Tag: Art

538: “Communally Co-Created Ritual” (With and For Latrelle Bright)

“Communally Co-created Ritual

loving, honoring, remembering, nostalgic, bittersweet
we are a village
we tell ghost stories. who/what are our ghosts?
ritual has very prescribed steps
we need to sing old songs / new songs
we need to make spirit houses for our ghosts
costumes, banners, crowns/garlands
cozy

harvest
it’s in the woods”

                -with and for Latrelle Bright

                A friend and dear colleague passed away this semester. Her name is Latrelle. She’s the kind of artist/educator/delight who spent her time co-creating communities, rituals, connections. Lives. She taught theater, and so much else. I can’t begin to say what she taught me. That we can come together, more meaningfully or more gently and more powerfully than we have yet hoped?
                The text above is from a thought map that was pinned up at a celebrations for Latrelle a few days after she passed away. I think it was from her friends and colleagues, co-creating the ritual that I was at when I saw it. The celebrating and remembering rituals that went on to an afternoon in the park with music and movement a few weeks later. Beneath trees, so almost in the woods. It could just as easily be from something Latrelle taught. She taught that way. Grounded in theater, she called it devising: a bringing together of our ideas, a recognizing of where and who we are, and how we’re moving, until we’re moving together. And maybe it’s really both: because like so many others, I speak Latrelle sometimes, or she speaks me, her laughters and reminders on my lips. Maybe I’m writing this because I want to co-create with her again. Maybe because she’s still co-creating me, and us. We tell ghost stories. We need to sing old songs / new songs. Cozy. We harvest. We gather together. We gather ourselves. We gather fruits and breaths and moments from the trees and grass and each other. Gather lives. It’s in the woods.

by Azlan

516: “Emphasis on Personality” (Chana Porter)

                “Trina moved into performance, both sound and video, involving her own body in the practice. She got a little bit famous and had some minor love affairs, made Deeba proud of her celebrity wife. Then she got bored of the art world; of its pageantry, its emphasis on personality.”
-Chana Porter, The Seep, p. 14

                Almost a decade ago (wow! Time sure washes along) I wrote about Julie Lythcott-Haims and the way passions are commodified into something we have to find—and perhaps sell. Six months ago my partner and I read Chana Porter’s The Seep. And I laid in bed, wondering if cults of individuality lead in part to this dead-end emphasis on personality.
                These days that’s often staged on social media: the influencer’s brand, and how whatever else they’re selling—investment software or skincare serums—they’re selling them. Their energy, fast and larger than life, homey and honest. I think it long predates social media: think of Hollywood stars. Think of celebrity artists. Think of politicians. Think of me, a teacher, told to develop my “teacher persona” and consolidate it into something authoritative and approachable and boundaried and wise and easy to understand and consumable. If individuals are so important, the most important thing around, then a distinct personality has to mean something.
                For me, I think, it means very little. I’ve been reading Moses Ose Utomi’s novellas, but I don’t think it’s his personality that I love. In part it’s the way his imagined world pulls at, reveals, and complicates the world I imagine to be true. In part its the sensory rhythm of sounds. And in person—well, is it really my friend’s personality I’m drawn to, the performance of a particular self? I think it’s more specific: this conversation. This walk together. This game. And more general: this shared gentle silence in which we care for each other. It’s at once more action and more being, and less a pageantry of self.

by Azlan

506: “Mi Vida Les Agobia” (Alaska y Dinarama)

“Mi vida les agobia
¿Por qué será?”
[My life overwhelms them—
And why is that?]
                -Alaska y Dinarama, “A Quien Le Importa”

                My love and I have been watching La Casa de las Flores (The House of Flowers), mostly because it’s so much wild fun, and so good to lie down and snuggle at the end of the day. Last night the third episode finished with my favorite scene so far. A young man coming out to his family takes advice from a queer performer, and so sings his coming out. But (as his sisters remind us, when he stands up to start) he’s no singer. The show’s filming blends from the awkward, uncertain beginning of his song to a color-washed version of the same performance, the young man shifting from hesitating to alight. From awkward to alive. And then we go back to the first, reserved version. The bright version was “in his head,” you might say. (In that version both his parents are joyful, supportive). Or maybe we were seeing for a little while with our hearts and our hopes and our delights.
                I love when art blends these two: a world “a camera might capture,” you could say (though it’s not that simple), and a world inside. Blends them, and shows how interconnected they are. Last year I learned that broadleaf plantains are edible, and so these days I walk around the neighborhood, and where before I saw weeds, weeds, weeds, I see foods, salads, delights.

by Azlan

492: “The Word ‘We'” (Divya Srinivasan)

                “And Little Owl thought how he loved the word ‘we.’”
                -Divya Srinivasan, Little Owl’s Love

                My partner and I just got back home, pulling into our shadowed driveway and waking up our sleepy chilly house, after a long visit out to family in Washington State. We solved puzzles with our grandpa and great aunt. We cooked with both of our moms, and made pot holders with one of them and with our nieces. We played games with our siblings. Different collections of family went out for walks to a frog pond, and walks beneath evergreens, and somewhere along the way I started making friends with a cedar tree. A small one, probably a little younger than I am. It chuckles nighttime thoughts in nighttime whisperings.
                And oh yes, we read Divya Srinivasan’s Little Owl’s Love with our nieces. My partner read it first to the kiddos, and then found me on the couch and said, “You’d love this one,” And I did. That was the day before a whole family of raccoons went climbing along the fence, I think. So many of the stories I saw around me as I grew up told me that life was an individual thing. Remembering back through all these sweet collections of growing things, I do so love the word we.

by Azlan

478: Drawing “What We Cannot Yet See”

                “How do we draw—or write—the emotions and parts of ourselves that we cannot yet see?”
                -Rachel Gu  my friend!) and Azlan Guttenberg Smith (that’s me!), “Our Monsters, Our Breath,” Experiments in Art Research

                Rachel and I sat next to each other in a grad seminar. Hour by hour, I watched shapes and shades wash out from the colored pens she brought with her. The pattern from a classmate’s shirt. The arrangement of our tables. A few branches, framed by our classroom window, and an abstract shape that was Rachel’s response to a piece of today’s reading.
                I’ve been scared of drawing for a long time. A mark on a page can feel so final, so I tried to put down perfect marks, clear edges, and everything I drew felt stiff, self-conscious, incomplete. And I’m also entranced when I watch people drawing. Smudging. Erasing. Playing out ratios and relationships.
                I started drawing along with Rachel. Class by class period, first with the pens she shared with me, then with colored pencils I brought to share with her. I picked up specific techniques, of course. (She dripped water from her bottle onto the table, and used it to smear her pen’s ink, and I loved it). But more than the specific techniques, I felt the space of drawing opening, the fear I’d felt settling into one tree in this rustling forest of shapes and shades as Rachel ran ahead and I followed—or turned off to wander a different way. Months after Rachel helped me start drawing again, I helped her start writing some poetry. These practices together led to the chapter we wrote for Experiments in Art Research, where you can read some of her poems and our translations. And these practices helped me—I hope us—sketch our way into a version of studying that is a kind of making space to share ourselves and share what we cannot yet see.

by Azlan

477: “It Helps Us Hope” (Ai Weiwei)

                “I think that it doesn’t matter whether poetry is good or bad… / …as long as it helps us hope.” -Ai Weiwei, Elettra Stamboulis, and Gianluca Costantini, Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir

                I want to write poetry the same way I step into the rain. Feeling raindrops scattering. Touched by a sky that whirls and swirls, vast and near, and chuckling along with the wind and the trees and neighbors who are chuckling, too. Which is to say: I want to write poetry the same way I garden, watering seeds, watching shoots grow, noticing shadows and sunlight and moisture. I want to write poetry the same way I cook for you: here, I made this, for us, a little snack. Which is to say: I want to step out into the rain and garden and cook like writing poetry, these little practices of hope.
                I’m less and less interested in good art. In evaluating. (I’m less and less clear about what “good art” means, too, but the question doesn’t draw me). Ai Weiwei and his co-authors put words to this delight of recognizing instead what art can do. My professor played our class a song that one of her colleagues wrote in response to my professor’s poem, posted on facebook. That’s how they became friends, this colleague and my professor. Another time I helped a friend make signs for a community garden: tomatoes, garlic, so volunteers who were planting and visitors who were harvesting could navigate the bursting leaves. Last weekend my partner and I went to the library and drew pieces for a community art project: on one wooden puzzle piece she drew an open door. On another I drew friends beneath a tree. These pieces sit next to kindergarteners’ pieces and neighbors’ pieces and elders’ pieces and strangers’ pieces and librarians’, and the library grows a little more into a place where maybe we meet.

by Azlan

475: Talking in Pictures (Bree Paulsen)

                In the last pages of Bree Paulsen’s Garlic and the Vampire, words fall away. We’ve had lots of words in the rest of the book: funny words and sad words, scared words and laughter. But here at the end friendships are growing, gardens and orchards blooming, and all we need is pictures. A bat flying. A community laughing. Seedlings sprouting. A hat for the nice vampire, as he’s sensitive to the sun after all. A cool evening in front of a warm fire, and next morning some more shared joyous work as the characters repot some plants. The book ends with a smile.
                I’ve never managed to make a photo essay that did what I wanted it to do. But reading Bree Paulsen, I wish I could draw this week’s post for you. There would be some deep shade beneath a sycamore, as it was hot today. A couch in our dim livingroom as afternoon relaxed and three of us sprawled together. A glass of water on a coffee table. Fingers typing, but just for a moment, and then a sycamore again, the shadows grown all up around it into full night. Then maybe a pillow. Then the ceiling. Then dark arcs the way artists sometimes draw when the character is closing their eyes. Towards dreams, all these images washing together, and the sweet excitement of hoping that tomorrow I’ll wake up to friends and shared work the same way Garlic and the Vampire does—and that, tonight, I’m going to sleep. Last night’s thunderstorms still swirling through my mind. A bat flying somewhere. Its soft wings.

by Azlan

472: “Collage is a method of care” (Tim Abel)

“Please read these as invitations:

Collage looks easy.
Collage is surprising. 
[…] Collage happens before, inside, during, after an artmaking/learning moment.
Collage is really about being open to detours.
[…] Collage is a method of care.”

-Tim Abel, “How Is Learning a Collage?” (p. 31) in Experiments in Art Research

                I’m writing this late today, because today’s been a flurry of writing a journal article (due soon!) and setting up our new house with my partner and running off to campus to meet with a friend and continuing some other university work and then having other friends over. The light slowly fading outside. The trees shifting. The dishes clinking into a stack after dinner. Sometimes on a flurried day I wonder, how do all these pieces fit together?
                Tim’s a good friend, an inspiring colleague, a caring teacher/student/companion. His article’s on my mind because I co-edited Experiments in Art Research, which came out this summer. My copy arrived today. I didn’t spend long looking at it, but behind everything else I’ve been thinking about all the wonderful friends who collaborated in writing. About Tim Abel and Ishita Dharap and Sarah Travis and Catalina Hernández-Cabal and Jorge Lucero and Rachel Gu and so many others. I’m thinking about us all as a collage, a coming together of relationships. Lives interspersed. 
                “Collage is a method of care.” Of caring how one piece sits next to, connects to another. A method of approaching the relationship between my research and my friends and the washing dishes and all the interweaving questions and researches and lives unfolding around me. Through me. Maybe today I wondered how do all these pieces fit together, but today, luckily, I also felt how all these pieces are already together. Tim’s “method of care” reminds me that all these pieces are growing together in easy, surprising, open ways.

by Azlan