter what earthly culture we are planted in. I need to think about this more. Guten Nacht my fellow saints.

- Alicia Laumann 

Musings : Thomas Kelly 1893-1941

"The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening.  The secret places of the heart cease to be our noisy workshop.  They become a holy sanctuary of adoration and self-oblation, where we are kept in perfect peace, if our minds be stayed on Him who has found us in the inward sprints of our life.  And in brief intervals of overpowering visitation we are able to carry the santuary frame of mind out into the world, into it's turmoil and its fitfulness, and in a hyperaesthesia of the soul, we see all mankind tinged with deeper shadows, and touched with Galilean glories."

Musings : Art & Fear

A 134 page yearly reminder.

 

"Given a small kernel of reality and any measure of optimism, nebulous expectations whisper to you that the work will soar, that it will become easy, that it will make itself.  And verily, now and then the sky opens and the work does make itself.  Unreal expectations are easy to come by, both from emotional needs and from the hope or memory of periods of wonder.  Unfortunately, expectations based on illusion lead almost always to disillusionment.

Conversely, expectations based on the work itself are the most useful tool the artist possesses.  What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece.  The place to learn about the your materials is in the last use of the your materials.  The place to learn about your execution is in your execution.  The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love.  Put simply, you work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work.  there is no other such book, and it is yours alone.  It functions this for no one else. Your fingerprints are all over your work, and you alone know how they got there.  Your work tells you about your working methods, your discipline, your strengths and weaknesses, your habitual gestures, your willingness to embrace.

The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work.  To see them, you need only look at the work clearly -- without judgment, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes.  Without emotional expectations.  Ask your work what it needs, not what you need.  Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child."

- Art & Fear

Musings : PLAY

"I would like to suggest that 'play' is a useful concept in understanding as least one key aspect of the 'ends' and means of art. When we say something has play in it we refer to an elasticity, capacity to be stretched, pushed and pulled that will reveal the true nature of the thing. A child's play is an essential process of learning about himself and his world. It takes delving deep inside oneself in order to project and connect with that which is outside. Anyone who observes a child's play notices the intensity of immersion that is involved. Social Historian Johannes Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture describes play as essential to human beings. The term home ludens is in fact Latin for 'mankind as the species of play.' According to Huizenga, to play is 'to dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension - these are the essence of the play-spirit.' It is in fact the spirit of relentless discovery and probing invention that requires such courageous exploration. Philosopher Rollo My defines creativity as 'the process of bringing something new into being' through the 'intense encounter' of a person with his or her world. He is, in essence, describing that immersive engagement that can bring about the light bulb experience, the 'ah-hah' moment of revelation and fresh understanding. This is the kind of activity that artists undertake in this pursuit called 'play' and this is the kind of moment that they can bring about for others through an engagement with their art. C.S. Lewis said that 'reason is the organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.' Arthur Danto, Columbia University philosopher and art critic, confirms that, 'Art is getting across indefinable, but inescapable meaning.' The artist's 'play' brings us into significant relationship with things generating meaning even though that meaning is often fraught with complexity, ambiguity, difficulty, doubt, and paradox."

- James Romaine

Today

I live in a world of scurrying, pressing movements, back up, drive forward, stop.  faces passing without a glance.  identities blurred by ritual, expectation.  drones in line, scraping.  not thinking. we follow a pattern, but what pattern?  why?  unable to live as individuals, trend followers, consumers.  each in his own car, motionless carried by an invisible purpose.  trees and plants and floating clouds and insects and birds chirping but not seen or acknowledged. a life built on a vapor trail, a puff of smoke and nothing more, nothing to put feet on, terra firma.  the desire is for mass, for texture, for form, for shape and smell and language and life.  the embrace, the solid weight of person to person, person within person.  

There is something about writing that is real, or it seems.  it's so easy to lose it.  moments needing to be revisited in constant movement.  a coming together, a oneness, all tasks melted into one task. agendas obliterated. finding space to breath under the shadow.awake. alive. the end of alternation.

Musings : Constellations

"Constellations are not the reality of the stars but only a pattern we impose upon them in order to recognize them, use them to find our bearings, and talk to each other about them."

- Margaret Silf