Stevia
By the third day, you would consider drowning a kitten, or giving up sex, for a decent cup of coffee. Such a pedestrian pleasure is hard to come by, apparently, and when you ask for it, a mug of almost-hot water gets plopped on the table with a jar of instant. Looks like sisters are doing it for themselves. A better bet is the OXXO chain, where you can get a Styrofoam take-out of those fake lattes. While not technically “good,” machine cappuccino is a delicious kind of guilty. And also, they are crack. Except that in Mexico, everything is ten times sweeter, and you can choke on the sugar. It’s not drinkable, but the sugar-free is worse. It’s Aspartame extremism. The stuff is so sweet that your eyes unhinge themselves from their sockets. Coffee in Mexico is, quite literally it seems, more rare than gold. There is gold everywhere, mountains of it, rising above you, showing you the way to heaven. Up, up, up it goes, taking your eye onto the frescoes where painted saints tell their stories. The altar in front of you is carved out of solid gold, and all the horrible and majestic history of Mexican mining and the Indians and land and the Spanish thieves and the grandeur of the church and beauty and all the art and skilled craftsmanship required and inspired, all of it is told to you on these altars. The candelabra, the frames on the Old Masters, the painted trim and the statues, gold, gold, gold. At night the flames to the dead and of our sins flicker and the churches thrum with quiet fire. You can kneel inside of this beauty, you can light another candle for a lost soul that you are missing so hard you fear you could fall open, you can watch the silent tear-streaked faces glowing gold in the trembling light. There is a gold beacon, a seven tonne angel, high above the maze and urgency of city traffic. El Angel, the Angel of Independence, stands triumphant and 22 feet tall, atop a column of 118 feet. Artist Enrique Alciati gave her wings by 1910 after a series of stops and starts and crumblings. Now Victory blinds in bronze, melting in the sun in a top coat of pure 24 karat gold. But you can’t get a proper coffee. Don’t worry, we’ll go to Starbucks, the artist tells you. If we have to, we have to. You take two strong Americanos over to the Malecon and watch a little man all in white balancing a few dozen cubic metres of colourful puffed snacks on a bicycle. You have already tried the dayglo green cheesies, and they might not have been bad if the guy hadn’t soaked them with hot sauce. The flavour had real pep, but the soggy texture negated the crunch that you needed from such a calorie investment. You sit behind the famous bronze dolphins and try to count the gold rays across the sea to the horizon but there are hundreds of them. The artist is telling you about what it was like, coming home after fifteen years. How he had gone into America through a hole in the fence when he was twelve, he’d been sent by his family to the other side. He’d had something of a life there, eventually. A wife and two kids, nearly teenagers now. A few years here and there in prison. You both chain smoke, sipping the coffees. The artist wonders if he will ever leave again. He hopes never, he was homesick every minute and he is happier now, even though he was also near the ocean there. He doesn’t mind serving tourists at a restaurant or making postcard paintings of the river or the sea. He doesn’t want to live away from Mexico. There’s Aztec blood still running through these veins, he says. Except he’s always been curious about Canada. Can you find construction work there if you’re willing, he asks. Is it easy to sell your art? Is the cold pretty? But you wonder about moving here, what it would take to never have to leave. Its sweetness has been mainlined into your veins and going back home feels like grief. You could be an ex-pat, like Toller Cranston or Elizabeth Taylor. You could open a coffee shop, you could have good coffee with a Stevia option, nothing artificial, and local art, and maybe some poets could read there at night, too. Lorette C. Luzajic Lorette C. Luzajic is a Toronto creative working in collage, paint, photography, poetry, and prose. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
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Voices in the Hospital Gallery: Musings on Art “Art’s whatever you choose to frame.”—Fleur Adcock, “Leaving the Tate” In the spacious, well-lit corridor of a major metropolitan hospital, a line of empty wheelchairs like taxis at an airport, a train of black and silver, press lightly against a white wall. Grids of 2-inch square photos, in 7 x 7 rows, hang above, part of an art project collaboration between medical students and photo-media students. Unintentional juxtaposition. Images in the grid: stethoscope and lens cap, otoscope head and “help” buzzer button, fragments, the top of a sanitizing liquid dispenser and color-coded chart tabs. Birds eye view of Q-tips and tongue depressors, an MRI stretcher-bed and vials of saline in marked tubes. Four of these prismatic grids with repeating and distinct images, sequences of chromatic variations like slides of stained cells. And yet. Some things defy measurement, defy scientific knowledge, fall away from our grasp and so there are missing squares on the fourth grid, empty spaces above the empty wheelchairs. The wheelchairs wait. Not meant as “art” they have become so, they have merged with the images above. This armada for arms, bodies and feet also speaks to what is missing from the photos above. There aren’t any human body parts visible. The next time I come to visit, the wheelchairs are gone. Deployed elsewhere? My view of the exhibit changes. Easier to see the images on the wall, easier to detach from the fact of a hospital. My perception is more simplified and reduced simultaneously, as if I’ve been transported out of the environment. Even though the images speak to medicine, the wheelchairs added an immediacy the grids lack. How do poets respond to other artist’s work? Where do I put my frame? I always want to be mindful of the context in which I’m viewing. In this same Sky Gallery, four plexi-glass boxes of eyes, about 30 in each, made by people working, visiting or staying in the hospital. No two alike though each began with the same blank, almond-shaped template. Riveted by eyes, rivets on eyes, a river of eyes. What you see, what they reflect, is from the outside looking in, or inside looking out. Some are literal eyes, with lashes, pupils and irises. The blue-eyed congregate with like-eyed as do the black and brown ones. Some are figurative, imagistic, symbolic. A heart where the pupil is and inside the heart, a book. One eye is decorated with paper leaves for lashes, constellations in the night sky fill what is usually white space, the pupil is a flower. “I always see / the forest” says the I-eye. In another part of the hospital a sign reads: DO NOT PLACE GURNEYS IN FRONT OF ART. A large, multi-media piece by Dennis Evans hangs next to it. Metal words frame the outside of the 5 x 10 foot piece. Natural Law hangs next to the warning sign. And the laws of nature say that nature abhors a vacuum so gurney attendants looking for a place to stash them must have found the space convenient. Was there a patient on the gurney who needed to rest, to gaze at something other than the white ceiling? Continuing over the top of the frame, Day, Times Rhythm, The Great Cycle, Nature Opera and Night carry on. Bifurcated canvas of creamy yellow and black further delineate day and night. Though no gurneys currently block the art, clearly one or more have. The second part of this art piece hangs directly opposite it, across the hall, and bears the ravages of being “equipment damaged.” It is missing three of its 5 metal ‘rocks’ which were once outcroppings on the piece that speaks to the balance of nature and science. Now out of balance, it appears as an amputee. This hospital, one of three in the area with significant collections of: paintings, sculptures, mixed media, crafts: woven, carved, glazed, sewn, stuffed, installed, photographed, made by “professional” artists, patients, doctors, nurses, and staff, is a testament to the need for, and high regard for, voices from both sides of the body/mind. “Is this a museum or a hospital?” a child asks his father. We are standing in an atrium space between surgery clinics. It is airy and spacious. A spiral staircase cascades down four flights from skylight to blue-rock pool. Touching art is often prohibited here, as in a museum, but in this space, a life-sized horse by Deborah Butterfield, made from recycled, metal scrap, can be petted. He gazes forever out the wall of glass to grass he’ll never graze. We hunger for escape too, hope that what ails us and what heals us can balance, lets us walk out unaided by chair or gurney, lets us reframe our world. As Fleur Adcock said: …Put what space you like around the ones you fix on, and gloat. Art multiplies itself. Art’s whatever your choose to frame. Suzanne E. Edison Suzanne's work appears, among other places, in: her chapbook, The Moth Eaten World, Finishing Line Press, 2014; Spillway; Crab Creek Review; The Healing Art of Writing, Vol. 1; The Examined Life Journal; Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening, and www.literarymama.com. www.seedison.com All photographs by the author. All artwork resides in the University of Washington Medical Center Hospital, Seattle, Washington.
Beautiful, Beautiful Machines “…Nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: ‘Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?’” Walker Evans I love to photograph machines, trucks, construction sites, glass, bricks, engines, skyscrapers, cement slabs, forklifts, bulldozers, factories. Like the great feminist philosopher Camille Paglia, I love roads and concrete bridges. She wrote, “When I cross America's great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.” When I consider nature, I feel appropriate awesome wonder. I am moved by stars and water lilies. I weep during storms. When I stand by the ocean, I feel God’s grandeur deeply in my soul. I feel the veins of minerals in the earth, lapis and turquoise and silver. The mirror of a lake is a miracle. Lava and lilacs, hail and icicles. Feathers astound, as does the unexpected ululating elegance of the neck of the giraffe. I am curious about the planets, and standing in a room of dinosaur bones is always downright mythic. Still, none of these holds my fancy for long. I scan the horizon of the sea for a ship and want to know her name, and the names of the men inside her. Walking in the forest among unwinding fiddleheads and vines and all of their attendant fairies, my spine prickles when I see an empty can of Coca Cola, or the remains of a fire pit. I comb the beach for plastic trinkets washed up from someone else’s life in another land. These treasures are their own kind of archeology. My pulse quickens when I see the footsteps of man. It’s fashionable for man to find man’s presence a disgrace, to snort with disgruntled indignation about man’s mark, to declare that our very presence has spoiled something pristine that is only pure without us. This self-hatred is readily revealed in how we use words like synthetic, unnatural, man-made, artificial, and unnatural; these are all used to describe the mark of man. But man is natural, man is nature, man is part of nature, and anything man makes or does is therefore natural and part of nature. How can anything we’ve made be artificial? Such language is an effective psychological manipulation to undermine human creativity. Our problem is not just racism, sexism, and a long lineup of assorted hatreds of the “other.” It is this, too, this intrinsic loathing for our own existence. In the face of human accomplishments, we feel a strange kind of guilt when the only moral response is gratitude. I don’t propose that humankind is perfect or that he does no wrong. On the contrary, I believe in sins, and our accountability for them. On the other hand, I don’t believe that natural is neutral, or share the Romantic painters’ adulation and delusion that she is innocent. Nature is not just pretty daisies and lazy meadows: it also open sores and parasites and festering diseases. It is the destructive power of fire, and the agony of childbirth inflicted on billions of innocents. It is the ruthlessness of rape in the animal kingdom, of tormenting one’s young and eating them for fun among chimpanzees. There is a certain kind of carelessness to in the thoughtlessly flung empty can, and the can’s story contains factory tyranny and toil. But it also includes the macabre fairy tale of sugar, an epic evil harnessed by man but which is wholly natural. No, not just the story of slavery, but the sweet stuff itself. It’s a substance that has seduced the gullible and left festering, rotten holes where teeth used to be; it has poisoned untold pancreases, crippled us with cancer, and wreaked more havoc than all the fake pharma we’ve ever known. But all the magic is here in this story of the tossed tin, too. How we took one of those veins from the soil, where it sat inert, we ground stones into pigment and made paint, and from that paint we have made a trillion paintings. We made tin and bronze, we melted metal, we polished emeralds and made heartbreakingly beautiful things. Machines are magic. Photography is witchcraft. We have made languages, and when we started writing, we began to preserve the history of culture. We could record poetry and stories. We were Dante and Virgil and Job, Sharon Olds and Haruki Murakami. We made music. On whatever we could find, and with manmade machines. With more machines, we also learned how to preserve it. Most paintings and pictures of the industrial revolution and of machines are clouded with some kind of obligatory apology or condemnation of progress. My photography of buildings and oil pipes and steel structures and urban alleys seeks to show magnificence instead. The chugging trains and the whirring printing presses and the trucks hauling produce and raw materials are about being alive. I see beauty in stacks and bricks and steam. Here is the story of our struggle to invent. Here is how we made the world smaller, and invented possibilities to know other people far away. I see grandeur in skyscrapers and cities. Here is the story of people, of communities striving to stretch the laws of physics to their limits, discover the boundaries of the outer edge of the imagination. From the wheel and turning sand to glass, to La Traviata. And consider how we take for granted the now ubiquitous mobile phone! If our ancestors dreamed we could whisper into a little black box and talk to strangers in the Congo or Buenos Aires, they would deem it sorcery. It boggles my mind when we “research” astrology or crystal “power” or look for evidence that a “medium” calling out “I feel the initial J!” might actually be talking to the dead. We have magic so magic that by pressing a button, we can see cinema filled with the living voices of dead people. We can turn sand into instruments that let us communicate instantly with people five thousand miles away. We know the names and chemical makeup of thousands of stars, for real, not for some mumbo jumbo. Magic is not some vague vibe from swishing sage or obsidian about! We have long taken the compounds in plants for real medicine and real food, we have already mapped time with those rocks. And oil, that apparent evil, black gold, as if energy is always some kind of personification of greed. Oil is a miracle- the ultimate in recycling. The discarded remains, the garbage dump, of beings gone before, turned into power that can fly us across the world into the arms of our lovers or new friends in a day. Refuse that can propel machines to take spices and pineapples north by morning. When I see machines and cities and concrete, I survey man’s astonishing history of architecture and culture and art and transportation and evolution. Oh, the machines! The spinning wheels! The greasy mechanical parts! The skyscrapers! The roaring engines! The mammoth steel bridges! Ayn Rand said, “The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time.” Machines have freed women from lye-raw hands and a lifetime of nothing but washing clothes, and machines have freed men from the fields, where they were mere beasts of burden, to be doctors and writers and chefs. Machines have made books available to everyone, not just to emperors. Beautiful, beautiful machines. When I wander in the glory of a starry night, I feel a profound sense of awesome wonder. I experience intense gratitude for the beauty of the natural world. But it is the skyline of a city and the twinkling of its lights breaking through those stars that inspires me more. Lorette C. Luzajic "I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all." Michelangelo Red Gladioli The fireplace with its dying fire, the green patterned wallpaper curling at the molding, the soft bed which has lately been stingy with dreams—the painting has made a painting of the room. The awkward stems in the awkward vase and the last flare of life in the darkness. Just a study, no subject but that which can be arranged on a table. No subject but experience, the weight of my blood in the darkness, my throbbing arm. The fire snaps and throws a flare on the hearth, the pattern on the wallpaper rising like bubbles in a fish tank. Workmen call to one another; a new dumpster clangs on the street. Life pedals on in the dark, lighting its dynamo. The blooms, now, there’s courage. Paul Barron Paul Barron received an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he teaches writing. He currently serves as the director of the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, a living-learning community focused on writing and the arts. His short fiction has appeared in Pretext and is forthcoming in The Nottingham Review. note from the editor: The author, David Brydges, is the artistic director of poeARTry North, an annual competition of painting and poetry. "Spring Pulse Poetry Festival is Northern Ontario’s first poetry/arts festival, which partnered in 2008 with Tyna Silver and Temiskaming Palette& Brush Club to solicit paintings/poems under the title “Poetic Visions.”We then created a competition/award ceremony during the festival to reward the best paintings and poems. The artists were colouring their words well. Its success spread and artists outside the local art club wished to participate. Since 2014 PoeARTry North has been open to all Northern Ontario Art Association members and non-members. Our vision is to expand in 2018 to all Ontario painter/poets. In 2020 make it a Canadian competition with invitation for painter/poets to submit to an eventual 2022 biannual international event."
Writing Down the Coloured Bones The Art of Writing on Art "Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it”. - Vincent Van Gogh Poems are the literary skeletons for inspirational flesh to hold upright the paintings’ body of expression. Both share a common heartbeat alive with juices from the muses. Group of Seven artist J. E. H. Macdonald writes, “A poem is a perfect moment of time with a heightened sense of heart and pulsation in it. A picture is a perfected enclosure of space seen with heightened vision.” The two genres engage and interrelate on canvas and paper the dual direction of where this creative pulse will finally rest in form and feeling. One spirit envelopes the process, giving coherence to what finally becomes a finish work of art. A technical simplicity is demanded to capture with precise order aflame perceptions sparking from mysteries source. Illustrated in the book, On the Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch states a useful metaphor for painting. "You gather as you read that economy of words with 'concrete nouns and active verbs' is what gives writing clarity and merit." He continues, “If you think of this in terms of painting and drawing you see that economy of line and colour holds just as important a part in art”. One danger is the painting overpowering the poem. Or the poem overpowering a painting. I co-judged one competition and sensed one of the strongest poems didn’t have a technically accurate painting to match its poetic backbone. Another time one of the strongest paintings had an inferior poem that just didn’t move the judges to reward a twofold vigour. Proportion is of upmost necessity in defining an award winning painting/poem. Every movement and stroke is coordinated to craft a well -formed picture. There is adventure in continual creation beyond just a painting. Rich rewards await the artist who keeps fueling the original fire, enabling another avenue of expression to impress itself. Revealing multiple details and cross- meanings to the paintings' first formed dimension. A twin light burning extra hours of illumined gifts adding balance and delight. When the urge to be poetic arrives, it is an intuitive dance that the artist brings to interplay. Words are not the first medium of comfort for some artists. One artist who won a painting/poetry competition said: “I now know what you writers struggle with when composing.” He spent three months crafting his very short almost haiku-style winning poem. It perfectly mirrored word for word a parallel connection to his visual story painting. Words tied with equal precision are ribbons of reverie complementing the paintings formative visuals. Once completed a certain tension diffuses enabling the artist a more vibrant vista. When you saw the painting you heard the poem and vice versa; when you read the poem you saw the painting. Simonides the Greek poet said, “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.” Imagery, the great equalizer, is deeply conversant and at home in both realms. Using different senses causes an appreciation of its fused merging. Each must divide “space to be” in order to reorder its route back to wholeness. You the reader and observer is drawn into an emotional dialogue. Felt connections quietly harmonize the eye and ear. Our frame of reference has shifted and reshaped itself into a more enlarged spatial canvas of aesthetic possibilities. Retraining to view/read with singularity and perceptual purpose a blending of mutual beauty. As William Blake says, “The eye altering, alters all.” At a painting/poetry competition award ceremony two years ago we had the people’s choice award. The general public is encouraged to be the judge and vote for their favourite. At the end of the night with ballots counted the winner is announced. That year the art loving public along with artists picked the painting /poem that won first place in this blind judging competition. A kinship of knowing had warmed everyone. The artist had done their job in conveying a cohesive brilliance. How a painting paired with a poem can unite the spirit of truth transcending its division of discipline. With an elegant intercession both are silent testaments hanging on the galleries walls. Pleasure extends to the audiences unique viewing perspective. The abundant journey favours all with rich rewards. A natural return to the complexion of creation. Art and writing co-existing in the same body of being. It’s muse voice says “write down my coloured bones so I can double the gifts”. David C. Brydges artistic director PoeARTry North mybrydges@yahoo.ca Ali Rashid
Critic Irving Sander wasn’t initially interested in art. But he happened upon a Franz Kline painting and couldn’t get it out of his mind. Upon reflecting on how art provoked such profound and intense emotional responses, he concluded that art, in a way, “has magical powers, like a fetish, icon, or reliquary…The art object can literally bewitch the viewer. Casting a spell, it can transform him or her- that is, summon up a fresh perception of art, life and the world, and even cause the viewer to feel, think, imagine, and act in new ways…” I too am bewitched by the captivating, mythical, mesmerizing effects of art. Indeed, this is exactly the reason I obsessively comb the Internet, pore over my library of art books, and scour galleries and museums. I got hooked on that magic. Some art is a visceral, albeit, cheap thrill, and its rush fades fast. Other art lingers, coming up time to time in the unconscious like a spectre rising over submersion, calling like a loon over a deep lake and flashing silver light into your own dark waters. The work of Ali Rashid seems to transcend still all of this. With a few sprinkled colours dancing on a monochromatic backdrop, the paintings might be pleasant but unassuming abstractions, perfectly decorative. But instead, somehow, they conjure Babylonian tablets and secret codes; symbology systems, ancient records and desert topographies. As if over millennia, there are wear marks and peeling textures and scratches that suggest mythologies older than time itself. But what are they? “Some years ago I visited a small island near the coast of Syria and there I saw walls that were, so to speak, talking to me,” wrote Wouter Welling on Rashid’s webpage. “Children had painted their own hands as signs of protection on the walls. The paintings of Ali Rashid reminded me of those walls filled with vivid signs. One doesn’t have to be able to read the signs to feel that they are bearers of meaning.” Indeed, Rashid was born in Iraq, where the mists of time cloak the earliest human writings we know of, cuneiform code systems from Sumer. Welling recounts Rashid telling him how his work began. Living under the savage dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and a soldier in the war against Iran, Rashid was writing in his notebook when he realized his words could put his life in danger. So he began drawing over the text, “in the process of course making the text unreadable. Layer upon layer he created later on paintings like a palimpsest, a way of adding time to the essence of the work. Rashid developed a poetic use of signs which relates him to artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró.” “Ali's drawings are a shocking memorial to the atrocities which took place,” says writer T.J. Bruder for Underground Magazine. Rashid spent ten years in hell, a pawn of two cruel dictators. Sending artists like Rashid to fight for him was a win-win for Saddam- it put numbers on his side, but if they died, that was also victory, since freethinkers were of no use to the Ba’ath regime. Bruder says Rashid began writing every day, poetry that documented all that he witnessed. But, “His black and white drawings of horror were laced with poems which were abstract lines to everyone but him. Ali had come up with his own secret code, protecting him from the authorities' continuous spot checks and searches…” This was an ingenious way of passing time, preserving history, and avoiding torture and death after controls and checkpoints. “He was now able to tell the authorities that the funny writing was just abstract creative technique, nothing else. In actuality, though, they represented his outcries of pain having to fight a cruel war…” Ultimately, Rashid moved to the west, to the Netherlands, into safety and freedom, where he continues to create his spellbinding art. While I look through, appreciate, and forget an endless parade of paintings, Rashid’s stay with me and I return to them again and again. I don’t feel the need to decipher them in any conscious way, and I don’t think we are meant to. The mark makings do feel like the walls of caves, whose textures are inscribed with ancient invocations from across millennia. They are transformed, however, by pure modernism, invoking and alluding to history but remaining a creative and spiritual invention of the present. So many artists, myself included, find their practice essential to their survival. We often say, “I do it because I have to.” Perhaps Rashid’s work embodies this concept more literally than we will ever experience ourselves. As such, his intriguing abstract art is not just symbolic of redemption, but a record of it. Lorette C. Luzajic This essay is from Lorette C. Luzajic's Truck, a collection of art writings, and will also be included in artist Ali Rashid's forthcoming book. Edward Hopper and J.M.W. Turner: Two Old Men and the Sea
Two paintings of the sea by two artists. Looking at each as if we knew nothing of their creators, something of their respective dispositions is obvious right away. J.M.W. Turner's work is wild and stormy; you know he’s eccentric and passionate. Edward Hopper’s is detached and moody, angular rather than organic, with a sardonic undercurrent you can’t quite put your finger on. The Snow Storm’s story is well known. It’s one of the most famous works by one of the most famous artists in history. Around 1842, J.M.W. was caught in a storm aboard the ship the Ariel. He allegedly asked to be tied to the mast to authentically experience man against the gods, or at the very least, man against the gales. This might be romanticizing the Romantic painting. Without proof of the incident, there are two teams: one that upholds the anecdote as truth, and one that dismisses it as myth. I would cast my lots with Team A. It fits with the tempestuous temperament of Turner, but more importantly, it’s the exact story the painting itself tells. It’s a jewel among a multitude of masterpieces, and perhaps the wildness that sets it apart is the experiential. That artists are Method Actors is no surprise- we have a strange habit of stepping into all manner of harrowing scenarios in search of the story. Now Hopper had a mean streak and violent temper that reared its ugly head in his relationship with his wife, but he was generally a more reticent character with rather staid emotions. His work is more introspective, more thoughtful. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Hopper painting that shows his hotheaded side. His art shows disconnection and resignation, and often melancholy, but not rage. This particular painting from 1951 is not one of his famous works, and it’s not even one of his best. It’s as banal a picture of the sea as there ever was. Except, it’s not. If some of Hopper’s paintings seem vaguely haunted, this one’s ghosts are palpable. Hopper gave Rooms by the Sea an alternate title in his notes- The Jumping Off Place. After discovering this darkly irreverent tidbit, a thin, icy breeze creeps into the frame. These are only two of a trillion acts of creativity inspired by the ocean, but both are worthy of contemplation. In Turner’s, we are there at the mast, with the cold waves whipping our faces into raw meat. We are the crossroads of the elements, captive to our fate in between life and death. In Hopper’s surreal sunny calm, we’re already gone. Lorette C. Luzajic Founder of The Ekphrastic Review, Lorette C. Luzajic is a mixed media artist working in collage, paint, poetry, and photography. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca. Adam at the Art Institute
Rodin’s Adam stands at the top of the stairs, more than life-size, looking as if he’s about to throw something. His left arm rests on his bent right leg; his right arm reaches back, as if gaining momentum for the release of some (invisible) object. The pose reminds me of the fifth-century Roman sculpture the Discus Thrower. To duplicate the discus thrower’s stance, all he needs to do is raise that right arm farther up behind him, bend his shoulders a bit more forward, and grip his fingers around a round metal plate. And wipe that sad expression off his face. Adam is my neighbour at the Art Institute, where, as a volunteer, I sit at an information kiosk explaining to visitors how to find the American wing, or the Picassos, or the toilet. Visitors flow steadily up and down the Grand Staircase, many of them pausing to ponder Rodin’s depiction of their earliest ancestor. Often they say something to me as they do so: “Look how big his head is,” or “Where’s Eve?” or “That position looks awkward.” They bend to read the label, which explains that Rodin based the figure on Michelangelo’s portrait of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. There, a newly created Adam reclines, his index finger receiving the breath of life from God’s extended fingertip. But Rodin has tipped him upright, as if to say, “Time to be up and about. Let’s look at what we’ve got here.” What we’ve got, though, doesn’t look too good. Adam has caved in on himself, eyes cast down, as if he’s contemplating his own flawed flesh. His right arm reaches not out toward God but downward, and his index finger—in Michelangelo’s depiction nearly touching God’s—now points uselessly toward the earth. Although he seems poised for action, his feet are glued to the statue’s base. If he were to move, it’s easier to imagine him toppling over than actually completing whatever motion he’s embarked on. But then, Adam is all about toppling. Rodin originally sculpted the figure to be paired with Eve at a portal entitled The Gates of Hell, the Art Institute website explains. Rodin’s inspiration was Dante’s Adam, who, before being raised to the left side of God, spent thousands of years in Limbo. His “agonized body,” we’re told, “strikingly conveys the sufferings caused by original sin.” Rodin’s version may aspire to the fluid power of the Discus Thrower, but his muscles are knotted, his hands and feet too huge and ill-proportioned for grace. Those feet anchor him to the earth to which his sin has bound him (Adama: earth, in Hebrew), and on which he’ll now have to labour. Adam’s awkwardness (old Norse: turned the wrong way) is, I think, why so many visitors stop not only to contemplate but also to interact with him. Adam’s twisted pose pulls visitors in, as if they feel his knotted muscles in their own bodies. I’ve seen multiple young men imitate his pose, swaying unsteadily as their friends take pictures. I’ve seen one man link an index finger through Adam’s, as if in solidarity, and another rest a hand on Adam’s calf as he posed for photographs. When I saw the man touch Adam’s leg, I thought of intervening: everyone knows, after all, you’re not supposed to touch the art. But I figured by the time I rebuked him, he’d have removed his hand. In any case, I was touched. I thought of Lincoln’s head at Springfield, his nose shiny from the touch of passersby, and thought perhaps Adam, more than any other work of art, should bear the mark of his fellow creatures’ caress. Museums offer a charged space in which sparks of affinity leap between viewer and object. Watching these intense responses to art, I feel like a lucky witness to the best that human beings can be: curious, receptive, eager, kind. They connect with each other—and me—as well as with what they see: a husband, pushing his wife in a wheelchair, reads her the labels she can’t see; a woman excitedly points out to her friend the Frank Lloyd Wright window suspended from the ceiling above me; a young man high-fives me when I give him a flyer about our mini-tour based on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I even become a strange kind of confidante, to whom they trust their uncertainties. Not just “Where is the nearest rest room?” But, “These are all replicas, aren’t they?” “You mean this is the only real American Gothic?” “Haven’t I seen a painting of Van Gogh’s bedroom somewhere else?” I thrum with sympathy, listening to these questions. What does “original” mean, after all, given that artists often paint or sculpt the same thing more than once, and that sculptures are cast multiple times, sometimes after the artist’s death? In how many different places have I seen Rodin’s Balzac? There’s our own, a naked figure in Gallery 201, whose crotch melts between his legs into what looks like a traffic cone; there’s his sibling, perched identically in the sculpture garden of the Baltimore Museum of Art; and there’s the massive, enrobed figure striding through the garden of the Rodin museum in Paris. Each question strikes me as complex and worth thinking about. “What makes a painting get so famous?” a young man asks me, after I explain where he can find Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Even “where is the nearest toilet?” requires a thoughtful, contextualized response. “What did you want to see on the way there?” I ask. But man, alas, is a fallen animal. That couple I thought was passionately discussing Rodin’s Adam is in fact quarreling about when to get lunch. “We’ve already waited six hours,” one insists, as loudly as you can in a museum without drawing the attention of a guard. “Let’s go.” And then there was the wealthy looking middle-aged couple who paused to ask me directions. “How do I get to the modern wing?” the woman asked. I told her. “How do I get to the armour?” the man asked. The woman re-inserted herself in the conversation before I could answer. “We’re not going to see the armour,” she said disgustedly. “We’re going straight to the modern wing.” The husband, ignoring her, asked me again, “How do I get to the armour?” “Go straight, behind the Caillebotte,” I said, in my standard explanation, “until you see furniture on the right. Then turn right and keep going.” The woman turned to go, but then paused and looked at me angrily. “You’re fired,” she said. I smiled politely and glanced at my neighbour Adam to see how he was taking it. He was, as usual, looking at his feet. His sad expression said all that needed saying. Ruth Hoberman Ruth Hoberman retired recently after thirty years as a Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. She taught and published on modern British literature. Her 2011 book Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (U of Virginia P) focused on the depiction of art and museums in early twentieth-century literature. Her poems have appeared in [PANK], Natural Bridge, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review. Collage, Electronica, and the Meaning of Life
When electronic music first came out, there was a big-to-do over its legitimacy. Detractors grumbled that it wasn’t “real” music since there weren’t any instruments. Others dismissed its pastiche sensibilities, denouncing the very idea of sampling previously recorded music to make new songs. I had other ideas about it. Clearly, the technological devices used to make it were “real” musical instruments, in my mind, even if they didn’t look like a French horn or didgeridoo. I didn’t foresee the annihilation of the symphony or opera. I saw instead a whole new art form, an expansion rather than a reduction. I went so far as to call it the “new classical.” It was a universal tongue, without lyrics. It had the power to create emotions in any language. And as for sampling, hadn’t humans been doing cover versions of the Eagles since kingdom come? Using a killer beat phrase to build a song, or mixing new life into an old classic was homage of the highest kind. Suing some poor unknown DJ who mixed your beats in his basement was kind of missing the point. And the point is this: there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps it was easier for me to understand the whole sampling idea because I was a collage artist. Until recently, thanks to the Internet, collage has been slow to earn formal recognition as a legitimate medium of creativity. By definition, it depends on “sampling.” Too many museums and galleries view us as vampires. Our inspiration depends on dismantling and deconstruction and reconstruction. In this view, we are not originators- we are thieves. To get around the scary world of copyright infringement, some collage artists work exclusively from imagery found in the public domain. There are catalogues available specifically for us. To me, this defeats the purpose of using the whole world as my palette. Limiting the scope of collage to a set of predetermined images negates the meaning of the art. It betrays the divine spark within collage, which is the idea that anything can grow into something new, or say something other than what it said before. To think the collagist is trying to pass off a Renoir or a modern Revlon ad as his or her own work indeed misses the point entirely. And once again, the point is this: there is nothing new under the sun. But what does that mean? Surely there is plenty new under the sun. When the depressed preacher wrote those words in the Old Testament’s book of Ecclesiastes several thousand years ago, he was already witnessing things that had never been seen before. And since then, clearly, we have advanced technologies; we have millions of works of literature; we have digital photography; we have Michael Jackson and state of the art hospitals and Tampax and cola. Well, yes. And everything “new” is made from something else. Everything created is inspired by something else. Inspiration itself has to come from somewhere, and “studying” is nothing more than learning something that someone else has discovered or put together. And at the very base of it all, there is a world of subatomic particles and in the beginning and in the end, every living and every dead thing and all the air and the dirt are all made of the same stuff. Like pigments and materials, the collage artist considers everything in the world around her to be a building block, whether a snippet of texture or a preformed concept. If so much can be made from three primary colours, how much can be made from everything! More, to remove one element from a whole means a new focus, a new way of seeing. To remove one element from a whole and combine it with other elements is invention, the mother of progress and civilization. Perhaps this is too metaphysical to accurately describe a collagist’s creative process. Collage means “to glue” after all, from the French “coller.” It means tearing words and images from somewhere and gluing them somewhere else; it does not mean lofty gobbledygook jargon about science, God, and the meaning of life. Still, what a collage artist does is take pre-existing elements to form something else. He manipulates the meaning of those elements by placing them in new contexts. This is what an artist does, or any artist for that matter. From an assembly of elementary particles, he creates ways of seeing. He invents solutions for problems. He looks with fresh eyes; he juxtaposes disparate elements. He singles out a specific element, or he jumbles many together. Something may come of nothing, or nothing may come of something. Some are to be thrown away. Some are jolting. Some are exquisite. “Emphasizing concept and process over end product, collage has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary,” Diane Waldman wrote in an essay on collage for the Guggenheim Museum. “…Collage served as a surrogate for the subconscious.” It always bothered me when someone said an electronic musician was just a wannabe who didn’t have the ability to sing or play an instrument. I saw her instead as someone who had circumvented such archaic limitations. Creativity is the birthright of everyone. It is the very meaning of life, isn’t it? It is what we do, taken even from a purely biological standpoint. Collage, for me, is the mother of all outlets, the natural result of artistic inquiry. It is unlimited in possibility, whether we are talking about possibilities in aesthetics, texture, colour, composition, or message. Collage requires engagement with everything else in the world. I think in random juxtapositions, not only when I’m holding my little pink scissors, but when I’m troubleshooting or inventing games for my nephews. I see in contrasting colours, in textures, and so my ordinary experience every day in my city is transformed into a visual extravaganza. I jot down words overheard- they find their way into my writing, into my art. The way I see the world is collage, and that informs even my interests. There’s no such thing as “uninterested.” I have learned through collage the value of everything, the range of emotions and creation and experience. I want to know everything and everyone. Through collage, I merge my conscious desires and manipulations with unconscious memories and meanings. In this way, collage removes the artificial gap between art and living. Lorette C. Luzajic This essay was originally published in 2011 at Art Nectar. Lorette C. Luzajic is a mixed media artist working with collage, paint, text, photography, and creative writing. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca. Artist Manifesto blue october and the blue dress lime green and blue cheese cracked pepper and pink salt black olives and white wine carmenere and lithium little esther and edith piaf polka dots and stripes apples and oysters pat condell and steve martin mozart and michael jackson johnny cash and rhett butler cigars and play doh sterling silver and turquoise peeling paint and rusty doors matthew mark luke and john shalimar and red lips bluegrass records and big machines cilantro and sriracha world war two and marshall mathers mommie dearest and marilyn monroe combines and colour fields culture and couture paradise and purgatory the marchesa di casati magritte and miro john bender and gentlehands terabithia and robbie joe cornell’s boxes and flea market treasures vintage nudes and ephemera the secret history and nancy drew mysteries african masks and indian beads bosch and breugel methamphetamine nightmares eternal mourning silver springs and new orleans voodoo and the crying game old hymns and amazing grace spring and fall and the red wheelbarrow lilacs and forget me nots tea and oranges that come all the way from china the wind up bird and pick up trucks star child and harriet the spy ketchup and hamburgers diamonds and bombay sapphire a heartbreaking world of staggering genius and the heart is a lonely hunter the stories of the street blue jeans and billie jean severed heads and suicide sociopaths and freedom fighters nighthawks and mannequins blood sucking monkeys from north tonawanda the black dogs and orange cats black pearls and cora pearl sailors and psychonauts invention and ativan demian and demian king david and the king cleavage and campbell’s cans wonder woman and the vivian girls camille paglia and sister wendy the blind assassin and walking the dark jughead and kramer and adrian mole the queen and the rook churchill and history bradbury and the future crazy for you and the angelus new york and lake charles war and peace freedom and reason cocaine and sunglasses a man who can be counted among the great loves of my life the salamander and the rabbit cowboy angels and when bobby sang the blues true friends and girls with narcissistic personality disorders ten of cups and five of pentacles strawberry island and rapa nui clandestino and caravaggio candy hearts and u.f.o.s e.e. cummings and oscar wilde medusa and yemaya mermaids and men lucinda and miller warhol and wonder sickness Lorette C. Luzajic Lorette C. Luzajic is an artist and writer in Toronto, Canada. This creative prose piece is from her book Truck, and Other Thoughts on Art. |
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