I’ve been busy taking a poetry workshop and online collage/painting classes at the same time.
Oddness of my poetry practice vs. visual art practice.
Poetry is suffering in comparison. It is so black and white and the letters are such tiny crabby forms. The lines are just so damn regular and horizontal.
Some links I’ve collected through this experience:
Wendy Tribulski – Abstract Paintings
Philoxenia – love of strangers (hospitality)
Or love of the strange, which seems something quite different.
From McKenzie Wark’s article A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, And His Art Collection:
Xmas is more like a philoxenia than a philanthropy: A love of making the event of the strange.
The great philanthropists turn out, on closer inspection, to be nothing of the sort. Their acts are, like Xmas, about the making present of some strange excess in the world. There is no love of our kind involved. Nancy Cunard, Gerard Lebovici, Edgar Kaufman: these were not great philanthropists. They were patrons of the strange, practitioners of philoxenia. They did not ‘collect’ art and erect vanity museums. They were the secret Santas of another life.
I’m having trouble grasping the point with respect to art, but I like his point with respect to Xmas:
For the child, Xmas has nothing to do with ‘consumerism’. The gift just appears. Its a bit of what the surrealists called the marvelous. For the adult, it is a way to give to the child without expecting the child to be grateful to the parent. Rather, it is so the child can know that world itself could be generous.
Baby Poetics, article by Joy Katz
I’m obsessed with this topic, have been for a long time.
How weak is any part of a baby, as a potential phrase. I can feel the sick pull of sentimentality, and I haven’t even written a metaphor. I can’t say whatever it is the feet of a baby are, can’t push them someway through language or sound to a new place, because the cliff-edge of preciousness is right there, waiting for me to fall off it.
In Lisa Jarnot’s workshop, we are working on strategies to use personal material without falling off the cliff edge.
It is quite serious. This problem goes to the heart of what is troubling the human species.
We tried to understand and apply things our teacher Mingyur Rinpoche said – especially hard ones like, “You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.”
Laurie Anderson, in her farewell to Lou Reed
A Manifesto: How to Make the Art World Bearable Again, by Filip Noterdaeme
- We need more artists who are not concerned with doing the “right thing.”
- We need more artists who find ways to examine and express human misery or bliss without a political agenda.
- We need more artists who don’t play by the rules imposed by curators, gallerists, museums and art collectors.
- We need more artists who are wary of “meaning” and embrace contradiction.
- We need more artists who don’t pretend to have the right answers.
- We need more artists who don’t give a damn about making you feel good or bad.
- We need more artists who are not afraid of running into trouble.
- We need more artists who are able to laugh at the absurdity of life and art.
- We need more artists who don’t resemble anybody’s idea of what an artist ought to be and who nonetheless produce great art that takes us by surprise, makes us think and reflect, and leaves plenty of room for multiple interpretations.
…I never consider my weavings as fine art. While fine art strives to visually or otherwise address a larger audience, my kimono are intended simply to fill the intimate environment of the wearer with joy.
One of my collages posted to the Hannah Hoch Fan Club