FEATURED TEXTS:
“The Far North Experience” by Rebecca Solnit, “On Reckoning with a Mother’s Relentless Need to Save Everything” by Donna Masini, and “A Burning is Not A Letting Go” by Suzanne Levine and Kristin Prevallet
I can identify with these authors because…
my work is largely anchored in my own urge to collect. I have spent countless hours sifting through the snapshots gathered in my studio. They are the fuel that drives every painting that I make.
There is a direct link between excessive accumulation and the human desire to identify with those closest to them. each article named above clearly outlines specific emotional impulses: the desire to accumulate possessions, the desire to dispose of/alter accumulated possessions, and the drive to empathetically connect with absent loved ones.
until the 20th century, most humans were plagued by scarcity. Everything from food to clothing to household goods were difficult to create, and relatively expensive to obtain. But the industrial revolution dramatically increased the average americans’ access to (and appetite for) cheap goods, crowding homes and creating a problem that would have been foreign to our ancestors: hoarding. Donna masini’s article paints a vivid picture of collection of outdated clothing, unused office supplies, and endless household gadgets that confronted her and her father after her mother’s death. Charged with the daunting task of de-cluttering her parents home, she was forced to grapple with her own emotional attachments to the objects that her mother had saved. Masini found that she was reluctant to dispose of things because they seemed to be the safeguards of her memories (she relates them to Tupperware), capable of holding onto the happy moments and keeping them safe. But as she sifted through her parents’ home, she came to the realization that no stockpile of keepsakes had the power to preserve memories. The past, she explains, only exists within her for as long as she is alive to remember it. The objects made her feel as though her loved ones were with her, but her memories were not tethered to them. Without which, they became “just junk (masini, 8).”
She closes the article with the realization that everything that she was holding onto could outlive her only if she wrote it down. Writing allowed donna masini to free herself from the anxiety of impending loss while curating and organizing the past. artist Suzanne Levine found that her own written records, meticulously preserved and archived, were the source of her “dread”. Like masini, Levine explains that memories “are not contained in anything (Levine, 2)”, rather they survive as fragments in the mind, occasionally re-connected by some external inspiration. the urge to hold onto keepsakes is driven by people who mistake documents and artifacts from the past for the past itself. Unlike more tangible aritfacts, levine’s decades-worth of diaries were different, because their words were capable of reviving memories that were better forgotten. The power that donna masini found so invigorating sparked anxiety for Levine. she was torn between a desire to preserve the diaries for posterity, and the conflicting notion that nobody else would care about the trials of her teenage years, and that they were not worth preserving.
Levine chose to confront the opposing urges by taking a radical artistic action. she chose to burn the diaries, taking photographs of the paper as it curls in and eventually fades into ash. the words that survived the flames became erasure poems, fragmented and fragile just like her memories of the years that they chronicled. The transformation freed her from the painful years of her childhood, allowing her to become the sole keeper of her memories.
Both of the above essays speak to the ways that we grapple with the objects that remain from our pasts, and the memories that are associated with them. rebecca solnit’s eloquent definition of empathy speaks to both artists’ need to dispose of the physical remnants. She relates the pursuit of empathetic interaction as navigating a labyrinth in the dark. lacking the ability to see, one must proceed into the unknown darkness with their hands outstretched, using their sense of touch to search for the way forward. This mindset is ripe for creativity because it forces one to act without planning ahead or fully comprehending their actions. Here, ideas can emerge unencumbered by the harshness or rationality. This “slow journey into the unknown and the unknowable (solnit, 4)” forces to embrace an all-encompassing state of confusion. This allows the wanderer to truly hear what surrounds them, to immerse themselves in it. This is the approach neccessary to learn empathy, because to empathize is to identify with a person by imagining their reality as if it were one’s own, by immersing oneself in it.
simply immersing, and hearing is insufficient. “To hear,” solnit explains “is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth go your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it (solnit, 5).” One must actively. engage with the information, reaching out for it, translating it into one’s own inner language so as to truly understand the others the way they understand themselves: through their senses. if we accept solnit’s definition of empathy, this active emotional connection and curiosity, then I wonder how it would feel to search through that metaphorical labyrinth only to find oneself alone. When we personify our heirlooms and keepsakes, we are acting out of desperation to achieve a sense of empathetic intimacy with an absent person. by picking up the things that they interacted with everyday, one can envelop themselves in the ruins left by their absent loved-one. they can smell the soap as they wash the kitchen sink, can wrap themselves in their coats, and go for walks on the same sidewalks. after all of that is gone, they are left to scour the snapshots and the outdated documents for any traces of that unknowable life.
EMPATHY CAN STILL BE FOUND FOR THOSE WHO ARE ABSENT IF ONE DIRECTS THOSE SAME EFFORTS TOWARDS ARTWORKS, LITERATURE, AND FILM. ALL SPEAK TO THE MINUTIAE OF DAILY LIFE, TO THOSE ASPECTS OF INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE THAT WOULD OTHERWISE BE LOST.
CITATIONs:
MANY THANKS to Literary Hub and Guernica Magazine, for not hiding your deep wells of collective artistic effort behind paywalls.
Solnit, Rebecca. “The Far North Experience: In Praise of Darkness (and Light).” Guernica Magazine, June 17, 2013. https://www.guernicamag.com/rebecca-solnit-the-far-north-of-experience.
Masini, Donna. “On Reckoning with a Mother's Relentless Need to Save Everything.” Literary Hub, September 4, 2019. https://lithub.com/on-reckoning-with-a-mothers-relentless-need-to-save-everything/.
Levine, Suzanne, and Kristin Prevallet. “A Burning Is Not Letting Go.” Guernica Magazine, May 9, 2017. https://www.guernicamag.com/kristin-prevallet-a-burning-is-not-a-letting-go/.
FEATURED RESOURCE: SPOTIFY
(NO REALLY, THIS IS AN ART RESOURCE)
As a painter, my hands and my eyes are constantly occupied while in my studio. This means that I have less time to catch up on media that I would normally read. In the studio, I use Spotify not just to listen to music, but to stay up to date on the news, to learn about intriguing makers and thinkers in the art world, and to become a a more culturally literate human being. I cite this as an art resource specifically because it features a number of really stellar art podcasts that not only inspire me in the studio, but that introduce important ideas that can advance one’s work in significant ways: many introduce listeners to up an coming artists that they might not otherwise have heard of, others give established artists air time to share useful technical knowledge, still more keep listeners up to date on the complex machinations of the art world, allowing listeners to maintain their awareness of our shared professional community.
DON’T BELIEVE ME? Check out some of my favorites!
Bad at Sports: Presents more than 700 interviews with the most influential artists, art historians, curators, critics, and teachers. The episodes are often more than an hour long, and are full of smart ideas that can come in handy when writing an artist statement or advancing a studio practice. They are based in Chicago, which means that they spend a lot of time on local happenings.
Check out episode 360 (where the crew interviews the radiant Lucy Lippard).
Savvy Painter Podcast with Antrese Wood: Host Antrese Wood interviews expert painters about every facet of their studio practices. Episodes are released every other Thursday, and explore a range of subjects such as trends in art sales, the future of painting in the digital age, and parenting as an artist. Other artists focus more on the evolving content of their work, or the technical advances in their studios. In addition, listeners can suggest artists, attend workshops, and learn more about painters who rarely catch the attention of larger publications.
My favorite episode: The love of literature & telling stories through art with Susan Lichtman
The Lonely Palette: Tamar Avishai spends each episode with a specific influential artwork. She starts by interviewing museum-visitors as they stand in front of the piece, exposing listeners to fresh ways of understanding their old favorites. Often, she speaks to people with no artistic background. Then, dives into the more academic portion of the show, breaking down the historical, social, and conceptual contexts that make each piece important. This podcast is useful for those artists who wish they had more time to settle down with a thick book, and want to keep their art history muscles flexed.
Start with episode 0: Art! What is it good for?
SOME OTHER ART PODCASTS WORTH EXPLORING:
Art Movements (by Hyperallergic)
Slowly But Surely:
This is a detail shot of the sixth scrap painting that I have been working on for the past couple of weeks.
I originally painted Brittle Anchors for an event at Archer Beach House in 2017, but struggled to resolve the painting. I finally finished it a few weeks ago, when I was inspired to crop it down.