"When you're healed..."

This week in my Art 111 class we had two readings from our book, Conversations before the End of Time.  We looked at two different conversations.  The first conversation the author, Suzi Gablik, had was with James Hillman.  Now James Hillman is interesting because, first of all, he is a theorist of the archetypal psychology movement.  And second of all, he likes to practice therapy, but he doesn’t believe in it.  When I first read that he didn’t believe in what he studies, it kind of made me feel like it was a little pointless to study it.  Why develop your life around something you don’t believe in?  That seems a little silly.  But the real reason is that he wants to transform the ways of therapists.  He wants to make is less about the individual and more about the “communal environment.”  And Gablik makes the point that this could be related to art in society right now.  Art could be less about the individual and more about the immediate environment.  The thoughts that came up were interesting.  They talked about the idea of healing the individual will ultimately heal the environment.  Hillman says that he rejects that because “when you’re healed, send me a postcard” (p.184).  But really, all that talk about never being healed?  Come on!  People need to grow up and stop complaining!  I get it if you just got shot, or you have a terminal illness, or something in your life is actually wrong.  But if you don’t like the color of your hair or your mom grounded you, or your boyfriend dumped you…  Get over it!  It happens to everyone!  We all go through struggles in our own way, but ultimately, we are all really blessed!  I mean, who gets the opportunity to go to the University of Oregon?  On a large scale, not very many people.  Who all gets to take Art 111?  Not very many people get to.  We all choose where we are going to be, but we choose to be here, and that is very lucky for us.  These thoughts are making me realize that therapy really might be dumb.  I don’t think I really believe in it either.  I think it’s interesting to hear theories about how someone might deal with certain feelings and exploring that is fun.

                This makes me think about our speaker in class on Tuesday.  His name:  Professor Dan Powell.  He is a photographer and was a constructivist in the sense that he compiled his images together and also added to them with his own drawings or markings.  His pictures, at first glance, seemed like a lot of nothing to me.  But when he explained them, you could start to notice that they were telling a story.  It was a kind of stream of consciousness.  It was a way for him to deal with his own thoughts and feelings.  Later in his work he got sick of working the lab and started going out in nature and taking physical pictures of it.

                This relates to the second conversation we read that Gablik has with Carolyn Merchant who is an environmental historian.  Merchant believes that the world will heal itself over time and this is why:  “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 and make something else work” (p.243).  She continues on to say, “is may draw inspiration from other places, but these ideas will have to work in a context that is uniquely our own” (p.243).  This describes Powell’s work exactly!  He gets inspiration from the most random objects and makes it work in his own way!  I don’t know if it is just because that it’s the way his mind works.  But it seems to me now, that this all connects!

                The images captured in Powell’s work have everything to do with his mind process, which is very much Cartesian!  This process is related to how Hillman feels about therapy and art.  He ignores the idea of what art should do and asks; rather, what art should serve.  This allows the mind to think about it on a larger scale, a less self-serving scale.  Which is how Merchant believes the world will heal itself.  It will create something new from all of the previous states of the world that didn’t work.  People will recognize it and everyone will make a change when necessary.  This kind of change requires the world to be completely in tune with itself.  This deep, underlying behavior comes from the analytical psychology.  It’s recognizing something that you might not have noticed before.  But eventually, the world will get there.  One step at a time.

"The Sublime.."

In art class this week I became exposed to the ideas of modernism and postmodernism art.  I’m beginning to understand that the two are related, in the sense that postmodernism seems to have emerged from the movement of art that is called modernism.  It emerged from it to counteract with it.

                

        From the modernist perspective, we read a conversation from “Conversations before the End of Time” that Suzi Gablik had with Hilton Kramer.  As a modernist he seems to believe in the artist as a lone figure, struggling against society.  He believes that there is “a failure in the cultural world they (the artists) inhabit to reinforce the values that mean the most to them as aspiring artists” (p.111).  To me, this means that he thinks that artists today are lazy and are only choosing the road to success and not the road to the previous values of art.  The old values of art are becoming less and less attractive to today’s views on art.  It just doesn’t make sense to make a piece or art that doesn’t serve a purpose.  Kramer says “that art is at its best when it serves only itself and not some other purpose” (p.108).  What the heck does that mean?!  Art should always have a purpose, which is why humans create things, to serve a purpose!  It should always serve a purpose because it is being created by someone, in other words, someone is making something special.  They’re making something that is meaningful to them.  It is bettering them as individuals and ultimately society.  There was an interesting question that Gablik proposed: “should the state of the world in any way affect how we view art, and the role that it might play in our culture at this time” (p.115)?  Kramer says that he hopes that it doesn’t because he says that we might lose art if we focus on fixing all of the problems in the world.  I say, why can’t we have a compromise?  Art is important in the world, it is definitely something to study and understand.  It aids in development and the structure of society.  On another note, Kramer believes that popular culture has played a “tremendously destructive role” on art.  What I don’t get, is why?  What if popular culture is art?  Basically, his beliefs are very opposite mine.  The two views do coincide though, when they discuss technological discoveries.  Both sides believe in the innovation of technology and finding new ways to view life, like Darwin.

                This is where Jack Ryan comes in.  His span of work started as what seemed to be modernism, but has strayed into what could be defined as postmodernism.  He started off believing in the “sublime” of nature, which is modernism.  His later work shows that he is all about using a lot of different techniques of media to display multiple ways of viewing life.  He wants his audience to leave his work with new questions in their heads about life and the way it works.  He seems to be more interested in science and the Isaac Newton way of defining life.  This leads more towards postmodernism and the views of our next reading with Satish Kumar.

                Kumar believes in exactly that; the artist’s role is to create and to be the bridge for developing a sense of reverence.  He believes that healing yourself will heal the world because once everyone works together and does their part, it will transcend to the universe.  This is kind of like the idea of art being a personal experience.  I kind of feel like Kramer doesn’t believe that art serves that purpose.  I kind of feel like he just thinks that art is made for art and nothing else.  That seems a little elitist to me.  Art is a contribution to the world, like Kumar states.  He wants to integrate life and its trends into the art world.  He created a school where he is integrating the lifestyle of the home to greater inspire the students to innovative ways of thinking.  He is instilling in them habits now that will continue with them for forever; like recycling and to not be wasteful, to be more spiritual and thankful for the world around them.

                I certainly agree with Kumar more than Kramer.  Art shouldn’t be so elite, it should be for everyone and the whole world should get to experience it and hopefully someday it will become integrated in everyday life.

"If I had the answer to that, I'd put it in a bottle and I'd sell it."

“Seek not the ways of the men of old; seek instead what they sought.”

This week in my Art 111 class we were talking about art in an ecological sense.  Our reading was from our usual textbook (“Conversations Before the End of Time” by Suzi Gablik) and covered two different conversations.  The first conversation was with Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds.  These two people were practicing artists living in the city and decided to, one day, give away all of their work and take to nature.  I’m not just talking about camping out in your little tent and bringing your portable stove.  I’m talking about utilizing every single resource that nature has to offer.  Honestly, when I first started reading, I thought that it was absurd.  But then I started to realize that I identified with these two artists views exactly.  The first thing that struck me was when Dutton was sharing her view of art, and this totally hits the nail on the head.  “Living on the prairie, in the context of the larger nature that has nothing to do with culture, we slowly started living life as an art” (p.65).  Isn’t that amazing?  They actually believe that everything they achieve in day-to-day life is art!  Imagine going through your life and embracing every minute detail so intensely that all of your actions become purposeful art forms!  I mean, this is just incredible to me!  Olds continues on to say that the art that he made previously, in Los Angeles, was not art; and that it was actually a message to him, personally.  “It was like being shown visions that came in strange ways―they had to come through my hands” (p.66).  Once I read that, I was in shock.  I have been feeling a lot like that myself with my own drawings.  When someone asks me if I am an artist, I say no.  I know I should say yes, but I honestly don’t feel like I am.  I am skilled at drawing and I love to do it for myself, but I don’t make art.  My intentions are personal; it’s almost as if I’m drawing aimlessly.  I randomly have these visions, or inspiration, and the only way they can escape me and be completely understood, is through my hands.  But life, which makes sense to me, life is art!  Art should serve a purpose, it should be meaningful―intentional.  Humans need to treasure life like that.  Life is a gift and everything in it should be viewed as sacred.  “Daily life as a prayer is that everything is holy.  You are holy, everything around you is holy, rinsing a vegetable in the sink is holy” (p.68).  I am so glad that someone finally shares the same view as I do.  Of course I appreciate the so-called “art” in museums.  I mean, I’ve been to Musee D’Orsay and it’s magnificent!  But I can’t help but wonder what all of those artists intentions were.  Degas is one of my favorites, his work just takes my breath away; but who was he doing his work for?  What was his purpose?  It’s incredibly beautiful and for some reason you find yourself feeling privileged to be able to look at it.  But when I look at “art” I can’t shake the feeling that it might just be something that someone felt compelled to draw.  Well regardless of the intention, art should be treasured, I know that for sure.  Art is special and should always be held onto.  Just like life, art is a gift.  It is always beautiful and always changing.  “I’d heard for years that in other cultures the things that are now called art in this culture were part of daily life.  And this is the doorway into that” (p.76).  So that’s it, the answer is simple; combine life with art.  It’s funny how things always have a way of being connected.  So to carry on the idea of continuity, humans need to “Seek not the ways of the men of old; seek instead what they sought” (p.82).  That way, humanity will continue to evolve, but in innovative ways.

“If I had the answer to that, I’d put it in a bottle and I’d sell it.”

The next conversation my class looked at was one with Christopher Manes.  Manes seemed to believe that each organism was just as important as the next.  “Everything is just as advanced as everything else” (p.86).  This thought, I seem to agree with.  My boyfriend is a marine biologist and he has led me to strongly believe in the system of life.  Each organism sustains other organisms and so on.  Manes tells us that the world has developed into this idea that the man is the ultimate being and that everything else around us is insignificant and needs to be improved.  The world has grown to believe that “nature is this immense silence, this immense, irrational silence” (p.90).  He then tells us that this is completely wrong.  I believe this to an extent.  Yes, I think that this is wrong and that we need to pay more attention to the origin of our lives and that, ultimately, humans are animals.  But I think that we were made the way we were for a purpose.  We were made different than animals to cultivate life, to improve it.  We created light bulbs to help us see in the dark, that invention was supposed to be a great discovery.  Yes, it uses electricity and is bad for the environment, but we did these things to help make life easier for ourselves.  No, I don’t think its laziness, I think its genius.  To scientists and inventors, that is their “art.”  We’ve come a long way from what used to be very hard living.  We made things like dishwashers and dryers and cars for a purpose.  They are a luxury that the world is trying to make accessible for every human.  We are not better than anything by making these things; we are just simply trying to live in this world in comparison to everything else.  We are not taking over, or above anything.  As long as we continue to preserve nature and try and come up with eco-friendly ways to keep every invention that we adore, then life can be balanced.

In this way, art becomes super important.  Manes was saying that art needs to be geared more towards emphasizing nature.  Humans need to follow nature, and not the other way around.  My class had a faculty member, Colin Ives, come in and present his work on Tuesday.  His art was centered on the idea of eco-art.  Beside the fact that his work was incredible, his focus was to amplify the behavior of animals.  His most important finding was this:  that a lot of the behavior he observed in animals is almost identical to the behaviors of humans.  This was such an amazing discovery because I’ve never really thought about that before, and it is so true!  Another finding that I couldn’t ignore was when he was talking about his project with Kit Foxes.  Kit Foxes have developed almost in sync with humans.  As humans multiply, so do Kit Foxes.  These animals seem to have adapted to the urban lifestyle and are growing in strength because of it!  Scientists are actually using the urban population of Kit Foxes to repopulate their designated wildlife areas!  Even though humans need to be more sympathetic to nature, there is always a way for the two to live in harmony.

"I just want to make something look good."

                                                “I just want to make something look good.”

                This statement was made by a young woman in my ART 111 class today.  What shocked me was how simple this sentence seemed to be.  Art should be that simple because it dates back to the core of the universe.  In our reading from “Conversations Before the End of Time” by Suzi Gablik our class learned about the purpose of art and the origins of art.  The author writes her book through conversations with other artists.  In the section we read, the author talked to Ellen Dissanayake.  Ellen Dissanayake is an author and describes her theory of the purpose of art as “making special.”  Making special is an incredibly delicate way of describing what art is.  Honestly, I believe it’s a quite beautiful way of describing it.  Making could be an adjective of craft.  Our class defined craft as something someone creates for a function.  I believe this is true, but doesn’t everything you create ultimately have a destiny?  Isn’t there going to be a means for every object that is made?  I don’t know about you, but when I make something, I know that when I’m done with it, there is going to be a purpose for it.  When you make something special, you want there to be a purpose for it.  It is imbedded in human nature to want to share their creations with society.  Without sharing creations, there would be no community.

                “There is a great deal of confusion currently about where art fits into society, and what function it should serve.  In the modern era, art’s role was to challenge and disrupt by means of its ‘otherness’ and inaccessibility.  Today the question of ‘community’ is much debated―not only ‘what’ art is for, but ‘who’ art is for.  Eleanor Heartney summarized the turmoil in an essay called ‘Quality Control’ in the New Art Examiner recently:  ‘Do we want art that is harmonizing or disruptive?  Should it build bridges or shake us up?  Should it express a community or an individual vision?  Does art suffer when it is instilled with an agenda?  Does it lose something when it begins to approximate the models of social work and therapy?’”

                                                                -from “Conversations” page 39.

I believe that art is for everyone.  To me, this seems like an obvious answer.  I guess to society, it doesn’t seem so easy to answer.  Art is for everyone because that is its purpose.  This is where the role of the viewer becomes extremely important.  The role of the viewer is the purpose of response.  Art needs to be responded to, that is why it’s created.  As for the other questions, we want art of all kinds.  This is so because otherwise our world would be deprived of diversity.  The more diverse the community, the better the history and culture; this was why America was such a glorious destination.

As for the response of art, it is important because when something is created, there needs to be a viewer to evaluate its purpose.  The viewer decides what might be missing.

“Something is missing there.  Something rogue.  Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out.”

                                -Toni Morrison, Jazz

This quote was one of the many that our professor presented us with.  As this quote struck our professor, it seemed to pose an interesting mystery to me, as well.  This quote makes me believe that art is meant to be deciphered.  It doesn’t matter how that art is conveyed, it is always meant to be deciphered and discovered.  It is a behavior.

“But when you view art as a ‘behavior’ of making important things special, it seems quite evident that this is universal, even though every culture may not paint or sculpt or make installations.”

                                                                                -from “ Conversations” page 43

Art is meant to be accomplished.  Take our professor for example; her art has become a series of actions.  It is incredibly passionate and creative and exactly what art should be defined as.  She is becoming more a performance artist and has brought me to believe in the action as art.  Art can be in all aspects of life and shouldn’t be so elitist.  It is for everyone and definitely can emerge from any kind of behavior.  Art is completely universal and something that is necessary to life.  Every person wants to make something that looks good.  I honestly believe that no person wants to look bad.  It doesn’t matter what their definition of bad is, nobody wants to look it.  Everyone strives to create themselves every single day.  Everything you do has a purpose and will ultimately complete a destiny.  Every action you make and word you say is a part of who you are.  This is why I believe that all aspects of life, no matter what aspects life may entail, are beautiful.  Life is art to me, and everything in it with respect to its intention, is art.  I say intention because art is all about one’s intention.  You have to believe in it to create it, no matter how one is creating it.