Bo's Request (an Art Thread)

[pan]

Been writing cover letters for job applications (two submitted yesterday). More of a movement artist than a wordsmith but, to get things started, here is something I wrote for Migrant, my section in Train.

Where is home?

Moved twelve times in the last 16 years. The transient in transit. Pierce Transit runs through it. Before I came here I was in Rush Limbaugh’s home town before I was surrounded by corn fed Norwegian bred Lutherans singing praise in perfect four part harmony to that Home on the Plain before I’m taken Home – Praise Jesus. I grew up in Iowa, Little Town on the Prairie an island afloat in the ocean of corn. Lived in SoCal, in the Desert where golf and plastic surgery reigns, might have the grit to stay in rainy Tacoma, but, I always say I’m from San Francisco - though I rarely visit anymore.

Home, where is home?

Home is where you are. Correction, home is where you and the two cats are.

What is home? That safe place. That place with love. I love that old car, it always brought me home. The ’75 Westphalia could be home. Or rather, the place that used to be home. Too old, too unreliable to be trusted anymore. Baling wire and duct tape. Just like the U-Haul I drive to the next place, hoping for home.

Searching for home. Migrants with heavy furniture. U-haul. Our orange travois with wheels keeps getting bigger. Full of stuff. Heavy Stuff. Stuff that anchors us. To a home of nostalgia. Anchors to a home that never really existed. That place. This is the place! Well bully for you Brigham Young. Bring ‘em young. Not young anymore, with more stuff each move to stuff in the moving van and every move leaves behind anchors that are mourned in passing.

A house burns down and the anchors are cremated and the past has passed on.

The bubble is burst. The house is on the market. The anchor is weighed. The trees we planted are left behind. Do the new owners love that Japanese Maple we planted as our 10th anniversary gift to our dream of home? Have they maintained the landscaping? Have any of the plants, the dreams, the love we planted been cared for in our absence? Or have they been torn up by the roots to make room for the next owners’ dream of home?

Where are the anchors? Is there a home port? Adrift. Without a home. Drift wood is picked up for beach fires to warm the beach rats without a home. Their shacks have been bulldozed like West Bank ancestral olive groves to make room for more condos and home-loving dreamers blowing a bubble. Pop!

[Cal]

Have any of you seen Ashes and Snow?

http://www.ashesandsnow.org/

[waldopaper]

Ashes and Snow looks absolutely beautiful... but I aint turnin my pop-up blocker off for anybody. It gets into "specieism," which I tried to introduce to a group recently without much success... it just didn't compute... the idea that it was a slippery slope- if we were blind to cruelty and brutality toward critters... we could do it to each other.

I'll probably re-visit this site as soon as I re-figure out how to get pop-up blocker to be selective. I had to do it with the skoolz.
How goes it now in Afrika? Do the traffic lights work yet?

[Cal]

Maybe not worth unblocking your pop-up blocker for Waldo. I must have browsed the site in the right frame of mind - found it very serene & beautiful - and an interesting synthesis of visuals and audio using the internet. It brought to mind ideas for the project you have mentioned here combining the talents of those amongst us who are creatively inclined. I browsed around the web finding out more about the creator, Gregory Colbert ... it seems you can't please all the people all of the time ... he isn't a hit with everyone ... the Times described them as 'spectacularly vacuous'.

http://bioephemera.com/2007/02/03/gregory-colbert-ashes-and-snow-co...

Traffic lights are working ... sporadically ... and we have all adapted to the status quo so well that these days we are pleased at how reliably and efficiently everything is working because the electricity load shedding program is being implemented as published. If it goes off when it's scheduled to and comes on again when it's scheduled to.we all cheer 'good old Eskom' .... I am still battling to get my head around a country running out of electricity in the way that this one has ... terrifically aware that that is the visible 'tip of the iceberg'.

[BO]

Well, I just lost my whole damn post about Colbert's work.
Oh well, I found this review which probably better states my own impression...Keep in mind that I'm a designer so a bit of an art critic as well. But then, it's my job to protect the world from kitsch.

http://www.landliving.com/articles/0000000996.aspx

[waldopaper]

I hadn't thought of kitsch, Bo... but I think you're right... this could be kitsch. Kitsch is only recognized as so (usually) generations afterwards. I was taken with the "technical" triumph... moreover... with the overlying message that has little to do with the execution.

But taking a longer eye... you're right. As future eyes would see it... it's kitsch.

[Cal]

Okay ... it's kitsch ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch

I shall remind myself of that (sternly) next time I escape into the 'absolute denial of shit' - Milan Kundera's definition of kitsch -:)

[pan]

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”
Milan Kundera

Kitsch is OK if it doesn't take itself seriously. You know, that postmodern, informed, queer theory kind of irony that makes it chic for young women to wear Hello Kitty accessories.

[pan]

Of course, the Frankfort School folks felt that kitsch supported false consciousness which makes that Hello Kitty handbag suddenly seem a lot less ironically informed.

Perhaps the Pet Rock was the ultimate in kitsch as commodity fetishism by the "[m]embers of a subordinate class (workers, peasants, serfs) [who] suffer from false consciousness in that their mental representations of the social relations around them systematically conceal or obscure the realities of subordination, exploitation, and domination those relations embody."

Sorry about the sudden turn towards academic-speak. I guess I am missing theory in my life.

Update: Pet Rocks have been surpassed - Hello Kitty Rocks

[BO]

I must confess, I actually like kitsch...when I know I'm being kitsched. Like pink flamingos in a trailer park or a trip to Disneyland.

Or bunnies laying eggs. What's that about?

[waldopaper]

"How does one cloak in allegory the dowager’s hump? Do we toot-wheedle a whimsy maudlin dump to tale and fey pennywhistle away it’s cackling mad? Yep, its gibbering mad culture eyes aflame far beyond satire or sarcasm or shame in the heat waves of summer the volume knobs came… all the way to the end."

pan- you surely do come up with some humdinger links! Them Frankfurt cats was among my favorite... when I was in search of a theory. A wise mentor advised me not to marry any theory... he advised the "three Fs."
"The three Fs?" I asked.
"Find em... "
"Oh yeah... THAT. I remember now."
But I gotta say... me and memetics are at least "engaged."

So the memes I saw in "Ashes and Snow" were exotic kids and critters... but only exotic to an old honky living in corn-pone land. If I lived in Afrika... neither may seem "exotic," altho the juxtaposition may seem so yet. Memories and elephants. So Jesus comes outta the cave today while the bunnies lay eggs. And if he sees his shadow... six more weeks of winter.

Happy Ishtar.

[pan]

Ahh.. exoticism in art. A popular western tradition since the 19th century

Of course, the other side of exoticism can be seen in Antonin Artaud having his world completely rocked by seeing a Balinese puppet theatre and his development of the Theatre of Cruelty

The theatre of cruelty wants a dance
of eyelids coupled up with elbows and kneecaps
and femurs and toes,
and wills it seen.

The "three F's of theory" - very male. But then, theory is all about penetration.....

[waldopaper]

Hipness is
what it is!
Sometimes hipness is what it ain't!