Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Dogs, Weather +Climate

Second Life

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Beltane                                                                      New Garlic Moon

Rigel has spent the morning with a very worried look.  She doesn’t like thunder and barks at it to tell it to go away.  That doesn’t work well.

She’s not nearly as reactive as Tira, one of our Irish Wolfhounds, who somehow had it in her head that she was safest inside a vehicle.  That meant if a window in either the truck or the Celica had been left open, she’d jump inside.  My Celica still has her clawmarks in the upholstery.

In the wee hours of one morning I found her hanging worn out over the top of a chain link gate we used to keep the big dogs out of the garage.  She’d jumped it, but gotten stuck.  In her frenzy she ripped the truck license plate, which was within reach, to shreds and scratched up the truck hood.  The license plate cut her lip and there was blood everywhere.  I thought she was dead.

Running over to her, I lifted her off the gate–not easy, since even the smallest Wolfhound bitch weighs in at 150 pounds–with sheer adrenalin.  She struggled to her feet and looked very happy to see me.

Stayed up a bit late last night working on my avatar in Second Life.  Inspired by the presentation yesterday I decided to check out a virtual world.  There’s a learning curve to it.  So far my avatar, Quam, a Latin word for why, has ash blond hair and is wearing a get up cobbled together from an array of clothing options, none of which really suit me.  In this regard a typical male, however, Quam does not want to spend all his time figuring out how to be a clothes horse so his current outfit is good enough for now.

Quam learned how to walk, fly, push things, see up close, how to chat, how to change his clothes, but his meat package real world avatar got sleepy and had to go to bed.  Not sure I’ll stick with Quam, but if I figure out how to do it, I’ll get a snapshot of him and post it here.

Here’s the weird part.  I had dreams of flying and of going to the tops of buildings to scout the terrain.  I did both of these things in Second Life.  Hmmm….

Art and Culture, Asia

Art Immersion

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Beltane                                                                              New Garlic Moon

One of those days.  Into the museum, leaving at 10:30 am and just got back now, 6:00 pm.  Had a Japan Art Cart, oh boy, with very few visitors.  A group of autistic kids and a classical musician and his daughters stopped by and that was about it.  The art cart business is just too passive on the one hand and too intrusive on the other, i.e. we have to encourage people to stop.  On the other hand, I do love talking about the Japanese tea ceremony, a great gift to world civilization.

After that, and I mean right after that, the art cart closed up at 1:30 and the continuing ed for the day started at 1:30.  Celia Peterson gave a very interesting presentation on games and art, both physical and virtual games, as possible adjuncts to museum experiences and as art objects themselves.   It really cranked up my thinking about the possible, the nearly possible and oh boy I can’t wait until it is possible.

(screenshot from acmipark, a virtual version of an Australian museum)

Example.  How about a museum that displays its objects inside a virtual world like second life?  Or, a virtual museum where interaction with objects could bring up art historical, geographical, biographical information, for example, about an object that interested you.  This kind of stuff turns me on, makes me want to get involved.

After that a meeting on my direct action idea, a rolling, international projection of the artist’s image on museum walls from eastern Europe to California on June 30th, the night before the 90th celebration of Chinese Communism.  A docent has agreed to take the idea to our museum president.  She’s also president of an international association of museums that would probably make this pretty easy.  It’s a big, yet simple idea, and it would have plenty of media punch.  Hope it happens.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

A Paradox

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Beltane                                                                                       Waning Last Frost Moon

Groceries.  Bees.  Check in for cruise.  That’s my day today.  Well, I might watch a bit of the 500, just see how it goes.

It Broke From Within (see post below) is based on a quote from a p.r. piece for an early Walker project that read:  Remember France?  It broke from within.  That can happen here.

It goes on:  We can only protect our own country within by making more of us more understanding of each other’s freedom and each other’s work and possessions.  We must learn to place a high value on the things that we have created and built and which we would inevitably lose through disunity and social revolution.  Nothing is more important to us than those civic institutions, of which the art center is one, that create a broader appreciation of our common bonds–our homes, our work, and our personal expressions.

At first I read this as an artist’s statement by Goshka Macuga and wrestled with its obviously conservative tone, especially in the sentence:  We must learn to place a high value on the things we have created and built and which we would inevitably lose through disunity and social revolution.  The first we here seems to encompass all, all Minneapolis, all Twin Cities, all Minnesota, all USA while the second we encompasses those who build and create, mostly the upper classes, who then, the third we, stand to lose things during a period of disunity and social revolution.

Then I realized that, no, it was not an artist’s statement, but a statement from the Walker Art Center fund drive brochure in 1941.  Oh.  Well, it makes sense then. However, in that time between first reading it and realizing it was a fund drive brochure quote, I did consider a conundrum, a paradox that dogs my thinking and my working life.

It is this.  Since the mid-60’s I have considered myself a political radical, willing to act outside the law if necessary to protest and resist unjust laws and unjust governmental or corporate actions.  I’ve not only considered myself a radical, but have, on many occasions, been a direct action activist.  What I’m saying here is that my political sympathies and my political work lie considerably left of center and left of liberal.

Here’s the rub.  I love art.  I love being around art and talking to other folks about art.  Especially in the context of a museum.  I love the outdoors and mother earth.  I love being outside and talking with others about being outside. I love the garden and growing things, working with bees.  I love my family, keeping them close and supporting them.  I love the classics in literature and music, too.  I love them enough to learn Latin and translate a 2000 year old Latin text.  These are all conservative impulses.

Art in museums and the purpose of a docent lies in admiring and sharing the work of artists over thousands of years and vast spans of geography.  This requires, quite literally, conservation and an appreciation for the past.  Working on behalf of mother earth and our great outdoors, even gardening and beekeeping, are, by definition, conservative.  That is, they act to conserve our natural world through good stewardship.  Loving family is a time honored conservative theme, because it too, quite literally, preserves and conserves our  species.  Even religion, which has been an important part of my life for a long time, entails conforming ones life to an often ancient code and deposit of tradition.

So.  There it is.  Radical leftist in politics.  Conservative in many of the areas about which I’m most passionate.  What’s that?  They’re categorically different uses of the word?  Well, maybe, but I think the underlying theme suggested in the Walker Brochure tries to argue for a universal conservative impulse, one oriented toward stability and fear of social chaos, yes, but also toward preserving the best of what we have learned, of what we have come to believe important.

Here is my current thought.  While I love art, nature, and family and will and do act to protect and nourish them, conservative intuitions, I also recognize that not all folks have equal access to art, to the natural world, even to stable families.  Those of us who have “created and built” must understand that all wish to do so.  That the culture and the families we love must see to it that others have that privilege, too.

We also must recognize that while we cherish certain institutions and achievements, others have them, too, often ones we have not recognized.  Jazz is a good example.  So is the native american’s delicate dialogue with the natural world.  So is the rich extended family life of the Latino culture.  They wish to conserve the things they have created and built just as much as we of the middle-upper and upper classes want to conserve ours.

It is this tension between what could be and what it is that drives the difference between the radical and the conservative.  And ever will.

Art and Culture

Artists Speak

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Beltane                                                                                     Waning Last Frost Moon

Loving art requires time and attentiveness, just as any relationship does.  An additional, more important impact of my visit to the Walker struck me after I finished the last post.

In the encounter with a work of art we can bring any level of ourSelf.  The Walker, at the moment more powerfully than the MIA, allows me to visit objects with what Paul Ricoeur calls second naivete. I can visit them with the knowledge I’ve gained over the last 10 years at the MIA, yet experience them fresh, with beginner’s mind, yet, even with beginner’s mind I also have the other, more experienced me accessible, too.

This creates a wonderful frisson, a magical moment in which the artist speaks to me through the work, not through its content, but through its creation, and in that act of creation emboldens me to create, to stretch out, to confound my highest hopes by yet higher ones, not for fame or money, but for expressive power, for a work that can do for another what these works did for me.

So, I come away from an afternoon like this with energy borrowed from these artists and transformed within me.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Humanities

Anco Impari (I’m Still Learning. Goya)

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Beltane                                                                 Waning Last Frost Moon

We continue sliding toward summer, a cool, moist descent, not at all like the sudden, blazing ascension we often see, usually full on in place by now, with sun screen and hats and pitchers of lemonade set out on patios.  At some point it will warm up, at least I think it will.  There have been years without summer, years when the weather remains much like what we have now, days cool in the morning, warming in the afternoon and falling off to cool nights.  Could be this will be one of those summers.

I’ve worked this morning on Pentheus, the first few verses proving difficult for me, almost as if I’d entered a different text altogether though it’s only 300 verses away from Diana and Actaeon and in the same Book, III of XV.

Something captivates me as I get into the Latin flow, the world tunes out; the text and I begin this tug of war, me digging, using dictionaries and online aids, the text resisting, remaining stubborn, not allowing its meaning to emerge without a struggle.  The tension between the text and me lies in the language of an ancient people and my learning, a tension requiring both, learning and the language.  Without some knowledge, there would be no tension.  If I had no learning, the words in Latin would sit immutable as stone, as strong a barrier to me.  If my learning were to the level of fluency, the text would not be a barrier at all, I would read as I do in English.  Instead, I’m in a middle place, knowing and learning at the same time, so the text became enticing, pulling me further into the journey, not only of Ovid’s texts, but of the others:  Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Martial, Tacitus, Horace, Seneca.

The feeling reminds me of how I reacted to serious study of art history.  At first there was so much information, so many different aspects that I felt overwhelmed, as if I could never get my head above the surface of this great ocean of learning.  As time passed, as I walked the halls of the museum, read texts and looked at more and more art, a shaky gestalt began to form.  There was a rough chronology, even a global chronology.  There were styles and forms and methods and instances of all three.  At some point the Song Dynasty became separate from the Tang and the Han, just as the early Buddha images became distinct from the later ones of Tibet, Thailand, China.  Neoclassicism and impressionism began to tease themselves apart and appear as separate, thought related movements.  Beckman and Kandinsky and Monet and Barye and Poussin and Church and the master of the embroidered foliage sorted out into times and influences and basic tenets.

(of course, like most of us, I’m a combination of autodidact and schooling, but since college, the autodidact part has definitely taken precedence.)

Now I have a scaffolding on which I can hang new learning, it fits in a large gestalt, which, while far from comprehensive, at least describes the outlines, the places where there are gaps and the places where some new learning easily fits.

Right now Ovid and his Metamorphoses are my teachers, aided by my tutor Greg Mambres and my own reading, learning.  My scaffolding is up, but it’s very shaky.  I have verb forms, conjugations, nouns, declensions, adverbs, participles, clauses, imperatives, word meanings, poetic forms but often I revisit and revisit the same learning, still not seeing with clarity where on the scaffold something belongs.

It was the same with the garden, first flowers and then vegetables and is still now with the bees.  Large tracts of unknowing papered over by fragments of knowledge.  In bee-keeping for example I look at cells.  Hmmm. Those look like drone cells but maybe they’re queen cells.  Or maybe not.  Is it time to put on the second hive box?  Or, is it too early?  Should I use full-sized hive boxes or should I switch to honey supers to keep things lighter?  In gardening.  Just try planting garlic in the spring some year.  Won’t work.  It needs to over winter for a late June harvest.  Want a colorful spring and early summer?  Plant in the fall.  In the orchard I’m practicing IPM, integrated pest management, which means at this point, killing bugs by hand.

What I’ve learned is that knowledge accumulates.  New knowledge needs a scaffolding, a chest of drawers, a memory palace so that it can become integrated.


Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Writing

Higher Education Does Not Need The Humanities. But, We Do.

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Beltane                                                    Waning Last Frost Moon

On a pile of essays, yet unread, sits one at the top, “The Great River of the Classics”, by Camille Paglia.  She is my heroine, an outspoken advocate for the content of the humanities, the deposit of art, music, literature and theater that flows from Western civilization’s beginnings in the fertile crescent, a river with a delta now rich with islands and streams, a fan of human experience at its most intense and intimate that nourishes the ocean that is Western humanity’s collective conscious and unconscious.

Egypt’s splendor, the profundity and innovation of the Greeks, the ordered ambition of the Romans, the spirituality of the Celts, the deep feeling of the Russians and the Germans, the list is long and has depth.  Gilgamesh.  The Egyptian Book of the Dead.  The fragments of the Pre-Socratic.  Jewish texts.  Christian and Muslim texts.  The pyramids.  The parthenon.  Rome.  The pantheon. Fra Lippa.  Giorgio. Botticelli.  Michelangelo. Da Vinci.  Petrarch.  Erasmus.  Francis Bacon.  Titian.  Brueghel.  Boccaccio. Chaucer.  Beowulf.  The poetic eddas.  Ovid.  Turner.  Poussin.  Rembrandt.  Barye.   Tolstoy.  Dostoevsky.  Singer.  the Baal Shem Tov.  Racine.  Shakespeare.  Marlowe.  Haydn.  Mozart.  Beethoven.  Brahms.

And the many, the very many left out of this brief evocation.

Perhaps the humanities do not pass the test of occupational preparedness, a test now applied to departments in higher education.  Just yesterday an academic group released a study the dollar value of varying university degrees based on earnings over time and starting salaries.  In many colleges and universities humanities departments look like low hanging fruit when it comes to the budget ax.

So.  If humanities degrees result in less earned income over a student’s life, does this make them, ipso facto, less valuable?  Obviously.  If, that is, the only yardstick is dollars.  No, I’m not going to make the argument that dollars are a grubby, undistinguished measure; each of us has to eat, reside somewhere, raise our children and nourish our dreams.

Even the fact that the humanities stood at the very center of the project of higher learning at its inception does not privilege them now.  The needs and values of the middle ages were different from ours today.  No, the humanities must stand valuable by today’s standards more than they must reflect the values of past centuries.

It may be that the university is no longer the place for the humanities.  It may be that higher education’s mission in contemporary life involves primarily occupational learning, a sort of advanced vocational training.  Institutions focuses change over time.  Their work must meet the needs of those whom they serve or they have no reason to exist.

It does not bother me if higher education strips out the humanities.  Let the music department perish.  Banish the philosophers, the artists, the literati, the linguists and language crowd, let history go, too.  Leave the ivy covered walls with only economics, business, pre-law, pre-med, engineering, architecture, agriculture, veterinary science, family and child psychology.  Keep those subjects that inform the workers of today and tomorrow and let the fluff go.  Keep the hard stuff, abandon the soft disciplines.

Why don’t these changes bother me?  Because an artist does not need an art department, she needs fellow artists and places to display and sell her goods, but art departments, no matter how good, no matter how well intentioned, are not necessary to artists.  Work is.  Literature, too.  Writers write because they must, because words and ideas matter to them.  No writer writes because there are good writing programs.  Of course, they can learn things in those programs, but writing does not depend on English departments.  Music, too, is part of the beating heart of culture.  Musicians, whether trained in universities or not, will make music.  Musicians will and do get trained in many other places than higher education.  Philosophers are stuck with the sort of minds that go to the root of things and they will dig deep without philosophy departments.  They need other philosophers, yes, but there are books and airplanes.

The humanities are of, by and for humans.  Because they are of our essence, they will survive diminished or even eliminated university and college support.  Will they be poorer?  Probably.  For a while.  But not for long.  We need music to fill our souls.  We need literature to grasp the many ways there are to be human.  We need painting and sculpture and print making because beauty satisfies an essential yearning of the human spirit and because we need to experience the interior world of others as much as we can.  We need those among us who will ask the difficult, the unpopular questions and pursue them where they lead.

We need all of these things; they do not need higher education.  It will be poorer without them, less reflective, more insular, more satisfied with apparently easy answers.

What might happen is this.  After the humanities have been ejected from higher education, humanities practitioners and scholars will meet, find they still need each other.  An idea will occur to them.  Why not have a place where the humanities can be taught?  An institute, maybe.  A gymnasium.  An academy.  Or, maybe something new.  A virtual gathering space for artists and scholars, for writers and teachers.

Out of these experiment might grow, what?  I don’t know.  Perhaps an educational institution with its primary mission immersing its students in the Great River of the Humanities, a baptism by art.  Could happen.

Art and Culture

Imagine a Line

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Beltane                                                               Waning Last Frost Moon

A very interesting conversation among fellow docents over lunch.  When I reflect on it, it seems like we’re asking a potentially troublesome, certainly challenging question.  What is the role of the docent?  The museum?  Art in a museum?  What kind of experience do we want our visitors to have when on a tour?  Should it be entertaining and fun?  Should it be informative?  Should the experience include wrestling with difficult topics like rape, violence, feminism, racism, colonialism, homosexuality or are those kind of topics best left alone?

Art, any art, whether in a museum or gallery or private collection or still resident in an artist’s studio, represents a dialogue between an individual and their interior life on the one hand and between an individual and the context of influence in which they swim, on the other.

Museums represent a democratizing of arts role in the culture in that they preserve works over time and exhibit them to anyone willing to come and, if necessary, pay an entrance fee.  Otherwise art remains locked away behind walls of privilege, secreted in private rooms or hung in institutions of wealth and power  corporate, governmental or religious.

Art’s intimate dialogue, a dance really, within the artist’s person expressed in the artist’s world, does not end with the finished work, rather, in one sense, it is only then that it truly begin.  Arts life, its voice, emerges only in those one-to-one moments when another individual stops, looks, wonders, connects, feels.  Imagine, if you will, the great stream of people who have seen Michelangelo’s Pieta since he finished it in 1499.  Imagine them as one long queue, standing patiently, moving slowly, each person stopping.

As I take my time before it, I’m moved by the tenderness to pity (pieta) both Mary and the crucified Jesus.  The humanness of a mother with her dead son cradled in her lap suggests heartbreak, anguish, maybe even despair.  In my case I may reverse it, remembering my mother, dying from a stroke at the age of 46.  The emotions, the experience comparable.

The smooth finish of the marble, the folds in Mary’s garments, the limp body pressing into her lap not as a long piece of stone, but as dead weight.  Her downcast eyes, her upturned left palm, her apparent youth.  All of these create in me a response not dictated by the material, marble, but by the marble’s transformation at the hands of a 15th century Italian, a rugged, intelligent, sensitive man.

Michelangelo speaks directly to me, soul to soul.  The conversation is lively, profound, memorable.  Yet he’s dead, just like Jesus.

The line moves on.  Who knows what the next person will experience?  What will their dialogue with Michelangelo be?  There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions in that line.  The Pieta is only one work of art.  Imagine the lines that have formed before Botticelli’s Primavera?  Rodin’s Burghers of Calais.  The Sphinx.  The Churning of the Sea of Milk in Angkor.   In each instance we offer ourselves up to another, at best we become vulnerable, the conversation is two way.

Then, there is the more complex phenomena of groups encountering art.  That is, of course, the essence of touring.  How can we make that experience, that encounter with a work, intimate?  What extra do we add to the experience that makes us worthwhile?  Answering that question, it seems to me, is the journey on which this small group of docents has begun.  Sounds significant to me.

Art and Culture, Family, Great Work

Clay

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Beltane                                                                      Waning Last Frost Moon

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings  gather   about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps  even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” –W.B. Yeats

Surprises.  They come unexpectedly.  That’s no surprise.  I had one tonight.

Kate signed us up for a couples clay class at the Northern Clay Center.  It ran from 6:30-9:00 pm.  Matt, a BFA grad from the U, teaching during a gap year before graduate school, lead us clay novices.

( Kiln Prayer)

It was fun.  Maybe more than fun.  The clay had a vitality, a presence I hadn’t expected.  The pieces I made ranged from uh-oh to not too bad.  One, a tea bowl, had some promise.  Since they won’t be fired and ready for two weeks, it’s tough to say just what happened.  But I liked it.

Talking with Matt, who began discussing sodium trees versus calcium trees and how those differences affect the wood ash impact on ceramics, a realization began to dawn on me.  This is clay.  Clay.  It’s part of mother earth.  Part of her body.  Working with clay is not only like working with soil, it is working with soil.  Glazes can be totally organic, using plant and mineral materials available anywhere.  In fact, the properties of the clay differ from region to region.  So do the types and variteies of plant and mineral materials available to fire kilns and use in glazes.

Ceramics, in other words, is a sister activity to permaculture, bee keeping, flower gardening and native plant use.

Every once in a while I like to push myself outside my comfort zone.  Tai Chi and Latin are my current excursions.  I can’t see getting into clay until after our cruise in the fall, but I want to do it.  By that time the learning curve for both Latin and Tai Chi will be manageable.  After that, though, I can see taking a class or two, maybe more.

Manual dexterity is not my thing, at least it hasn’t been, but why not?  No practice as much as anything.  So, if I can learn basic techniques and practice.  Well…

Art and Culture

Hangin’

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Beltane                                                            Full Last Frost Moon

Our remodeling is pretty close to finished.  Which is a good thing since we started in 2008 or so.  We finally hung the art in the living room, works we took down at the beginning of that fallbandprocess.  We didn’t want to rush into it.

(This is one of the paintings.  Artist is Jeremiah Miller, my brother-in-law.  Title:  Fall Band.)

I like the result.

Also got the Tundra oil changed and its undercarriage for perforations.  None.

A good days work.