Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Niicugni

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Spring                                                                           Planting Moon

 

Still thinking about the performance last night.  The direct to the emotions connection with movement.  And the book  Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists.  In this book the author discusses the dynamic interaction between Cage’s elevation of sound, all sound, to music or at least potentially musical and the thoughts of choreographer/dancer Merce Cunningham who saw movement, all movement, as dance, or at least potentially dance.

In particular Cage wanted to decouple music from dance so that dance did not interpret music and music did not happen as background for dance.  This lead them to have concerts where music would happen, then dance, then music, then dance.  And, the music might be banging pots, someone reading the New York Times want ads or the scrape of a chair on the floor while the dance might be walking, running, jumping, embracing.

Last night I followed the movement of salmon upstream as Emily and Aretha lay on the floor and made sinuous, flowing motions with their whole bodies.  I cheered in my heart when they threw up their arms, cringed when they showed snarling faces and hoped when they shed their skins.

These links between their movement and my heart happened because my body felt their movements, all those mirror neurons firing, firing, firing sending me a message not from the dancers, but from my own body as stimulated by them.  This is not intellectual processing at all.  It’s kinesthetic.  By embracing silence throughout the work except in very episodic short monologues Emily’s work created niicugni, her people’s (Yu’pik) word for Pay Attention, Listen.

This work had great coherence with the lighting provided by the fish-skin lanterns, created in the traditional Yu’pik manner.  In a masterful lighting design the lanterns flickered, came on and off, featured this part of the stage or that through being hung at varying heights and lit separately.

Emily has topics in the first two elements of her trilogy that are close to my heart:  home and the land.  What is home?  Where is home?  Why is home?  Can we have more than one home?  Do we have more than one home?  How much relationship does home have to the land?

Land.  Mother earth or grandmother earth.  That without which we do not survive.  The womb from which we are born and the grave to which we return.  How do we remember the land?  Honor her lifegiving powers?  What does it mean to be connected to the land?

These are essential question, never minor or subsidiary, but at the heart of each persons, each animals, each plants life and its living.  It is a canard I know, but modern civilization does distance us from the idea of home and especially from the land itself.  It is always there, supporting us, feeding us, connecting us but so often we assume it, ignore it, abuse it, poison it.

Emily’s work is important.  Thanks Allison for introducing me to it.

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Fish Skin Lanterns

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Spring                                                                       Planting Moon

Kona’s temp is down and she’s resting comfortably.  I’ll pick her up in the am.

Went over to Cecil’s Deli in St. Paul for dinner with Joy and Ginny, two docent friends.  That was fun. Cecil’s is an old Highland Park hangout from our days on Edgcumbe.  It’s an authentic Jewish Deli and always a fun place to eat.  I had a pastrami omelette.

After the dinner, we went over to O’Shaugnessy on the University of St. Catherine’s campus to see Emily Johnson and her collaborators perform Niicugni. Niicugni is a Yu’pik word meaning Pay Attention, Listen.

This is the second part of a trilogy, the first one focused on home, what it is, how we know it and experience it.  This performance focuses on the land and our always relationship to it, yet how we can become distanced from it so easily.  Reminds me of the quotes I posted from Chief Luther Standing Bear just below.

Emily and her co-dancer and collaborator, Aretha, (one of 5 members of Catalyst) tried to imagine how they could be in two places at once on the land.  Much of the movement in the performance grew from improvisation based on that idea.  The idea behind it, the intention of the piece, was to memorialize the fact that at any one point in time the land beneath our feet is connected to some other land, all other land, yes, but in particular land that may hold special meaning for us, like home if we are not at home.

Much of the work had little to no narrative line and included collaborators from three groups:  urban farmers, (I forget right now.) and people who learned the Yu’pik art of fish lantern creation.

Allison, also a docent friend and a dancer, learned how to sew the fish skin lantern and made one that hung in the lobby of the auditorium.  Many of the some 50 fish skin lanterns were the main lighting for the entire hour long performance.  Salmon are a primary food source for the Yu’pik in Alaska, Emily’s people and her home.  To make the fish skin lanterns the sewers skin the fish, then scrape all that could rot off, a process that can take up to 16 hours for each skin and four are used in the making of the lanterns.  So, a lot of work and work related directly to living from mother earth.

The intriguing part of the performance with the collaborators from the three different groups is that she gathers different groups together each place she performs the piece and choreographs their involvement so it integrates with her work.

In case you’re interested here’s a video on making fish-skin lanterns.

Emily Johnson Makes a Fish Skin Lantern from Emily Johnson on Vimeo.

Art and Culture, Feelings, US History

Mystic Chords of Memory

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Spring                                                                     Planting Moon

Monday afternoon around 5:45 pm I turned on NPR as I drove on 694 headed toward Bill Schmidt’s home.  It was mid-report on something that had happened in Boston, something important, so I stayed with the news.  At a recap I learned of the bombings during the 4 hour plus mark of the Boston Marathon.

I hollowed out and a sense of deep sadness raced in to fill the void.  The feelings from 9/11, not the event, but the feelings joined these.  Not anger.  Not bitterness.  Sadness and emptiness, a sudden vacuum in my interior world.

(Summer Evening, Hopper)

Then there was the ritual of repetitive reporting, the redundant witnesses, the guesses, the breathless commentary by this person and that one.  A reporter for Boston public radio said the Marathon would be forever marred.  And I thought, no.  No.  This will come to mind and it will be known as the work of an other and will not be allowed to mar the race, rather it will become part of the race’s history, its collective memory.

The most intense part of my initial reaction came when I realized what those feelings meant, the emptiness and the sadness and the vacuum.  They meant I am an American.  That this event was about us, was done to us.  Here, on a highway in the northern central part of our large country I felt violated and hit.  It makes me think of Lincoln’s line about the mystic chords of memory.  It was those chords that bomb caused to resonate.  It’s important, I think, to say out loud that those bonds make us strong and that it is good that we feel them.

It comes from the close of his 1st inaugural address:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Art and Culture, Dogs, Family

Road Trip Grandma

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Spring                                                                     Planting Moon

MNDOT says the roads between here and Iowa are in good condition.  Much better than this morning.  Gertie and Rigel watched, worried as we packed Kate’s rental Nissan.  She got off after lunch out and a nap.

No Quilt Museum this phase of the trip, she’ll drive into Iowa tonight as far as she can, then another day and another day and probably another day.  She may arrive earlier than she planned, but better before the birthday party than after.  Much better.

On the home front I’m headed over to Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove tonight to see a cinema version of a Manet exhibition. I have no idea whether this will be any good. Here’s the details from the e-mail:

Exhibition: Great Art on Screen – series begins this Thursday, April 11

Exhibition is a new series capturing the world’s greatest art exhibitions and screening at a cinema near you.

First in the series, Manet: Portraying Life takes viewers on a 90-minute virtual private tour of the career-encompassing collection of the works of Edouard Manet, currently on exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts with screenings from April 11. Two additional Exhibition events will follow including Munch with screenings from June 27 — a “once-in-a-lifetime” exhibition of the greatest number of Edvard Munch’s works ever, co-hosted by the National Museum and the Munch Museum in Oslo — and Vermeer with screenings from October 10 from the National Gallery, London where audiences will be given a unique perspective on the masterpieces of Johannes Vermeer. Go beyond the gallery to see exclusive behind-the-scenes footage on how an exhibition is created for public view. Hosted by art historian Tim Marlow, featuring special guests.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Politics

So Poor

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Spring                                                                            New (Planting) Moon

I heard for as long as Kate worked at Allina about corporate culture taking over medicine.  The MIA is not alone among museums in taking a “dynamic, new approach”, DNA, which involves wringing more dollars out of the visitor’s “museum experience.”  Major league sports underwent their corporate take-overs years ago.  When I worked for the church, business oriented members would often explain how it needed to be run more like a business.

A general economic malaise, largely created by two strangely related forces, the anti-tax intransigency of Republicans and the illegal manipulations of debt-related securities, has formed an environment in which non-profit institutions have become starved for cash.  Though a non-profit does not, by definition, have making money as its first or even second or third reason for being, all non-profits do have to balance the books somehow.

It is this need that makes them vulnerable to the inroads of corporate cultures for which making money is not only the bottom line, it’s the only line.  This leads to medical clinics defined as revenue centers, sports departments milked for their ticket income and docent lead tours to become big ticket items for museum special exhibitions.

The need for a non-profit to have enough income to offset expenditures is nothing new.  What’s new is those who make this need the primary objective of a medical group, or a university campus* or a museum department.  It’s at this point that the health needs of patients or the educational needs of students or museum goers get shoved down the list of reasons for a doctor or a professor or a teacher or a curator or a docent to do what they do.

You could argue, as many urging corporate style make overs of our most important cultural institutions do, that this is merely correcting an aberration, that these kind of institutions should always have had a sharper pencil, more attention to the time honored counting of beans.

It is not.  What this emphasis on corporate objectives does is negate, yes, I would go that far, negates, the long held belief in this country that some communal matters are too important to put at risk of creative destruction:  education, performing arts, art museums, science museums, medical care and spiritual welfare chief among them.

This prop 13 mentality has successfully challenged much of the fabric of our communal life, turning us toward the libertarian ideal of one for one and all for none.  This is individualism and liberty used not as instruments of freedom, but as wrecking balls.

This is not the country in which I want to live, nor is it the country in which I want my children or grand-children to live.  My oldest son and his wife are teachers.  My wife is a physician.  My youngest son is a captain in the Air Force.  All of them dedicated to the welfare of the communal whole.  All of them putting their own time and chance of capitalist success aside for a purpose, a reason for being that has nothing to do with the profitability of the school, the clinic or the military.

You could argue, I suppose, that what I’m saying here is special pleading and I would agree.   It’s a special pleading on the part of those who believe communal needs come before private ones.  I am one such person.

 

*  The University Will Not Be Sold (Chronicle of Higher Education for April 9, 2013)

“Public universities are not corporations. They are not sports franchises.

…The corporate vision of Rutgers’s president, Robert L. Barchi, and his associates centralizes sports branding as an income-generating strategy, clearly at the expense of our student athletes and potentially at the expense of academic excellence…

His administration’s embrace of a corporate vision has led President Barchi to behave like a corporate raider against his own university: He has treated Newark’s campus like a thriving company subjected to a hostile corporate takeover. His administration attempted to underfinance Newark and milk its profits (tuition). Next it plans to strip it of its assets (most-profitable graduate programs). We know how these hostile takeovers usually end—the raided “company” ends up on the junk heap.”

 

Art and Culture, Literature, Writing

The Dark Edge of Fiction

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Spring                                                                               Bloodroot Moon

“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”  A. Einstein

In one part of my life I chomp down on facts, ideas, connections, linkages.  Known and knowable things.  Stuffing them in, sometimes sideways, cramming them into the remaining nooks and crannies, or, rather growing dendrites and increasing those neuronal connections.  The Connectome.  My Connectome.

But.  When I write, instead of pouncing on the learning.  Trying to take it out for a spin in, say, an essay or a short non-fiction book.  I don’t.  My fiction comes from the darkness, from the circumference surrounding the knowledge, the place where the knowledge cannot go and would be of little help.

Fiction has its coherence with reality in spite of the definition, say on a continuum from realism to fantasy.  Even in fantasy, even one based on a world not this one, the characters are recognizable, they have to be, otherwise the fiction would not be communication but gibberish.

So, yes, there is that leash, but it’s a long one.  Often in fantasy long enough to lie useless on the sidewalk next to an orange lawn under an azure sun.  Oh, if you wanted, you could pick it up and follow it back to a Dairy Queen and ocean-going shipping, but why would you want to?  I mean, the action is at the other end of the leash.  That’s where I’d want to go.

And that’s the edge of fiction that lies alongside, shares a border with, the darkness.  Out there the leash no longer matters.  Except as a reminder that we’re all in this together somehow.  Somehow.

 

Art and Culture

Northern Burb’s Artists

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Spring                                                                          Bloodroot Moon

The Northern Art Crawl.  Up here in the outer reaches of the urb artists live separate lives down country lanes and tucked into cul de sacs.  Up in East Bethel (and south of Eden, I’d like to say) Kate and I visited a glass blower, Doug Becker, glass maestro–on his card–who lives on 40 of the original 80 acres he grew up on.  His brother has the other 40 and is also a glass blower.

A blue collar artist, he got his start at Anoka-Ramsey Technical College, then went for a brief stint in Sweden.  He had a colleague from Cambridge displaying with him and an apprentice–a guy who kept showing up–working on a piece, opening and closing the door of the oven with foot pedals like an organ, blowing occasionally on a small orange blob of molten glass, then sitting down to rest the blowing pipe on two metal arms, a place to roll the rod while cooling and shaping the glass using a cup like tool with water and on occasion a stack of wet newspaper.

A cute boxer and a water spaniel wandered around, tried to get us to play while we ate sausage from the deli tray and watched.  We left, walking past his sculptural glass flowers planted, he said, where he puts his canna lilies.  The glass flowers light up.

His bass boat sat in the big garage attached to a smallish house.

Next was a domestic quality potter, a good thing for us, since we need to replace some bowls and platters.  His work has a journeyman’s quality, good enough for everyday use.  A friend of his turned wood in the garage, showing a wide array of bowls, mostly bowls.  Some well done and interesting, others finished in a hurry, like the end of Missing.  Need some work.

Perhaps the most intriguing place we visited was a blacksmith’s, Daniel Kretchmar’s Irontree Works.  His items on display were so-so, but I asked a question, had he ever made an ax?  This got the engineer cum teacher cum blacksmith going on iron, steel, carbon steel, quenching and 1800 degrees, orange where things happen.  You can tell, he said, if a piece you’re working is at 1800 degrees by holding a magnet to it.  If the magnet doesn’t work, you’re at the right heat.

We also discussed, rather he discussed, iron blooms, pig iron, wrought iron–which is not made anymore and he gets his supply from demolished buildings–a great metal to work, and the making of his 81 fold kitchen knife with a random wave pattern reminiscent of the oft folded Japanese katana.  He teaches blacksmithing on Monday nights and I might go.  This craft has its adherents on Tailte.

The next to last stop was another glass blower, Jeff Sorensen.  He had been at it “37 or 38 years” and the fluidity with which he handled the pipe, at one point twirling it like a drum major’s baton to cool the work in progress, showed him a master of his craft.  His work displayed that skill as well.  We talked a bit about slowing down, about letting go of things we don’t need.  “Lots of things!”

I would buy from any of these folks.  Kate suggested we start using local artists as sources for gifts.  A good idea.  It’s another part of the art after the MIA process I’m still noodling.

The last stop of the day.  They had pamphlets about the Promise of Heaven, sappy water colors and pottery with a great glaze, used over and over again in pots of similar construction but different sizes.  Didn’t stay long.

Back to the homestead and a nap.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Translating Metamorphoses

An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come

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Spring                                                                           Bloodroot Moon

In May some docent friends from the class of 2005, a rowdy class and proud of it, will go to
Chicago for a time with the arts scene there.  Like my visit to the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago this too will be an exercise in part in discovering how to keep the arts active and alive in my life.

One of us has decided to offer a mini-tour on an object at the Chicago Art Institute.  I decided I would do one, too.  My plan is to focus on methods of analysis, including the praxis idea I wrote about yesterday.

Ever since I got seriously interested in Ovid, my seminary education in biblical criticism has niggled at the back of my mind.  Why?  Well, biblical criticism, the higher criticism in particular, uses scholarly methodology for exegesis.  Exegesis tries first to get at the plain meaning of the text in its context.  It precedes the task of hermeneutics, that is, interpretation of the text for a contemporary audience.  What’s niggled at me is that neither exegesis nor hermeneutics is peculiar to the study of scripture.

In fact, exegetical method can be applied to other texts, whether in a foreign language or not, just as hermeneutics can be applied to the resulting exegesis.  As this thought persisted I kept wanting to create a method for using exegetical tools designed for literature in the service of art history.

Well, that day has arrived.  “Exegesis includes a wide range of critical disciplines: textual criticism is the investigation into the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds for the author, the text, and the original audience. Other analysis includes classification of the type of literary genres present in the text, and an analysis of grammatical and syntactical features in the text itself.” wikipedia article

Not sure yet whether I’ll venture into the realm of hermeneutics.  That may, in art, best be left to the viewer.

This also raises another profound idea I learned from the philosopher of religion, Paul Ricoeur, second naivete.  Ricoeur developed this idea to explain how a student of the higher criticism might use its critical methods on scripture, then return to the text later with a second naivete, one that includes the scholarly work, or incorporates it, while at the same time allowing the text to speak again as scripture.

My sense is that the idea applies to analysis of art as well.  That is, we can engage formal analysis, praxis analysis, style and methodological analysis, school, content analysis, then step back from all that and return to the piece with a second naivete which allows that work to enrich our immediate engagement with the work.  Anyhow, this is on my mind right now.

Art and Culture, Politics

Art and Praxis

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Spring                                                                            Bloodroot Moon

Here’s an interesting couple of paragraphs from a NYT article:  My Dinner With Dr. King.

“After dinner Dr. King asked Wanda if he could use the telephone again. When he came back, he settled onto the sofa next to me. I tried to think of something clever to say, but before I could speak, he asked why I was studying for a Ph.D. in art history. He asked what I thought art could accomplish that other forms of communication could not. I remember that he said that he’d rarely discussed art, or even thought much about it. As I stammered an answer I cannot recall, he listened with the concentration of someone who genuinely wanted to understand. Never before, and rarely since, had I witnessed such authentic humility. It was so simple, so powerful a form of energy that for a few moments it freed me from bondage to myself.

A conversation that cannot have lasted more than 10 minutes ended up changing the way I thought about my life. When I got back to New York, my viewpoint toward earning a doctorate shifted. The determination to use my education to become a famous scholar gradually made room for a half-baked resolution to become a useful art historian. I began to consider the moral or religious content of Renaissance art; and once I got a job teaching art history at an institution whose values encouraged me to develop that ambition, teaching became a means for me to help students identify and examine their own values. That remains my goal. The short conversation I had with Dr. King had a lasting effect.”

This touched me in two ways.  First, the power of unclouded attention.  It’s so rare, especially in the age of the always-on.  Consider how this conversation might have gone with I-pod buds in the ear.  Or, checking the smart phone for messages furtively.  Unclouded attention is something we can all offer to each other, the only price is our inner voice that wants to interject, comment, offer an opinion.

Second, it opens yet another perspective on art.  Or, rather, it emphasizes a perspective I search for too little, a particular work’s moral or religious content, and I would add, its political.  One example was the post I made in response to Roberta Smith’s snarky review of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood show at the National Gallery (March 31).  This line of inquiry, a mode of praxis analysis, can locate a work in time and space and in so doing also place it in a longer line of argument, comment, ideas.

(Dreaming of St. Adorno, Siah Armajani)

Since the art historical point of view so rarely focuses on praxis, “…the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it,” (Paolo Freire), there is little danger to a work’s aesthetic relevance.

This lack of praxis analysis can be easily explained by the peculiar position of the art world when it comes to class structure.  Art is usually made by persons who are poor and who operate on the margins of a society.  Yes, by the time a work hits a museum, the artist may have become at least famous, perhaps rich, too, but the bulk of art comes from people of modest means.  Yet, art in its art historical moment too often has become a captive of the art market, a tiny, a minuscule portion of the global population and a very wealthy one.

Thus when art comes into the lens of history and makes it onto gallery walls it most often gets there as an expression of someone’s power, only after that does it get noticed as art.  Consider how most museums build their collections.  Donors.  Rich donors who often give whole their own collections.  This produces a trickle up, a siphoning of art through a long tube whose vacuum comes from the amount of money at one end.  Hardly the context for consideration of a work’s praxis.

 

 

 

Art and Culture

My Bags Are Packed

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Spring                                                                     Bloodroot Moon

Conversation over lunch with a docent friend whose experience at the MIA has grown stale.  The reasons are numerous in both our cases, among them: resenting the time for preparing for tours, no longer finding tours as nourishing (if at all), inadequate continuing education, uninspired leadership from the museum, lack of appreciation, lingering bad feelings over Allison’s sudden banishment.

I realized in this conversation that my dis-ease with being a docent began to blossom when I returned more seriously to writing.  Then, I began to feel tour preparation, the drive into the museum, the time there itself all eating into my creative time.  This changed over time into resentment (maybe too strong a word, let’s say begrudging) of the intrusive nature of the prep, the whole time involved.  The payback no longer balanced the effort.

That has led me to a final decision, I’ve toured my last at the MIA, but I still want to hold up my resignation because there are a few loose ends.  First, perhaps discovering a way those of us out of the MIA might co-operate.  Second, securing some things, like exit interviews and continuing perks for honorary docents.

Like me my friend wants to retain the time commitment to art, just not have it eaten up by the MIA process.  How that might happen is part of the conversation I want to have before finalizing my change.