technically, that blu video wasn’t the coolest thing i’ve seen this summer. i think it’s actually this, which was projected to fill an entire wall of a dark room in the art institute of chicago’s modern wing. i remember very little about the information posted outside the installation except that pierre huyghes made these small scale models & set about making the buildings “communicate” with each other. i recommend headphones. and sticking with it—the soundtrack doesn’t really pick up until after 2 minutes, with the shit really kicking up after about 4.
I’ve been in a lot of art galleries recently, and I’ve noticed this trend that really bites my nerves. Words on the canvas, only somewhat incorporated into the visual design, and worse, they’re the same abstract words that one should avoid in writing and therefore, I think, doubly avoid in art. You know the list by heart: dream, smile, love, believe, etc. I can deal with a poem ending on the heavy line “I’ve wasted my life,” but for some reason, if that poem were a painting, an idyllic scene of sunlight through pines and golden horse pies and a man in a hammock that had the words “I’ve wasted my life” painted in the sky, I would hate it. That’s what the title should do–provide just enough extra context to give the viewer a jolt.
Environmental phenomenologist David Abram wrote that “…today you read printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor.” Maybe that’s true, and if so, I think that ruining a perfectly fine painting by incorporating the word “believe” is like smearing bear shit over a corner of it.
If the audience should walk away with a sense of dreaming or the desire to create personal goals, the work should convey that. It’s not that I’m totally set against clever inclusions of words in art, and the kind of typographical fun where the type itself becomes important, not the message of the word. And those good examples do exist. Photographer Martin Wilson creates words and phrases on his contact sheets and they look amazing even if the message is a whimsical Motown lyric (eg. “Dancing in the Streets”). Read more »
the critics all agree: way better than the hollywood adaptation.
remember awp, way back when? i do, because i’ve still got a shitload of lit mags sitting in my apartment that i hauled home from denver, but which, as of yet, i have to read. and i’ve begged off posting about salt hill because i wanted to do a proper review of this excellent little journal. it’ll happen someday, but in the meantime i can’t wait any longer to share with you the glory of stefanie posavec’s work, which i discovered in salt hill 22. if you liked dan’s post with stuff from information is beautiful, this’ll be right up your alley, because this lady’s an evil genius. she’s taken works of literature and literally mapped them, in various ways, based on sentences, paragraph breaks, chapters, etc. you can learn about her process for creating sentence drawings, plus get some other brilliant work & links of hers over at eye blog.
and but there’s more! with a totally unrelated (except for in a conceptual way) link, i also wanted to share with you the mind-boggling awesomeness that is the cyoa project. in which samizdat took a dozen “choose your own adventure” books and mapped out every conceivable path. and then animated them in flash. it’s nothing short of stunning.
similar idea, different medium—each doing something better than the other could. here’s to always having the best of both worlds.
I had planned to go check out one of the Brooklyn Bridge Park movies with my friend Maryanna this week, but when I checked the schedule I saw that they were playing Brokeback Mountain–one of my least favorite movies of all time. Usually when I tell people how much I don’t like this movie they look at me with horror and distrust.
I agree that Brokeback Mountain is visually beautiful and the acting is great and the subject matter is important and maybe even groundbreaking–but all that isn’t enough because the movie plays one brutal, mournful, high-pitch the whole time, without acknowledging any layers, variance or contradiction of feeling. No matter how hopeless or terrifying artistic subject matter is, I never believe that it’s truthful to force and force and force the despair of it all on your audience for the duration of the piece–which I believe this movie does. That type of subject matter can speak for itself. It needs to be left to breathe once in a while. Read more »
Some news from my world: I’ve been hired to teach at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. I’m incredibly excited about this new development. A couple weeks ago they invited me to give a presentation at their professional development day, which was awesome, so I spent the entire day there last Thursday going to sessions, getting to know the people, and giving my own presentation, and it was great, but I realized something. One of their big challenges, at least in the liberal arts department, is getting these students, who all think they are artists, to write. In session after session, I heard teachers talk about trying to get students to see writing as something they should want to do, something they shouldn’t be afraid of, and for some reason I was a little surprised. I’m not new to students who hate writing, but generally those students don’t see themselves as creative people. Often they see themselves as better at math and science; they’re students who have been put down for their writing by one teacher or another and have given up on themselves as writers. I suppose that can happen to people who are good at visual arts, too, but my assumption, I’ve just learned, has been that words are part of the arts and that artists would most likely have an affinity for them. I was wrong. The teachers at PNCA went on and on about students who think writing is useless and painful and irrelevant. Sigh.
So here’s the question: how is writing like the visual arts? They are both skills that have to be practiced; neither of them are innately learned. There’s one thing. But what about the process? My boyfriend is a writer, visual artist, and musician, and it makes sense to me for all those things to go together, but how do I convince reluctant students of that? Could their hatred come from some learned misconception about what writing is? Maybe these are unanswerable questions until I get in there and meet my students, but I’m curious to know what other people think. If you’re a visual artist, how do you relate to writing? And vice versa? If language really is our most prominent mode of self expression, how do I convince a bunch of visual artists of this? Should I assign multigenre assignments where they’re allowed to incorporate words with images? Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated.
We could probably convince Mark Knopfler that writing a book isn’t exactly “money for nothin’” and these authors aren’t playing “the guitar on MTV,” but other than that it’s pretty close to the Dire Straits song. Okay, so you might have to use your imagination to hear “Hawaiian noises” and see “bangin’ on the bongos like a chimpanzee,” but as music artists of earlier decades had to make videos for MTV to create hits, authors now put book trailers on YouTube to keep up with the Joneses—actually, the Roberts and the Pattersons. In other words, it’s not enough for writers to worry whether we are photogenic enough for the book jacket portrait, now we can also be anxious about appearing natural on film.
…the trailer is fast becoming an essential component of online marketing. Asked to draw on often nonexistent acting skills, authors are holding forth for anything from 30 seconds to 6 minutes, frequently to the tune of stock guitar strumming, soulful violin or klezmer music. And now, those who once worried about no one reading their books can worry about no one watching their trailers. (A mother still nursing her 8-year-old: 25,864,943 views; recent best-selling maternal memoirist: 5,124 views.)
In January, Sam posted some words about Patti Smith and her memoir, Just Kids. I finished the book last night and will say that it belongs among the top five or ten most important books of my life to date.
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