cutting the other edge
Art
Giverny: Oct 27-30
Oct 30th
I broke down and downloaded Mozilla Firefox onto the ancient Dell computer provided for our use here in the great room of the farmhouse in Giverny, France. It had been running some furiously outdated version of Netscape, which didn’t like typepad or .Mac . So now I can post and email for the first time in quite a few days, though I had been using the old browser to follow the Libby indictment on Americablog.com rather obsessively. Let’s hope that indictment was the warning shot across the bow, so to speak; and that Karl’s still in Fitzgerald’s sights.
So we, the students of Marchutz school, left Aix-en-Provence on the TGV last Thursday, bound for Paris and points beyond–specifically Giverny, a village 10 minutes from Vernon on the Seine, an hour by local train northwest of Paris. Claude Monet had his house and gardens here, where he worked on his “Waterlilies” and other pieces in the later part of his life. Thursday we arrived at the village, a close, quaint place with beautiful Norman architecture and rose gardens in all the little yards. Our residence, the giant 6-bedroom renovated farmhouse, is owned, I think, by the American Museum here. We each have our own bedroom, and pretty much the private run of the place, as our professors are staying in the neighboring house. There is a kitchen for us all, and a bathroom on each floor, as well as cable TV and high-speed internet. The kitchen is crammed with breakfast food and snacks, and lunch and dinner are provided by the Museum’s restaurant kitchen. In other words, it is first-class–just what I needed to help me get well.
Our program here is a sculpture workshop with Greg Wyatt, sculptor-in-residence at St. John the Divine in NYC. Quite the honor, apparently. To be honest, I’d rather have had materials provided, and just have his guidance as we created our own projects out of plaster or wax, instead of specific assignments given by him. I did enough “schoolwork” art projects last year in AFO, the last thing I need is some condescending, self-congratulatory teacher giving me some opaque, oh-so-clever assignment during what needs to be a period of intense self-analysis and personal decision-making. I know, I know, he’s famous and has sculptures at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in D.C. and Shakespeare’s Garden in Stratford-upon-Avon, I’m not worthy to breathe his air or be in the same room with him. I know, I don’t deserve to be taught by him. But one thing my upbringing taught me is to not be overawed by anyone, even the famous or the wealthy. My personal code of values places utmost importance on who a person is as a person, their character, their style, their attitude–the work of art that they’ve made out of themselves. And I don’t like him, I am not like him, and I don’t want to be like him. I know that instinctively. It’s the exact opposite attitude I know the art world expects of me. One is supposed to pretend not to notice who the artist is as a person, and focus all attention instead on the works they produce. But in this, as in many other things, I have to hold to my own ethics. I’ve developed them consciously and they serve me well. He may have an enormous bronze eagle in front of the State Department building, but my antenna senses something grim, dark and undeveloped inside him. I can’t draw close.
Instead I wander the village. I collect pieces of wood and color them with oil pastels. I drink merlot and watch the greyish-blue tiedyed Norman sky. I read romance novels and pour myself into my diary. So much writing, after so many, many dry months–why does it feel like coming home, like coming back to myself after a long sojourn as another person? A tight, unhappy, anxious person, pushing away the past, fighting the present, scared of the future. She’s broken open, and myself is spilling out. You bet it’s breaking the containers and overflowing the channels that others set out. And yes, I watch that collateral damage–undone schoolwork, unsent emails, dusty and discarded to-do lists–and know what consequences it could bring. But the world will never spiral twice through the exact same spot in the universe, and here I am, trying to grab all that I can before it spins away. Living deeply, recording thoroughly. What can I ever truly accomplish that is greater than that?
Paris Hilton = Damien Hirst
Jun 15th
After reading many, many websites over the course of the last ten years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three main types: those that say something, those that ramble on about not much, and those that are carefully crafted to say a whole lot of nothing.
It’s the same way after a year of art school. The vast majority of student art is a whole lot of conflated blather about not much: labrynthine, “mysterious” depictions of repetitious personal issues; sophomoric, cookie-cutter attempts at current-event “statements”. Late-adolescent self-absorption aside (and I’m not judging; nobody was more self-obsessed than me at 19), there are left two camps of relatively serious artistic types–those who believe in meaning, and those who don’t. Those who believe in meaning view art as a way to say something, to place something of value from the inside of themselves, into another’s insides, through the medium of art. Symbolism, emotion, wordplay, mood, and setting, as well as all the formal elements of art, are simply tools to get the thing of value–concept/feeling/belief–across. Medium might be slightly subjugated to message, but both have a place of respect and a relationship with the artist.
Those artists who don’t believe in meaning would never tell you so. They make the kind of art that everyone pretends to understand and use big words about, and are in various stages of denial or cynicism about its true quality and worth. They are the current darlings. They wear trucker hats. They claim to play with the medium and let it speak for itself, but that’s a lie–the medium, as well as the audience, the concept of art, and reality itself, are victims of an attempted subjugation by the hollow ego of the artist. Every aspect of their art, formal and theoretical, is carefully calculated to add up to a great big nihilistic zero. Their artistry lies in how ambitious or complicated a piece they can make, and still have it arrive at complete meaningless degrading emptiness–either that, or how many people they can fool into thinking they’ve made something “so profound” that few could understand. They may not be completely responsible for the enthronement of empty trash, but they sure don’t mind benefitting from it. They are the ones who, having found their precious niches in postmodernism, absolutely refuse to let that movement organically die and be replaced by the next big thing–leading to a repulsive and ultimately empty cycle of conceptual bulimia. Garbage in, garbage out.
And yes, I think one way is better than the other, at least for now. I know, “values”, how biased and regressive of me. But you’d have to be a complete fool not to realize what a dark patch we’re going through right now, both as a country, and in the world. Nobody’s unaware of the horrifying illogic and madness the world is capable of inflicting on itself. Raping ourselves with nihilistic, meaningless imagery will only further teach us that insanity is normal. We don’t need any more education in that.
Believing that, and believing in soul, is one of the reasons why I feel perfectly alienated in the heart-of-darkness art world of America today. It’s claimed its position, and so have I.