I would like to start with a quote from Coco Fusco one of the artists conversations we had to read for the week, "I like to think of a productive relationship to society and to creating culture as being a back-and-forth kind of movement between going out into the world and learning about people, places and situations, and then going back and reflecting on them in the work that I do" (333).  Fusco talks about an interactive performance art piece most of the conversation and it was not until the end (till after reading that sentence) that I connected him with everyone else.  Suzi asks him if art is a waste of time because "the world is ending" and he responds the same way I think all the artists we've read and heard would, by simply saying art is the solution, art is the productive conversation we must all become and remain a part of in order to fix this world of chaos.

Over and over I say again, art lies within the rediscovery of what is and what comes out of that rediscovery, Fusco obviously feels the same way.  He looked to history to create a cage performance project that was show cased all over the world with radically different responses.  I loved the response from  the person on the Chicago ABC news that said, "I've been interested in Native Americans for a long time, but I've never seen this kind of tribe before.  This is really weird" (328).  That made me laugh.  Fusco relates to identity politics and advocated for native american minorities in his cage performance very much and wants to disassemble levels of culture just as I think our speaker this week Ron Graff does too.

Graff talked about his brutel hate for almost everything and his disspaointment of life, he was a crack up I really enjoyed what he had to say although it was hard to know what his heart was trying to say.  He said he began to despise realist paintings and drawings because he was no longer himself doing what his mind told him to do he became a commodity and began only serving people of high culture, who only wanted the art to enhance their wealthy apperance (not that he wanted to just give it away to people who didn't care about it but he no longer wanted to work for and support the higher status quo).  So he turned to abstract and illusionism and what he had once hated he now loved.  He spoke a quote that I think you can apply to all aspects of culture not just art, "I saw something I hated so I went home and tried to paint it myself and I didn't hate it anymore."  I think its about 'try it before you knock it' type deal.  Like when his friends told him his abstraction of art was destroying himself and everything he had worked to become, it was almost like they needed to get off their high horse of high culture and try something new, be apart of it, become active in the conversation and see what happens.


CONVERSATION.  Philosopher Arthur Danto was the over conversation we had to read, "I don't think anybody in the art world is able to function without other people being involved" (286).  Imitation, reproduction, rediscovery... both Graff and Danto talked about human connection needing to be a necessity in order to create art.  Graff simply came out and said that he would go to galleries then go home and copy it if he liked it, then alter it if need be and call it his own.  He become part of a productive process which could metaphorically be called a conversation.  I like Danto's idea of what it means to be a part of a community and he is totally right.  I come from a small town where teachers and parents would always talk all this bullshit about our responsibility as a member of this community, give me an effin break lets step back and talk about our responsibility to this world.  I hated everyone in that town we were not the same, I didn't want to be responsible for what they wanted to be responsible for.  I like the idea of us all just being interconnected between relationships we all individually have, which if we connect each relationship we would have this amazing web of interconnectivity = one big conversation!  Its all one in the same, language = art.  So get in where you fit in and start the conversation.

Rediscover the Dumpster

At the end of class tuesday Ty told us to look up two words: Cartesian and Jungian Analysis.  My understanding of Cartesian is as follows; that mind is separate from body just as I am separate from you and separate from this world, promotes western individualism and belief that science can provide answers to everything.  Jungian Analysis is the idea that the unconscious mind is a source of healing and development for the individual.  Individualism is the topic of the week, in the James Hillman conversation one sentence really stuck with me on page 188 when James defines Aesthesis as meaning to notice the world and my definition of aesthetics being a philosophy dealing with everything beautiful and everything art.  Connection of definitions-noticing the world is beautiful is artistic.  My photography teacher I had freshman year at an art school told me, "once you see the world through a lens, you finally see where you've been living, and tomorrow when you walk that same walk to school everyday you'll see trees you never saw before."  I believe this world is art and like I said in my last blog maybe its not about creating it but about discovering it.  Dan Powell was awesome and had super amazing work, I loved his visions with layering and using trash to make something beautiful.  He totally connected with the two conversations we read this week, in the Hillman conversation he says, "it rescued and made use of discarded materials."  Dan Powell did this in his early years of art physically and I think metaphorically in his later years of art.  Powell continually mentions his fascination with capturing human interaction with nature and human thought; capturing the intangible.  His early work deals with physically gathering trash (noticing his world) and then bringing it to his studio to create something aesthetically pleasing (discovering beauty) later on he decides he wants to take his camera out into the world and capture it, live it, be one with it.  He went outside of reasoning, Hillman and Merchant would approve, and looked to the world to give him art, he became enlightened with the idea that traveling this world looking at its physical history to find current cultural meaning was the best way to capture what art is, by rediscovering it over and over again.  I believe art is the process of rediscovering what was to know what is.  Like Merchant discussing art as participatory and about relationships with objects, nature, animals, humans, the world.  On page 236 Merchant creates this idea that transformation into this new world will be about reflection, support, encouragement and nurture, that through crisis and chaos a regrouping and reorganization will itself emerge and provide us with something new.  It is not us writing our story we are simply just a part of it, reading it as new everyday, we can't predict or solve with science to know the ending... we need to be humbled and realize were not in a domination race with nature but a partnership.  The quote that I loved the most from Merchant was, "It will arise out of our attempts to get away from the betrayals of the past, to see what has not worked and to try to make something else work... these ideas will have to work in a context that is uniquely our own."  Merchant's creativity lies in language and teaching as does Hillman and Powell's.  They all have a secret love affair with the beauty of language, and if art is beauty then I guess the conclusion is language and art are but the same thing!!  The old views of looking for solutions to chaos in the world was to find solutions through science, to be innovative and technologically dependent, those people who hold these views are stubborn, resource hunger and have an ugly relationship with over consumption.  It's the younger generations, our generations, that are learning and listening and understanding the connection between everything, "the world as a big giant conversation in which everybody is involved," the interconnectivity of the world is what has been ignored for far to long and the act of finally participating in this conversation is the most beautiful thing a person can do.  You don't need a paint brush, a camera, or a pencil to be an artist... you need language, conversation, and relationships with the world you live in, participation is art.  I think all three artists were dealing with this week want us to, like Hillman would say, turn away from the loyalty to the God of commodity and money, and search for the God the artist in the river is serving... whatever God that may be.

Fungus

A common thread that links all the conversations we've read thus far is biology, simple, plain to read, biology.  A biological need to make special, a biological behavior to act as hunter-gatherer, and a biological fact that our world depends more on fungus then the survival of human beings (Christopher Manes).  Were less useful for this planet than fungus yet we create computers smarter than we?  This worlds been turned upside down.  We strive not to make this world, this earth, a better more useful place rather we mystify away what place we really live on by creating on top of it sky scrappers and highways to hide the damage.  The guest speaker today Colin Ive's titled himself an Eco Artist, and that he was.  I really enjoyed his concept of starting with an animal like a opossum, an animal most people would cringe at the thought and not enjoy to see a picture of.  But when he showed us the videos he showed us what we would not normally look at or see, a opossum, another species, another living thing, because thats a common thing for us humans to do.. not notice other living things apparently.  Colin wanted to create multimedia video images of animals that were nocturnal and during his installations of his videos he would make them interactive with the audience just as if his audience was outside seeing this kit fox run and hide or mice scramble for food.  He created interaction between people and animals were interaction and understanding would not normally be found.  Much like the hope of Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds, Colin wanted to create understanding between man kind and wild life, to much of a lesser scale than Dutton and Olds but still the same hope that we can achieve a medium where we can live in peace and harmony.  To Dutton and Olds they realized that "culture doesn't matter at all in the great scope of the huge, grand earth"(64).   Our culture, something that continues to hold us back from being able to live side by side with every other species in this world.  Culture tells us we need money, TVs, cars, excessive food, refrigerators? (that one was a shock to me)... culture tells us we need everything, we need it now, we need to much of it and we are to never go without any of it!  But what is it?  It is a bunch of useless materials we've created in order to satisfy an evolving need for need.. if that makes any sense.  Dutton and Olds give up their arts lifestyles and become disgusted at the fact they were ever one because after they 'gave it all up' they got everything they ever needed, "your perception comes out of the landscape rather than at it,” (72).  Its only when your perception tells yourself your giving everything up that you believe you are.  After we realize that, we change.  Olds ends with this thought, "We can't assume what is comfortable for society, pick and choose.  You've got to do it all the way, or not at all.  Or we die" (83).  What Olds and Dutton don't know (or don't say) is that through this conversation and the biography of where they've been in life they have created art through a lifestyle.  They realized that art didn't need to be created but maybe looked for instead, like the deer footprints in the gravel or a sunset lighting up an infinite stretch of pure land.  Dutton no longer wanted to make symbols or paintings that stood for life, she wanted to live it instead, she wanted to break free from the cultural trance civilization is stuck in and wanted to learn something new… and live.  Like Dutton, Colin wanted too to help people break free from their cultural trance and normality too by providing interactive art that showed them either the effects of clear cutting (in a very clever way might I add) or the affect we directly have on salmon just trying to make it up stream.  Hopefully through interactive media and innovative ways to bring humans closer to the reality of nature and all its living things to be able to see our ghastly grotesque effects on them,  we can then realize were not the race that matters because if none of them are here, we wont be either.  Nature, nor animals, nor fungi, nor this world is fighting us… why do we continue to fight with all of them?

Artist expression of destruction

Ty showed us her journey through the art world the first week of ART111, it was an unconventional but totally acceptable and innovative way of creating expression.  She likes distortion and altering reality and presented us with work that had energy that audiences could feel.  Whether that energy hurt your stomach or got you motivated it definitely made everyone in the room feel something.  

I think that Ty’s work intertwines well with the introduction and first conversation that we had to read from Suzi Gablik’s book Conversations Before the End of Time.  Ty’s work is a prime example of where art is now and where it wasn’t so long ago.  Could you imagine walking into a church or museum with a giant screen of her doing push-ups till she passes out?  Sadly because of Western civilizations purist views of art they would of never let this be considered an art piece, it would have been looked at as inappropriate (mostly because she is a woman) and would be banished from religious like museums.  But today it is quite a different story.  Ty’s art represents the progress popular culture has made by denying the ability to give art definition or boundaries, art is no longer a commodity but a social engagement through aesthetics, it is a conversation.  The push-up video Ty showed us also tells a story similar to the one that Suzi tells us in the book, first I’ll tell Ty’s story (what I interpreted from it).  Here Ty is at the beginning of the video doing to her body what most anyone could do; a few push-ups.  Then it starts to hurt and you can hear the suffer and the pain, where logically most people stop… but no she keeps going and this vicious cycle where each push-up and each yelp of pain becomes louder, longer, and more destructive to her body but she keeps going and going and going.  The audience begins to think that she’s going to stop but instead she keeps building up this momentum of destruction… keeps exuding and abusing all the energy out of her body until BOOM, its over, its ended… There’s no more yelling, there’s no more breathing, there’s no more progress, there’s no more push-ups, there’s no more life—she passes out.  Is that not an artistic way of telling her audience, hey look at what I am doing to my body, is this not ultimately what we as a civilization are doing to our planet?  Just as Ty was abusing her body to create something we are constantly abusing our planet to create something too.  Ty created a momentum of destruction just as  civilization is too and just as Ty ignored the signs leading to her “death” are we not ignoring our planets signs of an ultimate apocalypse as well?  I think this is what the first conversation piece was about with Suzi and Ellen.  Art cannot stay the same and they both hope it won’t and that through our enlightenment of realization new art will emerge that show us more explicitly what we are doing to ourselves and to our earth, and that with this new radical ways of expression will come social change and no end to a story that would be cut short otherwise.  An art piece open to question, allowing conversation, creating new perspectives, and hopefully enlightening a culture so consumed in itself to get past preconceptions and evolve away from all this empty progress we've made to realize whats real; life and not the materials in it.