Rage

black painting..just wanted to add to my image

"Shape without form, shade without colour,
  Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"

thinking of T.S Eliot's "The Hollow Men"

Black Reprise

Black Reprise

16'' x 20'', acrylic on canvas

Black Painting

Black Paintings

Belle [short version]

I miss
I miss
I miss

I miss your warm touch...
I miss you holding

I miss your face,
more,
I miss your smile,
prelude to a kiss,
enveloped in cherry lips,
sweeter than honey,
I miss

I miss you being you
and me being me
me with you
I miss
I miss...
I miss making memories
your everything
combined with my nothing
Us
I miss

I miss
I miss

I miss

You. I miss You.
Simply because you are you. 

I originally planned on posting parts of a very heavy screenplay titled "In the Dark," based on my days in the Army, but erred on the side of caution, because this is academia after all. So, instead I went with this edited version of Belle, a love poem. Even though it is the short version, I believe the brokenness of the protagonist manages to come across. 

"Black Paintings"

This is my Black Painting

 

 Black painting, February 2013.

black painting

this is the first video i have made "as a piece of art"

"Black Painting"

This weeks assignment to create a "black painting" equivalent came at a sadly appropriate time for me, as my God brother's 2-month-old passed away late last week. With the funeral procession still in my mind, this short poem is my reach for perspective:


                                                   The Things They Carried

                             Words within their human realm. Bells to reach their Gods.
                             Mortality for to continue. Stray grass from the tombs.

People in Situations

I like to photograph people in Situations. Here, while the phony advertisement clashes with people's emotions, it also high-lights these peoples' emotions. The picture was taken last summer on Broadway somewhere in the 60's. I wish I had had a color film in my camera for the billboard was bright red with white letters. I hid behind a newspaper stand so the people could not see me until I had already snapped the photo.
Does the New York stroller in the image at the top care about new-age meditation philosophy? Or, do the teenagers care more about friends than money? I don't know, but I think it illustrates our society at the same time as it poses questions.

"Boney Apparition" Critique

Greetings, fellow artists!

I am posting photos from my first work for Sculpture Fundamentals, a wooden memorial, in hopes of gaining some critique/feedback. This is my first attempt at a sculptural work, though I have played around with sculptural elements in a few paintings. I created a memorial to bones, to structure/support, to things unseen. A little background on the work: it is completely composed of materials I would use to stretch canvas, support painting, and hang paintings. It is hard to see in the photographs, but some of the wood is treated in a way, using clear and white gesso, plus iridescent acrylic medium, so that it has a subtle sparkle to it. I initially showed the work in a completely dark room, illuminated by twinkle lights (I would have preferred LEDs or fiber-optics―alas, cost-prohibitive) and we all sat on the floor, séance-style. I removed the lighting, however, because I felt like, in lieu of optimal lighting execution, the piece was stronger without it. Looking back, I perhaps would have staggered the heights of the two hanging pieces; the choice to hang them at the same height was a reference to how I have hung my diptych paintings, but I think staggered heights would, perhaps, have been more interesting. Anyway, enough talk, here is a link to the photos:

Boney Apparition

Thanks so much,
Genevieve

Angelicus/ L'Etoile

Emotion as impetus

Above, one of my photos with this in mind. 

Also created a short video with her as protagonist, and within this theme. 

what are we looking at?

In November of 2011 I found myself sleeping on the sidewalk of a village in Northern Morocco.  The group I was traveling with had not found a sheltered place to spend the night, and Sebastian and I volunteered to stay up all night, watching over the sleeping bodies and back-packs all heaped up together in a corner of the winding stone streets.  Around five am, an old man came out from behind one of the crooked wooden doors near us.  He stood for a while in the lightening dark, surveying the pile-up of people and belongings behind us and looking Sebastian and me up and down for a long moment.  He then turned and motioned for us to come into the building behind him.  He sat and gave us tea.  Another, younger man came in a bit later with a giant sack behind his back.  They poured it out onto the floor and out tumbled scraps of wood, bits and pieces in funny little shapes.  The old man reached to a metal square fastened to the wall next to us and swung it open.  Inside was a large, cavernous space.  He shoveled these bits of pieces of wood into the furnace and lit in on fire.  We followed him up an uneven, narrow, and spiraling cement stairwell up to a small room stacked high with wooden crates, worn smooth with use, lined with patterned fabrics.  The walls were partially tiled in the same bright blue-and white patterns.
We began to understand what the man was doing.
In a giant tub, he heaved and shoved at a giant mass of dough.
He ripped out parts of it, patted them quickly into perfect little circles, and set them in rows on the crates.
I pulled out my phone and took a short video of the man working, muttering something about my phone being not as professional as the recording equipment we had outside, where our groupmates were fast asleep.
The man paused between throwing down discs of dough to stand hoveringly over the squishy balls, muttering something under his breath.  It was rhythmic and urgent, and completely unintelligible to Sebastian and me.  Neither of us spoke Arabic or French, let alone the unique dialect of the region we were in.  We leaned in and tried to decipher what we were hearing.
What are we looking at?  What are we hearing?
Prayer?  At first we thought it must be some prayer.  Or other religious chant.
Was he merely speaking to himself about this and that?  Was he talking to himself about the strangers at his side?
Finally, we realized he was (probably) counting the balls of dough.
Suddenly, the day broke.  The neighborhood cats came out to wind their bony, sparse backs against our ankles.  Plump women in colorful clothing came out with baskets to buy the bread the man had baked.  Our teammates woke up.  We had a breakfast of the bread we had watched the man bake, cheese, and sweet tea with mint leaves.  And we were on our way.

black painting

Surfin' USA

I think we’re looking at freedom. A willingness to be terrified. Joy at its peak.

And the song it plays. A melody. Reminds us still to drink.

Watching Watching

Watching people watching people. Cinema changed the voyeuristic part of our lives. People spend more time seeing people in the screen than in real life. Seeing people seeing something very attentively is almost kind of hilarious. What are they so excited about? Enough to gather around in this one space to singleminded-ly sit facing one direction? It is a powerful thing, a film, to make someone sit in a way among the crowd to pay their attention to one screen of unreal images moving around. I am looking at people looking onto a screen. And yet, this goes on for myself as well. I am not really looking at anything but a computer screen, just like the people in the image are looking onto the screen. The power and authority of the screen makes us surrender our eyes to it. Because anything unreal is so much better than the reality, or so it seems. So I sit here staring at a screen. What am I really looking at?

Image from Cinema Paradiso

I am looking at a xerox...

I am looking at a xerox of a photo reproduced on a photo paper. It is a black and white photo that looks old - it is yellowing and the reproduced image is a bit disintegrated. It is a picture of a woman standing on a background of a sea shore. The background is almost bare except for some flat shore waves stretching horizontally from one end to another, slicing the photo in the middle. There is a small, blurred ship in the very far distance on the left and an unidentifiable object, a stone or a sea shell, on the bottom right. I notice some elongated stain marks on the right of the standing figure which at first glance look like somehing is oozing, falling from the sky. There are couple of noticeable holes which (together with the “misplaced” marks) question the airy space, making it solid, a wall perhaps or a painted/ photographed backdrop. It could also be an inherited damage in the original photograph.

The woman is wearing a long striped dress or a bathing gown that flows gently in the sea breeze. In her left hand she clutches a jacket or scarf that complements her dress in pattern and movement. The figure casts a “flowing” dark and distinctive shadow on the ground. The sun or source of light that emenates from the left hits her left side; part of her turned face, arm and clutching hand, scarf, bottom of dress and left shoe. The vertical “wavy” black striped gown and the horizontal white waves, together with the parallell dark shadow, create a beautiful composition.

She is wearing high heeled pumps but the heels do not really sink in sand (whether wet or dry). In fact, it looks like she steps on solid surface. Again, Is the background a reproduced image of the sea?

She is standing with her face and half body turned towards the camera. It is a full body shot and the movement of the body and dress renders the photo a natural immediacy that “forgives” the dramatic, choreographed pose imposed possibly by the photographer or the poser herself. Is it a snap shot or a carefully planned event? And indeed why would she wear this dress and shoes to the beach?

She is smiling. But her smiling eyes and mouth are in the shade whereas the lit cheeks and chin give away the facial expression. This adds to the dramatic quality of the photograph. It is a good, open, trusting and friendly smile, slightly shy and naive and has a touch of coyness to it; a smile that looks rather spontaneous and inviting.

The woman in the reproduced photo is my mother. Her clothing and shoes make it clear that it was taken in the late 1930's. She is standing on the beach in Tel Aviv, possibly couple of years( maybe less) after arriving in Israel from Poland. She must be 18 or 19 years old , the youngest daughter in the family she left behind and lost soon after in the death camps. She has this look familiar with new immigrants; trying to make amends look, innocent, trusting, brave and hopeful look. But it is mainly a displaced look. The look that strains to put together disparate geographies and cultures. And in my mother's case (like so many others who arrived to Israel from the diaspora at that time) it is doubly displaced because of the tragic circumstances. She will soon learn (or has she learned already)about her family's lot and her predicament. I see this look and the backdrop. I see the holes and I see the stains on a wall that aspires to be beautiful mediterrenean sky. I could also stay on the beach and choose to see the sky as falling, or something falling from it , as in Bruegel's treatment of the myth of Icarus, she is standing smiling posing the question: can you see “what cannot be seen” and can you live with it?

What are we looking at?

I took a pause to notice this picture again after I got tired of listening to the few contemporary artists I put up with nowadays and decided to go back to never fail great music. Fleetwood Mac is one of my all-time favorite bands, but I had not really examined this album cover from 1977. What really stuck out to me, now, and what I perhaps didn’t notice before, was the pair of balls just hanging there between Mick Fleetwood's legs; his stance – hand akimbo, with that look on his face as he holds out, a crystal ball, with a distorted image, to the delicate looking Stevie Nicks, who gazes at it, while perching one leg over his balleted, stooled foot. Huh? After doing a little research I discovered that this picture is representational of some sort of old-fashioned courtship. However, I could not get past the balls. I mean, really. What is that supposed to mean? Is it symbolic is his manhood, or his power over her? Once I took notice of those balls, noting else in this picture mattered. Am I perhaps looking at the end of my love affair with Fleetwood Mac? Now, I have to go back and really listen to every song on this album, that I have been singing along to and making memories with for over a decade. 

On the 1: advertisement for canine plastic surgery

As a commuter besieged by images and text that promise me a better life through commodities and services, I was utterly delighted to encounter this subway ad for canine plastic surgery! Complete with "before and after" photos and testimonials, this sign appropriates the format of the ubiquitous Dr. Zizmor dermatology ads to mock the self-absorption and narcissistic anxiety that drives our consumer society. Masquerading as a "type", the absurdity of this nearly unnoticeable sign becomes all the more delightful in the textual sarcasm:

This imposter piece manages to be hilarious, subversive and (ironically) a very clever advertisement for a show on Comedy Central. Although it ultimately promotes consumer entertainment, the "ad' itself makes no direct reference to the show (The Kroll Show). Instead, the viewer does all the work--not the least of which is just being awake enough to notice the difference here and to delight in it. The lack of internet access on the subway prevents the viewer from immediately accessing the website, so a great part of the appeal is literally having to sit with this silly mystery and wonder what it is really about. In co-opting the visual language and textual cues of one of the most insipid (and pervasive) forms of advertising, this piece disrupts the rote quality of seeing and expectation. For that reason, it functions in the way of art, even as it participates in commercialism. Really, it made my day!

Overhead Fluorescents

said fluorescents

I snapped this photo during our gallery walk through Chelsea. Not particularly responsive to the gallery, I took in the surrounding structure of the building (because that's just what I do). Looking up, I saw these lights. Now, when looking at these lights, most people would probably see rather unappealing scraps of metal and glass hanging from the ceiling. That's cool, yo; that is what they are. But what do I see? I see structure and form, brightness and contrast. Sharp lines that could be developed and manipulated to create new silhouettes and textiles. For me, these lights are a source of inspiration.

But that's just what I see.

The Block

My favorite panel from Romare Bearden’s “The Block” (1971), which depicts Lenox Avenue between 132nd and 133rd streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. (Coincidentally, I used to reside on Lenox between 131st and 132nd, so it strikes a special chord with me.)

Romare Bearden     American, 1911—1988

The Block, 1971

Cut and pasted printed, colored and metallic papers, photostats, pencil, ink marker, gouache, watercolor, and pen and ink on Masonite

Overall: 48 x 216 inches; six panels, each: 48 x 36 inches

     Check it out at the Met.

What are we looking at?

I do not know enough about African American history, socio-economics, and/or race politics in the 1970s (or today, for that matter) to say anything other than... we are definitely looking at Bearden's perception of all of these things as he experienced them in Harlem in '71; furthermore, these themes are fundamental and permeating to contemporary Harlem, lending modern relevance to The Block.

As a white-girl Columbia student, an example of gentrification, who spent 9 months living on the sixth-floor of a building located just one block South of Bearden's, I want to point out that we are looking at lovers and pigeons. We are looking into the stifling hot bedroom of an apartment on the sixth-floor of a brick walk-up with a black tar roof, which is a special kind insulation: too hot in the Winter and hot-as-hell in the Summer. We are looking into a moment of escapism from the oppressive heat, noise (seriously, it may be the noisiest street in Manhattan), and stress of Lenox Avenue. We are looking at a group congregating on the sidewalk, surely in part because no one stays inside their apartment when it is cooler outside. (With many buildings still not rewired/approved for in-window air-conditioning units, this continues to be a problem today. My apartment reached 110 degrees on various days last July...) We are also looking at socialization, the kind that does not require any particular reason. We are looking at pigeons because every brick building on Lenox comes complete with a pigeon roost and incessant cooing beginning at daybreak. We are looking at neighborhood voyeurs, spectators, agoraphobics, people simultaneously oppressed and liberated by their home. We are looking at graffiti on the side of a building, a sidewalk, a skyline, the sun and the moon.We are looking at a collage not just of mediums, but of subjective sensory experiences and memories. We are looking at Bearden's Harlem, but we are also looking at my Harlem, the Harlem that belongs to anyone who has lived there (especially along Lenox because streets are so unique), and we are also looking at the Harlem that any passerby would see. It all depends on where you choose to situate your body or your gaze on The Block.

i have [public versus private, self-effacing but please look at/listen to me] feelings, i have feelings please (WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT?)

This is a screenshot of the 5,461st post on the facebook page of Columbia Admirers. Columbia Admirers' "about me" reads:

Columbia University Admirers understands the social awkwardness that plagues our community. Henceforth, this forum allows you to release your inner frustrations anonymously or not before you get bottled up into a depressive state for the best type of therapy is from which we receive public attention. 

Feel free to submit your deepest, darkest desires. 
Censorship not permitted.

This is meant to be a space for sharing positivity. 
Please be advised that if anything insulting is submitted, as backhanded as you can make it, it will not be posted.

Due to keeping privacy in this public domain, please submit to our anonymous tumblr (http://cuadmirers.tumblr.com/) and your entries will be published on this page.  

I've highlighted the sections that I think are relevant to consider when looking at the screenshot. When looking at this image in the context of the Eye and Idea blog, it's different than looking at the image on the facebook page. When looking critically at this posting about a posting in class, it's different than reading the posting on the facebook page alone in one's room. Public attention on facebook is public in that it's visible to nearly anyone, yet it's still somewhat private in the sense that the viewer is usually alone on their computer without anyone else physically present. Whoever posted this is both private and public. Whoever is seeing this post on their personal computer is private, yet the poster wanted it to be public in that sense--his feelings are not only to be received by Elle Christine, but also by anyone who reads the Columbia Admirers facebook page (Columbia Admirers has 4,204 friends who will receive its updates on their newsfeed, and its page is viewable to everyone). The words are put somewhere people are bound to see them, the feelings are public, the person it is about is tagged so that they're sure to see the post; the person who posted wants his very personal, private feelings to be known in public. But, the person is private in both his self-effacement ("the guy from your LitHum class/ that I bet you wouldn't recognize if we passed") and in his anonymity. In short, what I tried to say in a very long winded response is that I find the contradiction and affirmation between public and private attention in this post, its site of origin (Columbia Admirers as contained by the greater creature that is FACEBOOK), and the experience of viewing it to be compelling. Censorship not permitted unless it's private.

Voodoo

More Mysterious Wings

 What are we looking at?

Imagine the surprise to open our blog to see (and read) Saretta's entry. How bizarre...

But it becomes more bizarre because I took this photo (and a video) last Thursday. I had come back on campus after our field trip to Moma, stepped out of the subway at the Columbia stop and headed up Broadway. Approaching around the heighth of Joe's Cafe (120th) were these wings near the base of the building. But they didn't just lay there. They were placed, even carefully so, and as I stepped closer, I noted there was also a dried geranium leaf nearby. Nothing special about that.  Then, finally I noticed a little flower in metal.

This was some kind of Natura Morte, I thought.

But it was all very shocking, because as Saretta has observed the wings seemed to have been stripped. It was hurtful to observe this and realize it hadn't been the work of a hungry predator. I love animals, so this was particularly upsetting. What was also strange was that no one stopped or seemed to notice.   But Saretta was looking... and observing too.

Then, Friday morning I had lunch with a good friend who is a particularly insightful woman. She's known for her "extreme" architectural photography and has travelled to every imaginable place. She began her career taking photos at major archeological digs in Greece and continued this for more than 10 years. In sum. She has seen a lot.  I was sure she would know something about these wings. So after lunch I took out my Iphone and asked about the photo. She glanced at it and asked me to put it away.

"That's Voodoo or some kind of black magic," she said.

I don't know of these things. I've looked on the internet and found nothing. So I looked at Saretta's photo again. The wings she discovered are lighter. They are also oriented with the wings facing toward the building. The darker ones I found Thursday appeared to have more bone attached. And again there were the additional objects that imparted an idea of being composed.  So what was I looking at? A different pair of wings?  A ritual? A statement of some kind...

It seems there is and was some kind of organization of these materials. Animal, plant, and mineral.

Towards what end, I don't know.

Wings

Last Friday I saw a pair of wings that something (hopefully not someone) left on the Broadway side of the Northwest Corner building. I pulled out my iphone and snapped a few digital images for the sake of remembering. This was the first of three, and the only bird's eye view. Normally I send images of my day out to my sisters, but because I have two parrots, African Greys with similar colored wings, I was afraid that if I sent it to anyone close to me, their first thought would be that one of my birds had been attacked, and even if I provided a caption, the initial terror would be very unpleasant for them. I also feel a bit guilty taking visual delight from such an image with my own birds sitting across the room, thus I've been carrying this around with me for almost a week and terrified for anyone who knows me well to see it.

It's not a big deal, I know that. But the small delight I take from it is from the remains of the body that has been torn from its bones--and so cleanly, at that. It's kind of sick, I think, that in a sense what you're looking at is a little of my guilty pleasure.  

What are we looking at?

Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1960
Lithograph, 30 x 22 inches

Two years ago I had the opportunity to help Jasper Johns install a large group show, an exhibition benefit to raise money for the non-profit charity he founded 50 years ago. Each time we came to hang something - a painting, photograph, or placement of a sculpture - he would step back, look at it, and ask aloud: "What are we looking at?" I found this to be a very considerate, generous and curious way to approach looking at art (or looking at anything, really).

For Prompt #3, post to the blog one image of anything - this could be an artwork, a photo (perhaps from the internet, or an image you snap with your camera phone), something found in the newspaper - etc. and write a response to the image answering the question, "What are we looking at?"

Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925

These are a few of my favorite works from the Inventing Abstraction exhibition. What are some of yours?

Josef Albers' Gitterbild (Lattice Picture, also known as Grid Mounted); c. 1921; Glass, iron latticework, and copper wire

Marcel Duchamp's À Regarder; 1918; Oil, silver, lead wire, steel, and magnifying lens on glass (cracked), mounted between panes of glass in a standing metal frame

Augusto Giacometti's Chromatische Phantasie (Chromatic fantasy); 1914; Oil on canvas

Lovers of paradise

First, I loved the Agamben reading on contemporaries! What a concise exploration of what it means to be of one’s time, or rather to be timeless…

Especially in his discussion of fashion as a style of sin derived from adam and eve’s first adornment of leaves, and the idea of always being slightly out of date.

Aesthetic contemporaries.. Cody Cobb, Claire Denis, Pina Baush, Yoann Lemoine, Sorcha O Raghallaigh. I tend to connect most with musicians, writers, and skateboarders in terms of contemporaries, influence, and perspective. At the same time, I’m interested in putting together many voices of my contemporaries from all around saying the same thing… but then don’t we all say the same thing anyway?

"Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts them self for an hour so high above their personal destiny that their happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own." Hesse

What struck me most in the Agamben reading is the necessity to reveal darkness in light of the present. I am currently reading De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, in which he jumps ship from his typical excursions in pleasure to write about suffering. Suffering as the place of realization, innovation, and mystery. The truth where there is no shadow.

I feel Wilde is a true contemporary. I was walking in London with my friend Melody at the beginning of night, and she introduced me to Oscar Wilde with the quote “the only spoiled life is one whose growth is arrested.” De Profundis describes a period in Wilde’s life when he was sent to prison for 2 years, and there found in suffering the secret to his happiness.

Wilde says “Pleasure for the beautiful body. But pain for the beautiful soul.”

"Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come right out of myself... It could not have come before, nor later. Had anyone told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it... Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it."

To seek to taste the fruits of all life’s pleasures, and to live inside of and seek out the depths of suffering. This idea of darkness as a pathaway to something more is present in both Agamben and Wilde’s work…

Wilde very much lived everything he knows.. having Wilde’s work is like ‘having a friend in the diamond business’ – knowing somebody who sees life from the same place you do, who has been to many hilltops and river valleys, and can at least show you by example, that what you know is not unique.

His example reminds us what we are incapable of living – the past

and the present as being unlived. As Agamben defines the contemporary, he gave everything he had to his time.

some thoughts on Gustave Doré, Benozzo Gozzoli, pictorial narratives and details

This is not about a “choice”. It is impossible for me to make it (and it will take me to a different sort of discussion here). It's a story that I hope continues to unfold. I have a small booklet (5”x7.5”) of Gustave Doré's bible illustrations with me since I was three years old, a selection of 125 of “famous bible Illustrations” printed in Israel in the early 50's “depression” period. 

Paul Gustave Doré1832-1883 was a French artist, engraver, illustrator and sculptor. His career which started early on (at the age of 15 he has been already publishing his work) was mainly focused on engraving (wood, steel), and illustrations of seminal literary works by Rabelais, Balzac, Milton and Dante. His illustrations for the English Bible, completed in 1866, were a great success and in 1867 he had a major exhibition of his work in London. His woodcuts and engravings (later on he made series for Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven and Cervantes's Don Quixote) remain his most celebrated work (even though he produced numerous paintings). He created over 10,000 engravings and 4000 editions in forty year period! Here a world of fantasy is developed with rich detail and depth depicting, scenes, characters, landscapes and events in romantic grand manner. In the case of the bible, the scenes focus on a dramatic pivotal moment in a story; Absalom caught in a tree, Lot's wife turning her head, King Saul attempting to kill David etc., 

 They are full of movement and dramatic excess of expression. Also the scenery is a dramatic romantic rendition of 19^th century imagery of the holy land. I grew up in Israel where bible studies were forced upon secular educational program right from the start so this booklet really left a strong visual impression on me. 

 I remember going through it millions of times, referring to it along with school narratives, a kind of a graphic novel (titles..no captions).  I was drawn to the narrative as much as to the pictorial elements and particulars. I've never thought of it as “inspirational”, rather as a beautiful relic from my early past, partly a nostalgia item, yet a tangible living thing from my beginning, a link to my early childhood. Only when I started to get involved in printmaking and etching in particular, I came back to this book (I actually was asked to bring a particular and personal item to the class and intuitively I chose it). The etched line gave way to the inscribed past memory. It has become sort of an opening for me for the exploration of that past.

Also these illustrations, engravings, small as they are formatted, have a whole detailed world in them that pulls one in. I've been always drawn to works that are rich in detail. I like the engulfing, immersing effect of details..the ecstatic abundance feeling they create. There are so many examples but I chose one of my favorites here as a guide to “total” experience : Benozzo Gozzoli's Medici chapel in the Pallazzo Riccardi. The paintings (1459) in wet and dry frescoes technique, depict the journey of the magi from Jerusalem to Bethlechem, a journey that surround the whole wall space of the chapel (competing/completing wooden ceiling with roses in gold and colors, inlaid floor of ancient marbles (architect Michelozzo di Bartolommeo) and richly sculpted benches). 

Gozzoli, like a fine goldsmith, depicts precious materials of jewelry, fabrics, transparencies, harnesses, trees with fruit, meadows with flowers, birds' plumage, multi colored angels' wings, dogs , horses and even a panther.  The abundance of detail in this small room is breathtaking.  

Moreover the room is completely closed (no windows, doors or any other openings (apart from the narrow entrance door).  All of this  put in question not only its aesthetic but also its purpose. Is this a place for meditation?   I think it is.  Not only harmonious,   it manages in  creating an infinite feeling of space, a true ecstatic experience.  perfect. 

Dore and Gozzoli are my contemporaries.

M.I.A. IS ALWAYS RELEVANT (what is the contemporary?)

BAD GIRLS

BOYZ

SUNSHOWERS

I find M.I.A. immensely inspirational. The crafting of a successful, consumable, yet inherently radical identity as both an artist and an activist is something I admire and want to emulate--the consciousness of what it means to be an artist with regards to one's specific identity and within a larger (globalized) context. M.I.A. fled Sri Lanka when she was a child because of the civil war. Her experiences with poverty, violence, and displacement have shaped her artistic craft in terms of her aesthetic, content, and message. It is the way in which she subverts consumerism and capitalism that I find so impressive: her music is easy to dance to and is innovative and unique sounding; her style is fantastic and incredibly influential; she at first appears to be the "cool eclectic ethnic girl"; yet when you listen to her message and what she is saying through that aesthetic, a sharp critique of capitalism, retaliation against women of color's sexualization, Othering, and silencing, and aggressive advocacy of Third World unity emerges and punches you in the face. It radicalizes you, the listener. And even if you're unaware of the music's message and implications, that you are dancing and singing along to it means that she has succeeded as an artist; you have become an unwitting neophyte of her call for transnational Third World revolution. Additionally, M.I.A. distorts and confuses the space between performing one's identity for the sake of capitulation and acting out in defiance of the industry of cultural production: massively successful yet still under censorship, M.I.A. practices her politics as an art form without losing its relevancy or significance. Her identity is truly revolutionary. She complicates the discussion of "authenticity" yet still has the last laugh--she knows what she's doing all along. 

Centuries and Solitude

"Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands.  They are thus in this sense irrelevant.  But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time."  (40)

In any case, whatever the reason may be, the "now," the kairos of fashion is ungraspable:  the phrase, 'I am in this instant in fashion" is contradictory, because the moment in which the subject pronounces it, he is already out of fashion.  So being in fashion, like contemporariness, entails a certain "ease," a certain quality of being out-iof-phase or out-of-date, in which one's relevance includes within itself a small part of what lies outside of itself, a shade of demode, of being out of fashion."  (49)

"Historians of literature and of art know that there is a secret affinity between the archaic and the modern, not so much because the archaic forms seem to exercise a particular charm on the present, but rather because the key to the modern is hidden in the immemorial and the prehistoric.  Thus, the ancient world in its decline turns to the primordial so as to rediscover itself.  The avant-garde, which has lost itself overtime, also pursues the primitive and the archaic.  It is in this sense that one can say that the entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an archaeology  an archaeology that does not, however, regress to a historical past, but returns to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living."  (51)

The above quotes are some of the points I found most salient about Giorgio Agamben's essay on the contemporary.

I can say with confidence that reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time was one of the most profound artistic experiences of my life.  I was riding home one day on the 66 bus from Port Authority to my mother's apartment in Montclair, New Jersey, and somewhere along the polluted highway, sitting on a stained bus seat, I had what someone who appreciates the movie Waking Life might call a "holy moment."  The profundity of Marquez's words stunned me, hitting me squarely across time and space and language-- simply and matter of factly and perfectly barreling through these barriers which so many other artists try to transcend, and fail at.  I got off the bus a few blocks from my mother's home, unlocked the front door, and still shell-shocked, sat down at the kitchen counter in front of my mother, who was cooking dinner.  "I think I'm going to have to be an artist," I think I said.  My mother nodded and told me to eat.

It's always been hard for me to explain to people why this novel has had such a huge impact on me.  I've read the 400+ page book three times in English and once in Spanish so far.  One of my favorite aspects of the work is the masterful use of rhythm that Garcia uses to tell a tale that begins in primordial times (when river stones were as big as dinosaur eggs; when the world was so new that at times people still had to gesture at objects in order to indicate those things for which humans had not yet thought up names for) all the way to the modern, of decade-long rainstorms and strange white men looking to plant some banana trees.  The irreverent way with which Garcia ties the ends of time together to create a wheel, and the casual voice with each he describes impossible moments-- a child born so beautiful that her very smell drives men to suicide, an ancient jungle in which a wooden battle ship rests, covered in bloody flowers and golden salamanders, blanketing all those who come near in a suffocatingly inexplicable sadness-- earned him the title of the father of magical realism.  When interviewed about the ingenuity with which he wove the magical and the real, the ancient and the modern, he replied simply that these were the ways his grandmother always told family stories to him.  This to me embodies the exact anachronistic, "out-of-fashion"-ness that makes an art "in" according to Agamben.

There are many ways in which I hope that my work and writing pays homage to or is noticeably influenced by the writer, but more important to me, I feel that I've found a contemporary because even beyond my own creative output and art and what-have-you, I feel that I've found a kindred spirit of sorts, someone who affirms many of my own beliefs and life experiences with an old voice.  The connection I feel to Marquez each time I pore over his work is one I think is best described by Carl Sagan when he said:

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”

I am paranoid about citing artistic influences/inspirations, at least during this period of my body of work, because what I am currently focusing on is personal process and projecting my particular psychology by following my own arbitrary rules. I am experimenting with blinders and tunnel vision. Inspiration is everywhere and influence unavoidable—artworks, by nature, cannot exist in a vacuum (I believe in Danto's Artworld)—and all artists subconsciously and/or consciously incorporate their found aesthetic ideals into their work. So, of course, I could write about Mark Rothko and his focus on color and play with flatness; or Jackson Pollock and his degradation of the canvas and what is means to create depth; or Gerhard Richter and repetition and the impossibility of perfect replication; or Frida Kahlo and femininity, gender roles, sexuality, and the deformation of the body; or Brian Driscoll and art about Pop Art and the necessity of  intellectual elitism in the Artworld... However, it is very important to me, in this imaginary moment, that I do not seek out the phenomenon of influence. It will happen naturally, but I do not want to trap myself in self-created box by trying to pin down/define the natural. How can I situate myself among my contemporaries when I do not yet know who I am, or who I want to become, much less where I am in proximity to others?

For the purpose of this assignment, I will say that Howard Roark is my contemporary. Perhaps some of you will recall Ayn Rand's “fountainhead” of individualism, the architect who stood in solidarity at the front lines of the battle against collectivism. Roark's architecture is the natural, self-evident thrust from specific location, and his artistic will is uncompromising. Although Roark admired Henry Cameron, a predecessor of his who helped spark the fire of anti-secondhand architecture, I find it poignant that Roark never spoke of him as an influence or inspiration. I would like to relate to the aforementioned artists in a similar fashion. I would like to talk about Rothko, Pollock, Richter, etc. without needing to qualify them under any term like influence, inspiration, or contemporary. For this reason, I choose Howard Roark with the clause that I may think nothing of him when I wake up tomorrow.

Ideas as activities

-->

POINTEDNESS : This sphere will be a sharp point when it gets to the far corners of the room in your mind.

Yes painting

Cut Piece

Yoko Ono’s oeuvre spans across all media. Although her association with John Lennon overshadows her reputation as an artist, her work exudes both poignancy and playfulness. Her conceptually based works and performances activate viewers as participants. And while some of these contain(ed) social critique relevant to the political situation of the day, they also transmit a compelling sense of possibility and human agency. I admire how she makes art a viewpoint and not just a “thing.”  Although I am not exactly an artist, I resonate with her ethos of making ideas and then inviting people to inhabit them with their own sensibility. I like the idea her work gives to me—that art is a way of seeing and thinking and doing that is not exactly the same as mastering the material or producing a closed experience. I like the activity suggested by her work. I like the work the "viewer" gets to do in her work. When I make ideas, whether as physical entities or movements, I want them to engage both body and mind. I want to provoke activity and curiosity.

Sardine, Oranges and Contemporaries

In the 1960s, when poet Frank O’Hara worked at MoMA, he often spent his lunch breaks roaming the streets of midtown Manhattan, finding inspiration in the bustling city and its people and writing poems about his encounters.

Why I Am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

-Frank O'Hara

"With its use of the present tense and its offhanded delivery, "Why I Am Not a Painter" seems, at first glance, to tell a "true" story. One thinks, reading it, that O'Hara wrote a prose poem called "Oranges" at the same time that Goldberg painted Sardines, and that the conjunction is an accident. It turns out, however, that "Oranges" was written in 1949, when O'Hara was still a Harvard undergraduate, many years before he met Goldberg..." (http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ohara/painter.htm) 

Can we say that the work oranges and sardines are not contemporaries because they were temporally separated from one another? Giorgio Agamben explains that "Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it." In a way, his distortion makes Goldberg and O'Hara's working experience more contemporaneous.

Now in response to O'Hara, here I write Why I am not a poet: 

I meet O'Hara and sit down for a coke. He is writing his poems in his lunch break, having a bite off his sandwiches. It has words in it that reads, "it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience/ which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it." This is talking about painters. While he is taking in the marvelous experience and putting them into words, I look at her neck, her hair, and my paint brush dances. I am here now and the paint is still wet and it is breathing and moving. So here I am painting, but I would rather be a poet. And I call my painting WHAT IT IS. Frank's poem is called  HAVING A COKE WITH YOU. 

I can still have coke with Frank O'Hara in 1960's, just as he wrote Oranges when Goldberg painted Sardines. Moments like this happen everyday. 

Sorry about profuse use of quotation. 

"The Artworld" connection to "What is the Contemporary?"

While reading "What is the Contemporary?" by Giorgio Agamben, I could not help but make connections to Arthur Danto's philosophy of art elucidated in his essay, "The Artworld," which I think is one of the only philosophies that can qualify modern/contemporary fine art just as well as masterpieces of Post-Impressionism (arbitrary, kind of) and prior. This is especially evident in comparison to more traditional philosophies of art (Plato, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzche, Kant, etc.) Basically, Danto's theory is that for something to enter the Artworld—to be an artwork—it must reference itself in reference to other artworks. (It is important to understand that this reference is not necessarily intentional, but that is a finer point...) It is a philosophy that opposes definitions that rely on any physical property. The Artworld is this imaginary space that is not populated by people—rather, it is populated by things that get into it by being talked about being in it. There is a problem of infinite regress—what was the original artwork?—but Danto's theory is unique because it can be more inclusive by taking away the artist and any physical qualification, and also more exclusive in its referential demand, indirectly supporting the existence of a separation between fine art and craft. Examples where I thought Agamben intersected with Danto:

Both this distancing and nearness, which define contemporariness, have their foundation in this proximity to the origin that nowhere pulses with more force than in the present. (Agamben 50)

What remains unlived therefore is incessantly sucked back toward the origin, without ever being able to reach it. The present is nothing other than this unlived element in everything that is lived. That which impedes access to the present is precisely the mass of what for some reason (its traumatic character, its excessive nearness) we have not managed to live. The attention to this “unlived” is the life of the contemporary. (Agamben 51)

Anyway, if you have not read Danto's essay, check out “The Artworld.” Also, in case you did not know, Arthur Danto was a professor at Columbia!

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid

The fashion sense of the general American population can be described as preppy; it is safe and uninspiring. New York Fashion Week is known primarily for the recurring sportswear turned out each season. As a young, American designer, this is a fact that has always bothered me. I did not want to fall into the trap of commercialism, thus I found inspiration in the architecture of Zaha Hadid.

Zaha Hadid is an Iraqi-British born architect. Her buildings are distinctly futuristic in their appearance, her goal to create transformative cultural, corporate, residential and other spaces that work in synchronicity with their surroundings. Hadid's style is characterized by the "powerful, curving forms of her elongated structures."

Whilst her buildings have futuristic qualities, they retain a sense of the organic as if nature has adapted to the unrelenting chaos of modern societies. Hadid's approach to design is inspiring. In my own work, I strive to evoke the same feelings of strength and power, whilst maintaining a modern elegance, that Hadid has mastered.

What is the Contemporary?



TONI MORRISON













I chose the above two pictures of the great Toni Morrison because to me they display the awesome power of time, and things possible. I am fascinated with people who have lived several decades and the knowledge they are able to offer about life. What to hold dear? What will not matter at the end of our journey? Toni Morrison has written ten novels over the span of her career. Her ability recapture places in the time and its people, to tell a compelling story has earned her several writing honors, including the Nobel Prize.

Morrison says: "After I finished The Bluest Eye, [her first novel] which took me five years to write, I went into a long period of...not deep depression but a kind of melancholy. Then I had another idea for a book, Sula, where I was trying to write about real friendship between women—and the whole world came alive again. Everything I saw or did was potentially data, a word or a sound or something for the book, and then I really realized that for me writing meant having something coherent in the world. And that feels like...not exactly what I was born for, it's more the thing that holds me in the world in healthy relationship, with language, with people, bits of everything filter down, and I can stay here. Everything I see or do, the weather and the water, buildings...everything actual is an advantage when I am writing. It is like a menu, or a giant tool box, and I can pick and choose what I want. When I am not writing, or more important, when I have nothing on my mind for a book, then I see chaos, confusion, disorder.”

Though I cannot ever imagine creating the body of work she has, I relate to Morrison’s take on the world and writing. Writing keeps me engaged with the world. It is how I relate to and make sense of all things. When I am not working on a writing project, I feel a palpable disconnect with the world. I know now without doubt that I am a writer. But, I wish I was a lot more patient and appreciative of process it took to discover this.

Some years ago I felt compelled to start a novel. I would write a bit, leave it and return to it at a later date. I wrote without knowing the source of the words, which formed a language of a people and a place. Everything around me was a source of inspiration, a character, or a detail that moved the story forward. Then one summer, I put everything aside and I just wrote. I just went along with the story. At the same time my writer friends and I questioned the purpose behind the work we were doing and when would all end because it felt like we were writing these books forever. Then one afternoon, nearing the end of that summer, a woman I had never met, told me a piece of her life story, and also revealed the true title of the novel I was working on. But this was a dream. Just a dream that I woke up angry from because I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. My writer friends thought I was lucky to have such a dream. I thought different. A few months later, I put the novel aside. A year later, I just happen to be having a conversation with my uncle, who tells me a few details about his mother, my grandmother, who died before I was born. Those details matched the ones the woman in the dream told me and wanted me to write down. But I had already segued into screenwriting…