Art Rat Tra Tar Atr Rta

I'm a pretentious artist.

What is art? Is this bowl of fruit on my kitchen counter art? Is it only art when someone paints it or photographs it? Is a five-year-old's slapdash rendering of this bowl of fruit worth any less on the art scale than mine?

"Oh, you don't get it simply because you're uncultured. This toilet bowl that I've glued cat memes to is abstract. Don't you get it? This is art."

Does art have to have a purpose? 

When Rivera spake the fateful title of this post after being accused of willful propagandizing in the Rockefeller mural in New York City, he uttered an eternal truth that also highlighted the quandary of prophet versus poet. When does the prophet's preaching becoming singing? When does the artist's work advertise? It is an onerous question, related to the dying ars gratia artis argument immortalized by the Romans and the Greeks. More and more in today's society, art for art's sake is no longer seen as valid or worthy. Art has to do something. It has to advertise. Say something. Call to action. Art has to sell. 

I am an artist. I cannot deny anymore my own conflicting and insular feelings of superiority I have towards others' art. I have "high" standards, to say the least. It takes a lot to impress me with your artistic ability. I tend to dismiss others' efforts as juvenile or specious in value simply based on aesthetic value. I had never really considered messages too much in evaluating art, which, according to many, I have been getting completely wrong.

What has my own purpose been in my own art career? When I gaze back upon my own artistic career, I really can't say that I had much of a purpose in my art.

I just did it.

I just did it because it felt good and because I wanted to. I had no ulterior, all-encompassing, global purpose.

I don't know. It looked pretty.

I don't have an answer to what art is. Perhaps I never will.

I remember reading a quote somewhere along of the lines of "it is the job of an artist to fail." Perhaps that what it meant.

The Devil Winds

The story of California’s golden land begins with the country.

Los Angeles, whose weather is both known for its beauty and caviled by Easterners as being bland and unvarying, is prone to interruptions of a seductive calm that can become quite violent. LA is in certain ways an alien place; it is not the coastal California of subtropical twilight and the soft Westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California haunted by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that whines through at 100 miles an hour and works the nerves. October, at the end of the month just before Halloween, is a bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult, and the hills blaze up spontaneously.

To study these winds is to gaze over a long history in which a natural force of the most underappreciated element comes in from the desert and topples enormous trees, fans flames in the canyons and ignites infernos in the forests. These winds have inspired literature and fascinated Californians for their destructive nature in the Los Angeles Basin for over 5,000 years.

“The climate here is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.”

I would imagine that it is difficult for those outside of southern California to understand how vividly the Santa Ana captures local lore and how much a part of life its unpredictability is. The image of LA burning is engrained in the mind. What strikes the imagination is a picture of the city burning, burning, burning.

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” 


Additional Sources:

http://sharepoint.mvla.net/teachers/HectorP/Language%20and%20Comp%20AP/Documents/Resource%20AP%20Prompts/Joan%20Didion,%20Santa%20Ana%20Winds%20(samples).pdf
http://voices.yahoo.com/on-diction-selection-detail-joan-didions-795841.html
http://tywls12ela.wikispaces.com/file/view/Didion+Los+Angeles+Notebook.pdf
http://www.carljay.com/whatsnew/nothing_left.htm

Commodification of Labor, People, and Self-Worth: An essay in which I don't utter 'Jesus' as an expletive

Want to hear a sad fact of life?

The opportunities and situations we are afforded are largely determined by the circumstances and locations in which we are born.

That's sad.

Oh yes, no matter how optimistic or egalitarian everyone claims the world (or at least the US) to be, the fates are not kind to everyone. Pardon me, Jesus was not kind to everyone.

Opportunity is such a commodity.

A great example of this is child labor. Florence Kelley, a famous American social worker and reformer who successfully made great strides in working conditions for women and children during the late 19th century. In the in-class essay speech we read, Kelley uses emotional appeals and pithy diction to reel listeners in and gain rapport for her cause; her skills of rhetoric are highly effective, as they pull at the heart strings and establish a tone of immediacy to encourage a call to action: voting rights for women.

She describes the lifestyles of the children she defends. These girls do not know homework, candies, and stuffed animals, pink elephants of a childhood stripped away. They are instead replaced by the shackles of capitalism and corporate greed. They do not know stories that provide a fairy tale ambiance to tickle the imagination, to stir the heart, ease the mind. "Once upon a time" does not exist for them. That's sad. It is against this horrible reality that Florence Kelley fights.

The problem of child labor, while greatly reduced around the world, still persists today. Companies like Nike and Wal-Mart still benefit from the advantages of bone-cheap labor in lesser developed countries such as in southeast Asia. 

The Overabundance of Space

After reading Brent Staples' piece, "Black Men and Public Space", it was interesting to see how, after segregating the class by gender, the girls and the boys collectively viewed their own impacts on space. (Equally entertaining was Zack's demonstration of a "Bleh!" face when a girl farts in public. Haha.)

The whole discussion of how space is perceived based on the race or gender of its constituents reminded me (and Sadie) of a slam poem performed at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational for Wesleyan College by Lily Myers.

Her poem, deeply moving and highly engrossing, was a commentary on (as one YouTuber said) the systematic oppression of women that subtly exists in this country. How women feel less and less entitled to the amount of space they are allowed to move in and how much space they physically occupy.

How often is this is paralleled in our own classrooms, our own workplaces? To name an example, let's look at the way men and women sit. Boys generally take on a visually more aggressive posture, legs splayed out in a confident slouch, occupying more space and room for functionality; whereas girls are seen as prim and proper with their legs crossed over and their backs straighter, learning to keep themselves small and a nonhindrance to others around them.*

In relation to our discussion, women sort of limit ourselves to a vulnerability stereotype that renders us paranoid and maybe even hypersensitive to judgments of appearance, which could explain Staples' experience with his first "victim". As a result of this, woman have learned to collapse into themselves, learned to place a fixation on appearance that isn't seen too oft in men.

Could this be an explanation for how women feel more comfortable beating each other emotionally? Emotions, feelings, thoughts, they're all implicitly effeminate topics because they are intrinsic, taking on the phenomenon of women shrinking and making physical space because it's safer there. It's way easier for girls to play with those impalpable, intangible emotions than it is to use their physical space and physical presence as a means of communication.

***

The idea of a shrinking woman. It's subtle, that's for sure. It's hard to notice and even more impressive for Myers to articulate in such an impassioned, pithy way.

Worth a watch. A few times.

Lily Myers - "Shrinking Women" (CUPSI 2013)


*Yes, I made up that word. Nonhindrance. Yeah. 

Cognizance

"You look so much like your father!'

Ugh. Please, lady. Stop. I do not look like my father. At all. 

I remember when I was in middle school, newly pubescent and angry, my political and social ideologies still in those nascent stages of indignant ignorance with the dew of virgin childhood still fresh on me. I was a reformer! A fighter for the liberal causes of equality and justice! A proud and unapologetic atheist! I imagined myself to be part of some advanced, intellectual society that my parents were too old-fashioned, too incapable of joining. This internal pugnacity birthed a kind of war between my father and I that always existed in the household, a result not only of our completely differing views on whatever, but also our striking similarities in personality.

I suppose there has always been a sort of unspoken competition between my father and I. We are both so very alike, but any similarities that exist are only manifest to me now. My father came to America as a medical student. He had served in a residency in Korea for a while, but after his arrival in America, he had to learn English and relearn his dusty medical textbooks in order to take the USMLE. I remember myself as a five-year-old, sitting beside stacks of physiology and pathology textbooks, whose laminated covers were titled with acronyms and foreign words I could barely comprehend as I perfected my blooming skills in drawing. I suppose, in that way, we were--are--both students of the West. 

However, we were the angry students of the West. I grew up loving America, relishing in it, staunchly ready to defend the country I flourished in. My father, however, came to despise certain elements of it. Thus, our household, occupied with two pugnacious debaters, would go to war over aspects of this society that I loved and he hated. 

We argued over organized religion and the existence of a higher power and American social programs and racism and finding one's cultural identity and loads of other stuff I can't even recall and probably had no right to be debating on. 

Now, as Manning put it, I am no longer a "rebel in the household, trying to impress him with my education or my view on religion", no longer fighting a dictatorial enemy that never really existed to begin with. I wish I could take back all the hurtful words I flung at my him, all those oddly tense nights filled with a silence that would break any father's heart.

I've come to accept the stark differences that we share. Or perhaps my attitude has not yet fully developed into acceptance because whenever he makes some comment that I completely disagree with, I fall into a state of resignation, but that fire, that justice! that used to occupy my psyche is gone. Now, when people say that I look so much like my father, I'm happy. I'm proud, and I'll look back at my dad and sheepishly chuckle at those nights when I'd be screaming into a mirror, an older, wiser, more foreign, male version of myself. 

Mea culpa. 

John Singer Sargent

(Unfortunately, I do not remember where I found this painting, nor do I recall its title.)

By John Singer Sargent

The soft lamp of his room barely illuminates while
My boy reads in the soft shadow.
I don't mind. I steal glances.
I enjoy this time together, us
Just reading in the dim lighting
Investing in some wild and terrific secret that we ought
Not to discuss right now--
Just enjoy this time together, us.

I want to adjust the candle
To better illustrate my dreams
Perhaps make them reality.
To notice the thinly veiled streams on his hand, pale fingers
Twitch slightly, as he brings them up to turn the page
The nails of which stained a blue and black after a day.
Wish they would come up to me,
Hold me as dearly as he turns the page.

The room is dark.
That's quite alright, I'm used to it.
Shouldn't we turn on the other lamp?
No, really. I like it like this.
Fine.

I steal glances.
The light, a warm, buttery flicker
That softens the edges, blurs the lines, blurs any distinction
Between dreams and reality
That spills lazily over him, barely affording me
Any accurate observations.
It is a fluid, a watery substance that cannot be willed
Any more than its physics.

The kind of light that softens the irregularity,
Smooths the rough planes of loneliness
That, like jagged rocks painted on an empty canvas of sky,
Are only exacerbated by its obnubilating effects.

But I don't mind.
Because if he is not my boy,
I would still enjoy this time together, us.
To better illustrate my dreams. 

Stork Theory: Grade A: The Market for a Yale Woman's Eggs

This article was, quite simply, very strange. Very strange.

The whole manner and process in which David and Michelle, even the original author, discussed "eggs" left me feeling very uncomfortable. For the purposes of full disclosure, I was a bit thrown off—okay, very thrown off—by the very mechanical and businesslike style in which they handled their potential child.

This is supposed to be the spontaneous and beautiful miracle of life! Full of surprises and unimagined complexity. How could they even hope for perfection?

I remember how pregnancy and such things seemed to me as a child. When I was in the 4th grade (ish?) I picked up a Newsweek magazine, and, wanting to feel smart and mature for my age, flipped to a random article and forced myself to read the whole thing.

This article was on infertility and its effects on couples. Yippee!

The article never directly mentioned sex or how the whole pregnancy thing worked, but, from this, I was able to make the following conclusions:

·      Most women eventually end up pregnant.

·      If you want a child, you must be married and just wish really hard until it finally happens.

·      Even when married though, some women face the possibility of not becoming pregnant.

·       The older you get, the fewer chances you have of becoming pregnant.

·       Women have eggs. (Whatever that means.)

·       The stork theory is pure rubbish.

But from Grade A, it seems as though the whole "perfect child" theory is also rubbish, an insincere and pretentious attempt at confirming the supposition of an ideal reality, manifested in the impossible expectations and hopes for an inconceivable (pun intended) child.

In fact, the whole vagueness of the piece reflects how alien the whole process seemed to me, and no doubt overwhelming to the author as well. David's refusal to reveal anything about himself and his situation left me feeling very confused and with a bad impression of this "disturbing" man (I'm sorry, but he sounds like an asshole). It also left me thinking: what are the motives for David and Michelle? The very businesslike and ambiguous manner made it seem as though they weren't doing this because they had no other method of conception—to actually have a child—but instead to create an inhumane set of selective genes. A sort of trophy, one on an endless list of accomplishments to parade around town for others to envy.

"As a cripple, I swagger."

If you type "define cripple" into the Google search engine, you will read this at the top of the page:

crip·ple

ˈkripəl/

noun

1. 1.

   datedoffensive

   a person who is unable to walk or move properly because of disability or injury to their back or legs.

After Googling this woman, Nancy Mairs, I stumbled upon another jewel of a piece, On Being A Cripple. Despite being allowed only a small excerpt, I also found her candid and unapologetic honesty in addressing disability with a blunt "take it or leave it" attitude.

Upon an initial reading, I wondered why she had to label herself a cripple at all. Aren't we supposed to avoid labelling? Haven't we been warned of the self-detrimental effects of labelling and categorization of people?

However, upon some reflection, I realized that the word "cripple" does not serve as a label or a modifier, but instead as a small adjective, the kind that everyone must use to describe themselves in some way or another.

With the word cripple, Mairs accomplishes two things:

1. Cripple is actually less of a 'labelling' word than handicapped or disabled, as those two words imply some permanent or all-encompassing disadvantage to her situation and serve only a superficial euphemistic purpose in describing her condition. And the word cripple also has a unique "accuracy with which it describes [her] condition: [she has] lost full use of [her] limbs."

2. With the word cripple, Mairs chooses to call only herself this because "society is no readier to accept crippledness than to accept death, war, sex, sweat, or wrinkles."

"Perhaps I want them to wince."