Process Blog #1
Process Blog
This has been an interesting summer in my studio. With my commitment to TransArt secured, I have been hard pressed to finish many of the large scale and community projects commissioned through The Chicago Mosaic School organization. They have been uniquely rewarding and with each project I’ve had the opportunity to work with several different artists collectively to create beautiful outcomes for previously drab public spaces. Creating collaborative work in the time of covid has been a very different experience than pre- pandemic. The thirst for physical, hands-on togetherness, to again work collectively for the greater good. has been amplified. I feel a great sense of gratitude to create with others in a studio again. Creating beauty from chaos. Reimagining materials to conform to a design. The touch of many hands working to create a beautiful, unified image.
In my personal practice I’ve been doing a lot of writing and drawing. This is my process, how I formulate ideas, hone visions and begin to plan to bring an idea into the world as a mosaic. Drawing shapes and figures and forms that are sensual and curvaceous and lush become tablets for detailed narratives that will be built of shards of broken incised drawn and written clay slabs set into mortar for my eternity. These forms and shapes are constructed and carved. Slabs are painted black and carved like a soft journal page. After firings, the clay pages are broken and words and section of drawings to complete the surface and story of the form. I will document these steps via time lapse photography to get a new perspective on the multiple choices I make in my specific practice of making. There are several steps which I will elaborate and document in my next post.
This summer I read “American Baby” by Gabrielle Glaser. It is a factual account of stolen, then adopted, babies, mainly newborns, in America in the 1950-1960’s. I was one of those stolen children, brokered through an adoption agency in Chicago. The book gutted me as I rarely have the opportunity to similarly relate my exceptional circumstances to others. The exploitive, mid-century adoption business was lucrative and fulfilled infertile couple’s dreams while crushing and damaging a generation of young, vulnerable women. My mother was one of those wounded souls that lost faith and hope and trust in the world only days after I was born and taken.
The concept of tearing and separation has long been a recurring theme throughout much of my work. Tearing and repairing. Pulling apart yet maybe pulling together. Organs stretching and distorting, as if to free itself from the other; wrestling with loss and survival and memory.
I am revisiting many of these drawings after reading Miriam Hirsch’s “The Generation of Post Memory”, which investigates art of the’ 2nd generation’-the children of Holocaust survivors. Post-Memory, the generation after ‘the memory’. We only remember because of the stories, images and behaviors. I agree and believe there is also a transmission of memory- of trauma, as Hirsch writes, “an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture… it is a structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience.” (p.6)
Reading Diary 9/21
On Art Criticism:
In Feldmans’ Model of Art Criticism, the four basic tenets of conducting a critique are describe, analyze, interpret and judge. Of the four, analysis may be the most challenging as it requires specific knowledge context for and of art (ie: composition, design).
Judith Leeman’s Observations on Form and Pattern of Critique recalled much of my undergraduate and graduate experiences in art school. The “firing squad” was the ‘tough love-tough skin’ approach to defending one’s work in an unsympathetic environment. Although at times unpleasant, I liken the experience as preparation for the big bad real world by putting one’s work out into an unforgiving and unpredictable environment. Through this rigorous exercise one might gain the strength and perspective to accept anything (critical or otherwise) or anyone that might come at the work. I tend togravitate towards an approach that encourages possibilities yet examines flaws as a constructive tool for learning and evolving as an artist.
The Room of Silence is an excellent video document that opens the door to those art school rooms where students experience marginalization of their work in critique and in class settings. If there is an unwillingness to discuss issues of identity, race or gender because it is uncomfortable, it seems that, in itself, presents an incredible opportunity to address the perspective and, importantly, the content of student work. Get the elephant out of that room; do orientations on critiques that are inclusive and sensitive to diversity so artists can discuss their work without feeling disparaged.
In Sherry Barrett’s essay on “Criticising Art’ there are a plethora of categorizations and criteria for critiquing, observing, and judging an artworks. There are many good arguments here in support of critical arguments that defend and/ or interpreting an artwork to persuade their readers to see the work as they do. Understanding an artist's intention can be separate and different from descriptions and interpretations. Some criticisms are eloquent and articulate and are written to provide insights into a work while alternatively some may choose to leave those meanings in the eyes of the beholder. I personally enjoy gaining insight looking through my own work through a direct and new encounter between viewer/critic and the work before them. When there is a connection, art is empowered to fill a void between the observer artist and the world. Personal connections and interpretations may not always be communal. Without background and biographical information about the artist, the viewer can be reactive to the work directly.
Is Art always about something? I love this bit by Nelson Goodman and Arthur Danto (p.3) on the principle that “a work of art is an expressive object made by a person and that unlike a tree or a rock, for example it is about something.” Artworks demand to be not just described but interpreted. Some artists are eloquent and articulate and provide writing to provide insights into their work while others may choose to leave meanings mysterious and leave to the viewer to bring their own context to it.
Often the interpretation reveals more about the critic than the art itself. And as in Kurasowa’s film, “Rashomon” - the perspectives of the person looking - a witness viewer, or critic, can be completely different but all can be true.The artist's intention can be separate and different from descriptions and interpretations.
I agree Biographical information does help to give a bigger picture of a creation that is relevant to the work. “Artists should not be limited to their past nor should one argue that if someone is of this race or that gender or this is historical background then their art must be about such and such” In this idea the artist is not exempt from life because it is about the process and how it reflects on life issues which definitely has a specific perspective.
On Methodology:
James Baldwin says “the state of birth suffering Love and Death are extreme states Xtreme Universal and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. the artist is the disturber of the Peace There is nothing stable under heaven.”
James Baldwin's essay defines artists as champions of truth and the state of being alone is brave “ like in the aloneness of birth or death or love- the artist can envision extreme states of being human in order to solve the mystery of what is to be a human being”. Art is the record of the experience of the artist “who can be both in love and at war” - seeing the world’s ugliness and beauty and suffering and elation - only then can one understand and practice freedom. The nature of the artist's responsibility to his Society is that he must never cease challenging and questioning it for its sake and for his own. In lonliness the artist can discover that life is tragic and therefore honorably beautiful.
Guy Debord's DerivÉ theory- “psychogeographical urbanism”proposes how an environment affects one's emotions and curiosity and behavior The Derive- the drift, a focused meandering that interrupts productivity and schedules a practice theory or behavior that espouses one to “wander” as a source of discovery of what might be mundane. “Rapid passage through spaces”I wondered if it was a theoretical parody halfway through, but discovered it is a thing. I can see how this subject is looked at and examined in depth from many angles. Introduction to playfulness and spontaneity- drawn by the landscape and terrain to determine their wander, letting the surroundings surround you. Experience without an agenda but it is therefore and agenda.
I struggled reading “The Artist as Producer in Times of Crisis,” by curator and educator Okwui Enwezor. He looks at collective and collaborative art as a response to the capitalist “ART SYSTEMS” (art and artist as commodity). He puts forth that an artist as an individual is fairly powerless to impact change within today’s American art world or society at large yet self- interest and privilege is rising within collectives. In order to step fully outside this system, in times of change, social and political upheaval and crisis, the conditions of artistic practice and the role of art's function as political witness are empowered by the engagement of a collective or collaboration. For my large projects, collaboration is the best and way to create for impact a community through visual art. The process of making, including others so there are many hands and voices on one work strengthens the possibility of change- not only through the experience of creating one message collectively, but in the scale and inclusiveness that work may embody.
Venus in two parts recounts the experience of an enslaved dead girl using historical speculation or “critical fabulation” a way to recount and retell a history. “An impossible story” “ while simultaneously amplifying the “impossibility of its telling” (11). I am reminded of Gary Jennings’ historical fiction novel “Aztec”, also an ‘impossible retelling’ and speculative through the eyes of a young man during the time of Cortes. I did not know that this is a form of autoethnography, merging practices of autobiography, writing about the self, and ethnography, the study of and writing about culture. Related but not exactly autoethnographic, I recall my art school experience in Old Master Painting, where through embodying the artist whom we would spend an entire semester copying a specific work. In both process and execution (in my case it was Botticelli’s Annunciation), I was able to get inside the painters’ head, understand each specific brushstroke and his pigment choices in a way that reading about or viewing his work could not describe..
In Mignolo’s essay on Epistemic Disobedience, the need to decolonize knowledge, to reframe perspectives not through a Euro-centric lens, as I learned in school, but an inclusive and contextual viewpoint. Recognizing marginalized voices by “de-linking from the magic of the Western idea of modernity, ideals of humanity and promises of economic growth and financial prosperity (Wall Street dixit). will give a more true, visceral contextual landscape.