Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Charged Battery and Hope

Still on vaca but wanted to share a story that has me in awe... and though it shouldn't, I am feeling very lucky right now... and I am not talking about driving these back roads in the mountains while the snow is coming down horizontally.

I went into town today (West Jefferson, NC) cos Zoe was having anal gland (gross, but a necessity with labs) issues so I made an appt for that. I was driving around and got there early and they took her in pretty fast. From there I went to a pet store to get her a pressed rawhide and my battery died when I went to get back into the car. So here it is, snowing a little and it is about 29 degrees as a high... Anyway the pet store people let me use their phone and I called the Ford dealership. The guy that does their towing got there in less than 10 minutes and jumped the battery. He would not take any money even though I offered him $20.00 at least for a beer. Then he had me follow him to the dealership around the corner and made sure that someone was there to help. They had to have a battery sent in from somewhere close - apparently the Honda Element has a small battery cos a few people came over to look at it. It was funny to see these mechanics gather around this thing and talk about the size of this battery. All in total I was in there in less than 30 minutes and the charge was only $100.00 - that was with delivery, installing and the battery cost. I am flabbergasted!!! Needless to say I am very lucky this all happened down in town and not up here where it is pretty isolated. The battery was seriously dead. We were all joking that it was protesting the cold weather.

There are still pockets of great people!! I just cannot say how lucky I felt that this happened when it did at the time and the fact that is has given me some serious happiness in people. Sounds bitter but I don't mean it to be. I can almost guarantee that this would not have happened in Fort Laud., FL and maybe not in Austin, TX either. So the sun shown today, the snow fell and swirled in the the wind and it ended up as a shining point in this trip.
Thanks guys! You Rock!

Utah drilling

Alright, I cannot let this go. "W" wants to leave his last month to this. I just do not understand that this is what he wants to do on his last days as a president. Ripping apart this country is much more physical in this sense but still as destructive and ridiculous as his presidency has been. FYI, shale drilling is extremely destructive. What a legacy.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration Monday opened up two million acres of public land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to oil-shale exploration, challenging congressional Democrats who have opposed the move.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) has indicated that she would prefer to limit shale drilling on environmental grounds, but found it politically difficult to extend a ban on oil-shale operations after oil prices surged to record highs earlier this year.

It is unclear what will happen after President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January. If he and other Democrats want to keep federal oil-shale lands off-limits, they would have time to change course, because requests for new commercial leases undergo a lengthy review by the Interior Department.

The shale region in the western U.S. holds the equivalent of about 800 billion barrels of oil, according to Bureau of Land Management estimates. That is enough to meet current levels of U.S. demand for 110 years.

But the recent slump in oil prices could damp the petroleum industry's interest in the oil-shale region. Shale oil is costly to produce, because the dense rock where it is found has to be heated to extract the petroleum. Exxon Corp. in 1982 abandoned a big oil-shale project in Colorado when oil prices collapsed.

Environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have called oil shale one of the planet's dirtiest fuels. It can be converted into liquid petroleum, but only after being heated to 900 degrees Fahrenheit for five years or more, so production requires massive quantities of energy, the council says.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Into the Woods - not so far from Walden


OK :: Something weird is going on in these woods. No, I am not talking about the distant gunshots in the air heard at all times, nor the silent prayers as I am climbing steep hills/mountainsides that those same hunters don't mistake your dog's white lab butt as a deer - cos they are alarmingly similar if only seen from the hind. OR even the confession to having Johnny Cash on the ipod (his latest work mostly, and as I respect his music, it is just not something that I listen to often) OR!!! even the pondering which way North Carolina went in this seemingly liberal vs. conservative election on the blue/red map.... OR!!! even to stop to think for a moment that I am a girl alone in the woods with a lot of testosterone gunmen. it is the pondering of what is art and then finding this article in the NYT (sorry, more liberal-ness) about the author of a book called "The Gift". The journalist speaks with this man about doing art, the Walden way, the social way - no isolation and then the in between way. The idea of art in the public eye when it comes to the internet - and as if there were huge "!!!!" looming everywhere here in West Jefferson, NC. And if that were not enough, I am uploading images of the art that I have been making in isolation to MySpace as we speak. (And for all of those who know me, I am still cold and currently have 3 layers on.)

OK, this is weird. I have been sitting here in the woods pondering these issues. I even posted a late night rant a couple of days before the NYT posted this article. This idea of isolation that inspires the very art that you wish the public would consume. The public does not have to be a gallery it just means something beyond you. And then to add the thought of ownership of ideas and who owns it in an economical sense, is just right on target with where my head is right now. Back in school we debated the ideas of corporate greed and such over many cocktails, etc.. including the very thought of what it means to have Philip Morris sponsor art so heavily. But where does it leave us in the age of Facebook? MySpace? Blogging? Flickr? The very idea of posting your work wipes out the idea of ownership and it enters the realm of giving and sharing. But we are in a corporate world you say? Yeah, I know.

What gives?

Hell if I know. I just look at the money that it took to get to these woods and the distance from my job and its constant "noise" to see that this is a dichotomy that no amount of Johnny Walker Black is going to solve - yep, there it is again, an allusion to $.

I need to go drink a little more, ponder some more and then I will get back to it. But in the meantime, when is work copyrighted? What does that mean anymore? I am using Buddhist and Hindu symbolism in my work right now. Is it my right to interpret that work? I guess the irony of working alone is the time that one has to manifest these ideas about public consumption. I like the idea of questioning and forming opinions on culture. I think there is huge value in it. It is inspiring that others are doing it. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell just put out another book that discusses the idea of privilege and success. Again, these things are happening all at once and I feel that the questions I am raising and the ideas that I am thinking about are right on target. Even though there are few consumers out there who care about this and even less now since we are in a recession. (Yes, Bob Bernanke, I said it, the "R" word) so shoot me, not my dog.

There you go. Once again I have said a load of nothing. But it is easy to do this without censor and with a keyboard and a sprinkling of scotch.

The Gift

As a follow up to my Art rant, I saw this in the NYT today. Serendipitous that I saw this a couple of days after my post as well as the fact that I have fled to the woods to get away from the noise of my job in order to create. So since they are bunches more eloquent than I can be, here is the link: "What is Art for?"


Couple of paragraphs:
Last April I asked the writer Lewis Hyde if he would take a trip with me to Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. At 63, Hyde has boyishly tousled brown-gray hair, freckled, soft-looking cheeks and the slightly abstracted gaze of a man who spends a disproportionate amount of his time in library carrels. He has an ironic streak, but his default mode is a kind of easygoing acquiescence, and so one slate gray Saturday afternoon he picked me up in Cambridge, where he lives and works half the year, and drove us the 12 miles west to Walden.

Hyde knows the area well — among his ongoing projects is a detailed series of annotations of Henry David Thoreau’s essays — and he led me down a dirt path from the parking lot to the site of the cabin where, more than 150 years ago, Thoreau wrote his celebrated paean to solitude and self-reliance. The cabin no longer exists. In its place there is a lightly excavated, cordoned-off square of soil and, to its side, a waist-high cairn erected in commemoration by generations of pilgrims.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

A Room of One's Own

I have had the privilege of working in a cabin in the woods in northwest North Carolina. Besides the fact that it is freezing here, I have been reading (Atlas Shrugged), walking with Zoe the dog, and doing art. I have not watched TV one bit - though I do have internet.

It has been amazing just to kick back, listen to music (strangely, Pink Floyd and not so strangely, Cowboy Junkies have been the go to soundtrack) and draw until early morning. I have been very happy that this has slipped into an easy habit as I have always wanted to do this and feared that procrastination would set it. But alas, it has not and I have done some great work. The picture above is a reaction to the surrounding landscape and the thought "How would Jackson Pollack respond to Buddhism?". Jackson Pollack's Blue Poles is the basic inspiration but it really takes his concept of wrist flicking paint to jazz and pulls it back to deliberate chaos. As I walk through these woods and think about my walks back in Austin, TX, I see things as a whole and I see things in parts. This work I have been doing reflects those walks, those disparate thoughts and all of the feelings of just letting go and being. I am not a Buddhist but I use this and Hindu imagery because it feels like meditation. Though to be honest, this work is almost opposite cos my mind wanders and the thoughts come and I let them. Meditation is too restrictive for me and a little too dogmatic for my tastes - as religion is for me as well. That said, I find that this place that I go to in order to create is like religion.

Now, if I can answer the question of "what is art?" or even "who is John Galt?" I may be onto something. In the meantime, know that I am making compisitional decisions, the works are deliberate and are not as mindless as they can seem. I like creating a beautiful peace of work and I love thinking of the leaves in the wind, the smell of the earth and the feel of the sun. These pieces have that for me so I will move forward with that thought and enjoy what I am doing.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

When does something become art?


Alright, a blog without "w" bashing? Well since he is pretty much gone, then I will move on too.... for now anyway.



When does an "object" become art? As I am sitting here in the northern NC mountains during my two weeks of imposed solitude to make art, I am creating something that I question to be art. It is a beautiful object. It has a historical reference (Pollack's "Blue Poles"). It is "spiritual" lines of chaos forming a signified picture through Buddhist imagery. It is intellectual - giving into nature, pondering repetition, questioning minimalism and defining the "work of the hand". But I keep viewing it as decorative. At what point does something become art? Whether it is me or anyone else making an object, what makes it exist outside of that person? Is it the reaction it receives from a viewer? It is a likeness, as in a portrait? Is it art if you know the artist and they are inclined to make things? I know I stand before a Rembrandt and I tingle inside - someplace intangible (and understand, that is NOT my aesthetic) and I have utter sadness and absolute energy in front of a Rothko (more of my taste but he committed suicide), I gasp in front of Cy Twombly and I weep in front of a Deborah Butterfield.

In this day and age when we are about to dip into frugal ways once again, does art matter? Of course my education, the time and the passion I have spent making objects screams yes, but I have to go back to the point of need vs desire. Art is not a need. It is not shelter it is not food nor is it health. But throughout history it has been held in high esteem. It has ranged from historical recording, spiritual, narrative to community service. Andy Goldsworthy makes beautiful objects outside in the elements, takes photos for documentation and lets nature consume it back into the earth. So what is the art? The original piece of work or the preserved photo of the work that viewers will consume? At what point does making something go beyond the maker and reaches the consumer? There was a statement in a book written by Anita Politzer about Georgia O'Keefe. In her early years as a teacher in Amarillo, TX O'Keefe worked hard at her drawings. She put out piece after piece, drawing after drawing. Politzer gave some of these drawings/paintings to Steiglitz and he deemed them art. O'Keefe felt that it was at the point that her personal language became universal. When it was consumed and felt by another, it was art. But this was not instant. There was a trandscendance that occured. It went beyond the technical and it crossed over to another existance, a place that all artists understand inatetly.

I have no answer to this question and this is a rambling message but I wonder if we are part of a collective concious and we use our own symbolism as a language to communicate with others, is this art? When we are no longer the individual in the studio but the salesman with our wares that others respond too, are we making art? It takes isolation, individualism, quietness and observation to record something that trandscends the individual and makes it out into the larger world. Ironic, isn't it?

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

All things are possible...

I am sitting here just astounded. I am happy for us. I wasn't completely sure this was going to come about. I really thought that fear would leave people voting for what they knew. I also feel this was a close race. But overall I am sitting here thinking that I have a little bit less of a cynical outlook this morning. That is huge for me. I am happy at the turnout and as my friend wrote to me this am, "All things are possible." I can't help but to be happy for african americans... this is a huge message that all things are possible. To think 50 years ago, there were to different fountains for people to drink from. I think there are hard times ahead but I want to bask in this morning after of a huge night.

Peace