Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature

A Classic

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Mid-Summer                                                   Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Visiting the Inferno today, complete with air conditioning.  The Inferno exhibit, illustrations of this section of Dante’s masterpiece done by a contemporary artist, Michael Mazur, hang in a print exhibition at the MIA.  The Inferno, especially its introduction, has touched me deeply, as it has Western civilization. Here are two versions of its opening canto’s first lines.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

Midway the path of life that men pursue
I found me in a darkling wood astray,
For the direct way had been lost to view.
Ah me, how hard a thing it is to say
What was this thorny wildwood intricate
Whose memory renews the first dismay!
Scarcely in death is bitterness more great
But as concerns the good discovered there
The other things I saw will I relate.

Dante has uncovered that moment in our lives, come soon or late, when the way we had known, probably the one we had carried with us to that point unconsciously, the culturally given pattern for our lives, fails to work for us.  The moment when I realized achievement and upward progress hindered my self-knowledge, that old gender roles no longer served as guideposts for intimate relationships, that the racial stereotypes I had grown up with were wrong, that the liberal politics I had received at the breakfast table could no longer explain the problems I saw in American society, that the Christian faith could not stretch wide enough to include even my own family, in that moment I set off with Dante, needing a Virgil to guide me through the underworld of my own changing Self.

This is the power of the classics, the mirror held up to our search, the challenge to our comfortable assumptions and, perhaps most important, suggestions about where the path may lead beyond them.

Art and Culture, Humanities

Graphic Design

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Mid-Summer                                                                             Waning Garlic Moon

Started my History of Graphic Design class last night.   The guy teaching it has a solo design practice after working first for Larson, then a smaller advertising company.

The class consists of four women, all working or having worked in design oriented professions, and me.

As I anticipated, this is way different from anything I’ve done before, even different from art history.  Graphic Design proceeds, our instructor says, in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner.  This differentiates it from art history where styles and movements often appear over against something has come before, abstract expressionism versus the entire representational tradition, for example.  Graphic design, in contradistinction, moves in gradual steps from, say, cuneiform and Egyptian demotic to the Phoenician alphabet which morphs into the Greek alphabet.

Like art history, though, graphic design has one particular emphasis that sets it apart from any other discipline I’ve studied, mark-making.  Cuneiform for example had triangular marks made by a cut reed in soft clay.  This emphasized straight lines, no curves.  The Phoenician alphabet used ink on paper, so curves entered writing, made more easy by the both the substratum, paper, and the mark-making tool, a brush or pen.

There’s much more here than I can recapitulate in a quick summary, but I’ll keep you informed as I go along.

One thing:  we have a project that will take up the last three weeks of the course.  My thought right now is to redesign Ancientrails.  Just how, not sure.  If any of you have ideas, let me know.

Art and Culture, Woolly Mammoths

Art and Friends

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Beltane                                                       Waning Garlic Moon

Two meetings today.  The guides group met today to focus on continuing education.  A lot of very good ideas were thrown out and compiled.  Over the next week or so I’ll organize them and put together a mailing to go to our list, asking for more input.  After that, we will create a specific communication outlining possible avenues for dealing with the problem created by no longer having Monday’s available and declining attendance on Thursdays.  This may create a vehicle for organizing the three guide councils and for communicating our ideas further up the museum organizational chart.

Morry was a gracious host in a lovely home.  He provided meat, cheese and crackers along with beverages while other folks brought desert.  The only oddity of the day was those chairs in the master bedroom.  Those of you who here there know what I mean.

Woolly’s tonight.  Charlie H. has decided to retire and move out of the condo, up to the woods of Wisconsin.  Bill continued to express appreciation for his brother Pat in words and in deeds, a website and an upcoming service for Pat in Ankenny, Iowa.  Paul was back from his vision quest in the Santa Cruz mountains.  He reports that going without food for that length of time heightened his senses and made his dreams more vivid.  He wants to be a person of impeccable love and kindness, starting with himself.

Jim was his usual bigger than life self.  He had an article in the South Dakota magazine along with several of his photographs.  He has a show opening soon in Aberdeen and has begun negotiating for one here, too, perhaps at MCAD.

Mark’s knee has him in rehab and ahead of schedule, looking forward again.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Garden

Garlic

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Beltane                                                                      Waning Garlic Moon

In my new names for Minnesota full moons this is the garlic moon, because under its gaze, in its waning nights, the garlic leaves will begin to die back and the garlic will  be ready to come out of the garden.  This is now my third year with garlic started from garlic bulbs I grew myself.  Garlic gradually adapts itself to your soil and climate if you keep replanting it.  Not sure how long it takes overall, but the process should be well underway.  Artemis Garlic.

Walking the line.  Nope, not Johnny Cash, but me, trying to track down a short in our electric fence.  Found it.  An ironwood branch detached during the last round of heavy weather landed on the eastern run of our chain link fence, bending the chain down and over the electric fence.  Chain saw.  That old branch popped right off.  Since I had the chain saw warmed up, I went out to the front and pruned some of our amur maples.  They’re getting old and their limbs have begun to crack and die.

Now I’m in here, finishing up e-mail communications and getting ready for a nap.  Kate and I have a hand-built clay class this afternoon from 1-4.  The last two days required a burst of energy.  I have to restore it now.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Politics

Still Alive.

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Beltane                                                              Waxing Garlic Moon

Oh, boy.  I’ve not gone a day without a post in a long time.  Yesterday went by so fast.

Worked on Latin for a bit, but a brightening day pulled me outside.  I plucked tulip detritus out of a bed where some tomato plants needed to go.  These were full grown ones, liable to produce tomatoes as opposed to my healthy, but still immature seedling started back in April.

At the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers meeting Tuesday I learned that honey filling what could be brood frames means the bees in colonies 2 and 3 felt crowded.  I got out my honey supers, scraped them free of propolis, something I realized I could have done last fall, and excess wax, then plopped two each on 2 & 3.   These are the colonies that will be allowed to die out over the winter.  Colony 1 already has its 3rd hive box on with the queen producing brood at a quick pace.  All three of these colonies started out on drawn comb which reduces the initial work load significantly and allows the bees to focus on brood raising, foraging and honey and pollen collecting.

All of this means Artemis hives have positioned themselves for the start of the honey flow.

Then it was quick get into my nicer clothes for a 3 hour stint at the Netroots Convention in downtown Minneapolis.  I volunteered for service at the Sierra Club table in the convention’s exhibit hall.  We highlighted our Beyond Coal campaign.  I got into a snit with an organizer who felt that chairs should be anathema at tables.  He feels this creates a climate that forces staff and volunteers out into the stream of traffic, pressing cards and information into people’s hands, getting names and addresses.  At 64 standing on a concrete floor for 3 and 4 hours in a row is not something I choose to do.  A chair gives me an opportunity to take a break now and then.   Which I need.

The organizer’s view saw volunteers as numbers useful for gaining more numbers, rather than people.  This is an instrumentalist view of the person, an error in judgment not unusual among utopians who willingly sacrifice today’s people in service of a better future.  It ignores the true and only reason for organizing which is to gain a better life for others, a better life which begins in the present, not in some imagined or hoped for more powerful future.

Do we need to sacrifice to move our political ideas forward?  Of course.  Do we need to sacrifice our health and well-being?  Only in extreme situations.  Which the Netroots Convention in the Minneapolis Convention center is not.

After three hours of hawking underwear (I’ll explain later) and moving beyond coal as a source of electrical generation, I drove over to the Walker where I began a two session seminar at the Walker Art Center on THE BLURRING OF ART AND LIFE: IMPACT OF MASS CULTURE ON ART. Taught by an art historian from Hamline College, Roslye Ultan, this seminar approaches modern and contemporary art especially since Dada and Marcel DuChamp.  There are ten or eleven of us in the class, all women save for me and all Walker guides save for me.

This means I find in myself cast in the unusual role of traditionalist.  The MIA is an encyclopedic museum with an emphasis on the historicality and the geographicality of art from the earliest to the most recent, extending from a 20,000 year old Venus Figurine to a finished last year installation, Dreaming of St. Adorno by living artist, Siah Armajani.

Roslye takes her art historical cue from DuChamp who said he wanted to put art in the service of the mind.  Rosalye has expanded on or extended this idea into an assertion that it is not the object that is the universal, transcendent work but the idea given form in the object.  Seemingly entrenching my traditionalist orientation, I disagreed, holding out for the work of art itself as the what that transcended time.

She tried to tell me this was not right, but I am not easily budged by an argument from authority, so we had a tussle.  A mild one.  I backed off, as I often do in classroom settings, not wanting to waste other peoples time.  In this instance, as the class progressed, I found the tussle invigorated the class, gave it an edge and increased my focus.

That was two instances of conflict in one day.  On the drive home I turned them both over in my mind, like teasing a hole in a tooth.  Was I too much in the argument with the organizer?  Yes, my tone was over the top.  Did I regret?  Tone, yes. Content, no.  I’ll apologize for the tone to him today.  But not the need to treat volunteers as people not instruments.

The tussle in the class left me with no negative hangover.  In fact, when I put the two together, I realized they meant I’m alive and still living.  I felt good about that.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Yama

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Beltane                                                                                Waxing Garlic Moon

Still learning about fruit tree management.  Gonna go out and inspect the fruit trees one by one on a ladder this morning.  Then, mid-morning, the bees.  Later, tai-chi starts up again.

A busy week ahead so tomorrow is a Latin day.  I will be in the story of Pentheus for some time, Book III: 509-730.

Death.  A friend whose brother is dying and whose wife has been diagnosed with cancer said the other night, “I can feel them circling.”  This is, I imagine, a frequent sensation as we enter this last stage of life, no longer attending weddings so much as funerals.

The wonderful mandala and one thanka we have at the MIA speak to this.  They both celebrate Yama, the Lord of Death.  In Tibetan Buddhism Yama has a distinct role, he moves us toward enlightenment by teaching us how to reconcile with our own death.  A key move for Yama involves getting each person to embrace their own death, not shrink from it, or fear it, but understanding it as only the end point to this particular life.  In Tibetan Buddhism this has importance because the dying persons emotional state at death has a lot to do with the next incarnation.

In my (our) case I find Yama an important god because coming to grips with our own death does liberate us (can liberate us).  Yama represents that sacred force moving within us that wants us to live today because we know we may (will) die tomorrow.  When our fear of dying crimps our will to live (fully), then death has taken hold of us too early.  Instead, by accepting the eventual and definite reality of our own death, we can paradoxically gain new energy for living a full, rich, authentic life.

Art and Culture

Inverting the Pyramid of the Museum

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Beltane                                                                                          Waxing Garlic Moon

A museum is an odd organization since it has a bifurcated purpose, one dealing with things and another dealing with people.

As to things, it has a responsibility to the art works in its custody, a responsibility to not only exhibit them, but to care for them in such fashion that they will survive, as many already have, for centuries, even millennia.  This work of the museum is in the hands of curators, guardians or trustees from the original Latin, who both establish rules and procedures for keeping art safe, and purchase more art to enhance the museum’s collection goals.  Some see curators as taste-setting or taste-makers and they can serve that role by choosing what the public will see at any one time of a museum’s collections.  Others see them as conservators.  Others as connoisseurs.  They have all these roles and more.

Most of the time the work of the curator and the work of the museum going public line up.  That is, the curator wants to have the best examples of particular kinds of art and wants to display it to advantage.  The public comes to see the art and wants to see in a way that makes viewing both easy and informative.  Occasionally the curator may loan out certain works or remove certain works either for conservation or on a rotation with other, similar objects.  In those instances the curators work might frustrate the public.

As to people, though, the museum exists for its public.  Its public has certainly been defined and refined over the years.  In their origins museums served and often still do serve an educated elite who feel a particular bond with the arts and artists.  As long as museums serve this group primarily, the museum usually functions without controversy.

If, however, as is now the case, museums seek to measure their worth by attendance numbers and also by the diversity of the audience, the museum has a new position in relation to its visitors.  Groups who have not traditionally been seen as museum visitors, school children, financially disadvantaged persons, members of any community, really, neither moneyed nor educated at the college level and beyond, require some assistance, some guidance, some initial tutoring.

This has, traditionally, been the role of the docent whether paid or volunteer.

As more and more first time visitors come to the museum, such things as museum etiquette must be taught.  Stay one foot away from everything.  Use inside voices.  Don’t make telephone calls in the galleries.  Visitors must also be encouraged in that most basic art museum act, the encounter with individual works.  This  requires small groups, maybe 10-15 at best, of new visitors and a specially trained guide, most often a docent though there are now many different types of guide programs.

The vast majority of museum visitors will never see a curator, never talk to a development officer or an education staffer.  They will not even know there is a department of registration and will know the board and director only as far away figures, if at all.

They will encounter the art in one fashion or another.  A large number, perhaps most, will, at one point or another, however, meet a guide.  Most will meet docents.  Some will meet guides from other, specialized programs that focus only on school children or that provide tours of specific museum collections.

The docents and guides are hardly indispensable, but the museum does have two categories without which a museum does not make sense:  art and visitors.  The art needs curators, certainly, and visitors, many visitors, benefit from a guided experience, an engagement with the art designed to elicit careful looking, provide some information and enhance the possibility the art will do its radical job of confronting a visitor’s perceptions and preconceived notions.

Seen in this light, an inverted pyramid of the organization shines its light on art and visitors, then on those who work most closely with them, the guides.

The museum seen from this inverted perspective suggests a high degree of importance for a well-trained and continuously updated guide corps.  It also suggests a higher level of appreciation for this volunteer group that serves the most critical aspect of the museum’s mission, making art available to all.

Art and Culture, Memories

Northern Park II: The Morning After

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Beltane                                                          Waxing Garlic Moon

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw

An apt quote for another run at Northern Spark.  There was a lot of self-creation on display in Minneapolis last night, from the sperm and egg crew (seen here in the orange light of a 2011-06-05_09111sodium vapor light) to the freshmen of Washington High wandering around in the park for the Battle of Everyouth to many other, very varied events.

The organizer of Northern Spark also nailed it on the way night changes everything.  The whole event felt special, almost like a secret only the hundreds, maybe thousands, of us who knew.  It changed, for example, the context of the Voyeurism and Surveillance show at the Walker.  The first time I saw it I went in daylight and left in daylight.  This time I went into the exhibit at 11:15 pm and left near midnight.

How many people took the challenge to stay up all night?  No idea.  I got home at 1:00 am.  And felt pretty damn proud of myself for having lasted that long.  Geez, geeze.

While I sat at the Walker last night, looking at the IDS, couples wandered past, many in the early stages of their relationship.  I thought back.  When did I first come to the Walker on a date?  Must have been 1971.  How long ago was that?  OMG.  40 years.  How did that happen?

Anyhow, I went on and calculated that I was the age of many of these couples then, 24.  I had no idea where my life was going.  Seminary was a brand new experience and I still thought I’d probably get out after the first year.  It was so much fun to be out then, the promise of life and of the night ahead.

It surprised me to learn that I didn’t feel much different being out now at 64.  I still anticipate the life ahead and the promise of the night.  Well, except for the niggling fact that 1 am meant more to me than it did to my companions out at Northern Spark.  It meant I’d better be home.  Not because I particularly wanted to be, but because my body just doesn’t handle late, late nights the way it used to.

I didn’t get up this morning until 10:40, for example.

Oh, and back to the George Bernard Shaw quote.  I agree that life is not about finding yourself.  But I don’t agree that we are an act of self-creation alone as he implies.  We come into the world a Self, a larger than our self Self, a Self filled with opportunities not yet expressed, not yet plumbed.  Life is living into the larger, richer Self, a process of co-creation, not an ego only show.

Art and Culture

Northern Spark

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Beltane                                                                       Waxing Garlic Moon

1:03 AM with a sickle moon, stars and a warmish night fallen over the Twin Cities.  Just back from Minneapolis and the Northern Spark Festival.

There were lots of people, mostly in their twenties and early thirties, but not all.  I was there, for one.  As the organizer said, folks from other parts of the country can’t believe we roll up the sidewalks at 9:00 PM.  This event, which spread folks over several venues, made each place but one feel safe and accessible.  The feeling of people out, just out to be out, made me feel glad, joyful.  Walking along the River Road behind the Guthrie and the Mill City Museum reminded me of an evening I spent in Savannah a couple of years ago.

With one exception.  We have no small shops, restaurants and candy makers along the river.  We preserve our riverfront in a solemn, Scandinavian manner.  The upside is that it has not given way to tourist kitsch as parts of the Savannah area has; the downside is that it has no color, no life, only ruins and water.  Except for tonight.

I went to three venues after I realized the free bus ride would take two hours to get me back to my car.  I drove first to the MIA, walked to MCAD, then drove to the Walker and finally the area around the stone arch bridge.

The night itself was perfection.  I can’t imagine a more perfect combination of humidity and temperature and clear skies.  Not to mention the moon.

I began at the MIA because the Battle of Everyouth was a 10:00 to midnight affair and I wanted to be sure to see it.  Unfortunately, the only venue where it did not feel totally safe was this one.  The Battle of Everyouth, though it projected large, interesting images on the Museum’s north facing facade, did not have a very big footprint in the park, so the bulk of the park was dark.  This project, which I visited with some eagerness, was a bit underwhelming.  Part of that came from the darkness of the setup in a dark park.  It got swallowed up as a big event by the bigger park.  It’s primary impact may well have been the prep work with the kids from Washington High.

MCAD had three different venues that I saw and a couple I didn’t.  I’ll talk more about those tomorrow, but one, projected on a white wall just to the right of main entrance of the class wall featured a machine programmed by an artist with an algorithm that draws flowing shapes.  It got me attention.

At the Walker I revisited the show about Voyeurism and Surveillance and the It Broke From Within show again, too.  I wandered around outside, watching folks make small art projects and sat on the terraced wall and looked at down town.

The Stone Arch bridge had lots of people, the most of the three places I visited.  An excellent projection lit up the four grain elevators silos next to the Mill City Museum.  On the bridge there was the sperm and egg ride, a moving illustration of the classic of mountains and seas and a laser set up that baffled me as to its intent and its result.  but no horse on the barge.  I don’t know whether the floating white horse was elsewhere, but it was one I wanted to see and that I missed.

It was a fun evening, giving me a sensation I enjoy, that of being a tourist in my environs.  I hope it happens again next year and becomes bigger.  Maybe I’ll take a room in downtown for the event.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Humanities

Ripped Apart

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Beltane                                                                    Waxing Garlic Moon

Pentheus gets ripped apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes.  The Guthrie’s production of The Bacchantes by Euripides several years ago gave the story a telling I’ve never forgotten.  It gave me a jolt.  I’ve moved on from Diana and Actaeon in Ovid to Pentheus.  His story begins about 250 verses further on in Book III of the Metamorphosis.  I’m not far into it, only about 12 verses, but already Pentheus’ fate has been foreshadowed by the great seer, Teresias.

My tutor says I’ve learned to spot and translate the verbs, a key first move, but I still have trouble picking out the subjects of the sentences. That’s what I have to work on for next week.

(Pentheus and his mom.  Pompeii. Romersk ca. 70 e. Kr. (Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen)

Speaking of getting ripped apart, I came home from a lunch with Justin Fay, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist, to find Kate gone.  She had taken Gertie, our son and his wife’s dog, to the vet.  Yet another scrap broke out and this time Gertie ended up with seven spots that needed stitches.  The end result of this was, of course, a hefty vet bill and a hurried consultation between Denver and Andover over Gertie’s fate.

We resolved it this way.  Gertie has become a liability at Jon and Jen’s, growling at Gabe, 3 years old, nipping four neighbors and going after the postman, not to mention climbing the fence to get out.  So.  What to do?  I really like Gertie; she has a big personality, a bouncy vital way, but she is a mischief maker, a trickster.  Gertie will stay here with us and we’ll figure out how to manage our pack without any one getting hurt.  We’ve had to do it before when one of our Irish Wolfhound’s, Tully, decided that our Whippets were prey.

First step is to get Sollie back to Denver so we can reduce the number of dogs.  After that we’ll probably try letting Gertie and the big girls out again, hoping that the changed dynamics will have resolved.  If we have another spat, we’ll have to go to some management strategy, maybe a dog run outside, or having Gertie and one big dog at a time out.

We have Mark here now and Gertie will stay.  We’ve become a hostel.