American Literature Students and the Thoreau Challenge
by Molly Newman, Humanities Faculty
When Henry David Thoreau moved to a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, what did he hope to discover? Never content with mediocrity, Thoreau hoped to find nothing less than the meaning of life: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
157 years later, my American Literature class considered Thoreau’s endeavor with a healthy mixture of suspicion and reverence. “If he wants to simplify, why are his sentences so complicated?” one student asked. Someone else quipped: “Didn’t his mom do all his laundry for him?”
I love hearing the kinds of responses Thoreau provokes from my students. Reading Walden should be an uncomfortable, polarizing experience. Thoreau calls our comfortable lives into question, and if we don’t squirm, then we just might be a bit complacent. While I hardly consider IAA students to be complacent, I do think that they
can lose sight of the bigger picture while they are busily rehearsing, creating, studying, and socializing. For this reason, I asked my American Literature students to take the Thoreau Challenge: for one week, they had to make a change that would, ideally, make their life more meaningful.
They embraced the project with zeal. Some students decided to wake up earlier and walk or run through the woods; some students became vegetarian or vegan; one student took up meditation; another chose to be silent. A group of four girls camped out next to my house for four days!
At the end of the week, none professed to find the meaning of life. I think many realized, however, that discovery is unpredictable. To an individual paying attention, possibility is everywhere.
Below are excerpts from the essays my students wrote about their experience.
The founder of Buddhism, Hindu Prince Gautama Siddhartha, said in one of his writings, “If a man’s mind becomes pure, his surroundings will also become pure.” After this experiment, I felt like my mind was more pure than before and for this reason I had the ability to appreciate everything around me more. Being a vegetarian became more than just staying away from meat, it became a cleansing experience that made me realize how fortunate I am to live at a place that is so full of life and peace. It gave me the opportunity to appreciate nature and to understand how I can use it to inspire me in my daily life. Since I was not eating meat, I started to become more aware of all of the wild life that we have in Idyllwild. I have always known that there are a lot of animals where we live; I just never took the time to really acknowledge them. This project helped me learn to be grateful for what we have here and to use this for motivation in my day-to-day life. –Mariana Barba Cid
As Thoreau said, “there are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon”(890). I was unable to see the horizon ahead of me because I was the one holding myself back. I feel as though a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, and I can now see myself going to college.
Thoreau’s ways helped inspire me to make lifestyle changes that helped me in getting myself back on track. I was able to fully commit to this project for a week, going to bed earlier every night but one, and I never would have expected the outcome to be so rewarding. I was able to become a more centered and balanced individual, not hindering myself by pointlessly going to bed late. I had been hoping to be more productive during the day, but I was never expecting to be as efficient as I was. It gives me such satisfaction to say that I am almost done applying to college and that next year I can see myself at a university. Thoreau has helped me become a more successful individual and I think that anyone would agree that he is awesome for doing so. –Gabby DiMarco
Speech is a human connection going back to campfires and telling stories. It’s an outlet for thoughts and emotion. Not only was my “speechless” period relatively depressing because of the fact that I wasn’t talking to people (and when I did I punished myself), but I was missing an easy outlet for emotion. I wish I could say I noticed something I hadn’t seen before or had a groundbreaking epiphany, but I did not. The only thing I realized is that I should talk to more people. Make more of an effort for connection; show the garrulous side of Emiley Miller. When I wasn’t supposed to talk at all, it made talking to people I didn’t know much easier. –Emiley Miller
The biting cold made it difficult for me to want to write, to need to produce something tangible. It was not that I did not have the drive to write my thoughts down, but the idea of removing my hands from my pockets was terrifying. I found that I was content with the idea of my words remaining inside of my head, something which usually makes me uncomfortable. Removing my hands from my inner thighs, I reached for my cell phone. The screen was covered in thick condensation, which froze between the creases of my fingerprints. I had been lying awake for almost six hours; it was about a half an hour past four. When my alarm went off one hour later, I found it impossible to separate myself from my sleeping bag. –Rebecca Cox
Life is not about trying to never get a scratch from falling – it is about loving each scar because you will never get the same wound again. Failure is what makes us human – learning from that failure is what makes us successful humans. Taking risks will shove you forward, and even if you fall after, you still made it further than the person who stood still. Living – it’s the same as dancing – it doesn’t matter how many turns you can do, unless you mess up, you cannot get better. –Amira Lambert
So I sat in a sort of meditative state and just listened, trying to take in what nature had to say: the trees were alive, telling gossip and stories to one another. I heard the traveling songs of the leaves and they rustled along. I heard the playing of the woodland creatures, chatter of the nearby kids walking to class, and most important thing of all: nothing. I really enjoyed this day because I believed that it was very important to let Her get in a few words, instead of us talking all of the time. –Randy Plummer
Don’t forget to have fun with Transcendentalism. The whole point is to have a childlike view of the world full of innocence and wonder. I definitely got a little child-like. One of my favorite memories from this adventure was lying in the tent with Meg during the day and playing with her stuffed giraffe. One little thing would set us off into hysterical laughter. Maybe it was the exhaustion or maybe it was that we had successfully transcended and in turn regressed to our childhood selves. –Madison Gerringer
After reading all of my students’ essays, I was struck by how sincere they all were. I was reminded yet again of why I love teaching this adventurous bunch of aspiring young artists. Like Thoreau, they aspire to something transcendent. Their passion allows them to understand “that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Drawing From Both Sides of Your Brain
The following is a repost from The The Huffington Post ARTS
by Brian D. Cohen
President, Idyllwild Arts Academy
Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits… In art, there is room for all possibilities. — Pablo Picasso
Once, right after I had given an assignment for a drawing class, a student asked me which side of her brain she should use to make the drawing. I suggested she use whatever she had. Another student with whom I’d worked for a while, and knew to be right-handed, started drawing with her left hand in order to use the right side of her brain (which controls the left side of the body). She took things literally.
It got me to thinking about this sides-of-the-brain thing, a genuinely innovative idea from neuroscience, which, like so many valid scientific insights, got reified, oversimplified and misinterpreted by popular psychology. The book Drawing from the Right Side of Your Brain, wildly popular and in print since 1979, was loosely based on cerebral hemisphere research of the 1960′s. All of a sudden people started copying drawings upside-down and looking around for a gestalt. Pretty much everything the book says would have already been known and taught by any decent drawing teacher, but getting millions of people to draw when they didn’t think they could was remarkable.
A quick surf of the web reveals the following characteristics and capacities of the two sides of your brain:
Left Brain | Right Brain
Reality-based | Imaginative
Symbolic | Geometric
Mimetic | Risk-taking
Measuring | Spatial relations
Dexterity of the human right hand | Inventive
Planning | Concrete
Pattern perception | Perception of shapes and sizes
Conscious, externally-focused attention | Process ideas simultaneously
Looking at differences and distinctions | Sees relationships
Analytical | Synthesizing
Detail-orientation | Looks at the “big picture”
Enjoys observing | Sees more than one way of looking at things
Organizing information | Abstraction of qualities
Communicative | Gestural
(You are also told that if you happen to be a teacher, you’re left-brained; if you can explain your opinions in words, you’re left-brained; if you bother to read a how-to book, you’re left-brained; better put away thatDrawing from the Right Side of Your Brain book).
Drawing, or participating actively in any of the arts, demands the entirety of ourselves — these undertakings engage bodily, intellectual, analytical and emotional capacities. The act of perception itself — making sense of what you see — and the subsequent complex process of interpreting and translating to paper what you observe, are extraordinarily active and consuming tasks, and they require your whole brain. Drawing, like musical ability, is not a single ability, but a set of abilities, working simultaneously.
Let’s stop calling ourselves right- or left-brained, bad at art, bad at math; we share every capacity, albeit to varying degrees. Categorizing yourself just gets you off the hook. Leaving the arts to artists is like leaving exercise to athletes — you can do it, it’s good for you, and no one should fault you for not making a living at it.
In a recent study, David Navon of the University of Haifa asked brain-damaged patients to copy a picture in which 20 small copies of the uppercase letter A were arranged to form the shape of a large capital H: “Patients with damage to the left hemisphere often make a simple line drawing of the H with no small A letters included; patients with damage to the right hemisphere scatter small A letters unsystematically all over the page.” The two hemispheres of our brain, working in tandem, see both the small A’s and the big H. So use whatever you’ve got.
Idyllwild Arts Students Participate in Pacific Inland Ballet’s “The Nutcracker” By: Madison Marlow, Student Body President and member of IAA Dance Department
Like many other children, I was first exposed to the world of dance when my parents took me to see Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” at age three. To this day, I remain enchanted by this ballet for various reasons: Clara’s determination to save the Nutcracker, the waltzing of the flowers, the realistic snowflakes that gently swirl in the air and land on the dancers during the snow piece, and the Grand Pas De Deux music – so beautiful it could melt your heart. But above all, it is the hours of discipline and training of the dancers that shine through in their technique when they step on the stage.
“The Nutcracker” is a ballet in two acts about a young girl named Clara. During her family’s annual Christmas party, Clara is given a Nutcracker by her mysterious Godfather Drosselmeyer, the toymaker. After Clara has fallen asleep that night, she awakes to a frightening scene when the clock strikes midnight. Out of nowhere a Mouse King appears along with his mice, only to be slain by the Nutcracker, who has turned into a real-life prince. Clara thanks the prince for saving her from the hands of the Mouse King. Clara and the prince take a magical sleigh ride through the forest to the Land of Sweets. Different types of candies and sweets dance for Clara and the prince, out of gratitude for slaying the Mouse King. At the end of the festivities, Clara returns home and wishes the prince good-night. Clara wakes up the next morning underneath the Christmas tree to find the Nutcracker still in her arms.
Jonathan Sharp, faculty member of the Idyllwild Dance Department, is also faculty member of Inland Pacific Ballet as well as a principal dancer with their company. He presented the opportunity to the dancers of Idyllwild to audition for Inland Pacific Ballet Company’s Nutcracker season. With a small number of dancers accepted after the audition (Mauricio, Ricardo, and myself), rehearsals began immediately. For a few weeks, every Tuesday and Saturday were spent driving down the hill, taking class at Inland Pacific, rehearsing a few hours, and then returning to Idyllwild. Every single day of Thanksgiving break (with the exception of Thanksgiving Day), the three of us and Jonathan spent seven to eight hours a day rehearsing. We invested so much time and energy into “The Nutcracker,” and have enjoyed it every step of the way.
Idyllwild Arts Dance majors participate in the Inland Pacific Ballet's "Nutcracker". Pictured are Ricardo,Madison, Gina & Mauricio
The experience was nothing like I expected it would be, but I have learned so much from it. Every week, I have had the opportunity to take company class with company members from the ballet. The classes are taught by highly professional ballet teachers (including Jonathan) who have spent years in companies and the dance world themselves. The girls that I dance with are mostly my age and they are all incredibly beautiful ballerinas. The environment is very friendly, but everyone is so focused and disciplined. The dancers are strictly there to dance and learn how to improve their technique. I already feel stronger as a ballerina, especially after watching the other dancers and picking up on their good habits to exhibit in my own dancing.
I am so full of gratitude for being able to participate in Inland Pacific Ballet’s “The Nutcracker.” Mauricio, Ricardo, and I are so thankful for this opportunity that Jonathan has given us. Sometimes I feel a little claustrophobic in a small arts school on top of a mountain, and it is more than refreshing to dance with a company that exposes me to the true nature of the dance world. Going into college next year for dance, I now have a better sense of what to expect and the competition out there. By establishing relationships with the teachers and dancers at Inland, I now have even more connections in the dance world and I have made friends that I hope to dance again with someday.
The next performances of Inland Pacific Ballet’s “The Nutcracker” will be on the 10th, 11th, 17th, and 18th, at Big Bridges Auditorium on the campus of Pomona College in Claremont, California. Please come and watch the performance! To find out more information, please visit http://www.ipballet.org.
Parallax Online!
Parallax, the literary journal produced by the creative writing department, is proud to announce the launch of its online component, a companion to the print journal. The print journal, which has been running for fifteen years, features writing from high school students in IAA’s Creative Writing department. In addition, it showcases artwork from IAAs Visual Arts department.
With the help of alum David Shook, editor of the World Literature blog Molossus, and Brian Hewes, Director of Digital Media and Marketing at Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), the editors of Parallax (Whitney Aviles-Low, Editor in Chief; Becky Joy Hirsch, Junior Editor; Scarlett McCarthy, Fiction Editor; Rebecca Cox, Poetry Editor; and Isaac Dwyer, Dramatic Writing Editor) designed and launched Parallax Online in order to reach an international audience.
The goal of the Parallax Online Literary Magazine is to champion serious high school writing, providing a springboard for high school writers into the professional writing community. It is currently accepting submissions from high school students around the world.
Working on developing the website was a tedious, yet extremely rewarding, experience. The mentors, David Shook and Brian Hewes, were incredibly helpful with both designing the website and creating an amusing classroom experience. With David’s assistance, editors of the journal and students of the publishing class have been put in touch with upcoming authors for interviews, including John Worley, Maile Maloy, Susie Wild, and the translator of Haruki Murakami’s IQ84, Philip Gabriel. Brian’s mere presence seemed to make everything on the technical side just work—and with profound results.
We look forward to receiving submissions!
The website, although still under construction, can be viewed here:
http://parallax-online.com/
Submitted by Isaac Dwyer and Becky Hirsh
Music in the Meadow via Ustream
Last night was our first Music in the Meadow of the year. M in M is a juried recital, which means that the students audition to be a part of it. The fun part for me was that four of my students were selected to perform. They were great and really showed the work that they’ve been doing since school started six weeks ago. But the really fun part was our new UStream feature. Now for the first time we’re going to be live streaming concerts and other performances directly to the internet. Some of these will be archived so that they can be viewed at a later time by anyone with a computer and a good internet connection. Last night was a test, so the feed went out live with no real announcement. After, we liked what we did, so we shared on the Idyllwild Facebook page. Now about 15 hours later, it’s been seen over 300 times, more than three times the capacity of Stephens Recital Hall! Now, that does NOT mean if you live in Idyllwild we want you to stay home and watch our things on the computer! But if you’re not here, say, you’re parents that live in Omaha, or a third cousin that lives in Paris, please tune in! Share with your friends, help us create an online performance audience. More information will come in further tweets, facebook posts and centerstage emails. But for now, you can see last night’s performance by going here.
Also, here is the permanent link to our Ustream Channel for Music: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/music-performances
Visionaries and the Alphorn
From Sydney Cosselman
Krone Museum Director
Once again thank you to students who brought their parents by the Krone Museum during Family Weekend. As always, I enjoyed talking with them, and sharing our school’s history. There were many activities on campus this past weekend, and I am sure everyone had a wonderful time.
This year the Krone Museum is holding classes in our exhibit area. In preparation for this, I have recently begun a project that, when completed, will exhibit a visual timeline for our school. Through historical photograph displays, I will focus upon individuals who have made a difference during time spent at our school. Under the photographs there will be corresponding notebooks that include further information about these individuals for those who are interested. The photographs and notebooks will change periodically. In addition, I will be including more information to be presented on a monitor, and will introduce some of these individuals as well as objects in our collection each month in the museum blog. Please feel free to come into the museum when classes are not in session.
DID YOU KNOW?
The first object I would like to introduce is our Alp horn, and fittingly so because it was the first object to be donated to ISOMATA (Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts). The label reads “The first gift ISOMATA received was a Swiss Alphorn, a 12th century shepherd’s instrument that was a popular instrument until the 1880’s especially in the Swiss and Bavarian Alps. It was a gift from Mr.& Mrs. George Haight of Northwestern University who visited the Krones in Idyllwild and thought it a perfect place for an instrument that resounds through the mountains. On July 23, 1950, Meredith Willson premiered his song In Idyllwild in the Atwater Kent Bowl. It began with a distinctive four-note melody for alphorn, which became the traditional wake-up and lights-out signal at ISOMATA . Here are a few photos taken over the years…
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Does Art Make You a Better Person?
By Brian D. Cohen, President, Idyllwild Arts – reblogged from The Huffington Post
“If you want to be a better musician, become a better person.” — John Coltrane
Making art may seem pretty selfish. One fears the creative soul will withdraw from social interactions, into self-absorption, solipsism, and neglect of societal expectations and ordinary responsibilities. The often obsessive nature of art-making exacerbates our fears of these tendencies.
Maybe we’ve been taught to think that inwardly directed attention is a little bit shameful, egotistical, or self-indulgent, and the products of introspection are effete, impractical, or useless, at best. “You can’t eat beauty.” While you’re making art you’re not doing anything for anyone else, and you’re probably not helping out much around the house.
There may be more to it than that. The composer George Rochberg (I painted his garden furniture in 1978 while we argued whether Prokofiev or Shostakovich was the better composer; I had some nerve) stated: “The pursuit of art is much more than achieving technical mastery of means or even a personal style; it is a spiritual journey toward the transcendence of art and of the artist’s ego.” Art helps you get over yourself, beyond yourself.
The Greek philosopher Plotinus likened our lives to the creation of a work of art:
“How then can you see the sort of beauty a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then just as someone making a statue…must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright and never stop until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you…”
The French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault recalled that the ancient Greeks sought:
“to make their lives an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values” He had no fears that a self-aware individual would withdraw from outward social responsibilities, but would “be able to conduct himself properly in relation to others and for others.”
We tend to admire with less hesitation the discipline, direction, mastery, stamina, persistence, and the ability to live with ambiguity and uncertainty of artistic practice. Some schools have also figured out that while kids are making art, they’re staying out of worse kinds of trouble.
What about experiencing art? The concept of empathy began in 19th-century German psychology as a description of emotional and kinesthetic responses to works of art — engagement with works of art provokes empathic response. Empathy is how we know others’ minds and others’ experiences. It is a redefinition and expansion of oneself through recognition of the experience of another, resonance with another’s experience so immediate and complete it is experienced as one’s own response. Starting early in our lives, with children’s books, then music, movies, novels, poetry, and visual art, we discover through art worlds that belong to others, and they immediately become our own.
Recent studies in neuroscience have pointed to the role of mirror neurons in empathic response. Wikipedia tells us:
“a mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another…the neuron ‘mirrors’ the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.”
Is this the neurological basis for empathy? For understanding what other people are feeling? For moral behavior? Is this the basis for power of art to move and transform us?
The development of empathy in an individual from art mirrors the original derivation of the term; it is art that makes us empathic; art that models others’ inner lives for each of us; art that attunes us to experience and suffering beyond ourselves. It is imagination, the other signal attribute of creative thinking, that lets us see how the world can be changed to be better for ourselves and for others.
Grace
By Brian D. Cohen, President, Idyllwild Arts – reblogged from The Huffington Post
“I’ve been shooting in the dark too long/When something ain’t right it’s wrong…” — Bob Dylan
“This is what a picture should give us … a colored state of grace.” — Paul Cezanne
I don’t remember much of what was said to me in graduate school, now nearly thirty years ago. Most was dismissive, or condescending, or vague. (What most art schools fail to do is to examine their own premises. They so often are permeated by what style was current when their professors were trying and failing to make careers as gallery artists, or maybe by a dilute tertiary interpretation of what’s happening in Artforum, that they don’t question and don’t see the conformist pressures they unwittingly impose. These fish, they don’t know they swim in water.) I went my own way, quite alone, except for my friends, dead Modernists in art books.
But one thing was said to me, maybe the only thing I clearly remember, that stayed with me, and remains the highest praise I’ve ever received. It was from a visiting artist, the only woman ever to review graduate student work (all 19 tenured professors were male). She looked at my paintings for a long time and said they had grace. That was it — grace. She didn’t say anything else that I remember.
Why this stuck with me I don’t really know, but I thought, or hoped, I knew what she meant, and in fact the comment helped me realize that was what I wanted in my work. It has become what I’ve strived for ever since. Whether you can work for it, I don’t know either, as it usually comes unbidden, rarely when you want or need it the most. It won’t come without work, but it doesn’t come from work. (Salieri worked harder and was more devout than the petulant, irreverent, infantile Mozart, at least in the apocryphal movieAmadeus). It rarely comes at all, and never stays.
What is it — ineffable, resonant, untranslatable, immaterial (yet inarguably moving through the senses)?
The first and only time I heard the violinist Hilary Hahn in concert I saw her bow pass over the strings but I couldn’t sense where the sound was coming from. She made the sound, but it was no longer part of her, or a result of effort; it had left her for us.
Grace doesn’t belong to us, much as we may feel we’ve worked for it. It is not our own, but can reach others. What other reward of making art has this value: touched someone else with grace? Even this we rarely know. To be truly gifted is to be able to share this grace, and the gift of no use until shared.
This sense, feeling, state — that you’ve made something right and true, and necessary, something that must be in the world — is worth any amount of travail. Is this the only way we know we aren’t lying to ourselves? Nothing is right until you get there, and when you get there, you can rest. The rest is silence.
Things
By Brian D. Cohen, President, Idyllwild Arts – reposted from The Huffington Post
“As an artist, I sometimes feel no urgency to make more art because I am surrounded by throwaway images, piles of inexpensive objects, and lots of noise.”
–Ernesto Pujols
I have a profound ambivalence about things. I love to have my things around me and wouldn’t choose to part with any of them, but they impose a psychic burden on me. More than anything, I love to make things.
The English word “art” emerged from its root “to make” or “to put things together” and morphed into “artifact” and “artifice,” always implying the making of “things,” sometimes clever or tricky things.
Have all artists at some point realized that what we make is a fabrication, in two senses of the word? This is obvious, because we know we make something, but if we value sincerity, genuineness, purity of purpose and unaffectedness, it can be a difficult realization, and reconciling yourself with this self-consciousness is a necessary and painful creative condition. It can make it uncomfortable to call yourself an artist. The best things artists have made exist in the world in a dual state of obvious artifice and undeniably penetrating presence. Great art is at the same time false and the often only avenue to basic truths; an artist simultaneously lies to you and moves you, and you let it happen. You willingly suspend disbelief.
Picasso got this: “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” I like the Picasso in his late 20s, when he openly embraced painting’s artificial conventions (its lies), in Cubism, and the Picasso in his 80s, when he mocked his own loss of virility, his inability to keep lying to himself, his unaccustomed vulnerability (he was unexpectedly telling the truth). In between, except for Guernica, he lied to himself all the time.
I, and many artists I know, much as we love art, are drawn to things that don’t call themselves art, and hence don’t lie. Marcel Duchamp, in the guise of R. Mutt, wrote, “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.” Duchamp was avenging the insults and indifference of the provincial American art world of 1917, and passing a rather astute aesthetic judgment as well. But he was fed up with artifice, pretense and self-delusion — he was disarmingly honest. In excising both the “art” and functionality from objects he revealed their unseen beauty. And he stopped making things pretty much altogether.
The creation of much art is a result of compulsion, and we may not need all the things that come of it. A while ago I learned to engrave copper, and I enjoyed doing it so much (I was also pleased with myself for having acquired an anachronistic and highly specialized skill) that I engraved every hard surface I could find. I realized that I couldn’t stop and that what I created in exercising this manual compulsion didn’t matter. I enjoyed what I was doing and didn’t think a lot about what I was making.
The flip side of compulsive creation is compulsive acquisitiveness. Actor Hugh Laurie muses about acquiring his 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible: “In a funny way, the biggest difference now is not that I have the car, but that I lack the coveting. I genuinely love the car — it puts a spring in my step — but the coveting was almost more beautiful.” The thrill is in the chase, never the capture, says my cat. The object is a vehicle for desire.
We should get the compulsive creators and compulsive acquirers together. I guess that’s consumer capitalism.
William Morris in the mid-19th century became alarmed at the products of industrial mass production and their lost or decaying aesthetic standards: “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’” Industrialization created inexpensive things in formerly impossible quantities. I love all those cheap 19th-century things and the industrial aesthetic he hated, maybe just because to me they’re now old and not made of plastic. But I don’t like the unimaginable quantities of things in every endless aisle of Wal-Mart. I’m good with fetishism, not so much with planned obsolescence and rapid disposability. Consumerism creates trash, lots of it and very quickly, and also inevitably bad art, and crafts (formerly useful things made inutile and unaffordable by their presumption to be beautiful).
Picasso (again) saw the commodification of art happening, and inveighed against the objectification and superfluity of “art,” calling a stop to it: “Enough of Art. It’s Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.”
There are lots of things and lots of art in the world. The best things stand quietly apart from the world, take us away from it, then recall us to the world, mirror it, model it, intensify it and reflect it. The unique object is indispensable, irreplaceable and irreplicable (that is not a real word but should be). What do we see in it? Certain things become projections of images, ideas and analogies. We don’t see the “thing”; we see what it makes us see. Art historian James Elkins says, “No two people will see the same object; we change along with the object, we see a new experience … A picture is the ways and places it is viewed, and I am the result of those various encounters.” Elkins savors the perception of the “betweenness” of objects rather than their “thingness.” This betweenness is a numinous layer; it is why we want to possess things, and why we can’t.
I love my stuff, my found objects and artifacts (wood type, sea shells, bird’s nests, model airplanes, vintage motorcycles, books, ship models, an old Mercedes, engraving tools, measuring devices — things for the most part not made by an artist, or no one calling himself an artist), and I wouldn’t want to part with any of them. Their materiality is inherent, but our experience is immaterial. I can keep enjoying my things without wearing them out, using them up, or throwing them out. I would like to keep my things forever.
Vasari records, “It is said that Piero de’ Medici … often used to send for Michelangelo, with whom he had been intimate for many years … and one winter, when a great deal of snow fell in Florence, he had him make in his courtyard a statue of snow, which was very beautiful…” I’m no Michelangelo, but maybe my engraving was a more durable version of the same thing.
Is art “doing” or “making?” A verb, or a noun?
I have this post-apocalyptic image — that all we have made to endure is trash, permanent mementos of brief appetites, very, very briefly useful, disposed of, then surviving forever. We would do better to make statues in snow and leave nothing.
