SIx /
Breathe, create a new life, become accustom to the morning hours
The notion of making art work that somehow conveys an understanding of the times we live in is cited as an important aspect of art-making. This seems to be part of the current thinking about contemporary art practice, of work having a time stamp to it. - kathy brew
Reccurent themes:
Lika Mutal
water, waves, dark water and skies
waves, color light sounds universe human/object
the arrow of time
origins, entropy
horizon
beach, sand storm, watching the rain come in, looking into the valley, looking into the distance
salt water
undertow
travel, looking out a plane window
storms, clouds, wind
sky
twilight
desert
landscapes devoid of people
loss of gravity
Openings, the space between, transferring/communication, language
water flowing, leaching minerals
mountains
circles, breasts
crystals, minerals, canyons, vagina
textiles, texture, rugs
pink red fuscia purple orange
mist, fog, obsurred vision
traveling from above - flying
mountains, hips, fertile, pregnant, hip bones, pelvis, large headed long bones
mountain lakes, mirroring (cell devision, symmetry of body)
explosions, ejactulate
arches
driving in the desert or plains of the west
bodies touching, almost touching, energy moving between, yin yang, sex, power, sharing, communication, transformation, connectivity
buildings, building blocks, tree rings/growth
rules, self determinization
grids, organizational systems, mormons, bees, virus, city growth
stories in the stars, relating self to place in sapce using stars or landmarks
recurrent ideas
dirt/wetness/moss/cardboard cooling system in a greenhouse
plants
constellations
solitude
hiking, mountain air, mountain peaks, feeling small, vulnerable, safe
head house
sound hat
resonence
waves, om, the sound of the universe
color fields
dirt/wetness/moss/cardboard cooling system in a greenhouse
plants
constellations
solitude
hiking, mountain air, mountain peaks, feeling small, vulnerable, safe
head house
sound hat
resonence
waves, om, the sound of the universe
color fields
Five /
Working with light and smell and sound
A sculpture of flourescents, like a christmas tree or crystal pod, the smell of wet dirt, of cool air and moss covered cardboard
Charline von Heyl at Petzel, 456 W 18
Ralph Humphrey at Garth Greenan, 545 W 20
James Hayward at Miles McEnery 525 W 22
Barbara Takenaga at DC Moore, 535 W 22
Luis Zerbini at Sikkema Jenkins, 530 W 22
Landon Matz at Sean Kelly, 475 10th Ave.
Anthony Pearson at at Marion Boesky, 509 W 24
Dashiell Manley at Marion Boesky, 509 W 24
John Wesley at Fredericks and Freiser, 536 W 24
John Goodyear at Berry Campbell, 530 W 24
Joan Mitchell at Cheim and Read, 547 W 25
Kathy Butterly at James Cohan, 533 W 26
Tamiko Kawata at Garvey Simon, 547 W 27
Felipe Patone at Joshua Liner, 540 W 28
Trudy Benson at Lyles and King, 106 Forsyth St.
Katja Lojer at C24
objectification/self-objectification in art
the feminine gaze
the female body in art
https://blog.sivanaspirit.com/healing-singing-bowls/
four /
Ideas on place
A global sense of place - Doreen Massey
What does place mean to me? I have the story that I am a mountain girl, that I would be happy in a somewhat isolated cabin in the woods. Yet I have lived in NYC for 11 years. I don't take advantage of all the things I think of when I think of the city life - 24 hour everyhting, clubs, theater, opera, ballet, underground music or plays - but what I do like is the sense of possibility here. So many people moving here to follow their passion. There is the ability to meet and talk to all different types of people from all over the world here. It is like going on vacation in living here.
And yet, I am that woman who needs the mountains and some removal from all of that as well. I feel in love when I am slightly winded after hiking for two hours and reaching the top of a mountain or some isolated lake or field, less touched then other parts of my daily life. What is that? What me needs to be fed more? Am I ready to leave the city, where I feel stifled but have made an amazing community of friends? (albeit one that is hard to get together due to the difficulties of living in the city). Is it time to move to the west where I connect to the mountains but know few people? Or is it a compromise of the Hudson River, to stay close to friends and family yet have more space?
I digress, space, according to Massey, is a fluid ever-evolving combination of the history, people of and tangentially connected to or through the place. It is not something that is has a hard and fast boundary. So what does this mean for me? . . . TBD
Three /
Robert Irwin
Locative Media
http://themobilecity.nl/background-information/about-locative-media/
Birds eye view only offers a very rough view of what a place actually is, just as a social media account offers a very inaccurate view of the person.
Geography, materialism and the production of space
In the philosophical tradition, materialism is the simple idea that the world is made out of “stuff,” and that moreover, the world is only made out of “stuff.” All phenomena, then, from atmospheric dynamics to Jackson Pollock paintings, arise out of the interactions of material in the world...Methodologically, materialism suggests an empirical (although not necessarily positivistic) approach to understanding the world. ...In the contemporary intellectual climate, a materialist approach takes relationality for granted, but an analytic approach that insists on “stuff” can be a powerful way of circumventing or tempering the quasi-solipsistic tendencies found in some strains of vulgar poststructuralism.
Solipsistic: of or characterized by solipsism, or the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.
huh?
Production of space the production of space says that humans create the world around them and that humans are, in turn, created by the world around them. In other words, the human condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activity and our material surroundings. In this view, space is not a container for human activities to take place within, but is actively “produced” through human activity. The spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.
<consequences of this - social environmental political cultural>
Cultural production...A geographic approach to art, however, would look quite different than most conventional art history and criticism. The difference in approach would arise from the ways in which various disciplines rely on different underlying conceptions of the world. ...To speak very generally, the conceptual framework organizing much art history and criticism is one of “reading culture,”... this model of art criticism must (again, in a broad sense) tacitly assume an ontology of “art” in order to have an intelligible starting point for a reading, critique, or discussion.... a good geographer might ask questions along the lines of “How is this space called ‘art’ produced?” In other words, what are the specific historical, economic, cultural, and discursive conjunctions that come together to form something called “art” and, moreover, to produce a space that we colloquially know as an “art world”? The geographic question is not “What is art?” but “How is art?” ...
The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
If we accept Marx’s argument that a fundamental characteristic of human existence is “the production of material life itself” (that humans produce their own existence in dialectical relation to the rest of the world), and, following Lefebvre (and Marx) that production is a fundamentally spatial practice, then cultural production (like all production) is a spatial practice... the “space” of culture isn’t just Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling”but, as my friends Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Clayton Rosati underline, an “infrastructure of feeling.”
Experimental geography means practices that take on the production of space in a self-reflexive way, practices that recognize that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each another, and that cultural and intellectual production is a spatial practice.
one of modernism’s keywords, “experimental,”
Moreover, experimentation means production without guarantees, and producing new forms of space certainly comes without guarantees. Space is not deterministic, and the production of new spaces isn’t easy.
Walter Benjamin “The Author as Producer.” Benjamin...was identifying the relations of production that give rise to cultural work as a crucial political moment....Echoing Marx, he suggested that the task of transformative cultural production was to reconfigure the relations and apparatus of cultural production, to reinvent the “infrastructure” of feeling in ways designed to maximize human freedom. The actual “content” of the work was secondary.
The task of experimental geography, then, is to seize the opportunities that present themselves in the spatial practices of culture. To move beyond critical reflection, critique alone, and political “attitudes,” into the realm of practice. To experiment with creating new spaces, new ways of being.
Knowing Our Place – Barbara Kingsolver
Wilderness reminds us that our plans are small and sometimes absurd, and that our choices matter a great deal
"Beauty and grace are performed," says Annie Dillard, "whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
What I mean to say is I have come to depend on these places where I write. Dependent upon place; and the romanticized notion of nature as rejuvenator, the need to be away from technology, is this universal? No hominid agenda. I want mountians.
They hold my history, my passions and my capacity for honest work. I find I do my best thinking when I am looking out over a clean plank of planet Earth. Apparently I need this starting point — the world as it appeared before people bent it to their myriad plans—in order to begin dreaming up my own myriad, imaginary hominid agenda .
I write about things like liberty, equality and world peace, on an extremely domestic scale. I don't necessarily write about wilderness, in general, or the places I happen to love, in particular.
I only needed to be where I could think straight, remember, and properly invent. I needed the blessed emptiness of mind that comes from birdsong and dripping trees. I needed to sleep at night in a square box made of chestnut trees who died of natural causes.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper. But where does the need to create come from?
In the summer of 1996, human life on Earth made a subtle, uncelebrated passage from mostly rural to mostly urban. More that half of all humans now live in cities. The natural habitat of our species, then, officially, is steel, pavement, streetlights, architecture and enterprise—the hominid agenda.Do all these city dwellers enjoy this hominid agenda or, like me, crave the wild?
With all due respect for the wondrous ways people amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
I wonder what it will mean for us to forget that food, like rain, is not a product but a process. I wonder how we will imagine the infinite when we have never seen how the stars fill a dark night sky.
People will need wild places...They need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and ice ages...It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully.
Two /
https://www.amazon.com/Pedagogical-Sketchbook-Paul-Klee/dp/0571086187
So the seminar looks on four levels, first we look at the neurobiology of creativity, and that's kind of the physical layer. So how do our bodies, what is creativity in relation to our bodies? What do we know about our minds that makes us creative? And we look at V.S. Ramachandran who does a lot of work with Synesthesia and he also has a lot of ideas about universal principles of art in our visual system, peak experiences and how we process color, et cetera. So we look at all that and we can say a lot about it but we can't really say why we feel the need to make something, yet.
Then we look at on a psychological level, so after the physical level, we look kind of in the mental state, like our present state, our experience state and we mostly look at Joseph Campbell. Who talks about myth and the kind of stories we make up and that's a big part of it because one part of my daily practice is to do the improvisational drawing but the second part of it which has developed in the last couple of years is to write a story about it or tell a story about it. So by going on one hand and improvising symbols and then telling a story about it, well we could tell any story, ... you find yourself in anything. ... We look at C.G. Jung as well, because is there,... really is a subconscious or a collective unconscious out there. So where's that drawing coming from? And where's that creativity coming from? Is it coming from your own history and the things that you've experienced and the peak experiences that you've had or is it coming from, are you like an antenna, who's receiving these kind of things?... then the third aspect of it is the spiritual aspect. ...is this boundary, as I said, does it come from outside of you or inside of you? We get a taste of that with Carl Jung and then we look at like a zen ox drawings which give you kind of a map of creative practice. So that's kind of somewhere in between us. And also we look at the heroes journey, a map of the heroes journey, we go out into the world, we encounter things, we pass through initiation, we go to far realm and find something new, we bring it back and we share it.
So that's on a big journey but it's also every time you sit down to draw you kind of have to go through this initiation of like, this is silly, I don't know what I'm gonna draw, what should I draw? The page is blank, I don't know what I'll do. And then you go through and you make the marks, you initiate the drawing, you fight for what it's gonna be, to make it look good and then it looks terrible, it looks okay, this is not good, this is good. You go through this battle, you finally get it to a point you bring it back so we talk about that. And then finally, so that's sort of in between you and the world and then we get to what I call the computational which is also now kind of grown into the other, but then you have the kind of creative source.
So it's not one creative author in the thing but it keeps growing and changing. So those are all the modules of The Source of Creativity from how creativity's sourced inside you to how creativity's sourced from completely outside you.
crystal cave
Then you have the symbolic level, so are you choosing memes, like when Andy Warhol chooses Marilyn Monroe, or a soup can, he's choosing a very strong mimetic device. So to what degree are the symbols you're choosing lined up with the mimetic devices. Then on the very large scale what sort of archetypal images are you creating? Is your art about a struggle between good and evil? You know, is it about a personal journey, a personal conquest? So we can look at it, understanding what we know about the sources of creativity we can look at any individual work on that, give it that kind of analysis. So I ask people to try to get all those in sync. The degree that you can get the materials that choose in sync with the story that you have to tell, in sync with the memes that you're working with.
1) Create an artwork which contains your own "history" or "take" on "what is human" (i.e., how definitions of human, nonhuman, animal, and thing/hyperobject, have changed) in any medium of your choice. You will post either video, video documentation, or a piece of writing on the last day of class.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/who-or-what-can-legally-be-considered-a-person-31730
http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201002/201002_134_define_person.cfm
http://mentalfloss.com/article/50787/29-answers-question-what-human-being
https://us.whales.org/issues/who-not-what-personhood-and-moral-versus-legal-dolphin-rights
Begin again /
Ideas:
- headspace hide hole
- Mel Chin
- Regenerating soil
- Carbon sequeastering
- Brass
- Light
- Reflections
- Sound
- Om
- Universality
- Vibrations
- Communications
- Love
- Connection
- Purpose
- Evolution and (pro)creation - progeny
- grass
- earth
- wet soil and moss and water
- plants
- uv lights
- meditation
- walking
- reaching the divine
- a greater puropose? Olafur Eliason
Why art has the power to change the world
Inspiration:
Turner effects of light and color;
Monet inspiration from the landscape and his travels, But as with Turner, the work went beyond representation of merely a place, and took on an interiority and an examination of light and different conditions.
Hamish / boats / water / floating/flying / isolation / exploration / hard work / steel / blue
MOTHER FUCKING OLAFUR ELIASSON
And a sense of wonder
and Waves
Your Engagement Has Consequences
Heightened Awareness
Time
https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/when-living-life-becomes-secondary-to-showcasing-it
Spectrum of color
Waves, all things can be broken down to a wave, sound light, mass. Everything is a vibration. Vibrations as ways of communicating. Om as the sound of the universe?
Nick Cave
https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s8/nick-cave-in-chicago-segment/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6cG5wYxRcw
- Sound suits
- obscuring or equalizing
- a place of your own
- a thing that eases communication
- humor to soften the blow
- dance, energy, spiritual
- frenzy, trance, shaman, spiritual journey
- spirit animal, horse, snake, shrimp
Notes from Intro to Autobiography of Place
What is your role as a creative thinker and maker? What is it that makes you who you are? And how do you translate this into the work you create?
What is "a sense of place?" What does it mean to be a person in a place? How do people shape places, and how are they shaped by them? Can places be in our minds as well as etched in the physical landscape? Are our identities a kind of place, in and of themselves?
As you think of your own work in terms of the notion of autobiography of place, here are some other questions you might ask yourself:
- What am I trying to communicate with my work?
- How can I use technology in a meaningful way?
- How do I cull material from my own life and transform it into art?
- How do we transform the personal into the universal?
- How do we combat narcissism and the cult of confessional art and writing when using the self as the material base of one's artistic expression?
- How do I construct a work of art that is successful as parts of an entire body of work?
- How do you explore and express your own world, your own life, your own familiy, your community, etc. ?
Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out, the authors cite what they refer to as the “Five I’s” — Introspection, Inquiry, Intuition, Interaction, and Impact
With introspection and reflection, you work to uncover your unique creative voice. With inquiry, your curiosity drives you to work from real-life observations and experience. With intution, you draw on your unconscious or subconscious sources of creativity. With interaction, you think about the strength of your collaborations with others; and with impact, you’re trying to communicate at the deepest level with your audience.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the idea of flow
Places are imbued with meaning through human experiences and expression. People often develop emotional attachments to places that have a certain meaning for them. While places are made out of physical spaces, a sense of place comes from the setting and what a person brings to it.
Yi-Fu Tuan, emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been a pioneer in the field of human geography
the notion of place is based around four aspects that characterize a person’s experience of a place.
A. Physical/structural: Places are made from spaces that we can physically explore and inhabit, so they are physical spaces with some kind of structure; that is to say, they are embodied.
B. Personal: This relates to the feelings and emotions we associate with a place, to the memories evoked by it, to the personal knowledge and background we invest the place with while making sense of it.
C. Social: This involves the kind of social interaction and communication that occurs within the place, to the sharing of resources and memories
D. Cultural: This has to do with the conventions and cultural identity of a place and of its inhabitants.
Each particular experience of place is individual and unique, although it is influenced by the presence of and interaction with others – the social aspect. In order to understand a place and its inhabitants, all four dimensions and their interplay with each other have to be taken into account.
Doreen Massey places do not have single identities, but multiple ones. They are not neutral and static, but ever changing. Places are not frozen in time, but are in states of processes.
need for a progressive or “global” sense of place
For Space
For Ansel Adams the natural landscape is not a fixed and solid sculpture but an insubstantial image, as transient as the light that continually redefines it.”
Art:21 Place and companion website