Visual Art
November 13, 2007
Concretizing Our Abstract Ideas of Real Garbage, Real Toxins and Real Polluters
Thanks to the friend who sent me a link to the work of Chris Jordan, an artist whose photography uses garbage, toxins, pollutants and major sources of all the above so that we can see how much of this stuff there is mucking up our planet. I suggest you click on the links to Intolerable Beauty, which is photos of things like crushed cars, discarded cell phones and obsolete circuit boards, as well as the raw materials we need to build our homes and pave our streets, etc; and Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait (love that title!), which includes statistics to help the viewer understand just how much we throw away, how many children don't have health care, how many people die of smoking-related illnesses each year, etc.
It's very disturbing, the fact that we are able to think of garbage in terms of the few plastic bags we take home from the grocery store every few days and don't recycle, or the single broken dvd player we throw out and replace after a few years, because we don't think about how many other people are doing the exact same thing at the exact same intervals. Jordan's work makes it much harder to think in those narrow terms. After seeing these photographs, I will do my best from here on out to never again drink a beverage sold in a plastic bottle.
On Bill Moyer's Journal you can also watch a video (it's actually a series of stills with accompanying narration, but we call that a video, don't we?) about the photographs Jordan took after the waters receded from New Orleans, which have been collected in the book In Katrina's Wake.
Posted by Holly at 10:07 AM | Comments (2)
November 9, 2007
Under the Banner of a Really Great Collage: the 47th Carnival of Feminists
The 47th Carnival of Feminists is up at Ornamenting Away from dizzybuzzkill. I got up this morning, started coffee, sat down to read. I heard the coffee maker produce this click it makes when it needs to cool down because it's been on for too long, looked up at the clock, and realize I'd been sitting for an hour without coffee, because the posts were too interesting to get up from. (The coffee is just decaf--I don't need any stimulants at all--but it's nice in the morning to have a cup of slightly sweet, fairly milky warm liquid, which is how I like my coffee.)
There is something to intrigue, inspire and inform every feminist. I'm not done reading, but so far my favorite post (and new blog) is on "the modern cad" from Feminist Fire.
When you're done reading all the posts, please scroll down past dizzy's blog roll and click on the link to her banner art, which takes you to the collages of Blondstrawberry, a totally awesome collage artist. I am lucky enough to own a collage by Blondstrawberry--if you click on the gallery page and get gallery one, you'll see two columns of thumbnail images, the top right of which is a woman looking down at something. Click on that if you want to see the collage I bought.... It's called "Sober Beacon" and it hangs in my living room. It's not huge--only 4"x6"--but it's very cool. I got it when Blondstrawberry was just starting to sell her stuff and it wasn't pricey--it cost more to have framed and matted than to buy it in the first place--but I think she's seen some significant success and realized what her stuff is actually worth, so you can't get it for next to nothing anymore. But if you like her stuff, I would definitely contact her about acquiring some.
Posted by Holly at 9:48 AM | Comments (0)
September 4, 2007
Naked Guys at the Johnson Museum
A couple weeks ago I took my last trip of the summer: I went to Ithaca, NY, to visit dear friends.
Ithaca, in case you didn't know, is in a singularly beautiful part of the world. It's part of the finger lakes region of New York and has both rolling hills and steep valleys. At the Wegman's in Ithaca you can buy t-shirts proclaiming that it's "gorges." It's worth going just to survey the scenery, but there's also stuff to do. There are state parks, for hiking and swimming and boating. It's the home of the Moosewood Restaurant. The downtown is decent for hanging out. There's also the art gallery at Cornell university: the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
Admission is free, and the top floor of the museum (which houses a decent collection of Asian art) is a great place to get a panoramic view of the entire city, including Ithaca's own personal lake (the name of which I forget). But what will really stick with me are the statues of two naked guys that are the first piece of art you encounter when you walk in the door.
They're these life-sized bronze figures arranged to illustrate the name of the sculpture, which is "Conflict." To be frank, it's not an especially remarkable piece of art, but for some (OK, well, a fairly obvious) reason it has become the mascot of the museum, and the coffee cart and pastry case in the lobby of the museum have been dignified by the name of "2 Naked Guys Cafe," because they're only feet away from the naked guys.
The museum sells t-shirts for the cafe, and of course I bought one--I owed a birthday present to a gay man, and what gay man wouldn't want to walk around West Hollywood in a t-shirt like this?
Posted by Holly at 9:23 AM | Comments (1)
September 18, 2005
A Necessary Ingredient for Enjoying Art
I love Grendel by John Gardner so much I wish I'd written it.
It is, of course, a retelling of the Beowulf saga from the point of view of the monster who wrecks Hrothgar's meadhall and feasts on his men.
I love it because it's a fiercely intellectual book, concerned with truth and ultimate meaning. I love it because it has so many fabulous lines. I love it because the dragon Grendel visits is one of the best characters ever created in all of literature.
I love it because plot is never the point: if you've read Beowulf, you know how Grendel ends: Beowulf rips Grendel's arm off, and Grendel goes off to bleed to death in the woods. So you don't read it for what happens, you read it for how it happens, and why what happens matters.
I get annoyed when people refuse to know anything beyond the initial set-up of a book they want to read or a movie they want to watch. "Don't tell me! Don't ruin the end for me!" they shout, covering their ears, as if ignorance is a necessary ingredient for enjoying art. If I feel I'm getting too caught up in wondering what will happen next to appreciate things in a text like musicality of language and construction of scene, I'll read the end so I can just dispense with the suspense and concentrate on enjoying the pages before the end, rather than racing through to the end.
The best books remain compelling and worthwhile even when you know exactly how they end: you enter the world of the book and that world takes over. I've read Pride and Prejudice at least fifteen times, and every time I read it, I am as engrossed, as anxious to read the next scene, as if I didn't know the story at all--because Austen's prose is just so good, her insight into human beings so clear-eyed and astute, her narrative so breathtakingly complex and rewarding. I reread it this summer and had to stay up until 3:30 in the morning to finish it--I just couldn't put it down until I was done.
Grendel is the same way, and I love it for that; I love that its world is so compelling. I also love Grendel for the stark, empty epiphany he has as he confronts his death. He insists even in the final moments of his life that everything is a matter of chance, that nothing is fated, but at the same time, one choice is as good as another. He refuses to believe that Beowulf managed to hurt him through anything but accident, fortunate for Beowulf, unfortunate for Grendel.
I will cling to what is true. "Blind, mindless, mechanical Mere logic of chance." I am weak from loss of blood. No one follows me now. I stumble again and with my one weak arm I cling to the huge twisted roots of an oak. I look down part stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowing to my voluntary tumble into death.
In On Becoming a Novelist, Gardner discusses that scene and comments that while writing it, he was thinking "child thoughts of death with undertones of guilt and the ultimate moral ugliness of God." I have always loved both that phrase and that idea. I do think the idea of God, at least in his Christian form, is one of the most morally repugnant ideas humanity has ever invented, in part because God is so capricious--fate is a matter of his choices, in which one choice is as good as another: he can choose to destroy the world by flood, and then choose not to, and it's all pretty much the same as far as morality and ethics go, because he's God and gets to say so. When I still believed in such a creature, I also often felt like I was falling off the world into some endless hideous darkness.
Which maybe is another reason I don't mind knowing how things turn out.
But don't let the fact that I've provided one of the last paragraphs of the book and the idea behind it prevent you from reading Grendel yourself if you haven't already. It's so good! And since you know now (if you didn't already) how it's going to end, take your time and notice how inventive and insightful the book is, and don't worry about the plot.
Posted by Holly at 9:29 PM | Comments (1)
August 9, 2005
Self-Portrait Series
I love self-portraits, partly because in grad school I read this fabulous essay by Philippe Lejeune called "Looking at a Self-Portrait." Lejeune is a literary critic whose primary interest is autobiography, verbal and visual. He asks, "What is it that makes a self-portrait recognizable as such? What special interest can their be in looking at a self-portrait?"
Of course there is nothing in a painting that marks it as a self-portrait for anyone who does not know what the painter looks like, hence the existence of titles like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by Parmigianino (which John Ashbery borrowed for the title of one of his books). Painting, Lejeune points out, has no obvious first person, whereas "For the first person, writing is invincible."
Not long after reading that I started writing self-portraits: "Self-Portrait as Hungry Nude." "Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering." "Self-Portrait as Someone Who Looks Exactly Like Me."
I have this really fabulous book given to me by my big sister as a Christmas gift several years ago, called Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-Portraits. Some of the titles of the works depicted there are so thoroughly cool: "Self-Portrait Painting the Virgin and Child." "Self-Portrait at the Dressing Table." "Self-Portrait, Black Background." "Self-Portrait with Metro." And my favorite, by a painter named Cynthia Mailman: "Self-Portrait as God." (!) Some day I will steal all those titles and turn them into self-portraits in language.
Sometimes people call what I write stories. In the terminology of critics and writers, I don't write stories. I write nonfiction. I tell stories, but they are usually true stories, and the things I write about them are essays, memoirs and poems. I admit I have two ideas for novels I want to write, but they'll have to wait until I'm done figuring out my own life.
So what you'll get on this blog are lots of self-portraits. Self-portrait as Woman Who Can't Find Anything Worth Eating in her House on a Tuesday Morning. Self-Portrait as Insomniac. (I've done so many stinkin' versions of that one.) Self-Portrait as Someone who Simply Enjoys the Act of Typing. Self-Portrait as Someone with Something to Say. Because I want to say something that matters about the things that matter to me.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)