First time poster...

I've never posted to the BWP blog before or really ever blogged. I started one a few days ago and only have about four posts. I'm not too sure if I like it or not. There's something silly about writing on this forum. What on earth makes me feel qualified to write in such a public forum for others to read or censure? But then maybe every artist asks that question. When Andy Warhol was painting his Campbell soup can paintings or Marilyn Monroe, he had to ask himself if what he was doing was art. Was it art? Is it art now? Did we have to catch up with his creative mind before it could become art? Blogging is more public than Warhol's work but I wouldn't say it's an art--or at least I'd say writing is an art but the act of putting it online doesn't add an artistic dimension. So what are we doing here? I suppose we're perfecting our art, if you can call what I've written art.

I seem to have wrecked my train of thought so I'll let my first post end here. I look forward reading everyone else's.

Darcy

ART? You're kidding, right?

Okay, if you've read Matt's post you already know the source of my angst. I thought I had a somewhat clear idea of art, even if it was based only on my rather limited experience. Then I took 7010. Now art is whatever I, or the garbage man (person?) thinks it should be, which frankly annoys me to no end. So me, I'm not writing about art.

I would like to write about the weather. I love the rain, especially stormy days with thunder and lightning. I always thought it was cool when I was little that you could smell the rain coming. In the summer when it rained my grandaddy would take me and my cousins outside to sit under the carport and watch the rain pound the dirt. He would take a small stick and wedge it into a pea hull and we would float our boats in the rivers the rain made in the dirt driveway. I remember him sitting in a rusted metal chair, it looked like one from an old ice cream shop with scrollwork on the back, laughing at us as we tried to sink each others ship. Sometimes we'd slip out from under the carport to play in the puddles, but it never took my Granny long to come outside and pull us back under before we "caught cold." I know the idea that rain cleans everything comes off as trite, especially to people whose homes are flooded right now, but there's something about it that knocks the stink off and lets you start over. Sometimes things are messier afterwards, but either way the landscape is a little different. It gives a new perspective.

"Not an Artsy Fartsy Response"

How can you ever follow a posting by le profesor?  (Yes, I know that I probably jumbled both French and Spanish on that one, but I figured that it was time for you to get inside my brain!)  I will not even attempt to be cultured.  Instead I will be the little uncultured Asian that I am.  

I am not a good drawer.  I never have been.  Strangely, my stick figures at 29 were not much different than the one that I did in kindergarten.  Why I should choose to even mention stick figures is 1) a drawing I did in kindergarten is one of my most prized possessions 2) I refuse to draw stick figures for middle schoolers.  Let me start with the stick figure picture first.  

When I was little, I was told to draw what I wanted to be.  So I drew with a black crayon a stick figure with a skirt, ratty hair, and one eye bigger than the other.  My teacher had to have asked me what I wanted to be because there is no way that you would have gotten "school teacher" from my pitiful drawing.  So in brown marker she wrote below the purple dittoed "I want to be" a school teacher.  The thing that I love the most about the picture is that one eye is bigger than the other.  Clearly, I had a good sense of self even then.  (FYI: I am far-sighted in one eye and near-sighted in the other.)       

As for why I refuse to draw stick figures, let me start by explaining that at my school, we do SAT words with little pictures to help them remember the words.  The students are supposed to draw the pictures, and I would try to get students to volunteer to draw on the board for me. But if they wouldn't I would be stuck drawing the picture for them.  One day, I was in a hurry, and my stick figure ended up with a little something extra.  Needless to say, Ms. Elmore never drew stick figures ever again. 

    

  

"Ars gratia artis"

Lindsi & Heidi, if you’re out there, I think you will sympathize with me when I say that I’m not sure what art is any more. I thought I knew what it was – the Mona Lisa, stuff in the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, art that looks like our usual connotation of “high” art. Art is literature as well. And this “high” art is art, without doubt, but there are some that will say that art is much more. And this begs the question of where does art end and just what seems like not really anything begin. Now again, Heidi, Lindsi and I have been reading about various theories of art, and for the life of me I know not what to make of it. I know this though; I’m not an artist. I’ve tried to write some poems, and they’re not really that good. I even tried to write some dactylic hexameter, and I think the only portion that fell into natural dactyls was one I stole from Lucretius: “Quare etiamque etiam…” I cannot draw or paint. I don’t think that artists are as plentiful as some might believe. I want art to be a fine Greek black-figure vase, or a painting that hangs in a museum. But my opinion is one that is quickly becoming outdated it seems. Postmodern conceptions of art basically open art up to be nearly anything, but if something is anything, isn’t it basically nothing? It’s like if you hold a belief, and you violate the belief, is it really a belief? Does not the belief-concept implode? Perhaps not. Unless it does. It might be easier to say that art is what we conceive to be art. But the “we” varies. What is “l’objet petit a” and how does this correspond to our Desire? (Shane??) Art as desire-- maybe.

Art is necessary, but different folks tell us why for different reasons. Some would say that it is the divine essence within that strives to produce art. Others would say that artistic minds are born: they see the creative process, and they produce creatively. Some might say there is an artist within us all. Still others would say that the artist, the writer, the author, are “dead” figuratively. Dead inasmuch as the artist is nothing more than one who brings into being a performative as such, a bricoleur creating his bricolage. (You takin’ all this in Lindsi?) Others say we call ourselves into being through art – the ouroboros. And then the artist can be a product of Ideological State Apparatuses who in turn function within the General Modes of Production which drive Artistic Modes of Production. All creativity is after a fashion super-determined – dialectical materialism – etc. You can explain it away, but never pin it down. The answer to the question of “why is there art?” is that it is the question with no answer. Art is not necessary from a standpoint of survival. But art is an avenue to channel whatever it is within the human being into a representation of thought. Art is only necessary in the sentiment that it is a necessity that we express ourselves -- and it this not necessary? Finding the answers to all the questions is not possible for we know not even all the questions themselves -- once we leave logocentrism behind. What is true truth, the "vrai verite?" Most questions have no concrete answers, but art maybe helps this process of discovering whether or not we want to "know" the answer or back away from the "mise en abime."

Art Necessary?

With the down turn in the economy, we know that many things will go by the way side. More than likely, one of the programs not viewed as necessary will be funding for the arts. The question then arises are the arts necessary? What does a picture of a collection of lollipops, a picture of a giant guitar, or a poem have that make them necessary to exist? The answer lies in their nature of being shortcuts to a greater understanding. It is impossible to articulate or show the myriad of relationships that exist between objects and people and another way must be found. OMG! How sophomoric all of that was. . . Let me start again.

When I was younger (I mean really young like in my teens and twenties), I was often confused about how I felt about many things. I didn’t even know how to ask the questions to find the answers. The only thing that I found that would help me to come up with understanding what I was confused about was to write a poem or draw a picture. Not great stuff you understand. It was just another way for me to articulate my feelings. I remember one time drawing a picture of a man walking down a crooked path, but the interesting thing about the drawing was that his head was actually a huge tree that sprouted from his shoulders—no eyes or mouth—just branches. After drawing that picture, I understood that I didn’t know how to find my path or how to grow as a person. It was typical juvenile angst, but I didn’t know what I was feeling until I could represent my feelings and questions into a visual representation—a shorthand for the moment.

With all the information available on line today (a virtual library of man’s knowledge), it is even more difficult to find answers to questions that we cannot express. How can that be when we dissect everything into its constituent parts, cataloguing into smaller and finer bits? Despite this dissection, there are areas that escape our understanding on how they fit together—if they fit together. The intuition of art takes us to those indefinable places, navigating those unknown pathways. OMG . . . There I go again. Can you tell that basically I’m a nerd? I want to understand and am more than willing to stand on a soapbox to express my angst with the hopes of getting back some feedback that will aid that understanding? Or truth be told, I just like hearing what I come up with.

The true drawback to a blog is that it provides you with a soapbox without having to endure the sun, rain, and rotten fruit. It doesn’t stop anyone from hurling verbal bombs, however. Fire away! I will virtually duck out of the way. ;-)

Artistic License

Um, I don't really know where I'm going with this draft, but I came up with the title before I had anything to write, so I thought I would see where it takes me. I'm cheating a little. I posted the topic just before noon, and I'm writing this draft shortly afterward because I need to miss the beginning of Write Night. When I do arrive, I'll publish the draft I wrote around noon, maybe extending it a bit if I have time, but I'd rather save that time to read and respond to the writing of others.

As I announced in the writing prompt, the Spring into Art opening reception is tonight, and I need to be there to support Wes, Meghann, Mike, and other friends who have work in the show. Plus, it's fun. But I have Write Night tonight too, so I plan to split my time between the two events, art opening 6-7, Write Night 7-8.

Back to artistic license (did I spell that word right?) nature has certainly been taken artistic license. The rivers should be getting into trouble for not staying within the lines; they are boiling over the lines and even off the pages, flooding bridges and houses and whole communities. That's the kind of artistic license I don't like.

But mostly, I'm a fan of artistic license, and I want to grant it to most people. Yes, there's a time to learn what a sentence is, but shouldn't students also know the power of intentional fragments? I say yes, but students also need to know when they're being judged by people who may not agree, such as any high-stakes testing situation. The stakes are too high to take risks with their writing.

Um, okay, I have nowhere else to go with that topic, so I'll move beyond the title and just think about art. I am woefully uneducated about art. Perhaps I have some of the major movements, but not many, and I can't recognize the works of varied artists. That's bad, I know. But I know what I like when I see it. I know what I don't like. I'm not sure, though, why I like what I like. I like pieces that evoke emotion in me. I can appreciate artistry even when I don't like it. Ugh, this is way too generic. Maybe this isn't a good topic. It's too big, too abstract.

Let me go more specific. When Wes and I were dating in college, he wasn't making the highest grades in the world. He enjoyed art, so we decided to take an introductory art class together to help him raise his grade point average. I lasted about one month before I dropped the class, but he loved it. I felt completely out of my depth and knew the class would do no favors to my GPA. He took two or three more, but then had to get serious about taking the classes he needed to graduate. He talked briefly about switching his major but wanted to graduate more than he wanted to take art classes, so he finished his undergraduate degree in management with just one regretful look back.

I enjoyed some of the projects before I dropped the class, but I never developed a sense of what worked and what didn't. I couldn't evaluate my own efforts. I knew if I tried hard, but I didn't know if what I created worked or not. In my composition and literature classes, I always had a good sense of what grades I would receive on papers and tests. The results rarely surprised me although the papers I wrote sometimes did. Those were the fun papers, the ones that took me somewhere I didn't expect to go, the ones that rewarded me with new discoveries. I never got to that point with art classes, but Wes did. He started there.

I think I started there with acting. I've always loved to act. I rarely do it now--or do it for more than a few minutes to tease someone--but I loved it. My first official performance as a kid was in a play in second grade. But we often acted out parts as children. When the big family (Mom's family--the one with sixteen children) would get together at the beach, we would sometimes act like the crew of Gilligan's Island, except that there were so many of us that we would two Gilligans, two Mary Anns, etc. Usually, there were multiple Gingers. Then we created scenarios, loosely based on the show, and see what happened. Sometimes we played the Brady Bunch and just included other characters like Alice's cousin.

In high school I participated in One-Act Play for two years. One year I was a country bumpkin with a crush on a character named Hiram, whom I chased around the stage like a love-crazed hick. The next year I played a three-year-old brat named Punkin. That was fun--pitching temper tantrums, assaulting my siblings and not getting punished for it. I keep trying to relive those days, but no one else plays along.

Oh well, I'm not sure how I got here from where I started, but I'll just claim artistic license (and hope I'm spelling it right).

Write Night: Art

Okay, this topic comes out of tonight's Spring into Art Opening Reception, where Wes has two photos, one a collection of lollipops (named "Sucker") and one of the huge guitar at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas (named "Guitar Envy"), but it is a much bigger topic than that, of course. Think of all the drawings and colorings you did as a kid that became refrigerator art until another piece by you or a sibling pushed that one off the refrigerator. Or think about the arts and crafts classes over the years from summer camps and Vacation Bible School--the warped ash trays, the magazine racks, the leather products. Or maybe you want to focus on your current art--the way you weave words together and celebrate them as we do at Write Night. Or given the most recent holiday, maybe you should brag about your abilities as an Easter egg designer. Whatever. Let's hear about your artistic abilities or the abilities of others. Or ignore all of this and write whatever you want. We're easy.