Prompt 7: MY PSYCHIC ATLAS

Kerstin Bratsch is a New York and German based artist who works in painting, sculpture, installation, design and performance. Her practice is as much about making an exhibition - designing and installing an exhibition as a project -- as it is about creating individual works.

Bratsch received her MFA from Columbia in 2007. While at Columbia she wrote an artists statement titled "My Psychic Atlas" which probes and distills what is closest to her in her work - and asks the very tough question of herself in her practice - what is it that I really care about and commit myself to as an artist? 

Read Kerstin's Psychic Atlas here. 

For Prompt 7, write your own Psychic Atlas. This can be in list form, as Kerstin Bratsch did - or in paragraph form, or script, or whatever road the project takes you. The important thing to focus on is the question: between me and me, what is my work? 

Prompt #6

I'm sorry this is late--I had to wait for my friend to send me these files and he took longer than planned!

First and foremost, as you know, I am a visual thinker. Music doesn't make much sense to me. A completely invisible world of senses? How is that possible??? I talk about this a lot with one of my best friends, who is an acoustic thinker. The comments he makes about the way things sound are always so surprising and funny to me because if he hadn't have been there, I would have missed it. For example, one time we were cooking and when I dropped the fish on the pan, he said, "That sound is so hot." It was literally hot, but so not hot, i.e. very unattractive. Even though it's loud, I can't see it, so I don't notice it.

The first song is an unfinished piece he wrote based on journeys he and I have had together. What's crazy is that, because I know what he's referencing, I can understand the sound. When I listen to this song, my brain shuts off and I begin re-experiencing memories that I have stored in my mind's eye. When I say that my brain shuts off, I mean that I stop seeing. This is hard to articulate. I can't focus on anything--if someone were to wave their hand in front of my face I probably wouldn't notice. It feels like my brain is shutting off because I am normally so dependent on seeing. Try to listen to the song loud on high-quality speakers; you'll "see" how it makes your brain feel like it's melting. I really do think my friend is a genius.

The other song is something he sent me by accident when he was trying to send me the correct file twenty-two minutes ago, but it has a similar effect.

Find songs on SoundCloud

Prompt #6: When there is nothing to see, you look.

We often tend to take things for granted. Even the very environment that surrounds us is not something unusual. Our eyes swiftly move around, seeking to sense something sensational or outstanding; yet, by doing so, it is easy to miss the great detail that exists around us. For instance, I looked around my room, searching for something new. To my disappointment, there was nothing that captured my eye, or even moved my heart. At that moment, I decided to stop seeing, and to "look" at a particular thing. A silver lightbulb, which was illuminating with bright, shining light, was standing solidly on a desk. It did not move, yet this very stillness captured my attention; it was shining by itself, spreading light all around the room. Then, I looked at the window behind. The white, linear quality of the window was fresh and fascinating. There was great simplicity with the strictly linear lines of the window. I realized, that when I see something, I miss the hidden meaningful, interesting feature of the detail. When I look, there is a panorama of depth and excitement,

Prompt 6

When there is nothing to see....

In my sculpture 1 class with Jon Kessler--which is awesome, by the way--we did a class exercise where we had to face a blank white wall and choreograph some sort of expressive sequence of five movements that somehow involved the wall.  So as I stared at this blank wall I began to project own emotions and thoughts onto it.  I thought about my relationships with my loved ones, in particular.  I started punching, pushing and then caressing the wall.  We were told to repeat the sequence of movements on a loop until the exercise was over.  It was incredibly emotional, something I didn't expect when I was first told by the T.A. leading the exercise to dance with a blank wall. 

So, if we consider this wall to be "nothing," then in a certain way it has the potential to be everything. 

 After repeating my sequence of movements over and over again, I finally had some feeling of catharsis, though I was left with even more thoughts and and emotional hangover after the exercise.
At some point I began to appreciate the texture of the wall, the way light was refracted off of the uneven surface.  This sparked my imagination a bit.  I started imagining moon craters and interesting patterns.  Kind of reminded me of one of those Lee Bontecou sculptures.  All of a sudden the wall had new meaning.

I think this way of seeing objects that are usually overlooked can apply to anything.  It's a way of seeing beauty in the world, in the tiniest details.  I'm going to try to get into the habit of doing this more often.  I remember coming home recently after a sort of crappy, down day.  I stopped midway up the staircase to the first floor and just sat for a while.  I noticed a small L-shaped metal support piece on the bottom of the staircase railing.  It was an emotional moment; I had never, ever noticed this one detail.  I imagine that most people hadn't.  Why would they? But the shadows and reflections on this little supporting piece, the way the light bounced off of it, the way that it hid halfway in the darkness of the shadow of the railing was so beautiful.  It spurred all sorts of thoughts and emotions in me.  To think that that sort of beauty is everywhere, even in what me might call "nothing" is inspiring. 

So I guess that that's the kind of stuff I see when I'm looking at nothing.

Prompt 6

My immediate response to the prompt was an internal transportation to the realm of my childhood where my mom was convinced my brother and I had no sense of "wow." The first time I had been scolded in this way occurred while we were scaling a steep slope during a trip to Aspen for a wedding. It was summer and I had been dragged from my luxurious routine of nothingness and swim team practice. I was entirely incapable of appreciating the natural beauty of my surroundings 1) because I defiantly didn't want to, I was being forced to hike against my will, and  2) I had not yet in my life spent a great deal of time divorced from nature (which impacts the way I appreciate it now). Whenever my brother and I "failed" to value our surroundings in some way, this phrase was invoked and our eye rolls loyally followed. 

Seeing and wanting or desire are so profoundly connected. You can "see the world in a grain of sand," as William Blake writes, or you can see a speck of the earth as insignificant as the plastic bag in the bin (which, conversely, to someone else, is worthy of prize). You can see the beauty of a natural aspen landscape, or the mountains can taunt you and your lack of free will, exaggerating the small beads of sweat that have unfortunately begun to fall from exercise. 

I am particularly fond of the quote because there is the obvious implication that there's always something to see, it's just a matter of looking. The verb "to look" lacks the thoughtful connotation that charges "to see." If a person is open to the possibility of seeing, the only necessary avenue is the eye. I think it is in large part from the desire to see that I decided to both take a year off from school and transfer. I felt that too much time had been spent with my head down, or in a cubicle... the classroom can be stifling. So, I hopped off the academic treadmill and embraced new environments, and continue to do so with renewed vigor. 

My personal reality has become one where there is always something to see, always something to learn, aways something to be valued (or deemed invaluable.. which is also a worthy appraisal for the self). My tendency to return to social media commentary is becoming tiresome, however, I do think that instagram can be viewed positively in regard to appreciation of what was already there. Though enhancement is a defining feature, I would venture to say that there is the possibility that before, people didn't realize the artistry of their breakfast or the way the light catches a particularly imposing office building. Maybe people are more in tune to their environment, seeking to be captured by what is already there and has always been there, but not noticed. This appraisal ignores so many other aspects of this "seeking," but I want to keep maintain my positive characterization. 

This post is a ramble, but I will follow up with some visuals! 

or...

A way to look something...

"What is the contemprorary ?"....Why I don't answer

« What is the justice ? » Socrates asked to an old judge.

The old man couldn't answer clearly. He thought that he was judge but, in fact, by ignorance, he had never really been a judge. How being a judge without a clear philosophical Idea about the justice ?!

Finally, the old man felt that his whole life was meaningless !

Me, I make "contemporary art"...yeah...I'm almost sure.

But - please - don't question me about it. 

I prefer to keep the mystery. 

Coming Home, Michigan Version

When I first read of our assignment, based on Charline von Heyl's epiphany in Marfa, my first thought was, Bad timing! In a few weeks, I am taking my first trip to Montana. I wanted a glamorous, super-charged outdoorsy setting in which to "see nothing" too. Something like this:

Well, ha! I spent the weekend instead in suburban Detroit, where my cousin was getting married. Not only was it a typically bitter, gray day in Detroit but even my location there, about a half-hour from the idyllic, leafy neighborhoods of my youth, was an aesthetic bummer. A condo development of repetitive blandness that looks like this:

Talk about nothing to see. Even the garden at this home, usually a riot of color and creativity, was a vision of cut-down depression in anticipation of cold, sunless winter:

The last thing I wanted to do was start poking around this uninspired landscape in the Arctic cold. Then, the Charline von Heyl thing started happening. The cold invigorated me. So did the mere fact, as is typical for me, of being outside. I hadn't been in Michigan during autumn in years, and I started to remember, visually and aromatically, my home state's omnipresent natural wonder (among, admittedly, some fairly dreary development). The casual splendor of trees like this, for example:

I found pinecones so freshly fallen that the sap clustered all over my hands, leaving such a distinct pine scent that I felt transported, first to my school's nature center where we tapped trees each fall for syrup, and then to my childhood home where my brothers and I spent all of our time in the wooded ravine out back, no matter the season. The ground on which I ran, hid, fooled around, buried various dead critters in bizarre takes on Jewish funerals, it looked, smelled and crunched under my feet just like this backyard did:

Soon, everything looked amazing. A cluster of brittle twigs like a sea urchin:

A starburst of fallen trees whose single arcing branch transforms the thing into a hideout:

A hole that reminds me of Lee Bontecou, sigh:

Naturally, as I looked deliberately at the rich foliage of spring and summer dead on the ground, in picturesque heaps in advance of next year's bounty, thoughts of the cycle of life took over. This is when things get heavy.

I circle to the front of the condo, inexplicably really, since I no longer want to be indoors. Outside is free and fresh. I am cherishing being outside at home, a luxury that does not exist for me in Manhattan.

I come upon this little totem thing:

I have no idea why it is there, what my host means by it. I have seen it at this home many times, and I always think of it condescendingly as a white person's attempt to do something Japanesey, even though I have no idea whether the Japanese do anything like this in their gardens. This time -- because I am looking so closely at nothing! -- I see a companion to the Jewish cemetery ritual of placing a stone on the tombstone of a loved one. It's a ritual I look upon fondly even though I believe burial sucks.

I think of my brother, whose grave I only visit when I am at another funeral or unveiling at the same cemetery. I hate going there, seeing how he is dead in a box in the ground, a teenager who must be bored to death - ha! - surrounded by old people from our family (although I would wager that my dad's arrival made things better for my brother, though worse for me). I don't cry, I just think of him, grateful that this assignment made me do so in the context of nature, the outdoors and art, while I am alone. Grateful also that my own post-life instructions comprise the anti-Jewish rite of cremation, organ donation and a ceremonial scattering of whatever bits are left in the waters off Tel Aviv Beach. (You have probably thought of these things, too, if you, like me, have lost 40 percent of your immediate family by this point.)

That evening, I go to my cousin's wedding, the whole point of my trip. There is so much to see.

Isn't that leopard tail something else? The party was packed with bandage dresses, aggressive eye makeup and ironed-down hair, an attempt to control Jewfros run amuck. I reprised my role, taken up at my cousin's sister's wedding, of underground paparazzo.

Amid all the distraction, a family friend came to find me. Her sons were friends of my brother's in Hebrew school, which means they got in lots of trouble together (that's what it means for all good Jews). She told me that her sons, all these years later, still speak of my brother. As if on cue, they walked over and told me a story. I cried, grateful that my totally awesome brother hasn't been forgotten.

So where does that leave me? Besides really off-track? I brought home three fragrant pinecones and a pile of red leaves.

I am going to document their decline as a reminder that a project about my brother is long overdue.

My contemporary

I would prefer not to choose a contemporary.  I really aspire to be a contemporary of all artists who's work I come across, to be able to synthesize different references to their work consciously or unconsciously, while still managing to hopefully remain somewhat naive and not slowed down by any of my own possible preconceived notions about what is good or bad art.  I'd like to remain an intuitive and expressive worker who can take inspiration from work from any period of art history.  Every art piece, I think, is timeless, regardless of how strongly tied the work is to the social and historical context in which it was created.  I have found that every work of art that I see has something to teach me. This concept of periods and movements within art history is fascinating and valuable, but I'm not sure that it has any relevance to my vision of how I would like to make art in the future.

I can definitely think of current artists who's work I like and am inspired by, but I consider all of them contemporaries.

If I had to choose a contemporary, I might choose the person or people who did the cave paintings at Lascaux.


I like that the Lascaux cave paintings are pure and at the same time deep, highly expressive, thoughtful, and incredibly human.  There is something timelessly artistic and expressive about the paintings that I think embodies the human desire to create art. 


Take something, do something to it, do something to it again.  Take a bunch of things, smash 'em together, do something to 'em, do something to 'em again.  It's fucking fun.  I aspire to smash a bunch of things together.  I hope that one day someone might smash the things that I've smashed together and done something to together with the things that  someone else has smashed together and done something to.  It's like baby making, I guess.

Prompt #5: My Contemporary

My contemporary artist would undoubtably be Damien Hirst. I first encountered his work in my art history class in high school; I was shocked at that time to learn that this artist used dead animals in his works. I simply thought it was overly grotesque for someone to employ such method. Never have I thought that art could be so disgusting. Yet, this particular trait makes Hirst the "contemporary artist," one who, according to the text, "perceive[s] the darkness if the present." (46). Hirst boldly portrays death itself, as well as the vanity of the world. I think it is crucial for a person to contemplate about his death or his end of time, so that he can live the present at his fullest. I have learned that by realizing and actualizing my own death, I was able to be more bold and adventurous in what I do, since death is the single most uncomfortable truth that all men have to face. In fact, knowing death allowed me to cherish the present, and thankful for all that is given today. Damien Hirst, an artist who speaks of death in the midst of the living world, is the contemporary artist who represents "the beam of darkness that comes from his own time." (45)

When there is nothing to see...I make word painting

Today my entire flat was subject to me bemoaning where my art practice as become. Cries of "I used to be a painter" and now I am reduced to making childhood crafts (paper mache has taken over my life). But, to answer the prompt when there is nothing to see I cannot paint. I paint what I see. Currently I have been trying to play more with abstraction and form and concepts as opposed to technical skills. Then I had the best response ever to my lament - Emily you're a painter just say it maybe you are painting with words. Light bulb. I had been using words in my work as meaning but not as a tool for creation of line. It hadn't occurred to me to look at these forms. Really look at them. It was just words on a page after all...nothing special nothing new. But when I studied them more carefully and broke down the forms themselves I was able to push the concepts further that I had been playing with all along but in a more visually pretty way. This is just the beginning of where this is going. Simply the start of a formal breakdown one pattern of the many I will make I think...or I might make my paper mache monsters who know. Oh and I put in a painting just so you could see. For reference.

Look at all the detail...oooo

You can take the girl out of the drapery study but never the drapery study out of the girl...

Oh and on a side note I think there is a monster in my studio and I am worried it is going to come alive a la Audrey 2....

Prompt 6: There's nothing to see, so you look

Charline von Heyl, "Wall at WAM" mural, Worcester Art Museum, 2011

The Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts has a commissioning mural program. They invite artists to create a mural for their 67 x 17 foot wall in one of the primary entry spaces. It's a rotating commission program (the work does not stay permanently installed) and most artists who are invited to participate create an image that is digitally printed and hung much like billboard signs around the city.

When Charline von Heyl was invited in 2011, she thought - I'm a painter and I've been invited to paint a mural - so I'm going to paint it. And she did:

The drawing she made as a sketch for the mural came from a series of drawings she worked on while living in Marfa, Texas. In a talk at WAM on her process, she described spending long hours sitting in the prairie in Texas where there really is "nothing to look at" -- just grasses and large, empty sky. And so, when there is "nothing to see, you LOOK -- you really look at something." In shifting her focus to the minuscule nothing that was around her, she noticed "critters"- Texas bugs and crawly things, and began to draw them in all their awkward spindly legs and motion:

Charline von Heyl, Sketch for Wall at WAM (detail), 2010, ink and wax-crayon on paper, 19 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery

For Prompt 6, respond to von Heyl's phrase, "There's nothing to see, so you look." Shift your vision, use the environment around you (inside or outside) and respond either visually, or with words, or of course, with both... 

Post 5: Contemporary

        In reading the article and contemplating what it means to be contemporary, I quickly found myself feeling as though for me, this connection is not with a single artist, idea or thing. It is that collection of visual references that are so deeply embedded in my unconscious, those manifest motifs, that are my contemporary. As I knew (but was profoundly confronted with visually during the presentations), I have a very specific personal aesthetic that is intensely linked to who I am. 

The article quickly conjured Baudelaire's Dandy, the man who is at once a part of and apart from his age. I acknowledge that I am a product of the technological era. I consume images and construct identities with vigor, but, like the dandy perhaps, or the contemporary, I am aware of this on some level. I feel very connected to the idea of the "shattering, as well as of the welding, of the age's vertebrae." I've always had interests that "compete" in the eyes of the other. I, like everyone really, am not defined by a singular passion. Thus, being at once shattered and welded resonates with me, despite the tension that it may arouse in those that feel the need to appraise and classify people. 

It is from this place that my contemporary becomes, at once, all that my inner eye connects to. The sum of these elements, the broken whole, is what inspires me- it is what makes me excited and what drives me towards creative industries (the fact that fashion was not a key component in my presentation two was a self-crime.. it is, undoubtedly, one of my primary interests and something I have engaged with a lot in my spare time and summers). 

      The images I include are from my pinterest boards. It is on these small morsels that my eye often feasts, frivolous? To some perhaps, but I've recently realized just how relative frivolity and excess are. I enjoy the image generating world we live in. Does it sometimes overwhelm and drive me towards fantasies of empty fields and solitude? Of course. 

Sorry--Addendum!

I'm sorry that I am making a second post, but I was sitting here thinking about Kusama, when I realized I was conflating an image of her that I once saw and a recent self-portrait I took for my photo class. I think the comparison is applicable. The first one is Kusama, the second one is me.

My Contemporary

I grew up near the Whitney Museum on 75th street and attended the Biennial since I was a small child. As you can imagine, I understood little. My parents love telling the story of how, in the installation set up like a kitchen/dining area that had been destroyed by the artist, I responded, "What a mess!" Things changed in 2004, when I was ten. I stepped into Yayoi Kusama's Fireflies On The Water, and began to understand what art was all about. The few moments I had to myself in that room were the closest to magic I had ever come. I understood genius for the first time, and asked myself a question I would continue to ask myself every time I saw a brilliant art piece for the rest of my life: “How the fuck did he/she come up with that?”

I was not yet at an age where I knew to go home and conduct an extensive study of the artist. In fact, I promptly forgot the artist’s name. All I had was that image of the infinite lights over the water, the feeling of being suspended in outer space, alone with my own quiet reflection.

Two summers ago, Fireflies On The Water returned to the Whitney in a Yayoi Kusama retrospective. I didn’t mind that the wait was too long to see it again; Kusama’s other work was so beautiful that the one experience was all I needed. The exhibit was life-changing. Here, I thought, is one woman who truly gets how I feel.

Our artwork doesn’t look similar aside from the fact that we are both afraid of phalli, for reasons I won’t describe here. A past TA once told me the recipe to creating great art was to make something giant. If you can’t make it giant, make it small and repeat it as many times as you can. If you can’t repeat it, paint it red. The best is to do all three. In order to portray her fear of phalli, I think she tended towards the “repeat” and “red” category, whereas I tend towards the “make it big” (or at least four feet tall) category.

What I also find seducing about Kusama is that she has struggled with mental illness her entire life. She has had hallucinations and panic attacks as long as she can remember, which have informed much of her work. As a synesthete and (not jokingly) crazy person (I also won’t go into this here), it is comforting to know that the things I see can be turned into something mesmerizing and beautiful, or so unsettling that we are forced to call it beautiful.

There are certain aspects of her work that I feel like I only understand because I am part Japanese. Her parents tended a seedling nursery and you can see how the young plants infested her imagination like parasites.

There is something sterile about Japanese culture that ultimately is a breeding ground for fears of contamination and infection. My mother was always a “germophobe” and I have been very “OCD” about germs my entire life.

The thought that I could be touching something gross gave me a gut-wrenching visceral reaction. A lot of the time I have to repress my feelings of disgust and fear of contamination. (Compare my sculpture with what a germ looks like under a microscope...)

Kusama’s obsession with contamination and spread is somehow linked to her fear of phalli and thus sex. The phalli grow from her furniture like an overgrown garden, and her Infinity Nets spread out like an explosion of seeds.

There is this sense of the out-of-control spread and growth leads to morphing, even ‘anthropomorphing.’

There is much of her work that I don’t necessarily connect with as much, such as her performance art pieces. We certainly aren’t the same person, and we live in very different times. Still, when I think of which artist inspires me the most, and which one I want to be most like, I always think of Yayoi Kusama first.

My Eleanor, My Self

It feels strange, and not a little hubristic, to name Eleanor Antin as my "contemporary". At age 78, she is a major, accomplished artist who delves deep into feminism, identity, racism, ethnicity, narrative and more. Antin was breaking all kinds of taboos when I was learning handwriting in elementary school. What's more, she was doing these things when she was just a bit older than I am now.

I suppose I feel more comfortable saying I *aspire* to be something like Eleanor Antin. That she is a  big-time source of inspiration at the moment. That she was the person in my head when I was creating my Golem video. (More on that further down.)

When I was in the stacks at Avery, I spent a lot of time looking for a contemporary other than Eleanor Antin. It seemed a little too easy, maybe brown-nosey too, to cite an artist introduced to me on the second day of class. Try as I might, I couldn't get her out of my head. Every book I paged through left me wanting to track down the single book on Antin owned by Avery, which another student clearly had a lock on: I never got my hands on it.

So I returned to Emily Liebert's exhibition at the Wallach and took these three pictures (among many others), one from the King series, one from "The Nurse and the Hijackers" series, and one from the most obviously Jewish piece, the film made by the make-believe Jewish émigré Yevgeny Antinov.

In my two viewings of the exhibition, and also the "Art21" episode on Antin, I am struck by how much I have in common with her (again, this feels like a hubristic and strange thing to write): Jewish, feminist, storyteller, politically concerned. Like Antin, I am interested in work that is autobiographical, funny, outrageous, theatrical, crude in aesthetic; work that comments on present-day situations in a way in which hardcore beliefs come across with humor and way more subtlety than a sledgehammer.

Unlike me: Antin can really draw. She has the chutzpah to take on race. She lives in Southern California whereas I only *fantasize* about going West (sigh).

[More after the jump.]

I had never considering making a video until I saw Antin's decidedly lo-tech "The Nurse and the Hijackers" of 1979. Among other things, it demonstrated that my kitchen could work just fine as a studio and my props could be made entirely from art supplies I happened to have around the house. Moreover, the unambiguous presence of Antin (see her hand, lower right) gave me permission to do the same when my own paper dolls needed to move or speak. I am struck by the extent of the impact of that viewing. Now I am considering a video class next semester, as it appears to be an ideal narrative form for me. [More after the jump.]

In the Art21 segment, Antin observes that she tends to see the funny side of things. So do I. She relates this trait to her Judaism. I don't know if I would go that far with it, but I identify strongly as a secular Jew and this informs my creative process, my perspective, the voices in my head (so relieved to have permission to admit to their presence -- thanks, Mary and Michael Berryhill!). In my writing I tend to Jewish humor, and I am attracted to Antin's parody film of shtetl life, as that was the life of my grandmother and other relatives, and therefore crucial to my history.

Since reading Giorgio Agaman's piece, "What Is the Contemporary?," I have been thinking of his quotation of Nietzsche, that relevance comes from "disconnection, an out-of-jointness" with one's epoch. I am not sure whether that is true, or whether I believe it. But let's say for a moment that it is. To me, Antin's work appears echt-'70s -- political, feminist, muscular, always keeping it real. Before reading Agaman, I would have assumed the same for her personally. Agaman would disagree. On November 9, I am going to see for myself, when Antin speaks at the Wallach Gallery. At this point, my guess is that she is a person who knows how to move with the times -- perhaps while being not quite "of" them -- as she keeps a keen eye on her surroundings. To me, that is the definition not only of an artist but also of youthfulness. And maybe contemporariness.