Archive - January, 2012

The Sunday Poem: Kevin Young

January 29, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with Comments Off

 
I have a special video version of the Sunday Poem for you today by Kevin Young, one of my favorite contemporary poets. In this short clip from the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Young reads his poem “Aunties,” which appears in his collection Dear Darkness: Poems. Young is a talented reader of his own work, and a recitation really makes his poetry shine. Enjoy the poem and your Sunday!

 

 

 

 

About Kevin Young

Kevin Young was born 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1992, where he took poetry workshops with Lucie Brock-Broido and Seamus Heaney, and his MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1996.

His books of poetry include Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Dear Darkness: Poems (2008); For the Confederate Dead (2007); Black Maria (2005); Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003); To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Most Way Home (1995), selected for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Zacharis First Books Award from Ploughshares.

Young is also the editor of the anthologies The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010); Blues Poems (Everyman’s Library, 2003) and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), as well as a selected volume of poems by John Berryman for the Library of America.

About Young’s work, the poet Lucille Clifton has said, “This poet’s gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American.”

Young’s awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an NEA fellowship. He taught at the University of Georgia and at Indiana University. Currently, he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and lives in Boston and Atlanta.

For more information about Kevin Young, visit his website. You can purchase Kevin Young’s books here or at your local bookstore.

 

 

Would you like the Sunday Poem delivered to your email box each week? Subscribe to Gwarlingo by email. You can also connect on Twitter or Facebook. Read Gwarlingo’s entire Sunday Poem series here.

Check out the Gwarlingo Store for some of my favorite poetry books. Your purchases benefit this site.

 

This video is part of the Poetry Everywhere project airing on public television. Produced by David Grubin Productions and WGBH Boston, in association with the Poetry Foundation. Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. “Aunties” © Kevin Young.
 

Arch Prankster or Art Genius? 52 Art Works by British Street Artist Banksy

January 25, 2012 in Images with 2 Comments

 

A new piece by Banksy called "Fallen Soldier" (Photo courtesy banksy.com)

 

Genius or Scam Artist?

Artist and provocateur Banksy is a walking, breathing oxymoron. Depending on who you ask, he is either a genius or an overhyped vandal, a talented documentary filmmaker or a brilliant scam artist. As a self-described art terrorist, he is both a lefty and a critic of liberal piety. He flips off the art world establishment, and yet courts the very art world he claims to detest. He is a street artist who sells his work for high sums in galleries and auction houses, and “an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V.”1

 

Banksy's “Keep It Spotless,” a collaboration with Damien Hirst, sold for $1.8 million at Sotheby's in 2008. It remains the artist's highest reported sale. I suppose we should be grateful that someone decided to do something useful with some of the extra spot paintings Hirst had kicking around!

 

 

As the Guardian reported, a recent poll of 18- to 25-year-olds named Banksy an “arts hero” in third place behind Walt Disney and Peter Kay, and ahead of Leonardo da Vinci. (Banksy photo courtesy meh.ro)

 

 

A Banksy street sign

 

 

Rat-Banksy-Toxic Spill

 

 

Banksy's new sculpture "Cardinal Sin" was recently put on display at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Banksy made the piece by gluing bathroom tiles to the face of cardinal bust, to give the effect of a mosaiced photograph. "I love everything about the Walker Gallery," Banksy told the BBC, "-- the Old Masters, the contemporary art, the rude girl in the cafe. And when I found out Mr Walker built it with beer money it became my favorite gallery." Banksy said the piece is his response to the recent scandals in the Catholic church. (Photo courtesy boingboing.com)

 

The Banksy Mythology

The identity of Banksy is one of the best-kept secrets in the art world, though there has been plenty of speculation about who is behind the spray-painted rats, policemen, soldiers, apes, and children appearing in the streets of London, Bristol, Toronto, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Detroit.

According to the BBC, Banksy “was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England.” In his book Stencil Graffiti, author and graphic designer Tristan Manco says that Banksy is “the son of a photocopier technician” who “trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s.” The pseudonym “Banksy” is most likely a shortened version of “Bankside,” a district of London on the South Bank of the river Thames. Bankside is dominated by the former Bankside Power Station, which now houses the Tate Modern.

Banksy’s unique style relies on the use of stencils, a method he began using widely in 2000 due to its precision and efficiency (efficiency being key if one hopes to avoid the cops). Like Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, stencils give Banksy’s work a cohesive style and allow him to produce variations on a theme.

Banksy’s fan base is enormous, and growing by the day. There are websites devoted to tracking the locations of his street paintings. One fan named Simon Hassett recently released a new iPhone app that maps the location of Banksy’s art around the globe and lets viewers peruse a gallery of his work. Banksy’s 2009 solo show at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery was attended by over 300,000 people and his work currently sells for astronomical prices at auction houses. Brad Pitt, Damien Hirst, Angelina Jolie, and Dennis Hopper are some of his collectors. As the Guardian reported, a recent poll of 18- to 25-year-olds named Banksy an “arts hero” in third place behind Walt Disney and Peter Kay, and ahead of Leonardo da Vinci.

 

Banksy’s unique style relies on the use of stencils, a method he began using widely in 2000 due to its precision and efficiency--efficiency being key if one hopes to avoid the cops. (From the film "Exit Through the Gift Shop")

 

 

“Graffiti writers are not real villains," says Banksy. "Real villains consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of.” (Photo by Cody Simms courtesy Bored Panda)

 

 

"The easy humour that makes his work superficially likable removes from it any hope of being mad or poetic. He chooses grimly potent images, yet never has the Grim Reaper been less grim than on a wall in Shoreditch, where he gives Death a yellow smiley face." -Jonathan Jones on Banksy's "The Grin Reaper"

 

 

Single Lane Ahead by Banksy

 

 

 

Arch Prankster or Art Genius?

“Despite what they say graffiti is not the lowest form of art,” Banksy says in his bestselling book Wall and Piece. “Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum it’s actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.”

Claims like these are part of Banksy’s populist mythology. He gives the impression that he’s just some average, working-class guy who’s managed to make a name for himself in the high-class art world, in part because of his own cleverness, but also because of the art world’s stupidity.

Continue Reading…

The Sunday Poem: Donald Hall

January 21, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 3 Comments

 

 

 

The Coffee Cup


The newspaper, the coffee cup, the dog’s
   impatience for his morning walk:
These fibers braid the ordinary mystery.
   After the marriage of lovers
the children came, and the schoolbus
   that stopped to pick up the children,

and the expected death of the retired
   mailman Anthony “Cat” Middleton
who drove the schoolbus for a whole
   schoolyear, a persistence enduring
forever in the soul of Marilyn
   who was six years old that year.

We dug a hole for him. When his widow
   Florence sold the Cape and moved to town
to live near her daughter, the Mayflower
   van was substantial and unearthly.
Neither lymphoma nor a brown-and-white
   cardigan twenty years old

made an exception, not elbows nor
   Chevrolets nor hills cutting blue
shapes on blue sky, not Maple Street
   nor Main, not a pink-striped canopy
on an ice cream store, not grass.
   It was ordinary that on the day

of Cat’s funeral the schoolbus arrived
   driven by a woman called Mrs. Ek,
freckled and thin, wearing a white
   bandana and overalls, with one
eye blue and the other gray. Everything
   is strange; nothing is strange:

yarn, the moon, gray hair in a bun,
   New Hampshire, putting on socks.

 

 

 

About Donald Hall

Considered one of the major American poets of his generation, Donald Hall’s poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his more recent poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall uses simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall has built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lives on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, is also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.

Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was “steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface,” as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. “To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading.” By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: “I read Poe and my life changed,” he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.

At a recent reading in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Donald Hall told us that his new book, "The Back Chamber," would be his last book of poems. He explained that his mind doesn't work as it once did. Prose now comes easier to him than poetry. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge, 2011)

Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age sixteen. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish…

In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Donald Hall making me laugh at a reading and book signing sponsored by the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, New Hampshire (Photo by Sheri Fink, 2011)


 

Donald Hall working at his desk in his New Hampshire home near Eagle Pond in 2007 (Photo by Tony Cenicola courtesy The New York Times)

A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly “the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it.”

Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. “Baseball,” included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around the sequence of a baseball game, with nine stanzas of nine lines each. It remains one of Hall’s best-known poems.

President Obama awards the National Medal of Arts to Donald Hall in 2010 (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America)


 

Hall in his home reading beneath art by Marisol and Warhol (Photo by Tony Cenicola courtesy The New York Times)

In 1989, Hall was diagnosed with colon cancer. Though his chances for survival were slim, he eventually went into remission. In 1994, Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died fifteen months later. Kenyon’s death had a profound effect on Hall and he has struggled to document his loss in both his poetry and prose. The poems inWithout: Poems (1998) were written as Kenyon underwent chemotherapy and assembled her final volume, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1997). They bluntly address the facts of Kenyon’s death, detailing her physical deterioration and Hall’s own rage and grief.
Continue Reading…

Artist Doris Salcedo: I Began to Conceive of Works Based on Nothing

January 19, 2012 in Images with 5 Comments

 

Doris Salcedo, Installation at 8th International Istanbul Biennial, 2003.

 

With the continual stream of information and images flooding past me each day, I’ve come to appreciate the rare, found gems that stop me in my virtual tracks. This week it was the above photograph of wooden chairs piled between two buildings that caught my eye on a friend’s Facebook page and sent me on a pleasurable hunt for more details.

Doris Salcedo’s haunting artwork Shibboleth, a giant crack installed in the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, brought the Colombian artist well-deserved attention in 2007. But most of us are less familiar with her earlier projects, such as her 2003 chair piece titled Installation for the 8th Istanbul Biennale.

 

Doris Salcedo, "Shibboleth," 2007. Concrete and metal, 548 feet long. Installation at Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, London. (Photo by Tate Photography, London. © Doris Salcedo. Courtesy the Alexander and Bonin, New York)

 

 

Salcedo's idea was to create a "topography of war"--not tied to a specific historical event, but to war in general. Seeing these 1,550 wooden chairs piled high between two buildings in central Istanbul, I'm reminded of mass graves. Of anonymous victims. I think of both chaos and absence, two effects of wartime violence.

 

 

Chairs are an intriguing choice, because they have the power to communicate both absence and human connection. Amassing them in huge quantities is not only visually spectacular, but it also conveys individual experience, as well as the collective.

 

Like Shibboleth, Istanbul is simple in its concept, but powerful in its impact. Salcedo’s idea was to create a “topography of war”–not tied to a specific historical event, but to war in general. Seeing these 1,550 wooden chairs piled high between two buildings in central Istanbul, I’m reminded of mass graves. Of anonymous victims. I think of both chaos and absence, two effects of wartime violence.

Born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, Salcedo’s installations express the silenced lives of the marginalized. She is particularly interested in the gap between the powerful and the powerless, and in victims of violence and forced migration. “I am a Third World artist,” says Salcedo. Her artwork emerges “from that perspective—from the perspective of the victim, from the perspective of the defeated.”

“What I’m trying to get out of these pieces is that element that is common in all of us,” Salcedo explains. “And in a situation of war, we all experience it in much the same way, either as victim or perpetrator. So I’m not narrating a particular story. I’m just addressing experiences.”

According to Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, Salcedo once witnessed “a horrific clash between guerrillas and the state that ended in people being burned to death in the occupied Palace of Justice in Bogotá: ‘It left its mark on me. I began to conceive of works based on nothing.’ Her response was to go to a hospital in Bogotá and collect dead patients’ discarded shoes, which she put into cavities dug in a wall and veiled in a weblike fibre.”

Jones makes the excellent point that Salcedo’s approach to art is not to give form to the voices of the powerless, but to take form away:

“To give form is an act of power. There is no art more involved with power than architecture because nothing says as clearly as a building that ‘I had the power to build this.’ Surely it’s no coincidence that women such as Salcedo and [Rachel] Whiteread take on the heavy-duty materials and the power-bragging aesthetic of architecture and turn it inside out.”

 

 

Doris Salcedo, "Atrabiliarios," 1996, MoMA Collection (Image courtesy pathetica.net). These shoes once belonged to people who have since disappeared amid the political violence in Doris Salcedo's native Colombia. Salcedo's approach to art is not to give form to the voices of the powerless, but to take form away.

 

 

Salcedo's "Shibboleth" at the Tate Modern was filled in when the exhibition closed, but the scar is still visible in Turbine Hall. You can see photos of the scar in my article on the Tate here at Gwarlingo (Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis courtesy the AP)

 

 

Doris Salcedo, "Istanbul Project II," 2003 Piezo-pigment on Hahnemühle German Etching Paper, 24 1/2 x 37 1/4 inches. Edition of 35 (Photo by Bill Orcutt. © Doris Salcedo. Courtesy the Alexander and Bonin, New York)

 

Continue Reading…

Believing is Seeing: Errol Morris Uncovers the Mysteries of Photography

January 16, 2012 in Images, Words with Comments Off

 

 

What makes an “honest” photograph—a “true” photograph? Is the medium of photography more factual and authentic than other art forms? What makes a photograph “a fake”? Can a photo be objective or does it always have a point of view? When does a photograph document reality? When is it propaganda? When is it art? Can a single photograph be all of these things simultaneously?

These are some of the questions Academy-Award winning film director and MacArthur fellow Errol Morris tackles in his brilliant book Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography). This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the medium of photography and is one of my favorite publications from 2011.

A young Errol Morris with his parents (Photo courtesy Errol Morris from Seeing is Believing)

Morris’s fascination with photography began at a young age. His father died before Morris turned three, so the photographs on display throughout the family’s home were one of his only connections to his father. “In a sense, the photographs both gave me my father and took him away,” Morris explains in the introduction to his book. “Photographs put his images in front of me, but they also acutely reminded me of his absence.”

Morris also reveals that he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision. He blames his bad eye sight on the fact that he refused to wear a patch after surgery for a misaligned eye when he was a boy. In an interesting twist, the man who performed his eye surgery eventually became his stepfather. “My wife Julia calls it a new version of the Oedipus story: my future stepfather blinds me and then marries my mother. If I share anything with Oedipus, it is asking one too many questions.” Is it any wonder Morris is obsessed with the subject of perception?

 

"There is no correct way to take photographs or to make documentary films, or for that matter to write books," says Morris. "It’s not about correct and incorrect. Truth is something that you seek in what you do. You strive to understand the world around you but it's not guaranteed by style. Using available light or a hand held camera doesn’t make your work any more truthful than anybody else’s work."

 

Believing is Seeing is part detective story, part philosophical meditation. The essays, which originally appeared in a different form on Morris’ blog on the New York Times website, generated a lot of comment and debate when they first appeared, and for good reason. They are fascinating, provocative investigations into the limitations of looking.

To understand a photograph, Morris argues that we must seize on small details as a way of answering larger questions. The case of Roger Fenton is a good case in point. In 1855 the British photographer took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death during the Crimean War. One photo shows a road covered with cannonballs, and the other shows the same road without the cannonballs.

While reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Morris was struck by Sontag’s claim that the famous photograph of the cannonballs on the road was staged and that Fenton “oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.”

 

In 1855 Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death during the Crimean War. One photograph shows a road covered with cannonballs, and the other shows the same road without the cannonballs. Morris asks the provocative question, "Which photograph was taken first?"

 

 

Susan Sontag claimed that Roger Fenton posed the photograph with the cannonballs on the road, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Is it possible to recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago?

 

Sontag’s assertion about Fenton raises more questions for Morris than it answers. He wonders how Sontag actually knew the sequence of the two images? And why does she suggest “a certain laziness on Fenton’s part, as if he himself couldn’t be bothered picking up or putting down a cannonball but instead supervised or oversaw their placement”? And how can Sontag possibly know what Fenton’s motivations were while he was taking the photograph? Morris goes through remarkable (and humorous) lengths to answer these questions, and even returns to Crimea to see what revelations can be uncovered.

Morris reveals similar complexities in the iconic, Depression-era photographs of Farm Security Administration photographers like Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans. Morris makes a strong case that Walker Evans rearranged furniture and moved objects when documenting the interior of the Gudger family’s sharecropper cabin. Evans’s images were taken for the FSA and also were included in the landmark book Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Morris scrutinizes James Agee’s household inventory from Let us Now Praise Famous Men and compares it to the corresponding photographs taken by Evans. Morris also examines the sequence of Evans’s images and the placement of objects in each sequential frame.

 

Why did Evans's collaborator James Agee list the objects on the Gudger's mantle in such detail and yet fail to mention the Westclox Fortune No. 10 clock in the center of the mantle? Was the object Walker Evans's own personal travel clock? Did Evans add the alarm clock to the mantle to improve the composition of his image? Did he give the clock to Mr. Gudger, or did the clock belong to the family already? If so, why would the clock be placed on the mantle after Agee made his household inventory? (Image courtesy the New York Times/Walker Evans photo courtesy the Library of Congress)

 

Some fascinating questions emerge: Why did James Agee list the objects on the Gudger’s mantle in such detail (including small details like a nail file, two large safety pins, and needle and thread), and yet fail to mention the Westclox Fortune No. 10 clock in the center of the mantle?
Continue Reading…

The Sunday Poem: Tung-Hui Hu

January 14, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with Comments Off

 

 

 

 

Early Winter, After Sappho

 

Some say the air of
early winter moving through
windows. For some, black ships

coming towards the city
are the quietest sounds on earth.
But I say it is with whomever one loves.

And very easily proved:
when we are trying to think of
something to say to each other,

each remembering back
who said what, the ground
we’ve already covered,

you can hear all the money
lost earlier in the stock market,
even fresh water slipping
into salt water.

 

 

 

 

About Tung-Hui Hu

Tung-Hui Hu is the author of Mine (Ausable Press, 2007) and The Book of Motion (University of Georgia Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, and AGNI. His third collection Greenhouses, Lighthouses, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in October, won the 2007 James D. Phelan Literary Award. Described by the San Francisco Foundation as a “provocative gesture towards cinematography,” the book is composed of a series of palinodes, a form that sings back or recants a previous error.

A native of San Francisco, Tung-Hui Hu has worked as a political consultant and computer scientist, and holds degrees from Princeton, Michigan, and UC Berkeley. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan and a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows. His nonfiction piece, A History of Clouds in the Desert, examines the legacy of atomic blasts and electronic warfare in the empty spaces of the Nevada desert.

Speaking of Tung-Hui Hu’s poetry, Mark Doty said, “This fresh and unexpected poet extends the lyric into the social space without losing any of song’s intensity or mystery, so that these casually elegant, affecting poems feel as interior as they are worldly.”

For more information about Tung-Hui Hu, please visit his website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would you like the Sunday Poem delivered to your email box each week? Subscribe to Gwarlingo by email. You can also connect on Twitter or Facebook. Read Gwarlingo’s entire Sunday Poem series here.

Check out the Gwarlingo Store for some of my favorite poetry books. Your purchases benefit this site.

 

“Early Winter, After Sappho” © Tung-Hui Hu and was reprinted with permission from the author.

 

Listen to My Interview about Gwarlingo on NHPR’s Word of Mouth

January 12, 2012 in News with 1 Comment

 

 

Virginia Prescott, Taylor Quimby, and Rebecca Lavoie at NHPR’s Word of Mouth made my first live radio interview a blast. If only we had had more time to discuss those Japanese manhole covers, which are still flying around the “inter-web.”

If you missed today’s show on New Hampshire Public Radio, you can listen to the segment on Gwarlingo here.

Stay tuned! I have a new Creative Spaces feature in the works, plus a fun piece in my ongoing series on street art.

Don’t miss the next Gwarlingo feature. Subscribe to Gwarlingo by email. (It’s easy, safe, and free). You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

 

 

On Money, Fear, and the Artist

January 11, 2012 in Images, Process, Words with 14 Comments

 

A currency collage by artist Mark Wagner (Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

A visual artist I know once told me about an audit she endured with the IRS. My friend is a professional artist in New York City with her own studio. Her work is shown at galleries and museums. She has received grants, been accepted to artist residencies around the world, and every now and then, she even manages to sell a few pieces of artwork.

During the audit, one of the IRS employees explained to my friend that she couldn’t keep declaring a loss for her business year after year. “This looks more like a hobby than a profession,” the auditor said.

My friend attempted to explain the financial ups and downs of being a working artist. Yes. There had been a dry spell in the “income department” in recent years, but her expenses were legitimate. Art was her business, her life, her passion–not a mere hobby. The auditor was completely puzzled. “But if you aren’t making any money creating art,” he asked, “why do you keep doing this year after year?”

 

"The one dollar bill is the most ubiquitous piece of paper in America," says artist Mark Wagner. "Collage asks the question: what might be done to make it something else?" (Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

 

A detail of the above currency collage by artist Mark Wagner (Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

I love this story because it says so much about the profit-oriented culture we inhabit as artists (and when I say “artists,” I define that term broadly to include writers, performers, designers, filmmakers, composers, visual artists, etc.).

For most artists I know, money is a constant source of anxiety because most creative projects don’t make economic sense. As artists, we have chosen an alternative paradigm to the profit-oriented one. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be smart about the business-side of art making, only that money isn’t our primary motivator.

The concept of creating for its own sake remains a radical concept in our culture. This is one of the central rifts we’ve seen playing out between Wall Street bankers and supporters of the Occupy movement. One camp places a higher value on profits, while the other a higher value on more elusive qualities like imagination, empathy, and justice.

Of course, if you have your money invested in the stock market, then you want your broker to be greedy with your money–you want to earn 6%, not 4% like everyone else. But when it comes to art, greed turns the best ideas sour. It isn’t hard to sniff-out the difference between work that was created from a free, deep place, and a blatant commercial commodity.

You may be able sell the end product of art–the concert ticket, the photograph, the book–but the idea itself is free. Art is a gift, and like all gifts, it must be shared in order to make an impact.

 

(Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

 

"For most artists I know, money is a constant source of anxiety because most creative projects don’t make economic sense. As artists, we have chosen an alternative paradigm to the profit-oriented one." (Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

 

 

"Fear is normal for an artist--it's the reason we get trapped in the cycle of self-doubt and anxiety, the reason we hesitate to declare a project finished." (Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

Being an artist is so hard because we’re operating in a parallel universe from the larger culture–one that values imagination, creativity, and ideas more than money or status. But a true creative exchange–one in which art is given and accepted without obligation is a way of side-stepping the soul-crushing grimness of consumerism. I would go so far as to say that it’s an alternate way of being. It’s this free exchange between artist and audience that creates movement, provides pleasure, provokes change, and offers meaningful connection.

As writer and MacArthur fellow Lewis Hyde says in his classic book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, “The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is great it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.”

“Motion” is a key word here, for an artist needs this movement to thrive. “Make the work,” said Walt Whitman. “Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping,…Stop it and just DO!” wrote artist Sol LeWitt to his friend Eva Hesse. “All that is important is this one moment in movement,” Martha Graham once said. “Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”

Art that languishes for too long on the hard drive, on the studio wall, or in the murky recesses of the imagination becomes stagnant. At worst, it becomes insular and self-absorbed. “No art is sunk in the self,” observed Flannery O’Connor, “but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”

Fear is normal for an artist–it’s the reason we get trapped in the cycle of self-doubt and anxiety, the reason we hesitate to declare a project “finished.” Our bodies are wired for self-protection. The moment we sense artistic risk or criticism, our “fight or flight” response kicks in. This is perfectly natural, but if we aren’t careful, we can get stuck in this place, unconsciously filling our time with research, editing, re-evaluating, re-writing, re-working (the artist’s version of “flight”).

 

"A true creative exchange--one in which art is given and accepted without obligation is a way of side-stepping the soul-crushing grimness of consumerism." (Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

 

 

A detail of the above currency collage by Mark Wagner (Photo courtesy Mark Wagner at smokeinmydreams.com)

 

In Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton writes: “There is only one real deprivation,…and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most…The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.”

This doesn’t mean that stillness isn’t important–it’s key to the creative process–but at some point we have to let go and allow our work to be subjected to the marketplace. “The artist who hopes to market work that is the realization of his gifts cannot begin with the market,” Hyde explains in his book. “He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Continue Reading…

On the Anniversary of the Tucson Shooting: A New Work by Deanne Stillman

January 8, 2012 in News, Sunday Poem, Words with 2 Comments

The scene in a grocery store parking lot in Tucson the day Jared Lougnher shot nineteen people. Six people were killed, including a nine-year-old girl. (Photo Courtesy Chris Morrison/Christian Science Monitor)

 

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Tucson shooting that killed six and injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords and twelve others.

In place of the usual Sunday Poem, I’m delighted to share with you a new work by Deanne Stillman called “Reflections in a D’Back’s Eye,” which is a literary meditation on the events in Tucson. Also exceptionally, the piece is preceded by an interview with the author that provides additional context.

Stillman is a highly acclaimed creative nonfiction writer who has written extensively about the American West, particularly its relationship to violence and the American dream. This unique prose poem is an experimental piece that weaves together disparate voices–some real, others imagined. Stillman and I had an opportunity to correspond about her new piece via email.

 

Deanne Stillman (Photo by Mark Lamonica)

 

What inspired you to write about the shootings in Tucson?

A few things I guess… A lot of my work has to do with war and peace in our wide open spaces, and as I began to think about what happened, some things began to emerge. Of course, I started thinking about exactly who was this young man who mounted the attack? Some information suggests that one of the many things that agitated him was the question of 9/11 — was it an inside job? It seems he kept trying to get answers and may have been rebuffed by various authority figures.

Then it turned out that the little girl he killed, Christina-Taylor Green, was born on 9/11. She appears in a book about babies born that day. I was struck by the convergence of these things — that 9/11 was running through this incident. Bin-Laden said somewhere that after 9/11 the states would not be united. I doubt that he was talking about psychological states but he had to have known that he was stirring the American hive and some people would be tormented in inexplicable ways by what happened. But of course, this was just part of the murk in Jared Lougnher’s mind.

Christina Taylor-Green

Another thing that resonated for me was that a little girl was killed. The murder of a child is as bad as it gets. I was struck by the fact that Christina-Taylor Green came from a baseball family and played on her Little League team — one of two girls. I love baseball and know how hard that was, having played ball with neighborhood boys myself — or tried to. Her mother had warned her that playing with the boys would be rough, but she wasn’t deterred. In fact she was a good second baseman and hitter, once refusing to walk when she had been hit by a ball and going on to hit a line drive. Another time she broke up a scuffle during a play at second base after someone tried to slide in. Then there was the time that her father called and said she couldn’t play because she was sick, but she showed up anyway and said she didn’t want to let down her team.  The more I learned about her story, the more heartbreaking it became. She just wanted to play ball! That’s what she was doing on the day of the Tucson shootings – going to a meet and greet with Gabrielle Giffords, her representative. She wanted to run for Congress some day…she had just been elected to her student council. She was a team player — that’s what her coach said – and then she ends up colliding with the boy who played roughest of all.

Then of course there was Loughner’s own story. I started thinking about his final conversations and encounters… Who was he talking with and what did he say? One of them would have been with a Wal-Mart greeter before he bought a 30-round clip of ammunition; and then I learned that he liked jazz (!!!) — or used to — and he was evidently into Coltrane for awhile. Also his mother worked in a county park where people once went for the healing waters. One of the first things I did after the shootings was go there. I sat there for an afternoon and I started to wonder if his mother found any comfort among the old mesquites as her son was unraveling across town.

Jared Loughner's parents, Amy and Randy Loughner (Photo by Jennifer Polixenni Brankin courtesy The New York Post)

I had to write about all of this, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it could not be conventional; there were too many rivers running through it, and they were not the sort that could be contained in a linear way, including the desert itself – often a character in my work — and Native American history and myth playing out here, which to me is everywhere, but we don’t pay attention and here we have a major incident in Arizona — the Grand Canyon State. The Hopi say that the Grand Canyon is a point of their emergence, and here is a troubled young man running around in the desert with a gun. There is this sort of thing all over the West amid all of the beauty and really this has been going on since day one in this country, and it’s America’s original sin. The seeds of this incident are very deep.

 

Why did you choose the memorable image of the diamondback as a central part of your piece?

There is a pedestrian bridge that runs over the freeway that passes through Tucson. It’s in the shape of a rattlesnake and you walk though its mouth and you can look through its skin in any direction and it has a goofy-sounding rattle when you reach the tail. Snakes are plentiful in Arizona — and around Tucson — and the Phoenix baseball team is the Diamondbacks, so there was the baseball reference, for those who might pick it up. The image just seemed to work on a lot of levels and sometimes I found myself looking at the story from the snake’s POV, and I spent a lot of time on the bridge while I was writing the story…I didn’t have all of the information but the snake did and what was it?

 

"There is a pedestrian bridge that runs over the freeway that passes through Tucson. It's in the shape of a rattlesnake and you walk though its mouth and you can look through its skin in any direction and it has a goofy-sounding rattle when you reach the tail."

 

 

A photo of the pedestrian snake bridge taken by the author, Deanne Stillman

 

 

The diamondback rattlesnake bridge in Tucson as seen from Google Earth

 

Can you talk more about the various voices and texts you’ve woven into this prose poem?

I’ve taken published statements from players in the incident, news reports, ancient myths, and press releases and combined them with my own texts (not text messages! — although that’s an idea for next time) in order to try to co-exist with this story. For instance, some of the Christina-Taylor Green passages are derived from comments of hers that have been reprinted in articles, interviews with her parents that were published after the shootings, and a book by her mother. The sources for other passages are often identified, but sometimes all of these sources are merged. Regarding news reports, I draw from a wide range of material, often things overlooked by others. I’ve followed up on some on my own.

 

Deanne Stillman and Bugz. Bugz is a horse who survived the massacre of 34 wild horses outside Reno at Christmas time in 1998 -- a story Stillman tells in her critically acclaimed book "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West." (Photo by Betty Lee Kelly)

 

 

Writer Deanne Stillman at the Little Bighorn Battlefield. In her book "Mustang" Stillman tells the story of the American war horse Comanche, once wild, who was billed as "the lone survivor" of the battle at the time. (Photo courtesy Deanne Stillman)

 

You’ve written extensively about the American West, including books about the massacre of wild horses, two girls killed by a Marine after the Gulf War in the Twentynine Palms, Ca., and an infamous manhunt for a desert hermit who killed a town sheriff, then disappeared into the wilderness (a book coming out later this year). What characteristics of the desert West do you find particularly compelling?

As a child, I was influenced by the Edgar Allan Poe poem “Eldorado,” which my father used to read to me. It was my way out of early personal turmoil while growing up in Ohio, as I’ve written elsewhere, and opened up an escape route which I would later follow, with various detours. Once I began to wander the desert — the land of Eldorado — I molted, shedding a skin that had to do with reacting, always having an opinion, masking pain. As that happened, certain stories began calling me and I followed their trails for personal reasons… How has the American dream tricked or satisfied people?  Where do individual stories merge with the promises we hear in third grade?  The main thing I see is that geography informs and drives everything…the great mantra — “it’s a free country and I can do what I want” — is our promise and our curse and it came right out of the American West.

Continue Reading…

Page 1 of 212»