Frederico Garcia Lorca

A great poem is like vitamins for my soul. The way Lorca manipulates words is visceral, the connections he makes between images so strange yet so perfect...his poetry is like painting with language (incredibly beautiful in English and Spanish)...here's one that is particularly haunting, inspiring, etc. etc...In reading it I remember the true power of art:

Gacela X
De la huida
(Ghazal of the Flight)

I have often been lost on the sea
with my ear full of fresh-cut flowers,
with my tongue full of agony and love.
Often I have been lost on the sea,
as I am lost in the heart of certain children.

There is no one who can kiss
without feeling the smile of those without faces;
there is no one who can touch
an infant and forget the immobile skulls of horses.

Because roses search the forehead
for a hard landscape of bone,
and human hands have no more sense
than to mimic roots beneath the soil.

As I am lost in the heart of certain children,
I have often been lost on the sea.
Not knowing water, I keep looking
to be consumed in luminous death.

-F.G. Lorca

Who's in charge here???

After watching "The Beauty of Questions," I began thinking about Robert Irwin and what I could learn from him. He spoke so thoughtfully of his journey through art and life...he seemed able to step away from himself and analyze the developmental stages he went through artistically in order to come to the place where he finally felt that his work was communicating in the way he desired it to. It seems like he came upon an awful lot of resistance in his journey: people didn't know how to react to his work. It defied categorization and even enraged some people as he stripped the idea of a painting further and further away from physical object. I wonder if he always felt as sure of his vision as he did in the retrospective angle of the film. I wonder if there were times...and I remember from the film Irwin describing an opening for his work where a woman yelled at him to "stop it" immediately...when he doubted himself and the validity of his ideas. When he sold all his studio equipment and spent a year in the desert, was he searching for his reason for making, the truth behind it? I suppose that a big part of the reason (THE reason?) we make art is because we have something to say, whether or not it is understood may be irrelevant. But even so, it can't be denied that we make work for others to see, that we want someone to hear what we are saying. Irwin seems so sure of himself...maybe the reason that he resonates with me so much is that I am struggling to pinpoint why it is that I want to speak and what it is that I want to say, and the validity of this desire. The question is, how is that validity determined? Who is in charge of deciding if I am valid? Now everybody sees what Irwin doing when he stopped painting with paint, where he was going with the shadow thing...thus the film about him...but what about in the middle of his development when old ladies were yelling at him in galleries? So who can say in the moment what's right or wrong, good or bad? And why do I even care what others think? This is a constant debate in my head. But I do care, and a lot of times I don't feel so confident, so when I see things like "The Beauty of Questions" or read about someone like David Wilson and his Museum of Jurassic Technology I am recharged and inspired. Sometimes it doesn't matter who is in charge, who says what's art or a painting or a museum. What matters is the drive inside that must be obeyed despite external opposition. Trusting ourselves, questioning established parameters...let someone else figure it out later.

Some thought-provoking quotes from Robert Irwin:

"The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness."

"We have chosen that experience out of the realm of experiences to be defined as "art," because having this label it is given special attention. Perhaps this is all "art" means—this Frame of Mind."

"If that state of consciousness I keep talking about became, in a sense, the consciousness of society as a whole, if we really thought in those terms, and were really that aware, . . . really that sense-sophisticated, then our art would be an integral part of our society, and the artist as a separate discipline or art as a separate event would not exist."

art making as investigation

When is content and context given to a piece of artwork? Is it before the artist even begins the act of making, the catalyst for creation and the driving force behind the final product? Or can it be something that seeps in later, even beyond the artist's control? In my own experience it's been a little bit of both: I begin with a certain idea that I wish to wrap my head around through making, usually an observation about myself, and through the course of my project the idea morphs, expands- becomes something that is not about little me at all but about the larger "me" that is not unique, a shared experience among people in a more general sense. The making is an investigation, both into the "why" of a subject that burns in my brain, such as the flaws and tragic beauty of the human animal, as well as into the materials I am using to deal with that "why". Deep into the meat of such a work, the concept takes a back seat as I respond to texture, color, volume, quantity. My investigation turns to questions like, "What would happen if I made 100 of these? What does this weave structure feel like when it is loose and open versus closed? What if I added color?" At this point the work is much more intuitive, though I like to think the concepts are still floating around in the back of my mind, subconsciously influencing my response to the materials and the choices I make about them. Then after the last line is drawn and the last stitch is knotted off, something amazing happens. Not only has my original direction usually changed (often without my realizing it but finally having to admit to it...sometimes it's hard to let go of what you thought you were doing), but lurking in the work are completely new ideas that I didn't even know I was dealing with. I cannot take full credit for these things, but again I like to think that the contents of my brain can affect what I'm doing without me necessarily realizing it- ideas shaking around and bumping into each other up there, leaving all with traces of their collison. But art takes on it's own life once released to the wild and each pair of eyes that takes time to stop and think will invent their own meaning. In this way the piece keeps expanding, the investigation continues. I think I learn just as much about the questions I ask after the work is finished as when I am consciously searching for insight into the themes I investigate.

Things rolling around in my brain right now? Let's play stream of consciousness....people people people communication community war the tragedy of not recognizing our shared humanity complexity of language shared elements of all language unspoken language self destructive behavior isolation need for contact insides guts are all the same blood is all the same social structures popular culture influence of group individuality feeling different not really different personal space self imposed barriers social cues walls ........I could go on. So I guess the thing to do now is to keep thinking, keep wondering, keep investigating, keep storing these things in my brain and we'll see what bumps together.

some visuals:

Diary of a Monster

















alien language?


sign writing


















Bantu symbols

Beauty and wonder in the ritual of making

What drives us as artists and makers to do what we do? The repetitive actions and technical processes that I as a weaver understand as necessary to my creation of art may seem to some as mind-numbing, tedious, and even unnecessary. After a particularly labor-intensive day, I sometimes question my methods: why do I spend hours guiding hundreds of threads individually through my loom when I could just buy a piece of cloth? This care, this attention to the single units that are eventually swallowed into the entirety of the work, what purpose does it serve? Like many artists, part of it is related to compulsion: the performance and ritual of making a sculptural raw material like cloth feels as natural and necessary as breathing, it's something I must do to feel like myself. After reading Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, I found that there was one particular story that I kept returning to, and I realized that it spoke to me on this very level of artistic obsession. It's about a man named Hagop Sandaldijan, a sculptor who carved his work not out of blocks of marble but individual strands of human hair. In the book, Sandaldijan's son describes his process:

'He would wait until late at night,' Levon said, 'when we kids were in bed and the rumble from the nearby highways had subsided. Then he would hunch over his microscope and time his applications between heartbeats-- he was working at such an infinitesimal scale that he could recognize the stirings of his own pulse in the shudder of the instruments he was using.'

The act itself is a work of art, a ritualistic performance only for the maker: but what does it satisfy? I imagine this sculptor hunched intensely at his microscope, barely breathing, knowing the only evidence of his toil will be tiny marks in a strand of hair. Underlying this process is the search for an innermost essence or truth: that which might be seen through a microscope, between the pulse of one's own heart. In the irrationality of his work we catch a glimpse of living poetry, a testiment to purity and the human capacity for goodness, beauty beyond what words can articulate. This is the gift we are given as artists, makers, human beings. As I sit at my loom and pass lines of thread back and forth, trapping the evidence of my labor one strand at a time, I understand why Sandaldijan must perform his quiet ritual. In the rythm of my own hands, my breathing, and the soft rising and falling in this machine I conduct: I realize that I too am aware of my heartbeat.