Week 7 

Walking clears head for muse to enter 

Hartford Connecticut was home to Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and poet Wallace Stevens, who lived there from 1916 to his death in 1955. Stevens is proof that to be an artist one does not have to give up the middle class life; he worked as a claims lawyer for a Hartford insurance company and wrote poems in his spare time. He turned down opportunities to teach poetry, instead preferring his alternative life as insurance man. He never learned to drive and walked the 2.4 miles to and from work every day, composing poems in his head as he walked and writing them down when he got there.. The time spent walking the familiar path was time for the muse to work within him. Today the thought of doing this seems to be totally in opposition to how most of us live our lives these days and even to how we create art. We drive. We use electronic devices. We do both at the same time. We are never unoccupied. I am guilty of this too even though I know that when I am walking, thoughts do enter my head that I might not have otherwise had and problems resolve themselves without my having to consciously work on them. Solutions just come. This is why it has been very hard for me the past months when I have not been able to walk without discomfort. Walking is time for my mind to clear. I have missed it.

Below is a Stevens poem with which I am familiar. It is dense stuff. Having a traditional job does not mean that one can’t be a weird artist too.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/travel/for-the-poet-wallace-stevens-hartford-was-an-unlikely-muse.html

The Emperor of Ice-Cream
by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Week 7 art - 2 pieces

1.

Just prior to and during the time that I had the cast on my foot I created lots of art pieces that I now need to finish. This week I worked on finishing this piece. It is a cast of a piece of knitting. It was done by putting ink onto the knitting and pressing it into paper pulp. The paper pulp was made from shredded credit card bills, checks, and other waste paper. I then cover the piece with acrylic medium to make it harder and less vulnerable to moisture.  Because the process uses lots of water, the ink did not really show up the knitting pattern, But I find that adding some color to these pieces does help make them more visible than when they are solid white. Below is a close-up.  I guess there is some irony that this is cast paper and relates to a time when i had a cast on my foot but this was unintended. 

2. Bundles and Rolls first installation

This is either the first in a series or a study for a larger installation. It is composed of 5 bundles of junk mail wrapped in cotton string and 20 tubes of magazine paper taken from a previous week's art (made from magazines taken out of my recycling). They were placed in a small trench (about 10 inches long and 5 inches wide) in my back yard. I intend to photograph them periodically to see how they weather. My intent is that they will eventually totally disintegrate. I put them in a place where I will never be tempted to grow edibles as I do not know how the inks and the paper itself might affect the soil. I have been making bundles from my junk mail ever since I thought of this project and have thus slightly decreased the amount of paper that goes into the recycling. Whether it is a reasonable trade-off to then bury this paper in the ground where it might add toxins to the soil I am not sure. This bundling and wrapping of materials holds great appeal to me. It somehow seems homey and comforting, even though it is made from trash. Putting it in the ground is a way to make this art temporary (making it a part of my Impermanent Collection), which appeals to me because I do not have room to store all of the art that I am inspired to create.  It is also a way to get rid of this trash. If it contaminates the soil in the process it is not a good solution. If it merely adds texture to the poor soil in my back yard then I will be pleased. 

News: Slavery after Emancipation

Tomorrow is the groundbreaking ceremony for the new building for theNational Museum of African American History. (The museum, created by an act of Congress in 2003, is currently located in a gallery of the National Museum of American History.) Well it's about time, isn't it? African Americans have been a part of US history since the founding of the country. They have conributed to our economy in ways that most other people have not. Without their free (slave) labor, the country would not perhaps have become as srong as it did. A recent PBS broadcast showed how even once slavery was abolished, white businesspeople managed to keep it alive so that their businesses could thrive. All they had to do was to rent a black man from prison. And if the supply ran low, there were always trumped up charges on which black men could be arrested to keep up the supply. Businesses in Birmingham, Alabama took full advantage of this labor to mine the coal and other raw materials that they needed for their thriving steel industry When this scam was finally outlawed, a new way to get free labor was invented - the chain gang. Chain gangs did not work for individual business owners but worked on public projects such as road building. This was the worst yet as no one had a financial investment in these men so that there was no incentive to treat them well. When one died, more were available for free. 
When I spoke with  my partner at the diversity workshop we attended earlier in the semester, he said that one reason he is reluctant to talk about race because he thinks that peole will look at him and sigh saying, "...another angry young black man." After seeing this documentary, I am angry too.
http://video.pbs.org/program/slavery-another-name/

week 6 news

It is hardly news but the oceans are full of floating garbage and we need to be much more concerned about it than we as a society seem to be. As of 2009, as reported in the New York Times, every pound of plankton in the central Pacific Ocean was offset by 6 pounds of litter. On August 5, 2009 the Times reported the beginning of Project Kasei. The ship set sail to chart the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", with the goal of increasing awareness of marine debris, its impacts and its possible solutions. The initial thought was that there might be potential for recycling some of this mass, although after time the plastic breaks down into a goopy mess. The organization  celebrated June 11, 2011 as World Ocean Day, collaborating with researchers and recreational users of the ocean to sponsor local beach cleanups.

One problem is debris tossed by fishermen. Its impact on wildlife can be seen in this photo of nets being pulled from the stomach of a dead sperm whale. Another problem is plastic bottles. They float. They wash away in storms. If they make it to the ocean, they get caught in currents and end up in a vortex with tons of other garbage. My personal way of helping with this problem is to use plastic bottles as little as possible. Tap water is rarely so bad that I don't prefer it to buying a bottle of water. The widespread promotion of bottled water as being better for us is simply another lie being foisted on us by various industries and we would do well to ignore it, the consequences of its overuse being what they are.

Project Kaisei - Capturing the Plastic Vortex

www.projectkaisei.org/

week 6 art
1. Here is an installation I found ready-made outside a MARTA station in Atlanta this weekend. Why did someone leave one shoe and a pair of jeans? I almost hate to think..... For some reason the image won't load in the proper orientation. The trashcan really was upright.

2. Went to the Picasso to Warhol exhibit and got inspired to try my own drip painting. Was limited in color palette by the house paints we had that were not dried up. I didn't realize the patience required and made a mistake by pouring big blobs of paint on to start rather than strictly sticking with drips, which I think would have been better. I wasnot as free as Jackson Pollock to fling paint, not wanting it all over my basement, nor did I have all of the tools I might have liked. May try this again some time in a freer environment. It may not be my medium of choice but it does have a vertain appeal.

 below is a detail of an area of particular energy.

Week 5 art  The Soft Crutch
Hand knit tubes of wool stuffed with newspaper

Week 5 posts

We have torn up the fabric of our cities and replaced it with utter ugliness. The basic landscape of cities and suburbs, is not only ugly but totally unfriendly to people, except for people in their cars. Think about The Summit, think about Preston Highway out near the Outer Loop. Think about trying to walk through these landscapes to get from one business to another. It is not safe unless you are driving. By my examples I mean to show that this difficulty is not limited to poorer areas of town. Downtown Louisville, despite the number of buildings that have already been torn down, still has areas that resemble the old type of Main Street where people were what mattered. Every old building that is torn down tears at this remnant. Historic preservation is important if we are to save our downtowns and make them livable again. Louisville is making some good progress in this regard and a part of the reason is the people who speak up when preservation efforts are threatened. The Courier Journal link is to an editorial written to protest proposed changes to the preservation ordinance, changes which will make it much more difficult to protect historic buildings. This change has not been reported in the CJ as far as I can tell and I am aware of it thanks to getting news updates from a local preservation organization and thanks to my councilperson who posted news of it in her weekly newsletter. It should not be so difficult to find out about these things.

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012302120050

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

TED talk by James Howard Kunstler in which Kunstler rants againstsuburbia. Though he is a bit of a curmudgeon, I agree totally with what he says.

Quote from his blog: “James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, ‘Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.’”

India Flint

India Flint is an environmental fiber artist. She dyes fabric using materials that she finds around her, in her travels, and dyes them in a manner safe for the environment and portable as well. “I make marks with bio-regionally gathered, ecologically sustainable plant dyes.” She wraps of bundles of fabric and plants, heats them, lets them sit, and creates very interesting pieces of clothing and hangings from the results. She uses what she finds around her and thereby limits her impact on her environment. When she travels she brings a pot with her to cook up whatever fabric and plant bundles she is able to create where she is. The blog post is an example of her inventiveness. I like to think that my approach to art and to the world as a whole is at least a little bit like India Flint’s.

http://prophet-of-bloom.blogspot.com/2012/01/simple-folded-
paper-bag.html

week 4 art

These are assemblages made with natural materials on handmade paper. I have not yet made them permanent (in other words they are just laid out on the paper right now)  but will ponder them for work I want to do later in the semester.

Week 4 posts

Peter Richards, environmental artist

Peter Richards has long been the artist in residence at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception. His art installations help people connect with the space where they are sited. He has no signature style because each site demands a different approach and takes advantage of and reflects the particularity of that space. He has helped create a public greenspace in Palo Alto wetlands that were once the site of a landfill. (http://www.ci.kent.wa.us/content.aspx?id=7610) The point here was not to try to recreate a pristine space as it was before humans intervened and screwed it up but rather to take advantage of what the space offers now and make it amenable to human recreational activities. Another work that particularly interests me is the Wave Organ, an installation on a jetty in the San Francisco Bay. Richards was brought up in the mountains so the ocean was new to him. When he discovered this jetty, created in part with stonework from a demolished cemetery, at the end of a path that seemed to lead nowhere, he was intrigued, both by the ocean influence on the space and the appearance of ruins created by the cemetery stones. He collaborated with sculptor and stone mason George Gonzalez, to create vent pipes that would amplify the sounds of the water moving against the ends of the pipes. This was inspired by a recording made by Bill Fontana of sounds from a vent pipe in of Sydney, Australia. Combined with the already-present ambient sounds of water, birds, and other aspects of the space, Richards finds the site calming and always wondrous. It attracts local visitors to a space that would otherwise be abandoned and unappreciated. http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/plan_your_visit/wave_organ/

Blue Marble Images of the Earth

In the late 1960s, scientists first were able to show us images of the whole earth from space. The images have changed and improved over time but they remain a startling depiction of how small the earth is in the scheme of the universe and how interrelated everything on earth is. This report aired on NPR’s Science Friday on February 3; I heard it and was interested. But today, listening to it while looking at the images, I realize how compelling the concept is – to be able to see the whole earth at once, as a unit, as the one place where we all live. It is inspiration for the environmental movement and gives rise to all sorts of philosophical thoughts that most people were not thinking and perhaps were hardly capable of formulating before the 1960s when these images were available. Astronaut John Glenn saw it first, when he orbited the earth in 1962.(See the film The Right Stuff for a reenactment of how exciting it was for him.) To see more versions of the blue marble, go to NASA’s website. http://visibleearth.nasa.gov

Here is the link to the Science Friday broadcast. http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201202034

So now we know, the earth really does look like the maps, just a lot more real.