Reflection
Hello everyone,
Hope you are maintaining this month. A few art updates and reflections:
A quick note of housekeeping. Two new workshops have been announced for next year:
May 26th–31st I’ll be co-teaching a class on process and creativity with Mike Cina at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Honestly, I’m bewildered that Mike is doing this with me! I call him a friend (and I also call him a lot on the phone). Having Mike Cina respond to a text is one of the greatest measures of my success as an artist. “Hey Mike,” I might say on a Tuesday at 10 a.m., “which one of these is working?” And I’ll send two half-baked renderings of some kernel of an idea. AND HE WILL RESPOND, AND WITH INSIGHTFUL COMMENTS. I might be the biggest Mike Cina fan in the world, and I’m honored that he’s doing this with me and excited that I get to spend a week with him. You should come take our class! It’ll be fun and neither of us have taught it, or taught together, so who knows what could happen??
June 17th–21st I’ll be at the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado. This one-week class will be just me (no Mike Cina, sadly, but may include you, possibly) folding, cutting, and gluing paper in beautiful Snowmass Village. I’ve never been to Anderson Ranch and have been told it will be restorative and enlightening. This one hasn’t been announced officially, but should go live on their site in December.
In September, I spend a few days in Houston for an opening and had a complete breakdown at the Rothko Chapel.
It was a 10/10 experience and I would do it again, but not anytime soon. The chapel is a large octagonal room filled with floor-to-ceiling bruise-colored paintings. But calling them bruises isn’t exactly right; they are voids perhaps, but not initially. When entering, you are met with the sound of the space—it echoes foot steps—and has a faint old-book smell. I went alone, and there were a few people present. They don’t allow phones or electronics. My first impression was that it was a bit much. I’m a Rothko fan, but this was a lot.
I walked the perimeter and stopped at the center triptych. I was standing about sixteen inches away from the center painting when it started vibrating.
(I called Mike Cina later that day and told him that I stood close to the piece and it started vibrating and he said, “Yeah, once that happens you’re fucked.”) Well, I was fucked. Getting that close, the painting engulfs your vision and you are in the painting. Everyone there left, and it was just me in the painting.
There’s that Nietzsche quote, “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.” Up close, each painting is similar, but different in the way various parts of your body experience aching differently. Some days, the only thing sharp about me is my ability to feel pain. Grief is in that space, but also a sense of longing. It’s both overpowering and surreal. I thought about the fight that happens in depression, against sadness itself and the wonder / insanity of life in general. How almost nothing makes sense, nothing really matters, and why any of this is even happening. How in the end, the struggle is the point; knowing that you will inevitably lose, you still show up to fight. The only true response to insanity is to be insane and keep going. It’s not a giving up but a giving in that happens.
I didn’t know I was crying until the docent brought me a tissue. “It happens a lot,” she said.
Rothko painted the Chapel pieces in 1964 (the Chapel wasn’t completed until after his death in 1971), and they still maintain their power sixty years later. I thought about James Elkins’s Pictures and Tears, which I read years ago but didn’t remember until I was in the chapel. I thought a lot about paying attention and paying attention to what we pay attention to. I thought about Robert Irwin, who died this week, and the excellent book Lawrence Weschler wrote about him, Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. In it, Irwin talks about his early discoveries.
“In the beginning, all this was not very considered,” Irwin recalls. “It was done very intuitively. My concentration was not real good. It was mostly a question of just staying in the studio and simply not going out. Whether I did anything or didn’t do anything, whether I was able to work or not, I simply would not let myself leave. But after a while, if you don’t let yourself leave, then everything else begins to leave, that is, all your other reasons or ambitions in being there; and if you’re very fortunate, you might then reach a point of being completely alone in an intimate dialogue with yourself as acted out in the realm of the painting.”
Irwin would sit in his closed studio, staring at a monotone, textured canvas of fairly bright color, such as orange or yellow, with two thin lines in the same color spread horizontally across the field. “I would sit there and look at those two lines. Then I’d remove one of them and move it up an eighth of an inch—I had a way of doing that that I’d worked out . . .” And to his astonishment, Irwin noticed one afternoon that just raising the line that one eighth of an inch changed the entire perceptual field!
I thought about Matthew Goulish (author of what is possibly my all-time favorite book, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance) and his writing about how a painting becomes more than a painting:
Let us attempt to view The Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio. First, we must travel to Rome. Once there, we must find the Chiesa Santa Maria del Popolo. Upon entering the unlit cavernous church, we see the painting immediately, and see that we cannot see it. It hangs high on the wall obscured in shadow twenty feet away beyond an uncrossable boundary.
We notice a small box to our right, labeled with the word “luce,” below which is a slot the size of a 100 lira coin.
One of us volunteers to drop a coin in the slot, and suddenly a miraculous heavenly beam of electric light from the ceiling illuminates The Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio.
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Before we can begin our contemplation, we realize that tourists from all corners of the church have swarmed to our position, it being the only illuminated area. Jostling to maintain our view of the painting, we focus our concentration on the cramped and colorful composition. We feel momentarily overwhelmed, not just by the startling structures and figures, but also by the textures. We see St. Paul on his back on the ground, eyes closed and arms outstretched to an interior heaven, his horse beside him, one front hoof poised above Paul’s chest, reined by a frightened steward.
Above Paul’s head, the horse’s head; above the horse’s head, the steward’s head; above the steward’s head just off the corner of the canvas, the sky. With a click the light has gone out, plunging the painting back into darkness. The tourists hesitate, waiting for somebody to volunteer another coin. When no one does, they wander off again into the interior of the church.
What is The Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio? We expected a painting, but found a series of events. Does the painting we expected exist? There is the painting, but there is also the coin box and the coin, ourselves and the crowd, the church of Santa Maria del Popolo and the city of Rome, the shadows and the light. Of course The Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio exists, but this is not really the question. The question is where does The Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio stop? What is a work? A work is an object overflowing its frame, converging into a series of other objects each overflowing their frames, not becoming one another, but becoming events, each moving in the direction of their own infinite singularity and difference. Somebody pulls another 100 lira coin from a pocket, holds it over the slot, and says,
“Get ready.”
I’ve been working on a series of pieces since returning from Houston currently titled Post chapel studies. I’ll probably change that later, but right now I’m not in a literary title mode but a making mode. I want to run with them a bit before I totally understand what’s happening. I like the idea of getting to know a child before giving them a name. (We had Fjora around for a few days before we knew she was a Fjora.) I feel like Irwin—seeing things new and paying attention to elements I hadn’t previously considered.
A piece of art needs to connect. It needs to have some element of truth to it that resonates with the viewer and leaves them something after they’ve left the piece. It asks questions and teaches something we didn’t know or shows us something we didn’t know we knew. It articulates something we’ve felt and we connect to that thing in a way where words aren’t necessary. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe but makes us feel less alone in a way—that someone else understands us and gives a voice to this thing inside us. A piece of art extends beyond its frame and becomes part of us.
Am I typing into the void? Please leave a comment below; being human is connecting with other humans, and I want to know what you think.
Be well, stay safe. Get ready.
<3
m
Artwork always available here.
Post Chapel pieces are very nice. Thanks for the kind words.
I for one am in love with Post Chapel, in white and gold paper. The way the light works with it is spectacular to me.
I've never had the visceral reaction you describe to art, and though I love and appreciate it, for me it is more about the context at the time and where it fits in my space as well as the piece itself. I do, however, love the poetry of your description and the feelings that evokes in me. Wonderful, and please keep writing. It isn't so much of a void you are typing into as a white space you are giving context to for me anyway. And I appreciate it a lot.