Vitamins G-S and G.V. for my artistic soul

A wonderful thing about VCU is that while the challenges and intensity of the MFA program might weigh quite heavily on a young and idealistic art student, there are also so many opportunities to be inspired, invigorated, encouraged, and enlightened. This is why I'm in graduate school, bombarded from all sides with stuff to read and look at and listen to, discovering things I might never have found on my own. I feel like I'm in an information accelerator...this can be overwhelming and I must admit that I often feel stressed and off-balance, but maybe the high intensity serves its own purpose...a break-down of barriers, an overload of information, an escape from the comfort zone...will I leave here having grown more than I could imagine? I certainly hope so. Meanwhile, I will hang on, enjoying the ride through all of its ups and downs.
The catalyst for this warm and fuzzy graduate school moment (I must remember to read this one day at 3am when I am wondering why I thought not sleeping for 2 years would help my personal path as artist and human) was a recent lecture from art critic and VCU faculty member Gregory Volk, who was kind enough to visit my critique class and share a bit of his passion for the search of thoughtful, profound, dare I say existential contemporary art. His lecture employed the works of Francis Alys and Ayse Erkmen as examples for thinking outside the box, making art outside the studio, and moving beyond the art world into a universe of limitless opportunities for expression. Quoting Emerson, he emphasized that "art is the path of the creator to his work" and not the final product. This idea, and the connection of the visual artistic process to Emersonian principles in general, is an inspiring and empowering one. Art making is not about being serious, or serving up great profound truths to the masses below. Art is about the creative process...MY creative process...it's about respecting that journey, paying attention both inwardly and outwardly along the way. Like a walk through the woods, the joy lies not in the destination but the experience itself...the smells, the sounds, the thoughts that occur in that magical environment. This way of art making is a way of living, an embrace of wonder.
It's always so helpful when someone can illuminate an idea or value which is important to you, but might not yet be fully materialized in your own consciousness. I truly enjoyed Mr.Volk's obvious passion for literature, and the way in which it informed and enriched his experience of visual art. Though I love to read classic literature from America and elsewhere (Borges, Marques, and Lorca are among my favorites from abroad) and feel incomplete without a wonderful book on the table by my bed, I am ashamed to admit that I never consciously connected the profound beauty I experience when I read the words of these and many other authors, to their ability to teach me something about my own studio practice. And yet it is so obvious: I want to evoke the feeling I get from their words: I want to be a channel for that poetry, that profound beauty, that melancholy and ache. While listening to Mr.Volk's lecture, I realized that this connection I feel to literature is not only valid, but an important voice to listen for when walking along through the forest of my ideas, dreams, and ambitions. So it seems that 100 Years of Solitude might be an appropriate textbook for my artistic study. In addition, as Mr.Volk suggested, I will be breaking out my Emerson, my Whitman, my Dickenson, with fresh eyes and a new context. I think I will need a bigger nightstand.

Wonder and Numbers

During a recent trip to the MoMA I was able to visit the Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities exhibit, and ran across a modern cabinet of wonder by Mark Dion. This piece, called Cabinet, got me thinking about the relationship between the quantity of a certain object and its ability to interest us or inspire wonder. In Dion's cabinet, the curiosities are collected from an excavation of relatively unexciting building materials, everything from bricks to screws. But as I viewed the objects in their glass covered drawers, neatly organized in collections by item, they became more than simple materials that I understood as existing within the relm of the functinal and the everyday. The repetition of quantity, with unique variations from item to item, made these pieces worthy of display and contemplation. What is it about the repetition of a form that can inspire our curiosity? A bird floating on a current of air is something to notice. But 200 birds doing the same is something to wonder at. A lightbulb is something to appreciate, but 75,000 of them in Dr. Hugh Francis Hick's Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting is amazing. There is a lot of interesting psychology out there about collectors: part of it is the desire for order. But it's more than that: I am not a collector, yet I am in awe of anything normal taken out of context and in great quantity. In the same way that a large quantity of things which hold little value on their own gain intersest and value when grouped, sometimes things which are seen as highly valuable on their own will lose that value in quantity. This may be pure economics, but again, that can't be the whole explanation. When value hinges on rarity, wonderful things drop in esteem when we percieve that they may not be so rare. One example are the fruit-stone carvings that, in spite of the feat of their creation, they were so plentiful that every respectable wondercabinet had one, and were dismissed more than marvelled at. In my own work, I often find myself responding to something I've made with "this would be really interesting if there were 100 more!" Fortunately for me I don't necessarily carry out this compulsion, but now I do wonder, what do I make that holds power from being unique, and what would actually benefit from quantity?

Another theory of time

I wonder how long Einstein's Dreams really could have been: how many more theories of time might Alan Lightman have floating around in his head? I came up with one myself the other day: Time exists in multiple channels. It moves at different speeds and in varying numbers of separate occurences which develop off of one central channel. This diagram of time would look something like a bathtub full of bubbles: the main channel is the water in the tub, the time experienced constantly by a person's body, and bubbles that float up from the tub are the renegade channels, short existences that occur simultaneously with the main one but are not necessarily experienced at the same speed. These bubbles float up and out, separating themselves further and further from the main body of time until they finally pop, that channel of time then disintegrating back into the big tub, leaving you in your bubble bath with a feeling of having been somewhere else. I came up with this theory while daydreaming in my bathtub: I was thinking about an event that occurred a few days before while also staring at the tile in the shower, my mind running off to ponder the color and structure. These two separate but simultaneous thoughts then seemed to pop, and I was suddenly aware that I had mentally been off in space while still physically aware of the warm water and steam around me, the smell of bath salts. Had I not read this book I might have overlooked the moment, but instead I made a new theory! In this culture which opperates on many of the not-so-poetic-and-dreamy theories of time laid out in Einstien's Dreams, I find it comforting to imagine that time does not necessarily follow the ridgid structures we impose upon it, and it upon us. Beyond illuminating these constraints specifically related to time, Einsten is an exercise of questioning what is assumed to be proven fact, an exercise in utter abandonment to the imagination and appreciation of the secrets of our minds. As a graduate student in art school, I see this book as a reminder to view my work from as many different angles as I can, to keep asking "what if", to assume nothing and try everything. As a human being in a very stressful and exciting time in my life, I see this book as a lesson in recognizing and understanding the various relationships I have with time and how they might hurt or help me in maximizing the life I have. I plan on critically rereading this book in a few years...I wonder if I might interpret it differently when I am in a new set of circumstances. Until then, I will try to remember to think less literally and more imaginatively: maybe I will document a few more time theories of my own.