Yesterday morning, I biked over to someone’s house to pick up a used coffee grinder for $5. As I discovered by testing this out own my own grinder at home, this technology is lifesaving (a bad joke for the one or two people reading all my posts). I can now grind a handful of dry clay pieces into to a fine powder in roughly 3.5 seconds. Bits of plant matter included.
As you can also see, I’ve been busy with the local clay that I got from Jeff Meldrum, a very cool artist doing work such as Art for Animals.
Jeff dug this clay up from a band of it he’s found on his land in Northern Saskatchewan, the very same land where he installs sculptures and then has motion-detecting cameras “shoot” animals interacting with them: “In recruiting wild animals as stand-ins for the human viewer/collaborator, I hope to subvert the dichotomy of human vs. animal which has erroneously placed humankind at the top of the pyramid” ( Art for Animals). I picked the clay up from his place in Regina two days ago, and yesterday got busy grinding and applying it to a new dinner plate-sized mold I made last weekend.
I applied very little at a time, misting it with water and occasionally stopping to tamp it with a spoon.
This afternoon, I returned to see how it dried overnight, and I’m pleased enough with the result; the plate made of this pulverized local clay can exist as a free-standing entity! The fact that it’s local and that looks more like dust (especially thinking of Great Depression dust) than the porcelain version does means it’s the winner. I’m nowhere near finished experimenting with this project, but at least I’ll have something to show at Neutral Ground and to the End of Semester Review Committee that I feel is as good as I can get it for now.
I went back to check on its drying this evening, and I was able to move it off of the paper and board I’d set it up on and onto a small photo-box a fellow ceramics student owns. At least at this stage, while it’s still quite wet, I can actually lift it with my hands. This assures me that I’ll be able to set up a plate like this at Neutral Ground tomorrow (I’ll create it in the gallery tomorrow and then remove the mold on Friday); it also means my next step, photographing a plate like this blowing away, will be another challenge to overcome.
I like that it definitely reads as dirt. I’m not sure how much the idea of dust comes across. I’m also slightly concerned that it could read as cow pie. It reminds me of of the dried camel dung patties that we burned for cooking fuel when stranded in Mongolia, twenty years ago. There’s a pile of them to the right of the fire pit in this old photo I dug up.
My neighbour-friends tell me that from photos shared, this dust plate look more like plate than dung, which is reassuring. One of them observed that “the drying process reflects the drought.” The other commented that the object reminds them of “the cross section of a tree or fungus” — interesting! My husband thought “tree” when he saw it too.
That’s where things are at with “Dust” for now. I’ll see if I can create a “Dust Bowl” of this material tomorrow, if I have time between work, installing at Neutral Ground, and then hosting a For Our Kids meeting in the evening. It’ll be a full day.
Here are a few photos and then a few thoughts about where I’m at with this project at this time.
From experimenting with a bowl-mold I threw (using only porcelain and water to create the “dust bowl”):
Result of the bowl mold: It could work, but on its own the bowl form is no easier to use than the plate form.
2. From experimenting with adding aquafaba (the liquid in a can of chickpeas)* as a natural adhesive:
Result of aquafaba and likely any liquefied adhesive: clumpy and not all that useful.
*My closest friend is a vegan; she’s taught me a thing or two about reducing my meat and dairy consumption, and one trick is to use aquafaba as a substitute for egg white.
3. From experimenting with covering the plate mold in plastic-wrap and in aluminum foil (back to porcelain and water; misting the water while sprinkling the porcelain, not in layers):
Aha! The plastic wrap was the ticket. If I unstuck it from the glazed mold as the dust was drying, I was then able to slide the mold out from under the clay without disrupting the clay at all. THE PLATE STAYED STANDING:
This tells me a few things: it is possible to do this(!); the mold doesn’t need to be fired (or glazed); paper may also work, which would be better if I choose to fire these pieces.
4. Speaking of firing, this is what the material looks like when fired:
As expected, the clay dust is much whiter when fired to temperature (the temperature at which the clay-body vitrifies, which is Cone 6, a bit over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit). I now have a dilemma: to fire or not. While aesthetically more pleasing when fired, firing this clay means creating CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels that an electric kiln uses… our electricity in this place (Saskatchewan, Canada) is predominantly created through burning natural gas and coal.
It seems to be black and white: burning CO2 is hypocritical when producing work about the climate crisis; ergo, don’t do it. However, I don’t know if it’s that simple. Just as people who view people like me as and environmental nut-bar are quick to point out, I still burn gas to heat my home. In other words, the line of argumentation is false: it’s not being a hypocrite to have behaviours that you in general are striving to reduce. In the scheme of things, the electricity I’d be using to fire part of a kiln (I’d coordinate with others students to fill the kiln) is minimal. Compare firing a kiln to burning a private jet. (I don’t have a private jet). Besides, we’re already screwed, right? What may slow down our fall will be mass changes to institution, corporation, and government policy. I work towards influencing those changes in my activist life. Does all of this mean I shouldn’t fire a kiln? Unlikely. However, I know that the medium is always part of the message, and that the message is all that matters (if anything matters) in a work like this. For the moment, I’ll leave these plates unfired. Clay is clay; ceramic is ceramic. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that jazz. Besides, I can always fire them later.
I’m now waiting for five large plate molds to dry sufficiently so that I can use them (unfired). I’m due to install work in the Neutral Ground (a local artist-run gallery) in three days for a show of Master of Fine Arts students titled endings + beginings. I’m planning to create four of these dust plates on my dining room table while installing in the gallery this Thursday. Wish me luck.
One last update on this project, and one other dilemma, is the clay itself. I’ve just today procured (via a trade for local eggs) some local clay — clay that was dug up on land just about two hours north of Regina. It’s brown in colour. I plan to grind it tomorrow and test out what it looks like in dust-plate form. So…. porcelain (highly processed; ingredients from far far away) or local clay taken from the very soils of the province where I live? Local, right? The dilemma stems from aesthetics (I’m realizing this semester how much I like the colour white in my work) and from content: most plates in our homes are made of some form of porcelain. I have exactly one and a half days to figure this and everything else out before I install something in Neutral Ground.
Madeleine began the talk by explaining the reason behind her choice of title. She said that the word “propagation” was an appropriate choice because it has several meanings that coincide with her work’s themes: “how plants reproduce; how people and animals reproduce in a biological sense; how we create families; how ideas can spread among groups of people and beyond – especially in this case the knowledge of women that’s been propagated, but also with a show I can propagate my own ideas.”
She went on to describe the ideas that she’s propagating with this show, largely that food is “meaningful, and it has value, and it deserves being invested in.” She spoke about not just the way our bodies are formed from the nourishment we gain from food, but also how many aspects of our lives revolve around, or should revolve around, the growing, harvesting, and consuming of food. Eating food, and especially growing one’s own food, is often a social act: “it’s obvious how meaningful and emotional food can be just in terms of how central it is to celebrations and how sharing food is such a universal human act.”
I really admire the way Madeleine engages her audience through her work. Her drawings and prints certainly do propagate the ideas that she wishes them to. At the same time, the work is visually stunning — full of voluptuous shapes and colours that attract viewers to spend time looking at these images of the items we often gloss over at our kitchen counter or table. We may realize that the produce we brng into our homes pales in comparison (and is literally paler) than the produce in these works, and we should consider that fact. What are we losing by allowing corporations to feed us what big-ag produces in the name of produce? As Barbara Kingsolver puts it in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, “How did supermarket vegetables lose their palatability, with so many of us right there watching?” (48). She points out elsewhere in the book that food—a requirement of life, something we take into our bodies at least three times a day— is now nearly completely outside of our control: most of us don’t grow it, we don’t even hardly know it. We don’t even know what could or could not grow from the soil and climate in which we live. The food we now eat is far removed from its source, not only geographically as is often the case (apples from Chile; kiwi from Greece) but also in terms of its nutritional value. The situation is quite insane. Madeleine’s prints and drawings convey it beautifully and simply in “Diversity Among My Tomatoes,” “My Sister’s Apples,” “Silverbeet Rainbow Chard, Red Leaf” and many works.
Propagation also includes a personal essay Madeleine printed out by hand on large sheets of paper that hang on the wall. It tells the story of her family’s next-door neighbours from when she was a child who tragically died in a house fire, their land then sold to Madeline’s parents who continue to garden on it to this day. This garden is an extension of as well as the source of her recent artistic practice. Madeleine’s love for this subject matter—these ideas she’s propagating—is clear. Hearing her read this essay out loud during her talk was remarkable. She opened herself up entirely to the audience. As David would describe this work of writing as well as her prints and drawings, she is entirely sincere.
I admire Madeleine for taking on subject matter that is so hugely important and responding to it through her work in such a deeply personal way. I asked her if she sees her work as activist in nature, to which she replied that it isn’t explicitly so, but she’s thinking she’ll explore more directly activist work in the future. I’ll be interested to see if/where she takes that, but to be honest, her current approach grounds me somehow; I take reassurance from her courage to convey so much important content through work that appears modest (in the positive sense, as in not vain, not didactic) as well as beautiful. Thank you, Madeleine.
Work cited:
Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2007.
The following are key quotations (in italics or quotation marks) and a summary of points from this book that I’m storing here for easy reference:
Kolbert, Elizabeth. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. New York: Random House, 2021.
This material is extremely relevant to my work on “cracked,” which I’ve since given a different working title: “A Pound of Cure.” I refer to a review of the book in a previous update on this project. I’m grateful to Mike for buying me this book for my birthday… what a gift!
From Kolbert’s intro (7-8):
An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’ success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago. Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. At this point it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us—as of this writing nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable.
And so we face a no-analog predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control. Only now what’s got to be managed is not a nature that exists—or is imagined to exist–apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself—not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature. First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.
A few of the Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) and geoengineering solutions described in the book:
CO2 scrubbing—blasting CO2 into basalt rock deep in the earth’s crust: Climeworks is a company doing this; one can purchase CO2 “credits” with them, but it’s still very expensive ($1,000 per ton CO2); (pages 143-44)
Forcing CO2 into water sent deep into the earth where it “would react with volcanic rock and minearlize” (145): Reykjavik Energy power plant—a sign reading “out of thin air” placed at the cite of a the power plant (144-146)
CO2 beads: Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at ASU in 2014; German-born physicist Klaus Lackner; tiny beads made of some kind of resin used in water treatment dried out—-the powder absorbs CO2 when dry, releases it into water when wet; the CO2-filled water can be “piped out of the container and the whole process restarted” (152)
enhanced weathering: bring basalt rock to the surface, crush it and spread it on cropland where it will absorb CO2 (158-159)
Olivine in oceans: a green-coloured mineral found in volcanic rock; crush it and dissolve it in oceans to make them absorb more CO2 (and will help offset acidification) (159)
plant a trillion trees: effectiveness of forest-CO2-sequestration is still debatable; what do you do with tree rot? —cut down mature trees and bury them in trenches!” so the release of CO2 would be forestalled” (159)
Reforestation combined with underground injection, so “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”: technique called BECCS (pronounced “becks”); for example: plant trees (or other crops) to pull CO2, then burn them to create electricity, and then capture that CO2 and force it underground (160)
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Lofter (SAIL) (starting from page 166): David Keith, prof of applied physics at Harvard; use airplanes to spread aerosols in the stratosphere (around 60,000′); this could make the sky appear white (book’s title) and/or perhaps create amazing sunsets; in a list of concerns about this idea, climate scientist Alan Robock has that it could also change rainfall patterns, create “conflict between countries” and… number 28: “do humans have the right to do this?” (181)
Keeping the poles from freezing: “it’s been proposed that sea-level rise could be slowed by propping up the Arctic ice shelves or by blocking the mouth of one of Greenland’s largest outlet glaciers, the Jakobshavn ice stream” with a “three-hundred-foot-tall, three-mile-long concrete-topped embankment” (199)
The way Lackner [see CO2 beads above] sees things, the key to avoiding “deep trouble” is thinking differently. “We need to change the paradigm,” he told me. Carbon dioxide, in his view, should be regarded much the same way we look at sewage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste. “Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,” Lackner has observed. “At the same time, we don’t shit on the sidewalk. One of the reasons we’ve had such trouble addressing the carbon problem, he contends, is the issue has acquired an ethical charge. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty. (153)
“I think what the IPCC really is saying is, ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios,'” Klaus Lackner told me. “‘And, of all the scenarios, which stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.” (155-56)
Of the cutting down mature trees idea: As strange as these ideas may sound, the, too, take their inspiration from nature. In the Carboniferous period, vast quantities of plant material got flooded and buried. The eventual result was coal, which had it been left in the ground, would have held on to its carbon more or less forever. (159)
I suggested humans didn’t have a very good track record when it came to the sort of intervention he was studying [Keith — see SAIL above]. […] Keith suggested I was revealing my own biases: “To people who say most of our technological fixes go wrong, I say, ‘Okay, did agriculture go wrong?’ It’s certainly true that agriculture had all sorts of very unexpected outcomes.People think of all the bad examples of environmental modification,” he went on. “They forget all the ones that are more or less working.” (178-79)
Conclusion (200-01):
This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds—these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances.
It’s in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be “entirely crazy and quite disconcerting,” but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of “the pain and suffering away,” or help to prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn’t have to be considered?
Andy Parker is the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which works to expand the “global conversation” around geoengineering. His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”
Suppose that the world—or just a small group of assertive nations—launched a fleet of SAILs. And suppose that even as the SAILs are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a return to the climate of per-industrial days or to that of the Pliocene or even that of the Eocene, where crocodiles basked on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.
Last night, I attended Dunlop Art Gallery’s “Date Night: Land Art Travel Tour,” led by their Education Assistant Sarah Pitman. The idea behind the “Date Night” series is to offer people a chance to view and discuss art in a virtual setting once a month. In a Carillon article about the series, Sarah says, “If you have nothing to do on a Friday night (due to the pandemic), there’s this idea of travel in our Date Nights. We try to pull artists or art works that are from around the world.”
This was my first time attending one of these events, and I’m glad I did. I was especially interested in last night’s event because its topic was land and environmental art. I wasn’t really aware of how the Date Nights run and was expecting a more indepth conversation around this type of art than what it turned out to be (it was more of a survey class), but it was still a great way to see examples from many artists’ works pulled together and discussed. Sarah did a great job of introducing us to a range of works, a few of which I didn’t know. I’m still a beginner in this world of land art and environmental art, so this was a good way for me to expand my knowledge on the topic.
Sarah started the talk by showing examples of historical land art, including Stonehendge in England, the Great Serpent mound in Ohio, and Nazca Lines in Peru. She then covered several contemporary artists, including Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Andy Goldsworthy, Walter De Maria, Ana Mendieta, Agnes Denes, Andres Amador, Niles-Udo, and the Red Earth Environmental Group.
I’ll say a bit about a couple of the works I was introduced to that really struck a chord.
Robert Smithson’s first large-scale earthwork Asphalt Runway (1969) is a piece I hadn’t known about before.
I was immediately convinced that this work was meant to say something about how we’re leaving negative impact on the planet with our industrial waste, pit mining, and elimination of natural habitats for our sprawling cities. I was surprised to find out from Sarah that Smithson was more trying to speak to time, that it is meant to be seen “as time frozen, mid-flow, or as yet another sedimentary layer in the infinite accumulation of time” (according to the Holt/Smithson Foundation). When another participant made a comment about how they didn’t like the piece because it was damaging the environment, I piped in and spoke about my interpretation. Reading up about this piece after the talk, I found that I am not alone in seeing the work as a statement about our environmental footprint. In a post for a website used for a grad course in Sweden titled Anthropocene: A History of the World, Lisa Martin writes that
Smithson’s “action” or performance, the act of pouring asphalt over the edge of an open-pit mine, further disrupts the landscape as well as functionally re-covering the exposed strata. This ambiguous act reflects the mutually destructive and conservationist forms that human impact may take in the Anthropocene.
I can’t find a lot about this work online, which surprises me given Smithson’s fame from other works such as Spiral Jetty. From everything else I’ve been able to find, the work really is about time and the earth, and what time does to the earth. For instance, in John Culbert’s blog I found a quotation which I believe to be from Smithson:
Each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substrata of disaster — a narrative that discloses “no story, no buoyancy, no plot” (Jean Cayrol: Lazare parmi nous). Deeper than the ruins of concentration camps, are worlds more frightening, worlds more meaningless. The hells of geology remain to be discovered. If art history is a nightmare, what is natural history? (Writings, 375)
I like the idea of how “the hells of geology remain to be discovered,” but I’m still stumped at how this piece, Asphalt Runway wasn’t meant to address the human imprint on the planet. This just makes me question (again) what role an artist’s intention plays/should play in how their work is viewed. I also became aware last night how tainted (and obsessed?) I am: how I viewed nearly every work shown as saying something about the negative impact of people on the planet, even when this wasn’t the artist’s intent for the work.
By the way, I also learned from the above blog that Smithson performed a version of this piece in Vancouver (my home!) three months after the one in Rome. This time, he poured a barrel of glue down a muddy slope in Glue Pour (1970).
It’s funny, I’ve been working with glue in one of my projects recently, trying to figure out if it’s the right medium for the job. It’s just neat to come across it being used by someone else.
The other piece I’ll mention as it was new to me was Anes Denes’s Wheatfield — A Confrontation(1982).
This piece comprised two acres of white that was hand planted and then harvested in Manhattan (on a landfill of rubble created by the building of the Twin Towers) in the summer of 1982. According to Denes’ website, the project took place “on land worth $4.5 billion dollars.” The grain produced became part of “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger,” travelling to 28 countries. Sarah told us that to complete this project, Denes had 200 trucks of soil brought in, as well as fertilizer, pesticide, and irrigation system that used to grow the wheat.
Just as in the case with the Smithson piece, my mind immediately shouted consumption! man-made landscapes! destruction of native prairie grasslands! neonicotinoids and the insect apocalypse! industrial and capitalist catastrophe! the sixth mass extinction! (and it went on like that for a while, as Sarah took comments from people about how much they love gardening).
Denes did make this piece at least partially in response to climate change (at first I thought she was only reflecting on world hunger, based on the conversation last night), and I see her described as “ahead of her time” for it (“Agnes Denes’s Prophetic Wheatfield Remains as Relevant as Ever”). I guess the pessimist in me just sighs and says “well, if this huge of a project took place in ’82…. getting this much attention to the issue…. and we’re still where we are today…. fuuck.”
Denes’ website includes a description of the work and how it included a microfilm that was
desiccated and placed in a steel capsule inside a heavy lead box in nine feet of concrete. A plaque marks the spot: at the edge of the Indian forest, surrounded by blackberry bushes. The time capsule is to be opened in 2979, in the 30th century, a thousand years from the time of the burial. There are, still within the framework of this project, several time capsules planned on earth and in space, aimed at various time frames in the future.
It boggles the mind to imagine what will come of that steel capsule stuck in nine feet of concrete over millennia as the earth continues its movements that only appear slow because of our incapacity to imagine epochal time. In the nearer future, I don’t expect people to be opening it up in 2979, or for anyone to be around for there to actually be a “30th century.” At least, I doubt the water bears will know what time it is.
If anyone reading this is interested in another cool project of Denes’ and what she has to say about her work, check out Sheep in the Image of Man(1998).
I’m glad I attended this talk to learn about these and other works. Thanks, Dunlop Art Gallery, for the wonderful events you’ve hosted in these last few months.
Today, I attended an Art for Lunch featuring Nasrin Himada. The description for the talk was as follows:
“Nasrin’s curator talk will delve into the personal, experiential and embodied forms of knowledge by exploring the ways in which art can be a catalyst in constituting a radical, intimate and poetic ecology that extends beyond the work. Instead of talking or writing about artwork as a way to analyze, explain or interpret, art criticism and curation can engage with art as relation, rather than representation.”
Quotations are what I transcribed from the (I’m a fast typist) and either noted in quotation marks or in red.
As stated in this event’s description, Nasrin is interested in “frameworks” (they used this word a few time) of knowledge: who creates them, who controls them, and how we may shift them. They opened the talk with a quotation from Solmaz Sharif’s book, Look, from a poem of that same title:
“Let it matter what we call a thing” – Solmaz Sharif
They went on to explain how they’re interested in how art, curation, and writing can “challenge ways of seeing, manipulate our perception, and give us a new framework for ways we can form a thought.” Their epistemological inquiry is deeply rooted in an considering the ways political and institutional systems attempt to control these knowledge frameworks. They gave a few clues as to what it means to them to be Palestinian and how that diaspora (and lost original materials, such as Palestinian film footage) has impacted their life, including their work, in part because of what it means to have had your history (a knowledge system) attacked and nearly wiped out. Suspicious of knowledge systems and frameworks, they ask, what does it mean to “break form” in both language and in exhibition? Their work often involves writing, and even within the structures of writing (imposed by academia, for instance), they say,
“I do not function from a place or representation; my intention in curating and writing about my experience is not to come at it from a place of representation but a place of experiential and process-based formation, so for me it’s so difficult to bring language to this and why I find it so fascinating to bring language to process-based work.”
This is really fascinating to me, as I’m just starting to understand what it means to me to create work (artwork) in a serious way. In the last week, actually, I made huge progress in one of my two projects (“Cracked”), and I was thickly aware of how I was letting “process” just take over. At times, I felt as though I was relinquishing control over the work. I have yet to write about this experience of my last few days, but I’ve been mulling over how I’ll even go about doing so in a near-future blog post. I guess, I’ve been thinking, that I’ll do the usual combination of a few photos and a bit of text. But how, I have yet to figure out, will I adequately convey what it felt like to be working on this piece and to nearly feel like I was the medium that the work was using to bring itself to this stage? Can I get that into a blog post? Also, for whom and for what purpose am I writing these posts (the ones on my art practice this term)? Will writing that post about this past week help me understand something about the experience I had? This has been the case several times, that writing has helped me “think through” or “process” what I’m doing, and it’s also a good way for me to keep track of what I’m doing/thinking, but I should continually question this practice rather than fall into it as a comforting routine or structure to my work.
I try to think about what is the right space for something to be expressed that is going to make the most sense. “I think about intention and how in intention we position ourselves as practitioners. How to extend beyond the materiality of the work, the outcome. Often it’s the process, the relationships, the events around making and doing that spark the initial idea. In this way, I also think often about form, what it enables. Form conditions content.” (this was quotation of their own writing they had up on the screen during their talk) (emphasis mine)
Artists are aware of (or at least questioning) how their work fits into the form—content relationship. Some more than others (and for Nasrin for sure), the process of making the work determines the end form. I think that what this boils down to for me is that the very process of art-making has influences not only on the result (the art) but also on my relationships: with the art I’m creating, with the people involved in making it, with the people I speak to about the work and show it to, and with the way I live in the world at large.
For another writing piece, Project: For Many Returns, Nasrin described how they were in a transition period, going through a lot in life, and was facing a deadline for a commissioned piece of writing. They felt entirely unable to write yet another piece of academic writing (or read any), and how after stumbling on a writing project for a while, text they really needed to write just came out of them:
I sat for two hours and I just wrote something, it’s the most … it resonated so much with so many people, but it goes to show that I really just pushed myself to be the writer I wanted to be without any pressure, and this is what came out, and I was so thankful for that moment because now this is an entire project, I’m at part five, and now it’s allowing me to create a manuscript out of this work. When I said fuck it, I decided I was going to turn my back away from academia because I’d had enough of writing in that framework. I didn’t like the kinds of pressures that come with that kind of writing, I didn’t even like reading it, and also I was so bored of reading art reviews that just gave nothing, and I didn’t want to just write another boring art review that doesn’t really say very much. I wanted to move away from art writing as an analytical tool, and rather as a relational one, and not as a review that explains the object in question, but as a way to extend the work by seriously confronting my love for it. So, I really started to think about the form that this writing was taking was a love letter, and I really stuck to that. How was I going to write a love letter to this work that I love so much?
I love the way they spoke about their writing about art as a love letter. I could see myself getting into doing writing like that about my own work as well as the work of others.
Holly asked Nasrin to elaborate on the reactions they got to this type of writing. In their response, Nasrin gave a few names of writers who’ve inspired this type of writing in them, but I wasn’t able to get their names (I’ll see if Holly will forward my email to them so I can get in touch and ask for these names). They also said that the reactions they got show that people have wanted to write on art in the way they were doing, but they thought they couldn’t. After writing this first “love letter,” they realized “what a beautiful challenge it would be to bring the experience (of viewing art) through art writing, rather than writing about it in this analytical mode above the work.” They said about this type of art writing,
I realized I was writing alongside it, like it was living beside me, sitting right here all the time, and what did that feel like, and what did that do, and what did it bring up? And that’s what I articulated in that piece.
I wished that Nic Wilson had been listening in on this talk, as I know from his Art for Lunch that he’d have an interest in this topic.
Larissa Tiggelers asked Nasrin to describe what it means to “find the right form” for their work. Nasrin spoke more about how their exhibitions have come from the relationships they’ve built with the artists, how they often become close friends with these artists and then the exhibition comes from that relationship. They also said they care a lot about context when deciding what to take on:
It’s driven by the conversations I’m already having with the artists themselves: what are we grappling with right now? I think the most import thing for me right now is context. I don’t want to show work that has nothing to do with what’s going on in the world right now. I think the questions I’d have are how are we going to do better, how are we going to be better, how are we going to create language that’s going to make us think better, in order to change this world that we live in that’s riddled with all of this violence? I don’t stop thinking about that. I don’t stop thinking about that. The artists who come into my life are doing the same kind of work.
In short, I would love to one day be one of the artists who come into Nasrin’s life. I wonder what they think about climate change.
Last night, I attended (can we still use that word for YouTube livestreams?) Dunlop Art Gallery’s Artist Talk: End of the World/Beginning of the World with Andrea Carlson. Andrea has work in the Dunlop’s States of Collapes show that’s currently on, a show that couldn’t be more informative to my own work these days. I’ve really lucked-out. Earlier this winter, I attended their “Opening Remarks and Artist Talk” on this show and wrote an entry for this journal on it as well.
The Facebook event description of tonight’s talk was as follows: “Chicago-based artist Andrea Carlson will discuss her work that interrogates the historical role of the museum in the collection and interpretation of cultural objects as a form of misrepresentation and colonialism.”
After introducing herself in Anishinaabe, Andrea began her talk by showing photos of the land she is from, Grand Portage, Minnesota. She said of this place that “when I think of where my work ‘sits,’ I think of this place.” I found it powerful to hear someone else say this because I have the landscapes of British Columbia in my mind when I work with clay, as I’ve previously expostulated on in a personal essay “on clay.” While I am of immigrant ancestry and by no means claim to truly belong to British Columbia (I was born in Montreal, in fact), that province feels like home, and my work is in part a response to its landscapes.
Andrea also spoke about storytelling, and how “our stories are frozen, we breathe life into them when we perform.” Describing a painting of a plate that depicts the Dakota 38 + 2, when the US Army simultaneously hung 38 Indigenous men for their resistance during the Dakota war and uprising of 1862. She asked, rhetorically, how can anyone eat off of this plate? We “heap stories onto objects,” she said, “and my paintings are objects too.” I wonder, when hearing this, how every object is a “heap of stories.” What are the stories in my work? How important is it that these stories are easy for viewers to “read”?
Storytelling is key in Andrea’s work. She showed examples of her massive paintings (painting-drawings? she uses oil, acrylic, ink, and colour pencil on paper) that function both as temporal and spacial film strips; she explained this to us — in short, these pieces show movement when viewed both horizontally and vertically. The connection to film goes beyond their structure of multiple individual “frames” — with their size and bright forms that “pop out” at you, the works mimic movie billboards, leading us to ask what is the film we’d see? What is the story taking place here? Even Andrea’s website requires viewers to scroll through images of her work from left to right rather than from top to bottom, more closely imitating the way we read.
One work of Andrea’s that I’m particularly interested in is Red Exit (115 x 183 inches).
Andrea described this piece as being about recreating the world, about healing, and about survival. Images central the work are the loon from the Ojibwe narrative as the earth re-creator, the infinity sign, and the “Man Mound” that appears to be walking away.
These are themes that are in much of her work. The piece that she is showing in States of Collapse is Apocalypse Domani. Dunlop’s web page for this exhibit describes this work in the following way:
“Through the implication that the colonizer, as a consuming machine, is incapable of forging its own path, Andrea Carlson’s Apocalypse Domani proposes that it is Indigenous peoples who are better equipped [than settlers] for survival.”
The connection between colonization and the climate catastrophe that we’re experiencing is a topic I’ve spent some time thinking and reading about. I would have liked if Andrea had talked about Apocalypse Domani during her talk. I wish that I could have another conversation with her about this issue as well as other questions I have about her practice.
In the Q&A period, via the YouTube chat-box, I asked Andrea the following question:
While very different, “Red Earth” and other multi-paneled pieces of yours remind me of David Opdyke. Opdyke’s “This Land” also embodies a hugely rich landscape comprised of individual and highly detailed images. What is the significance of the fragment to your work?
Andrea elaborated on how she views the genre of landscape art and what the history of the landscape reveals, especially from an Indigenous perspective. She talked about how the Flemish became very interested in landscape art after they removed the Spanish occupation. She said it was a sign that they were exhibiting pride in their landscapes again, “owning a little piece of the land in the painting.” She also talked about the relationship between landscape art and the colonial gaze, and how she thinks about decolonizing landscapes and landscapes that one can’t access (they only exist in her paintings). There is so much here to think about, though I wish she’d also answered my question about the significance of the fragment in her work! 🙂
I’ll report one final detail from her talk that I found especially beautiful. She spoke about painted turtles, and how they carry on their body a painting that “they keep between themselves and the earth” — a very intimate painting that one only gets to see only when the turtle is in trouble. This is an image (or description) of art, earth, and Indigenous ways of thinking that I’ll be pondering for a long while.
Once again, I am grateful to the Dunlop for organizing this show and this talk.
My attempts at getting terracotta clay to dry in a cracked formation similar to what’s found on dry riverbeds and areas of drought are just not working out, so I think it’s time to put this idea on hold until the summer when I can use the natural elements for it.
I’ve now turned my attention to a version of this project (still tentatively called “Cracked”) in which I throw plates on the wheel that end up with the types of cracks that are the potter’s bane: s-cracks and rim-cracks
image source: “Tips for Centering and Preventing S-Cracks in Dinner Plates Don’t lose another plate to s-cracks!”
My idea is to purposefully create failed plates only to then build apparatuses that are clearly stupid attempts to save them — these apparatuses would in fact make the plates more unfunctional than the cracks themselves.
Here are a couple of the ideas I’ve sketched out. Others involve an automatic spray bottle, ratchet straps, and a bottle of white glue. However, I need to decide if I’ll purchase these materials or use only salvaged metal scraps, bits of wood, and other discarded materials I can find.
The meaning of the work? Rather than learn how to do this thing called “living on the planet” better, we’re hoping that the same technological thinking that got us into this mess in the first place is what will get us out of it.
The technology-based climate change “solutions” I’ve read about range from reasonable (ex. develop better plant-based meat alternatives so more people start consuming less meat) to completely ridiculous, in my view, including refreezing the poles, greening the oceans with CO2-absorbing algae, and spraying sea salt into the ozone to reflect the sun’s rays, just to name a few. The idea, I gather, is that these more ridiculous-sounding projects would only be considered in a worst-case scenario. Many could lead to more problems than they’d solve.
concludes with the ultimate example of fiddling with the planetary controls: the kind of geoengineering that might produce a white sky. This section could almost be printed in red with a warning sign, “Do not open, except in the event of a catastrophe – and even then think twice.” Solar radiation management, ocean seeding and other efforts to fix the world’s thermostat are no mere tweaks, no simple re-wiring jobs. Some of the scientists involved tell Kolbert they hope their research will never be applied.
Rebecca Solnit summed it up nicely in a Facebook post from February 23rd this year in which she describes a couple of the geoengineering “schemes” that Bill Gates has funded (“the technocratic path is a treacherous one”) and the “alternative path” — to make the sociopolitical changes that we already have the power to make: “no miracle needed.”
I’m at the stage now where I’ve been trying to throw plates that crack. I’ve done everything right (or should I say I’ve done everything wrong?): not compressing the clay; leaving the bottoms too thick in comparison to the rims; drying them very quickly. Plates are notoriously hard to throw, with cracking being one of the biggest issues, and I don’t consider myself at all an expert thrower (more like an advanced-beginner). But they’re just not cracking. I just don’t get what’s going on. Murphy’s Law?
Our ceramic technician, Darcy Zink, suggested I cut a shallow crack into the bottom-side of the plates and hope that as they dry this fissure will produce a complete crack. I’m awaiting the results from this test. I’ve also just thrown a couple larger plates from reclaimed terracotta that I hope will be thrown poorly enough this time to result in what I’m after.
I’ll keep throwing for another few days, and if nothing cracks, I’ll have to start breaking them apart with force. I’m running out of time for this semester.
Tonight, I attended the Art Gallery of Regina’s annual The Artist Is In talk. Sandee Moore, as curator, introduced the three guest speakers: KC Adams; Brenda Wolf; Carole Epp. All three gave a brief introduction to their work — they were each given eight minutes to summarize what they’re all about… tough to do! To my great fortune, the artists chosen for this talk are all ceramicists, and their ceramic work was the subject. They were meant to also tie their work to Ruth Chambers’ current show at this gallery, Tend.
I’ve still got a virtual stack of essays to grade from my last batch (for the day job), so I’ll have to keep this post brief (lord knows, I do like to ramble on). I’ll spend time here summarizing what I got out of listening to KC and Carole, as their work resonates with me most (though Wolf’s is incredible too).
My nêhiyaw name is Flying Overhead in Circles Eagle Woman, my artist name is KC Adams and I am an artist, educator, activist and mentor. I specialize in social activist art and my focus is on the dynamic relationship between nature (the living) and technology (progress). I create work that explores technology and how it relates to identity and knowledge. My process is to start with an idea and then choose a medium that best represents that thought. I work in video, installation, drawing, painting, photography, ceramics, welding, printmaking, kinetic art, adornment art and public art.
I’m immediately interested in the fact that she does “social activist art” AND work on “the dynamic relationship between nature and technology.” This is right up my alley. I’m also interested in the fact that she puts the needs of the work first, finding the medium (or media) that suit it best. While I’ve been focusing (again) on clay/ceramics lately, I’m also planning on using building materials for “Cracked” and, well, dust for “Dust.” I’ve employed other media for previous works, using glass, wood, and water, for example. I’m not set on sticking with ceramics, though I imagine it’ll play a major role in my work for at least some time to come. All of this raises a question to me: at what point does one not get to call oneself a ceramicist?
KC showed images of a few of her pieces, including “Cyborg Chicken Eggs”:
In this piece, she says she was working with the idea of genetically modified food. The piece has “a whole bunch of feathers and porcelain eggs, glowing, akin to nuclear chickens that have just hatched, and a sound in the background, sounds like hundreds of chickens clucking and scratching, talking about mutations and our body” (roughly quoted from this talk). This work is very appealing to me. Aesthetically, it’s interesting. It’s also deeply ironic (David), its title is important (Nic Wilson), and its subject matter is connected to issues I care about as well: how we are altering the lifeforms (and therefore the planet); how our health and the health of other organisms are connected; how fragile we and our systems are.
I was also very interested to hear her talk about leaving commercial clays to work with clay she harvests herself from this land. Being First Nations, she spoke about how this turn in her work was an attempt to connect to her ancestors. At first, however, she bemoaned the “new” clay she was attempting to work with. It was much, much more difficult. Yet she knew there was “no turning back.” She said it was “a whole other animal and I had to start all over again; I was like a toddler learning to walk; it connected me to my culture; it ignited my blood memory; it was like coming home” (quoting her talk). Later, during the question and answer period, she spoke about how little time her ancestors had to make their pots: the women were in charge of so much work, and with such a short summer season in Saskatchewan, they simply couldn’t spend a lot of time on their pots. She also said that unlike now, when we often see an artist as someone who devotes their life to making art, back then, being an artist was just a part of being alive. All of these understandings she’s come to are so fascinating to me. I’ll have to process all of this and see if it changes any part of my own path from here.
Carole Epp’s work amazes me, too. I admire her for creating both a functional and sculptural work, and I hope to get the chance to speak with her one day about how she views these two elements of her practice. In her introduction to Carole, Sandee quoted her, saying:
“None of us want to be confronted with the devastation that humanity can cause, but we cannot remain indifferent and inactive when so many suffer around us. Learning how to use my privilege to empower others, rather than to shield and protect my family, is going to be a lifelong journey of self-criticism and growth.” Carole Epp
(I asked, and Sandee pasted the exact quotation into the chat box on the Zoom call for me — thanks, Sandee)
As you can see, Carole is interested in “confronting” difficult topics in her work. While she claims that with her functional ware, “It’s simple really, I like to make things that make people smile,” she also spoke tonight about incorporating difficult subject material into her plates (she focused on her plates in this talk), pushing herself and people to confront harsh realities. She said that as a 42 year-old with children, she’s finding it harder to ignore the major issues that our world is facing (we have a lot in common):
“I was doing a lot of, I still do a lot of cats and unicorns and rainbows on my dishes and that kind of stuff, but a lot of this darker human condition stuff started coming through in the dishes and that’s what’s really been pushing me in the last couple of years is playing around with that idea of objects that we use every day that have that subject matter on them. People often say well this is great but you’re talking about the news and I want to turn off the news and look away. And I kind of want to force myself to look at these things but maybe also nudge others people to as well, so maybe through these handmade objects that they have in their lives, their coffee cup, they may start to look at the world in a different way” (quoted from the talk).
In this piece (above) in particular, Carole is reflecting on both Covid19 (our “bubbles”) and environmental catastrophe — look at the browns and greys of Earth, the house in its own bubble… Yet Carole said that the plate, to her at least, also shows hope. I suppose there’s still a bright smiling sun looking down on everyone, and one of her telltale hearts. There’s also the fact that these smiling characters, holding hands, cannot be anything but happy. We may not know why… but they just are. I’d love to chat with Carole one day about how she finds (or attempts to find) balance between the difficult subjects she’s working on and the pleasure she derives (presumably) from creating these pieces. (Look at those juicy finger imprints, “dimples,” on this plate… I can just feel the pleasure of creating them, of even just holding this plate in my hands). That’s a complexity that I’m facing in my own work right now.
My supervisor, David Garneau, and I have wonderfully intense weekly meetings. I joked just yesterday while we were meeting face-to-face in his office for the first time in weeks (a nice break from Zoom) that I needed a chaise lounge (and he needed a beard and a cigar) as he basically forced me to dive deeper into the real reasons why I’m creating the art I’m creating. Again we talked about nihilism, apocalypse, what got us here (on the brink of planetary life-system collapse), what I am trying to do about it as a mother/activist/artist, what I’m really saying in my work. It was difficult. It was marvelous.
It’s great when the work you’re doing for different university classes coincides in such a way that you’re allowed to spend all your time focused on what you need to focus on at that moment in your degree. I’m lucky that this is happening for me this semester.
For my Group Studio class this term, our prof, Holly Fay, is asking us to give a presentation / facilitate a discussion in the class on a topic that interests us. The assignment description is as follows:
“Determine an art topic relevant to contemporary studio practice to discuss in class. This topic should be something you are interested in for your own practice, but which is timely and relevant to students in the class besides yourself. If you need help deciding on a topic, I can assist you. Form a persuasive ‘thesis’ about your topic and find materials in the form of writing, lectures, video interviews, etc. by artists, critics, curators, or theorists to support your position. Your 20-minute seminar presentation which includes an opening presentation and a facilitated discussion. You will present a 10 min. opening, prepare and provide questions/activities to facilitated a 10-minute discussion with your seminar participants.”
The topic I’ve chosen is one from the list that Holly had prepared:
Does art change things? / Can art make a difference in societal thinking?
My thesis statement is: art changes things… for some people, for some things.
From what I’ve been learning, we’re dealing with a spectrum of responses to these questions, and I don’t believe there are definitive answers. Art will not “change things” for all people. Neither can all art “make a difference in societal thinking,” certainly not one that can be measured. I’ll spend some time here looking at these questions from a few different angles.
In the Winter 2020 semester, I took a newly minted MAP course designed and taught by Sarah Abbott titled “Engaging Climate Change: Creativity, Community, Intervention.” For that class’ research paper, I began with the following paragraph:
“Climate change puts each of us in a position that we have no means of fully understanding as there has never been a situation like it in human history. How do we begin to acknowledge that we are potentially devastating not only our own future but also the future of nearly all life forms on the planet? How does this fact disturb our ontological understanding of our place in the world? What agency do any of us have to change this situation? Artists who are aware of the seriousness of climate change may feel the urge to turn their practice into a form of activism. Some would argue that the world “needs artists” more now than ever before for the precise reason that more awareness of, more conversations about, and more action on tackling the problem of climate change is vital. In a video showing an Extinction Rebellion sit-in at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in November 2019, a reporter explains that the ‘main message here is to use your creativity, use your imagination for good and fight the climate crisis. It’s up to people like you and I to share creative work, to support creatives, and if you’re a creative, to produce content and spread awareness’ (Extinction Rebellion 2:13).”
If we look at this video, at the 1:40 mark, you’ll here this message:
I’ve been told by my husband and at least one prof that art which is explicitly (and only) trying to make a point — trying to change people — is either boring or at least simply ineffective. I quickly learned that the word “didactic,” when used as in “that work is didactic,” is a pejorative. However, why do most if not all artists make art if not because they are trying to communicate something — and that “something” is often a type of call: look at this; see what I see; pay attention; maybe even do something.
Case in point: climate change art.
I’ve spent hours looking at artist statements and other writings on how artists perceive the role of art in facing/responding to/advocating action when dealing with climate change. In addition to well-known artists who deal with climate change in their work, such as Edward Burtynsky, Ai Wei Wei, and Marina Abramović, less well-known artists I’ve recently discovered who have done powerful work on environmental issues include Eve S. Mosher, Jason DeCaires Taylor, and Morgan Wedderspoon, just to name three of the dozens I’ve encountered. I was particularly inspired by the words of David Opdyke quoted in a New York Times article from January 18th 2018:
“For years I’ve been feeling the need to do something about the dismal future into which we all seem to be sleepwalking. And yet,” he paused before continuing, “I’m constantly haunted by worry. Can such artistic gestures ever really make any difference, especially given the sheer scale of the challenge?”
So, where would he fall on the spectrum of answers to the question of “does art change anything”? This next citation holds his response:
Reminded of Auden’s line to the effect that “Art makes nothing happen,” Mr. Opdyke seemed to rally, countering, “Yeah, but Eudora Welty says that ‘Making reality real is art’s responsibility,’ and maybe that’s what most needs doing now: making the stakes involved in our current crisis real and tangibly visible for people. One ends up hoping that pieces like this might propel the urgent changes in vision, one person at a time, necessary to provoke an appropriate mass response.” (emphasis mine)
There are so many artists out there with similar stances. There are academic articles and critical theory books on this topic. There are even artist organizations specifically devoted to activism on different social causes; one that interests me is The Center for Artistic Activism. The Center has created this primer to help answer “why artistic activism?”
Artistic activism mobilizes affect and effect
Artistic activism thrives in the contemporary landscape
Artistic activism has been used throughout history
Artistic activism creates openings
Artistic activism is accessible
Artistic activism stimulates a culture of creativity
Artistic activism energizes people and organizations
Artistic activism is about the long game
Artistic activism is peaceful and persuasive
It appears there are many supporting points proving the thesis that art can change things. In fact, there is likely a group supporting artists doing work on any societal issue. (Another group supporting artists who want to “make a difference” with their work is Artists and Climate Change.)
But does this mean that art actually makes a difference? Can art actually change things?
My husband, Michael Trussler, is an English prof here and a creative writer, and one of his areas of interest is ekphrasis (the literary device of describing works of visual art in words). In what he calls his “best article ever,” he discusses this “particularly thorny dilemma” of “what communicates ‘meaning’ better, image or text?”:
“More than any other single painting this century [20th], Guernica has focused discussion on the relationships between art and politics, aesthetic form versus ideological content. To Peter Weiss, ‘the paining scream[s] out in memory of every past period of oppression’ (220), providing a narrative of revolution […]. Equally convinced of the painting’s power, but wary that aesthetic grandeur might seduce us from the anguish experienced by those who suffered the event itself, Norbert Lynton warns that Picasso ‘is so successful that we have to discipline ourselves lest the bombing itself should be diminished by his picture into little more than a… prerequisite for it’ (qtd. in Masheck 217). Although Guernica points to history for its authority, the relationship between aesthetic transformation and praxis is indeterminate. Jean-Paul Sartre’s response to the painting in ‘What is Writing?’ is blunt: ‘[D]oes anyone think that it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause? And yet something is said that can never quite be heard and that would take an infinity of words to express’ (28). Sartre’s diffidence regarding Guernica accentuates his questions regarding representation in the essay as a whole — what communicates ‘meaning’ better, image or text?” (Trussler 266-67)
In other words, for all it has done, Guernica didn’t prevent any future deaths. No art does. Art on the subject of climate change will not either.
Needless to say, we have intense dinner conversations at our place. (Our 11 year-old is already proficient in keeping up with such conversations). We sometimes talk about art and what it can/cannot do. I have the great advantage (sometimes disadvantage: he always wins arguments on art or philosophy) of Mike’s enormous library.
One of the many books he’s brought to my attention when we’ve talked about what art can and cannot do is Jean Améry’s, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities.
Near the beginning of his book, Améry describes something that occurred to him while walking back to his bunker one evening at Auschwitz after a day of grueling labour. It was winter, and he noticed a flag waving as he passed by an unfinished building. A stanza came to him from a Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin poem: “The walls stand speechless and cold, the flags clank in the wind” (7). Améry recited the line out loud a couple of times, “But nothing happened. The poem no longer transcended reality. There it was and all that remained was objective statement: such and such, and the Kapo roars ‘left,’ and the soup was watery, and the flags clanking in the wind” (7). He goes on to say that maybe this line of poetry (art) would have had another meaning in this place and at that moment had he had a comrade with whom to share it. But he did not. Even when he recalled at that moment the Parisian philosopher he had “searched out, not without effort and risk,” (7) he remembers that the philosopher was silent: “We trudged through the camp streets with our tin ration can under our arm, and, to no avail, I attempted to get an intellectual conversation underway. The philosopher gave monosyllabic, mechanical answers and finally grew silent entirely” (7). What, speculated Améry, was the cause for his silence?: “He simply no longer believed in the reality of the world of the mind, and he rejected an intellectual word game that here no longer had any social relevance” (7-8).
Skipping ahead a few pages, Améry tells us that what he learned in Auschwitz is that “for the greatest part the intellect is a ludus and that we are nothing more—or, better said, before we entered the camp we were nothing more—than homines ludentes” (20). Homines ludentes translates from Latin to English as basically a species (homines – our species) that plays. And this, Mike tells me, is how he (Mike) views art—and us: we play. Everything we do is play. Nothing is transcendental.
To Améry, this perspective brings with it both freedom from unjustified pretense as well as a loss of one’s sense of self: “With that [awareness of being homines ludentes] we lost a good deal of arrogance, of metaphysical conceit, but also quite a bit of our naive joy in the intellect and what we falsely imagined was the sense of life” (20).
What does this mean to one making art? Basically, it means that nothing we do matters. It’s all just part of the game.
(I don’t place this photo here, amid writing about Auschwitz, lightly; I’m very aware of how lucky I am that my family left Poland four generations ago)
At least, this is one perspective. To continue with another example from a concentration camp survivor, Tzvetan Todorov writes in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps that people in the camps were desperate for books (for art). As books were banned (with the threat of death for being caught with them), prisoners resorted to their memory of books they’d read. A fellow inmate, Ginzburg, “knew by heart the works of countless writers from Pushkin to Pasternak,” and “never missed a chance to recite from them, much to the enjoyment of those around her” (92). On one occasion, she was overheard reciting a book and threatened that if she could not prove she’d recited it from memory (not read from a hidden physical book) by doing so for half an hour, it would “the irons for you” (93). She won the “bet,” reciting from this book she’d memorized (Eugene Onegin) for well over half an hour. Ginzburg “continued to believe in this kind of resistance throughout her incarceration: ‘I felt instinctively,’ she wrote, ‘that as long as I could be stirred to emotion by the sea breeze, by the brilliance of the stars, and by poetry, I would still be alive, however much my legs tremble and my back bend under the load of burning stones'” (93).
Primo Levi, also a survivor, writes from a similar perspective in Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assult on Humanity. He recounts a moment when he had a few lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy stop him as he worked:
‘Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence’
qtd. in Levi 113
And Levi writes about this memory: “As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forgot who I am and where I am” (113).
I think about these remarks of Todorov and Levi when I think about David’s question to me of what my work really means or what I am really trying to say. Do I think my art will “make a difference”? No, I’m quite certain it won’t. I’m certain that at this point, all the climate activism going on around the world may slow our fate somewhat, but it’s not going to be enough to save us. And my art projects, certainly, are not going to give us any extra second worth of time, keep but one glacier any more frozen, save but one insect species from extinction, etc, etc. But I’m compelled to make these objects — these statements — nonetheless.
I reflected on this topic at the end of a personal essay I wrote last semester, “on clay.” I ended the essay this way:
I cannot do much to change the course of climate change beyond the time and money I give to environmental organizations. In fact, I feel like the busyness of participating in activism amid a day job, art-making, and parenting is proving to be too much. With the urgency I know this crisis demands, and my urgency to raise as much awareness of the situation as I can, I’ve been missing something important – that sustainability must also involve the personal as well as the global. I need to be able to sustain myself, and recently, I’ve become attuned to a major lack in my life: joy. Without it, it’s hard to keep fighting for the future, for “[i]f we kill all pleasure in the actual processes of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?” (Orwell qtd in. Scranton 324).
Does art change things? Does art make a difference in societal thinking? In other words, does it matter? These questions have different answers depending on who you ask, their personalities, what they know, and what their circumstances in life are at the time of the question. (For one thing, there’s usually some amount of privilege that allows one to make art, and often times, privilege involved in being able to view it).
I’m learning that art matters to me (and learning to recognize my own privilege). It may bring me joy at times, such as the tactile joy it brings me of sinking my hand into a pail of terracotta slip, or intellectual joy of discovering a solution to a technical problem. However, at other times, working with this subject matter, researching the Dirty Thirties and what drought is in store for us now, for instance, art-making doesn’t bring me any joy at all. Neither do I get joy from seeing other people’s art, however brilliant or well-executed, that is dealing with climate change. I think we make this type of art because we feel the personal need to — perhaps it’s about feeling alive, or about feeling human, or about not forgetting who we are. In other words, we do it for ourselves, and at the very least, it changes us.
This is as far as I’m able to get (for now) in answering your question, David. Hey! I just remembered that you told the class last semester that every MFA student ends up making art that’s about them self. I guess I’m no exception.
Now, to get this into a ten-minute presentation for my class!
Works Cited
Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Indiana: Indiana UP, 1980.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assult on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Scranton, Roy. We’re Doomed. Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change. New York: Soho Press Inc., 2018.
Trussler, Michael. “Literary Artifacts: Ekphrasis in the Short Fiction of Donald Barthelme, Salman Rushdie, and John Edgar Wideman.” Contemporary Literature 41, no 2 (2000): 252-90.
Tzvetan Todorov writes in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.
It seems my first crack at “Cracked” did not give me the results I was after.
The clay (slip) dried in just a few days. The photos above were taken three and four days after I poured it. I could tell already that things were likely not going to work out well, but I left it to dry further, hoping more cracks would form.
By day eight I realized it was hopeless. One likely problem was indeed the sheet under the clay providing too much structural support. I think the clay was too thin, too. Perhaps having two or three inches of height would help. Still, I thought a few of the details from this failure were still somehow interesting.
Other students needed the drying table, and no plate-sized pieces of cracked clay were miraculously forming, so it was time to break this mess up.
Milk chocolate, anyone? Maybe for April Fools day?
I suppose I could simply crack the clay into the shapes I want rather than waiting for it to crack into pieces by itself… Somehow, I’d rather have this process happen naturally, or as naturally as I can get it to happen.
It’s now slaked down in a pail of water again, waiting for it’s next act. I’ve been waiting for warmer weather — I have a half a cubic metre of brick sand in my back yard that’s been frozen solid lately. It’s supposed to get up to seven degrees in a couple of days … a world away from the -40 we’ve been at … and I plan to take a few shovelfuls of it to the studio. I’ll lay out a smaller area, put down the sheet, add an inch of sand, pour two inches of slip, and then wait for evaporation to do its trick. Again, I’m not too optimistic. I’ve been realizing I may need to wait for summer (also Ruth’s thought) for when I don’t need to try to mimic the conditions of the outdoors. Sun, wind, and an earthen surface that doesn’t absorb and hold all the moisture may need to be in my toolbox.
Meanwhile, I may also experiment with throwing plates on the wheel that end up with the dreaded “S-crack” – the crack in the centre of a poorly thrown or poorly dried plate that is a potter’s bane. This time, I’d put one there intentionally. I’ll see if this idea can take me anywhere for the time being, while summer is still a ways away.
My first attempt at constructing a plate out of porcelain dust has failed, unsurprisingly.
I threw a sort of press-mold to use for this project a few days ago. The form of the mold is of the space that exists between the bottom of a plate and the surface it rests on. I used one of my grandparents’ plates to create the form. The idea I have is that I would compress the powdered porcelain I’ve made onto this press-mold. Ideally, I’d not have to fire the mold, so it could be recycled once I’m finished with it.
Creating this mold was much harder to do than I’d anticipated. Throwing a ring of clay the exact form of the bottom side of a plate is tricky. Of course, pressing the plate itself onto the ring of wet clay to get this form creates a suction … meaning that it’s nearly impossible to remove the plate without ruining the mold. It took a lot of fussing, and the result wasn’t great, but I figured it would serve well enough to tell me if this approach to making the dust plate would work.
I sliced this in half while it was wet, and then left it to dry. When I checked on it yesterday, I was disappointed to see that it was drying in such a way that the two halves no longer aligned seamlessly… this was problem A I’ve encountered thus far.
Today, I excitedly went into the studio to test it out. I figured that I could fire the mold if necessary to press the dust down firmly enough, but before doing so, I should play around with the it on the mold to see how they get along. They didn’t get along well, or to be more accurate, they got along too well. The porcelain dust stuck onto the mold (not much of a surprise) to the extent that it was 100% impossible to move the mold out from under it. Problem B.
My next step is going to be building a plaster mold of my model plate. I’m not sure how I’ll get a mold that can come apart into at least two different pieces, but I’m ready to learn. Maybe things will work better if I have a complete mold with pieces that align properly, and one that I can add something to in order to make it slippery. Wetting the porcelain dust is another trick I have up my sleeve. I hope I get other ideas, as I’m quite sure that neither of these will solve the problem.
I really don’t know at this point if I’ll be able to achieve creating a dust plate at all this term (or ever). I’m not going to give up, but after thinking about this project for a few weeks, now, after handling it physically, I realize how difficult it is going to be. If it weren’t for the success I had with the Saskatchewan Glacier cups, I probably wouldn’t be taking this risk. I can still hear the ceramics technician telling me that what I wanted to do with those porcelain snowflakes was impossible. Well, if I did the impossible once, maybe I’ll find a way to do it again. Or maybe not.
There must be very few if any alive today who remember the Dust Bowl of the Dirty Thirties. It really wasn’t that long ago, even though looking at photos from that time make it seem so.
The drought of the Dirty Thirties caused the suffering of millions was a largely man-made event. Ninety years later, we are likely not going to hang dead snakes belly-up as way to put an end to drought any longer (see “Fact 9” in “25+ Mind-blowing Facts about the Dust Bowl that Happened in the 1930s“), but that doesn’t mean we’ve made much progress in learning how to stop causing it in the first place. In fact, here in Canada, we’ve undone a lot of the environmental protection support systems meant to protect us, a few which were created following the 30s. According to Marc Fawcett-Atkinson writing for Yorkton This Week in “A 1930s-era federal agency helped farms recover from an ecological crisis: It’s time for a replacement, advocates say”:
“The crisis [of the Dirty Thirties] led the federal government to create the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), an institution that brought together agricultural researchers, engineers, and extension (community outreach) staff to help farmers use their land sustainably — a sort of Medicare for farms. “It became a body of expertise and understanding of grassland ecosystems, and grazing relationships, and biodiversity. In more recent years they were really looking into how the pasture land sequestered carbon,” said Cathy Holtslander, director of research and policy at the National Farmers Union. The PFRA endured for the next 77 years, helping Prairie farmers deal with water supply issues, develop drought and flood resilience plans, diversify their crops, and farm sustainably. Researchers with the organization also restored failed farmland into ecologically vibrant grasslands and offered free tree seedlings to farmers who supported native pollinators, slowed wind erosion, and captured carbon. “These were (among the) federal government’s positive contributions to the public good that people really valued. It was a living, concrete argument for public interest investment in people’s lives,” she said. The organization was dismantled by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2013.”
Drought is going to be one of the most serious consequences of climate change that this region of Canada experiences. It’s going to get dusty.
I’ve had an interest in dust for a long time. My research paper for my MA in English (2005) was titled “‘On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation’: The Fragment and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Fiction.” Sebald is one of my favourite writers, and dust, a type of fragment, plays a major role in his books. This is most clearly displayed in the character of a painter, Ferber, in The Emigrants. Ferber’s relationship with dust is described as follows:
Since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work progressed, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimeters thick at the centre and thinning out towards the outer edges, in places resembling the flow of lava. This, said Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure. It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, […] that nothing further should be added [to the studio] but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continually fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. (161-62)
The Emigrants. New Directions, 1997.
About this citation, I wrote that “Ferber’s ‘lava,’ ‘debris’ and ‘dust’ are clear examples of the type of physical fragment that Sebald pays special attention to in each of his books: similar to Dakyns’ office landscape of shards of written information, the remains of a charcoal drawing which is constantly erased form a collection of individual pieces of debris and dust that ultimately harden and form a different type of ‘whole’ – an encrustation of a previous fragmentation – that is also a constant reminder of an act of destruction. That this debris and dust is the ‘true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure,’ explains why Ferber’s studio interested Sebald’s narrator – he had come across another person who was so closely engrossed in the process of matter’s breakdown ‘into nothingness’ and the material remains of ruination.”
In this paper I wrote nearly 16 years ago, I was grappling with the philosophical questions of what makes a whole vs. what is a fragment, and what is artistic creation vs. destruction or failure. (All of this past study of mine was part of why I nodded when Larissa Tiggeler’s asked me if “failure” was a subject of my own work and if “it could be generative” during my End of Semester Review last term). Drought and climate change were no where on my mind back then. Now, I’ve returned to pondering dust, but more as a way of imagining what will likely be our future here on this prairie. Still, I think it’s time I refresh my memory of Sebald as well as of a few of the books in my research paper’s works cited page, including Simon Critchley’s Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. I feel like there is likely something connecting this work I did in my MA and the work I’m doing now for my MFA. I also wonder what it’ll be like to reread these texts with a climate change lens.
Rickard used 187 pencils and 25 erasers to create and then erase 38 drawings of endangered species.
This image from the article instantly reminded me of Sebald’s description of Ferber’s studio
and of the porcelain snowflakes of “Saskatchewan Glacier” that collected on the floor of the Fifth Parallel Gallery.
I’ve started out with a stroke of luck — I happened to be in the ceramics classroom the other day when a fellow ceramics student was trimming her pots made out of my favourite porcelain, “Polar Ice.” I asked if she’d be sweeping up the refuse to slake down and reuse, sure that her answer would be affirmative. She told me that she actually doesn’t have the time to go through that process, so she throws these scraps in the garbage. (Insert wide-eyed emoji showing shock). Of course I quickly volunteered to clean up her “mess” so that I could use these fragments for this project. How serendipitous! Not only can I now rest assured that this precious porcelain material wasn’t wasted nor mined in England and transported here for me, but I also enjoyed the process of reclaiming it from the floor and surrounding furniture, gently sweeping up the smaller pieces and lifting the larger ones carefully by hand. I felt like a mushroom hunter or wildflower collector who’d stumbled upon the finding of a lifetime.
Once collected in my basket (five gallon pail), I first crushed the pieces using a heavy brick and then, in very small batches, went at them with a mortar and pestle until I had a fine porcelain “dust.”
I am so pleased that this fine dust has some structural integrity to it when pinched or pressed, as you can sort of make out in the photos below. This leaves me cautiously optimistic that my plan may succeed.
Next step is to make a press mold of this plate (which was my maternal grandmother’s)…
… and then, well, I have no idea how I’ll accomplish this, but I hope to end up with a plate made up of exclusively porcelain dust that I can then blow away.
Of course, I know this isn’t real dust — it’s not collected from drought-ridden farmers’ fields, composed of soil and atmospheric particles, nor is it contemporary household dust, comprised of pollution and dead skin cells. (Real dust these days says much about our lifestyle, often composed of microscopic plastics, traces of metals such as lead, and known carcinogens such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)). Still, I’ll call this porcelain power “dust,” and it’ll do the trick for the metaphor I’m working with here. After all, plates are often made of porcelain, and plates are used to hold food. Food is hard to grow during a drought.
On Feb. 4 2021, I “attended” (watched) a program put on by the Whitney Museum of American Art: “Art History From Home: Making Knowing.”
The objective of the talk was to:
“Explore how artists have used the materials, methods, and strategies of craft to challenge the power structures that determine artistic value and reclaim visual languages that have typically been coded as feminine, domestic, or vernacular. Some expand techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing, or pottery, while others experiment with textiles, thread, clay, beads, and glass, among other mediums. Featured artists include Mike Kelley, Miriam Schapiro, Marie Watt, and LaToya Ruby Frazier.”
The speaker was Grant Johnson, and this is his bio that accompanied the event post on Facebook:
“Grant Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of art history at the University of Southern California and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney. His dissertation, Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World, traces the first critical history of the prolific American artist, weaver, and pioneer of global contemporary art. An active curator, critic, and writer, he has published work in Artforum, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Garage, and Performa magazine, where he was a writer-in-residence from 2012 to 2014.”
I’ll quote from and summarize Johnson’s analysis of three of the works he showed during this talk, and I’ll respond to what he said by considering my own practice alongside the points he made. All quotations below are as direct (word for word) as I could type up while he was speaking.
Showing an image of a quilt by Rosie Lee Tompkins, Johnson made the comment that “craft is an opportunity for understanding ourselves in a larger world, in the way that the squares are pieced together in the cover quilt by Tompkins.” I find this idea beautiful: that for craft artists, craft-making provides a way to reflect on our own life and relation to others/the world. Not only through spending time on often monotonous and repetitive motions can craft artists have this space for reflection, but there is also something taking place in the action of making physical connections (between pieces of cloth, here) itself that somehow helps us elucify the non-physical connections that also make up a life. At least, this is what I thought about as I heard Johnson talk about Tompkins’ work.
The next piece he showed was a painting by Charles Sheeler — “Interior” 1926. I’m afraid I can’t find a colour image of it that I’m able to copy, so here it is in black and white:
Johnson described how “decorative arts have often been at the core of how we define American art – iconographic, material culture, one that doesn’t come from the so-called fine arts — but one that comes from craft arts.” By doing a reading of this painting, he showed us the place that handmade, “craft” objects have indeed long held in what has traditionally been defined as the fine-arts; within this painting which hangs on museum walls is the meticulously hand-built wooden table in the foreground; the ceramic pitcher and plate; the rugs and quilt that adorn the room.
I especially appreciated listening to what Johnson had to say about this work. Forgive the long quotation, but I’d like to keep a record of this here so I can return to it and think with it again and again:
“There’s a value and a psychological weight and a kind of index in them of a gift and emotional economy (the love hours) but then also the aspect of trauma of the fact that that is a perpetual debt economy – the love hours will never be repaid in full, there’ll always be a kind of inequality there, and maybe also partially for Kelley to put them into an art object had to be found in a discarded context (good will store, Salvation Army) blankets, stuffed animal, clothing, thing that indicate a life previous to being in this context. You can tell that this is an original object, not something made in a factory – each one of these objects represents some real human individual life and a kind of investment we put into our objects, and that also is what the piece moors [?] — the eternal cycling of objects, material, things, that really does lead us to a melancholic place, especially if we think or question the ecological crisis and sustainability that have become more ever-present in everyone’s mind. In case anyone decides to question this further, the candles on the left-hand side and the corn husks on the corners sort of cue us into the idea that this is a ceremonial alter, that it has a religious or spiritual significance, the candle also signifies the kind of things you’d find in a teenager’s bedroom, moody broody spiritual. So there is something playful and ironic happening here that is typical a of Kelley and the 80s moment.”
I was taken in by what Johnson said about is piece because, despite he fact that its content is in most ways very different from the content of my work, I can see a few parallels between between what Kelley was doing here and what I’m attempting to do in my work. I too feel that I put “love hours” into the making of my pieces, and while the pieces themselves are not meant to be gifts to an individual in the way that a handmade teddy bear or a crochet blanket normally is, I’d like to think of them as something close to a gift all the same.
I also appreciate, of course, Johnson’s analysis of how each object in the piece “represents some real human individual life and a kind of investment we put into our objects.” These days, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t factory-made, and we generally have very few physical “investments.” I’m not sure if Johnson was speaking about the melancholy surrounding the loss that comes with no longer having hardly any such objects or the melancholy of the “ecological crisis” that is “ever-present in everyone’s mind” (as a side note: I only wish it were true that this crisis were on everyone’s mind). Maybe I missed something he said here on the melancholy point. I agree that handmade objects signify a return to that level of care and investments for the objects that adorn our lives.
I noted Johnson’s choice of the word “ironic” as the idea of art that works with irony is one that David and I recently chatted about. I definitely see at least a couple levels of irony here. Of course there is that the thrift-store sourced soft objects, usually relegated to the worlds of women and children, are here presented in a rectangle on a gallery wall, and with a title. Then there’s the title itself and the concept it communicates: that these objects represent countless hours of love, only to have been abandoned. Even that which we cherish the most (the love that went into these pieces) isn’t appreciated forever and always. In a sense, this should be devastating for me to consider as an environmentalist. If this Kelley piece shows us that even familial love simply fails to maintain for us the significance of objects for very long, who can expect us to care enough to “repay” our debt to that “mother” (nature) which is so far removed from us that we hardly acknowledge our reliance on it? In the context of environmental preservation, it makes sense that we take what we want and throw away what we no longer need of the planet’s resources — we don’t even maintain an appreciation for the investment that goes into objects our loved ones make for us by hand. Perhaps this is something Johnson was alluding to as well.
One last quotation from what Johnson said:
If you’re not able to get to a museum right now, take this example in mind and turn your attention to works of function, decorative art in your own home and appreciate them in the way you would in a museum. If we saw this as a piece on a white wall in the Whitney, we’d see it as art. What happens when we start to appreciate these arts [craft arts] in that way?
This reminded me of the post I made about my love of clay, and how the few cups, bowls, and plates of my own that I have at home have become more valuable to me in the last year that I have not been producing any new ones. I’m still not sure if I’d call these pieces of mine “art,” but I also wonder if that distinction doesn’t matter much — I can enjoy these objects and value them as investments just as much as if they’d been in a gallery and had a title.
I’m tentatively calling this project “cracked” — this is to be the set of plate-like pieces that resemble river mud that’s dried to the point of cracking:
My plan is to create pieces of terracotta (unfired) that have formed into irregular shapes similar to what we see in these photos above. With each piece, I’d put them upside-down on the wheel and trip a foot, making it so that from that vantage point, they’d read as plates. I can imagine setting a table with several of these “plates,” arranging them as a puzzle, or stacking them.
I was happy to get 20 pounds of terracotta clay that had been left behind by previous students. This is clay that would likely have been reclaimed for use by future students, so I don’t consider it entirely “salvaged” or “recycled,” but I feel just slightly better than if I’d gone out and purchased some myself. If this becomes a project worth further development, I could see using actual riverbed mud… how wonderful would it be to return to the North Saskatchewan River, “borrow” a few of these naturally-made shapes of dried mud, and then throw (or attach) a foot to each of them? I could even return them to the riverbed once I was done with them. Hmmmm… For now, I’m testing out this idea with terracotta.
I dried and crushed the clay before soaking it in just enough water to cover it (“slaking it down”) to turn it into slip, a liquid form of clay.
I prepared the plaster drying table in the classroom with “walls” to contain the slip, then covered it with a bed-sheet.
I thought it would be best for the slip to be as thick as possible so that there’d be less water to evaporate out of it before it dried. However, when the five gallon pail of it was dumped onto the table (thanks to Jesse Goddard for his help lifting it), I realized it was too thick. I wanted it to fill out the space I’d made for it evenly, but instead it just sat where it landed, a large… well… something between pudding and turd.
I added water, one yogurt-container-full at a time, and mixed, waiting for it to be a consistency that would run through my fingers (six containers total). In the middle picture below, the slip wasn’t quite there yet. In the picture on the right, it is.
I used water that I’d saved from the process of cleaning off the other tools I’d used (stir stick; drill with blender attachment) in the container I’d used for the slaking down of the clay (it needed cleaning too). These attempts at reducing the environmental footprint of my work are really just gestures at this point, but perhaps they’ll have some significance to my practice one day.
And yes, this was the most glorious tactile experience I’ve had in a long time. I realized two things: just how much I’ve missed working with clay; that while it’s not throwing on the wheel, which is my happy place (when far from mountain silt), I can actually achieve that same sensation of deep-body wellness, peacefulness, just from sinking my hand into a bucket of slip. I made noises.
Second attempt at pouring the slip. It was still too thick to spread by itself, but it eventually worked out. A long piece of 1×3 wood helped smooth it over.
How I left it. I’m excited to see how it dries.
My prediction is that this will not produce the effect I’m after. Having a sheet under the slip (which I thought was necessary to keep it contained and to clean up the table afterwards) and using a plaster table will obviously cause the clay to dry differently from how mud dries on riverbed, but we’ll see. If this doesn’t work, I plan to dry it, smash it, slake it, mix it, and pour it again, perhaps on a 1″ bed of sand.
In our weekly meeting this past Monday, David got me thinking about my purpose in making art. This isn’t a question I’m new to, but I think our conversation has helped me move further along in my ongoing response to it.
These are my notes from / responses to what David had to say about the overall direction/trajectory I see my work taking.
1. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe there’s any greater being out there/any great purpose to anything happening down here.
2. I don’t subscribe to the “pro-Anthropocene” (a new term to me) movement; that is, I don’t believe that our technology, the very thing that got us into this situation we’re in, is going to be what gets us out of it. I think there’s a chance we can slow down this catastrophe, but I don’t believe we’re going to come up with one or one set of solutions that will just solve it. It’s not just that we’re not smart enough to build such technology, as nothing we create can be as intelligent as the systems we’ve messed up, but it’s that we’re not smart enough to be able to work together to implement any single solution at the scale necessary to deal with the problems we’re facing.
3. I’m not about to check out of society, as in, I’m not going to go live in an off-grid 100% self-sufficient domicile where I take advantage of zero of society’s technologies and live as close to a zero-footprint life as possible. I don’t see doing this as a solution, and in fact I see it as deeply problematic — leaving the world to its problems just because one has the interest—and privilege—to do so.
(Yes, the idea of an earthship is interesting and appeals to the fear that apocalypse brings me [this was especially bad a decade ago while I was watching The Walking Dead… I wanted to buy a gun, jerrycans, and beef-up my relationship with a farmer I knew so I could go live on his land], but no, I don’t plan on building one. I don’t have the money nor skill sets to do so.)
I also don’t agree with or wish to further the “all or nothing” mentality regarding climate change. Yes, I do what I can. Yes, I’m very concerned — terrified — about what we’re doing to the planet. But yes, I heat my home. This doesn’t make me a hypocrite. And no, living in a cave is not a solution for any or all of us. Just as how Barbara Kingsolver points out in “Setting Free the Crabs” that saving one orchid from a doomed rain forest to bring to Canada and cherish is about as useful as leaving it there to die.
4. So, David asked me, if I don’t turn to a greater purpose (metaphysics) for guidance or meaning in all of this, I don’t see technology as our solution, and I’m not about to leave everyone and everything behind… what do I see as the “solution”? If I see none, he says, I’m a nihilist.
Fair enough.
The question then is, what do I believe, and, again, what do I believe is the purpose of my art?
Good questions.
I believe we’re most likely fucked. I have a shred of hope that the species will survive, but to be honest, apart from my son and step-children, and my nieces and nephew… hmm… well, it’s hard to care all that much for the future of our species. As a species, we suffer and inflict suffering of unimaginable proportions. (A question I’ve asked myself when studying the Holocaust is whether the suffering of many actually adds up to more than the suffering of one. Is there such a thing as collective suffering? My intuition is that there is not. This doesn’t at all undermine the horrors of an individual’s experience of pain [physical, emotional, whichever kind]. But I don’t put much weight in “the suffering of a nation,” for instance. Where is that actually felt? We each feel our own pain, nothing more and nothing less. There is empathy, but empathy is not pain. That’s my view, anyways.)
One big problem of course is that my son and step-children, and my nieces and nephew, all need there to be other people on this planet. From whom will my son buy his iPad, who will build the bloody thing, who will work to channel the electricity to run it, who build the couch on which he sits with it, who will heat the home in which he uses it… if we aren’t all here?
I’m being facetious of course.
Back to my art.
5. Do I have any hope? I guess I do. Just a tiny bit, but it’s there. Either that, or I simply cannot face collapsing in front of complete acknowledgment of the situation we’re in — aka, I’m allowing myself some healthy denial.
5. David, I believe, suggested that if I really do see the situation as “nihilistically” as this — impending extinction of the species — then I should consider how to align my art practice with this belief/philosophy. I believe he said it would be “brave” to toss aside any pretext of trying to change people. I believe he means that didactic art, as Risa pointed out to me early last term, is limited, or at least that it may not match what I really believe is true about the situation and what my work conveys. Asking people to take action (ie. change a light-bulb, lower their thermostat) is ridiculous if what I believe is that we’re facing extinction, and these pieces simply make that point and no other. This is an “if” I need to consider, though.
To me, the grief I feel at the thought of extinction is not limited to us, but to all of life. It’s the kingdoms: animalia; plantae; fungi; protista; eubacteria; archaebacteria.
I don’t know where this love came from, but I feel a love for life on this planet. I understand that I am made up of the same elements as the mountains, the trees, and many other animals. I raised my son from when he was an infant on just about no tv other than our dvds of David Attenborough’s documentaries; together, we feel in love with Life on Earth, the film, and the real thing. How the hell did earth come up with creatures such as the dumbo octopus, living four kilometers below the ocean’s surface? The zombie worm? The bubbler crab? The pangolin? (I have a soft spot for pangolins).
(When my son was five, he identified a picture of an opossum in his animal encyclopedia one night in bed. When asked how he knew what it was, as he couldn’t yet read, he said to me matter-of-factly, “Isn’t it obvious? From the opposable thumb and the prehensile tail!” My love for my son grew with his love of life on this planet, and to this day, as I become a more active environmental activist, he becomes more compassionate. I hope he won’t be totally screwed as a result, but hey, Philip Larkin said it best in “This Be the Verse”:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
In my reading of this poem, from my family’s perspective, the fault is hope, and the “fools in old-style hats and coats” is all of us, but most especially those who arrived on this land (and too many lands), stole it, and brought us to where we are today.)
Whoa, what a digression. In short, I really really care for the life on this planet, and I can’t give up some tiny shred of hope that it’ll go on long after my immediate family is gone. I suppose, if the beauty of life is all I care about, I shouldn’t worry too much. Something will remain, even if it’s nothing like what it is today. New kingdoms, likely unnamed, will grow. We won’t be around to see them, but so what? I’m not alone in having this opinion, of course. This must be why Jill Ho-You‘s work with bacterial and mold speaks to me so well.
As for my work, I still haven’t answered David’s question. What is its purpose?
6. Can I be brave and only focus on what we stand to lose… not waste my time asking people to change?
A simple answer for now, but really a question: Does it matter what my intent is, anyways? I’m a modernist at heart. Whether or not my artist statement asks viewers to go to a website or participate in local politics, the work is what will catch people’s attention and hold a tiny space in their memory, not what I have to say on the side, the “supplemental” material as I believe David called it. Does it matter if this material is “didactic”? Really, does art itself matter, or is it all just play at this point, as my husband calls it? These are questions I still have to — will likely always have to — wrestle with, as long as I continue down this path.
For my second semester as an MFA student at the U of R, I’m once again taking a Group Studio course — a class students need to take at least four times throughout their degree. The course objectives are as follows:
The MFA Group Studio is a seminar focused on studio work, research, writing, presentation and professional practice. Through group discussions, studio visits, gallery visits and field trips seminar participants will practice critical engagement and build collegiality in the university community and beyond. (from the syllabus)
This term, Holly Fay is teaching the course, and I stand to learn a lot. Her own work deals with “natural systems, phenomenology, ideas of place, and has addressed anthropocentric representation of nature in the tradition of Western landscape art” (“about”). In fact, in one of her recent projects, Floating Series, she is exploring how in nature, “patterns of structure that are self similar can be observed over a wide range of scales” (Floating Series), such as patters seen in both clouds and water molecules. This is someone I have to get to know! I hope to learn more about her practice as the term goes on.
Floating Worlds series, graphite on paper, 15″x22″ image source
One of the assignments she’s having us do for this class is called the “Arts & Culture Events Journal.” For it, we need to write a reflective text on four such events.
Last night, thanks to Holly alerting me to it, I watched the Dunlop Gallery’s live-streamed “Opening Remarks and Artist Talk” for their States of Collapse exhibit.
OMG, it was amazing. This was the first online presentation that I actually did NOT multitask once throughout. I hung on every word the presenters spoke, transcribing them for my future reference (I don’t trust my memory). Here’s my response to this event.
The three artists who spoke last night are each doing work that amazes me. Jude Griebel, Jill Ho-You, and Sylvia Ziemann. I want to talk with them. I want to go out for coffee with them. This can’t happen. I also want to thank them — for the work they’re doing, and also for what I’ve learned from them. Through listening to them talk, I reached a deeper level of understanding something about my own art practice: that it’s okay to portray “states of collapse.” It’s okay to show the anticipated effects of catastrophic climate change. It’s alright to include melting glaciers, for example. I don’t mean this in terms of being given an “okay” to keep reproducing tired tropes, but inasmuch as my concerns about depicting the “doom and gloom” of the situation and how doing so may actually turn people further away from taking any type of personal (or political) action. One of my concerns has been how to implement what I’ve read in a few studies about the psychology of viewing images of climate change — how images showing “the solutions” nudge more people towards becoming invested in those solutions, whereas images showing emaciated polar bears just make people sad. These three artists don’t seem to worry about such studies, at least not from what they said. They are creating the work they feel they need to create, and they know it will stand to impact its viewers in a positive way. Ho-You put this so well when answering the question “what are the ways that you’re hopeful about the state of the world?”
Really great question, and other people have asked me about that because my work is very somber and clinical, and for me a part of the function of showing these speculative images is we’re sensory animals, we’re logical too, but we respond to images because we’re so visual. I think there is some usefulness in making these cataclysmic images because it speaks to a different part of our psychology than lists of statistics. If you think about warming in the arctic and polar bears, someone would tell you that and you’d know it logically, but as soon as you see the image of the emaciated polar bear swimming, it hits you on a more bodily level, so I’d like to think that my work opens up a space where people can start to imagine – what would be left, what would it look like, if all life on earth was gone? What would happen to our cities/infrastructure. Despite some of the images, I am very hopeful. They’re not created out of despair for me, though certainly people are in their right to feel anxious and despair and think “this could be the worst thing that could happen, so now that we’ve imagined that, that’s like, now we know we don’t want that, so what are the actions we need to take?”
Ho-You, Jill. “States of Collapse — Opening Remarks and Artist Talk” YouTube Livestreamed event, Dunlop Art Gallery, January 26 2021.
(this reminds me of Quarmly’s account of seeing art work about a polar bear in Watermelon Snow — I mention this in my post about that book).
The work Ho-You shared at this event is an installation titled Inversion comprising a series of petri dishes with images of industrial life etched into a medium that bacteria and mold eats away over time. They are a synecdoche — the micro-climates inside each dish contain a process of consumption and then death (when the food, in this case the medium, runs out) that mimics what is happening all around us — what Ho-You (and scientists) believe may ultimately take place with our species. In the end, she says, the world may belong to bacteria and mold once again.
Jude Griebel’s work has a much more playful quality to it, and yet the messages in the work are just as dire. He says he uses a lot of humor in the intricate miniatures he creates to help viewers “navigate the larger things happening in them.” Another way he words this is by saying that his work “provides an access point for a diverse public to confront issues.” So, so important.
Jude Griebel. Ice Cap, 2018 (Photo: On White Wall NYC/Courtesy of the artist) image sourceJude Griebel. Detail of Ice Cap, 2018. (Photo: On White Wall NYC/Courtesy of the artist)
Sylvia Ziemann takes this strategic use of humour even farther in her work. In her recent work, she’s created dioramas where animal/human figures go about their daily business. She says that “if kids and old people can’t appreciate my work, then I’m not communicating property.” At the same time, the work is as much about impending apocalypse as the work of the other artists who spoke: “I have a doomsday clock in the rabbit room. It’s at 20 seconds to midnight.”
I’m not able to find the image of this work that we saw during her talk, but I she’s done other work with dioramas and puppets on similar themes, such as for Carnival at the End of the World:
The work and words of all three of these artists are incredibly inspiring to me. I’m going to stop worrying about not making pieces that include solar panels. I’m going to keep considering how to incorporate humour into my work (I’m waiting to receive The Artist’s Joke, thanks to Risa). I’m so grateful to have been able to attend/watch this event. I’ll end this post with the words of Cindy Baker, the event’s moderator:
We can’t yet fathom whatever will become our ultimate undoing; all the calamities we know about seem way too easy because we have imagined them. They end neatly, with a conclusion that we feel some resolution from. Contemporary artists though don’t wrap things up with neat bows; we ask questions, etc. We refuse resolution. We play an important role in an uncertain world. The artists in this exhibit are creating the unfathomable right now.
Baker, Cindy. “States of Collapse — Opening Remarks and Artist Talk” YouTube Livestreamed event, Dunlop Art Gallery, January 26 2021.
After much deliberation over the break, I’ve decided to return to representing the effects of climate change in clay and ceramic.
For my directed studio course with David this semester, his first assignment is to come up with ten ideas. Five of these should be strictly illustrative, straight-up objects, and five should be about process. In 2018, I came up with the idea to represent melting glaciers via the form of the cup. I’d like to return to that idea and create other pieces that resemble functional ware (cups, bowls, plates) but that are purely conceptual representations of other effects of climate change.
Here’s what I’ve got.
But first, the effects of climate change include:
drought
flooding
forest fires
intense storms
extreme winds
heatwaves
ice loss
rising sea levels
biodiversity loss (contributing to the 6th mass extinction)
increase in disease
increase in pests (ex. mountain pine beetle)
ocean acidification
mass migration (human)
hunger and water shortages
collapse of economic systems
emotional toll
Illustrative Objects
a plate that looks like dried mud
Here in the Canadian prairie, where agriculture is a major resource (and one which also significantly contributes to climate change), I know that drought is going to be a major problem in the future in part because of diminishing runoff from mountains and in part because of changing weather patterns that will likely mean extended periods of low-precipitation rates. The processes we employ to grow the food we eat are factors leading to our future food shortages. A plate is symbolic of eating.
I’d use terracotta for this piece, and likely leave it unfired.
(photos from the bank of South Saskatchewan River, near Leader Sask, 2015)
2. A partner piece to the one above, a plate made to mimic flat pieces of sea ice
I’d use fired porcelain (polar ice, cone 6) with either no glaze or a transparent glaze that in an oxidized firing gives a blue hue.
I could imagine having slabs that mimic these sea ice forms set on a dinning table with tableware.
I’m less sure about how I’d connect the form of a plate to these pieces of ice. A cup would be a better form for this representation, but artistically, the shape of a plate is more suitable. Actually, the fact that people may not see the connection between arctic ice melt and our everyday life and survival needs (such as the food we put on our plate) is in itself an important issue to draw attention to. I’d have to think about this more.
3. A bowl shape formed of what looks like pieces of bleached coral.
As excessive carbon dioxide is absorbed into oceans, it lowers the water’s pH, making it more acidic and leading to coral bleaching.
This would be a piece that involves hand-building, and it would require considerable time and experimentation to achieve the look I’m after. I’d use unglazed polar ice porcelain for this piece.
There are several causes for biodiversity loss and the mass extinction event we are seeing, and climate change will become a major one of those issues as time goes on. Weakened by pesticides, mono-culture, and other anthropogenic changes to their environment, insects are weakened and particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change. We are experiencing what has come to be known as the insect apocalypse. This is not good for anyone alive on the planet.
I’d attempt to make this plate out of bees cast in fired porcelain slip, but I’d also consider leaving it as a plate shaped out of dead bees (no clay involved).
5. A plate that shows the edge of an undercut glacier
Glaciers are melting much faster than scientists have predicted, and one reason appears to be that they are becoming undercut by currents of warm water.
I can imagine a piece of porcelain in the shape of a glacier on one side that gradually morphs into the shape of a dinner plate on the other side.
6. a bowl with a single ridge of trees standing on its lip
Forests are in danger as a result of climate change for two main reasons: increases in forest fires due to drought and storms; mass movement of insects that destroy trees. The image below is what remains after clear cutting (not an effect of climate change), but I have this image in mind as I think about the precarity of our forests facing climate change.
I can imagine a bowl with a circle of trees coming out of its lip. Would they be burned? I don’t know yet. This isn’t a strong idea to begin with, but hey, it’s a sixth…
Here in the Canadian prairies, drought will likely be one of the largest and most devastating consequences of climate change as time passes. WaterCanada reports that
Canada faces its own land degradation challenges. Most people associate dryland regions with a hot and dry climate. However, large parts of the Canadian Prairie provinces—Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba — can be classified as drylands. They are also enormously important agricultural areas, accounting for 60 per cent of the cropland and 80 per cent of the rangeland in Canada.
The Prairies expect to see longer and more intense periods of drought interspersed with major flooding with future climate change. And although North America is one of five regions identified by the UN as facing relatively fewer challenges related to land compared to the countries most at risk, the region does face significant water stress challenges.
I can imagine this plate of dust which blows away (or simply crumbles on a plinth) being an apt representation of the situation we’re facing and will be facing more so in the near and distant future.
2. a stop motion video of one of my Saskatchewan Glacier cups disintegrating
The group of “snowflake cups” I made between 2019-2020 is my most successful work to date. Representing the fragility of the world’s glaciers at this time, the cups also draw a connection between the glaciers’ demise and our own survival: 80% of our drinking water in this part of Saskatchewan, for instance, is made up of mountain runoff.
I created a rough trial of this video in 2019, but I’ve been wanting to return to the idea and make it more successful.
3. a stack of fired porcelain plates on the brink of being destroyed
This idea is quite outrageous, but it’s one I came up with when pressed to find ten ideas in a week…
I imagine using a machine similar to one that I was recently introduced to in an episode of the Netflix show Sherlock. In this episode, “The Blind Banker,” we see a tool of ancient Chinese escapology in use. To quote from the website Kulture: Asian American Media Watchdog,
At 1:02:00, Sherlock, Watson and Sarah (Watson’s white date, played by Zoe Telford)) enter the tent of the Chinese circus in town. […] The act is supposed to be one of [an Asian man] escaping before being impaled by a crossbow’s bolt. The crossbow is attached to a delicate string that will deploy once weight is placed upon it. The Asian woman stabs a sandbag attached to a string an pulley that begins to lower a weight toward the delicate string attached to the crossbow.The three white heroes look onward at the seemingly bizarre cultural act.
This machine that I would construct would employ the idea of the sandbag rising as sand pours from a hole in its fabric. As it rises, another part of the contraption lowers. At a certain point, the part that is being lowered would trigger another weight to fall. This weight would land on a stack of porcelain plates, destroying them.
It’s a stretch, and so likely not a very good idea, but the sand loss would symbolize the planet’s sixth mass extinction that we are beginning to witness: grain by grain… species by species. The Guardianreported in 2017 that
A “biological annihilation” of wildlife in recent decades means a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and is more severe than previously feared, according to research.
At some point, the life systems that support us, and which we have been taking advantage of for centuries, are going to collapse to such a degree that our own survival is threatened. With the insect apocalypse I mention above, for instance, our pollinators are dying at such a rate that simply growing our crops will increasingly become a dire challenge.
4. a cup that keeps rising, filling, and sinking in a tank of water
The idea of a tank of water rising and emptying is one I take from an installation in Times Square, Holoscenes, in which performance artists took turns carrying out mundane daily tasks while in a 12 ton tank of water that would continuously fill and empty:
I imagine having a much smaller (10″x10″x18″ or so) tank of water with a cup inside of it that somehow (???) will continuously rise and fall. How can we keep our cup full and upright?
5. For an even wilder idea… a typhoon tank, similar to what we have at our local Science Centre, that people can add plates into which will immediately spiral and crash
I can’t find an image of the one we have here, but there is (or used to be) a plexiglass box near the stairs to the second floor of the Science Centre that had a crank people could use which would induce a mini whirlwind. As tornadoes are going to become more common in this part of Canada in the future, I can imagine employing something like this. Perhaps audience members could participate by somehow inserting a plate into the box to watch it smash? Yeah, pretty crazy. Hmmm.
That’s all I’ve had time to come up with. Let’s see if I carry out any of the above ideas over the next three months.
Quarmby, Lynne. Watermelon Snow: Science, Art, and a Lone Polar Bear. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000.
Risa gave me several great book and article recommendations this past term. A book that I made sure to read over the December break is Watermelon Snow. In it, Quarmby intertwines journal-like entries from her time on the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency (28 artists and two scientists on a tall ship sailing the International Territory of Svalbard), her work as a biologist, and her work as a climate change activist (she quotes from this article in the book, page 123). It’s a beautifully written and heartfelt account of an attempt to maintain some sense of wellness while learning about and combating the existential crisis that climate change presents. Thank you, Risa, for telling me about the book. It was also very cool to see your name mentioned in it (Risa was a member of the 2017 residency that Quarmby was on).
Quarmby tells us about the dilemma she had regarding whether or not to cross an injunction line and risk arrest (see article linked above). She was involved in a protest that was blocking access to Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion. She writes in Watermelon Snow:
“If I violated the injunction, it most certainly would be flagrant, and criminal charges could mean jail time or a large fine, and a criminal record that could cause difficulty crossing into the US, where my son Jacob lives. Friends advised that I really did not need to do this. I had done enough already and others could now step up. But then I called Jacob. After all, it was he who stood to lose his financial safety net if I were to lose my condo and my retirement savings. ‘Do it, Mom,’ he said. ‘There is nothing you could do for my future that is more important than this'” (126).
I took this section of the book especially to heart. I haven’t risked arrest yet, but I’ve considered it. I’ve been starting to get involved with a newly formed (still at a nascent stage) Saskatchewan group of Extinction Rebellion. I nearly went ahead with an idea I’d had for an act of non-violent civil disobedience. I was shocked to read what is considered against the law in Canada in Direct Action Works’ A Legal Handbook for Civil Disobedience and Non-violent Direct Action in Canada.
Even so much as singing or shouting (what I’d been planning to do for my action) is illegal: Causing a disturbance is a criminal offence, appearing in section 175(1) of the Criminal Code, and includes such actions in a public place as fighting, shouting, swearing, singing, using obscene or insulting language, obstructing people, or loitering” (81 Direct Action Works). I knew it was unlikely I’d be caught and charged, but this handbook did give me pause. Am I willing to be arrested for an act of protest in the name of climate change? The short answer is “no,” not now at least. I admire Quarmby very much for her courage and selflessness.
The following are several long citations from the last thirty pages of the book which I found most powerful and useful.
In our story so far [that of the evolution of complex life], some consider the emergence of consciousness to be the final grand leap. I wonder if the climactic grand leap in the dance of energy and life might have come when the most complex of the complex species discovered fossil fuels — carbon fixed into complex organic molecules by life that lived eons ago. The discovery of this energy source powered the development of industrialized civilization and simultaneously transformed Earth’s atmosphere. Will our dance with energy resolve with a beautiful pirouette and a surprising denouement? (138)
Sitting on the knoll, I wonder: which [artist] projects will come to fruition? What will the projects contribute? Who will be influenced? Much of what I am seeing perplexes and amuses me. I lack the knowledge or the vision to see where the work is going. […] Had I seen but not recognized Ai Weiwei lying on a pebble beach in Lesbos, in the pose of the now iconic image of the drowned Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, would I have dismissed Ai as crass or frivolous? It seemed silly when the four artists “walked” the polar bear print around the ice floe while a fifth made a video recording. Yet, in a few months I will see Adam’s slow-motion video of this walk and be moved more deeply than by any photographs of the living bear encountered on our hike. […] I felt nothing but amusement when watching the action in real time, but the eerie slow-motion animation elicits a deep sadness. It grows in me as I contemplate the care with which the carcass was moved, oiled, and printed, the artists who conceived of the return of the “bear” to the sea ice, and of course, the bear that died of starvation. Sometimes, it takes an unusual and provocative shift to knock us out of a flat response to a pervasive iconic image, like the polar bear. It occurs to me that the risks involved in experimenting with unusual and provocative shifts are akin tot he risks at the leading edges of science. (141-2)
For a long time, the production of this pollutant [oxygen] wasn’t a problem becasue tehre were lots of sinks to soak up the oxygen — iron, for example, rusting to red iron oxides. But eventually the sinks filled and oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere. Now at this time, methane was abundant in the atmosphere, and, being a powerful greenhouse gas, methane was keeping the earth warm. When oxygen reacted with the methane, carbon dioxide, a much less potent greenhouse gas, was produced, and the earth began to coll. The earth cooled so dramatically it entered a global ice age known as Snowball Earth. […] And so it was that the discovery by cyanobacteria of an awesome new way to make a proton gradient ended up poisoning the atmosphere and triggering massive climate change. This was likely the first mass extinction of life on Earth. Some lineages, including the cyanobacteria, squeaked through. We have no idea what evolutionary inventions might have been lost, but life survived. The cyanobacteria couldn’t have known the consequences of their discovery, nor could they have changed course had they known. Now we are the species remodeling the planet by dumping carbon dioxide, the waste product of our energy consumption, into the atmosphere. We know what we’re doing and it’s within our abilities to change course. (143-4)
And yet, as I look at the eerily peaceful storybook depiction of a Yangtze River dolphin, I feel sick to my stomach. The dolphin in question is now extinct. I flip through the book and see science infused with [Douglas] Adams’s quirky humour. A world tour to see species on the cusp of extinction — to raise awareness, but also, I suspect, because it was something the authors wanted to do. The book was published in 1990. Does this make it okay in the way that, if one is so inclined, it can be easier to forgive an old man his misogyny? I am not in a forgiving mood. I am repulsed by the book — not by the authors or by a text I haven’t read, but by the extinctions we are causing, and by what has since become a thing: extinction tourism. And now I feel called out — by my own thoughts, by Brett handing me this book [Last Chance to See]. Here I am. Here we are. I close the book and hand it back to Brett, who has been watching all of this play out on my face. He smiles and says softly, “I knew you’d understand.” He gently reshelves the book. Has he just executed a small and personal act of art? (145-6)
I explain the greenhouse effect and then show the Keeling Curve, direct daily measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958. (147)
The lens of cold fresh water off Greenland is contributing to a weakening of the critically important major Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). If AMOC stalls, the implications are enormous, including extremely cold winters in Europe, hotter summers and extended droughts in Africa, and more-rapid sea level rise for the eastern US. We’re facing loss of species, especially in the oceans, but also on land, as climatic regions shift faster than species can migrate or adapt. (So far, the accelerated rate of extinctions is due to habitat fragmentation and pollution. Climate-related extinctions are just beginning.) Related to all of these things, we’re already seeing increased famine, human migration, and war. We’re facing radical changes in our weather systems, with severe impacts on human civilization. It’s happening now and it will continue to get worse. How fast it gets worse and how bad it gets is up to us. (149)
[Upon finishing a talk to the members of the residency about the science of climate change] I’ve presented the problem and its urgency. I’ve connected the dots from fossil fuels to carbon dioxide to consequences that affect us all. What comes next is important, but my confidence flags. People always want to know what to do. Sometimes, the awareness of all that I could be doing can weigh me down to the point of not being able to act at all. I refuse to be prescriptive — individual responses to different solutions vary dramatically. And that is okay because climate change is a complex problem — it requires us to pull together, towards the same goals, but not necessarily doing the same things. My approach is to open the floor at this point and allow solutions to emerge, as they always do. (149)
The conversations have fragmented and I pull us back together for a wrap-up. I emphasize that one of the most important things we can do is to talk about climate change. By working to reduce our own personal footprints, we inspire and motivate others to action, both personal and political. I emphasize that individual behavioural change, however diligent and widespread, isn’t enough. Nor is it necessarily something we should expect form everyone. It is only with regulatory changes, new policies, and cultural shifts that we can build a society where low carbon choices are the easy, appealing choices. If we don’t take back the power, corporations will continue to dictate environmental regulations and policy that favours pollution on a scale that wipes our all of the individual and community good we might do — pollution in service of enriching the rich. (151)
At the end of the day, politicians work for us. We hire them with our votes and with our votes they get to keep their jobs. The failure of our politicians is our failure. In her TED talk, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says that the most important action we can take is to talk about climate change. I think that she is right. The more of us who understand the urgency, the more likely we are to hire political leaders willing to pull with us instead of against us. Participatory democracy requires participation. (152)
For the past decade I’ve been, perhaps, a bit manic with fear. When I finally understood the magnitude and urgency of global warming, I panicked. I felt a tremendous weight of moral responsibility to act, to join the climate justice movement and do everything in my power to help humanity change course. I gave it everything I had until I had nothing left to give. Yet, the situation remains urgent and some days it feels not much has changed, or that some things are changing, but much too slowly. Gradually, I’ve become aware that global warming will define not just the present, but the entirety of my remaining life. (159)
I breathe and watch the water appear at the top of the ramparts and cascade down its short but spectacular life as a waterfall; the water bounces up briefly as it strikes the scree and then falls again and disappears underground. Only now do I see that this Arctic trip has been like a “celebration of life” for ice. I think of this new gang of mine, standing together on the deck of the Antigua listening to the bearded seals singing to one another under the fast ice of Raudfjorden. There was joy and celebration in our exclamations of surprise, laughter, and fellowship as we shared the astonishing experience of summer sea ice. Some of us shared sadness when we awoke to find ourselves tethered to a much smaller ice floe than we had played on the day before. We all delighted in the immensity of the glaciers, the ethereal sky-blue glow of some bergy bits, the tinkling sounds of a bay filled with ice from a crumbling glacier, the reverberating gunshot and splash of calving. Every day, we celebrated ice. And every day there was sorrow at how much a glacier had retreated, at the sight of a polar bear in distress. (160)
Change is motivated by connecting on values, not by sharing data. (163)
When I raise the issue of the carbon cost of air travel [at meetings back at work] and suggest alternatives, the room is quiet. I would like to see us shift from a financial budget to a carbon budget. I am politely listened to, there are a few murmers of “Good idea” and “Yes, we should think about that,” and then we are on to the next item on the agenda. Have I become the crone who is politely given space to speak, and then is ignored? I feel like screaming, “Wake up!” I think of my great-grandfather stuck in his cabin, “I am near crazy for being such a fool.” But then I let it go. I don’t choose to fight this battle. (166)
I thought my job was to take care of myself and recover from burnout so I could once again be my warrior self, defending polar bears, microbes, and the generations of humans that follow, but it isn’t as simple as that. In the process of reading my journals and assembling this chronicle, I became aware of my growing irritability, low-grade depression, and sense of separation from others. Burnout to be sure, but also a failure to process grief. How does one mourn something so big and abstract and at the same time profoundly personal: the world my son will inherit, the loss of the rich, old-growth forests of my youth, the loss of summer sea ice? What would healthy grief look like? Lately, I have found some peace — at least intermittently — and I’ve noticed a richer quality to life. But I can only do this a little at a time. I am terrified by the thought of opening myself to this grief. I’ve leaned heavily on an evolutionary perspective, an intelligent grieving that may not adequately release me. I am keen to turn my attention to a painting project because I am curious whether the more visceral experience of that form might take my grief to a new place, but that too, I know, is missing something important. (169)
There’s no denying the darkenss of what the cheater class has done to our planet. Acknowledging the constant pain that comes with that knowledge has been part of my healing. Letting go of my investment in particular outcomes has also been important. (169-70)
Hope and despair are ephemeral. What matters, is we have found a way to live well, however desperate the reality of our times. (170) (last page of the book)
Visual Arts MFA students at the U of R receive an incredible amount of attention from the faculty. At least four times throughout their program, they must go through an “end of semester review” in which they give a 15-minute presentation about the work they’ve done over the term followed by a 45-minute Q&A session with the entire Visual Arts faculty. I had my first such review this past week, and it was an amazingly useful experience. The faculty asked me extremely apropos questions and made very insightful comments. Below are the questions that each faculty member asked me (I had a fellow student, Raegan Moynes, as my note-taker, and I’m grateful to her fast typing) with some further thoughts I’ve had in response since the review took place.
For some context, I ended my presentation with the following questions:
For myself:
What am I trying to achieve through my art practice?
What role do I want clay and performance to have in this practice?
For the committee:
Is it feasible to attempt to become good at using two different media/approaches to art-making in a MFA program?
David Garneau’s question:
It seems to me that the performances were almost complete disasters… using plastic signs, to not being in shape for the hurdles, to not having any audiences, etc… you may say there are other ways to evaluate things, but if you’re going to be a successful performer, audience engagement is essential, unless its a solipsistic exercise for the sake of documentation for a talk or something.
In Group Studio, you cited at least two eloquent environmental practices as models, so how would you engage performance towards those models and how you would solve the problem you ask us: bring ceramics and performance together, or as separate activities? What have you come to in the last six weeks?
I’m still not fully able to answer this question, but I’m getting a sense of the type of performance ideas which are most successful: they are completely clear and very simple. Their point is succinct. As I mentioned when we chatted after class one day, thinking about Occam’s razor is useful. The idea should be so simple that at the most all one needs to say is “climate change” and viewers would get the work’s message. Ideally, even saying that should be unnecessary. Unless the work is interactive or dialogic, or unless the point is the follow-up media attention only, the message the performer is making should be immediately obvious to any viewer.
An idea such as Eve S. Mosher’s of drawing a line to show where water will rise to is almost immediately clear. Mosher’s objective was to spark questions about what she was doing while doing it that would invite conversation on climate change. By the way, it seems others have had the same idea of using a line to mark where water levels will rise to as an effect of climate change. At least two I’ve discovered this term are Lines (57° 59’N, 7° 16’W) (2018) and Chris Bodle’s Watermark (2009).
Performances that do not invite questions or conversation from viewers in this way need to have an even more obvious message unless the artist doesn’t mind there being ambiguity “on the street” because they expect media attention to spread the point they are making. Perhaps they figure that by becoming well known people will immediately associate their work with this issue. As Sherry said, if you’re the best at something, you can advocate for it. For instance, Stein Henningson’s performances are beautifully simple, yet not all are obvious enough to guarantee that all viewers would know the work is about climate change. A few are slightly more abstract, such as Guangzhao Live 2 (2017).
I don’t know if or how Henningsen informs viewers that his work is about climate change. There is no title up on a gallery wall, obviously. Unlike in Mosher’s piece, which is meant to engage people in conversation, in the examples of Henningson’s performances I’ve watched online, he just begins and ends them without explaining the work or inviting any dialogue. Would viewers chat among themselves… such as:
“what’s this all about?”
“I dunno. Maybe climate change?”
“Oh, yeah, must be.”
One performance I’ve come across that may be clear enough without any title, text, or conversation was a piece by a group of protesters in Germany who stood on ice blocks with a noose around their necks. I think that people would immediately understand what they’re doing, but I’m sure there are still some who wouldn’t.
It seems they encountered a few negative responses after the action that raise interesting issues with this type of work. I myself wouldn’t necessarily do something that is as “doom and gloom” as this, knowing what I know about how people respond to such messages (they don’t prompt viewers to take engage in this issue as much as works depicting solutions to it do). This piece, put on by student activists, also raises the question of deciphering which events are considered “performance art” and which are considered activist “actions,” a question that Sherry Farrell-Racette raised during my review.
Holoscene (2017) was an installation of a tank of water in Times Square in which performers would carry out everyday tasks, such as making a bed, as the tank filled and emptied with water.
Again, this installation would likely need to have some text or announcement telling viewers it’s about climate change, right? If not, people walking by think it’s speaking to a host of issues such as depression or anxiety, right? Or perhaps this could be interpreted as an artistic work without a “message.” So, basically, what I need to find out if and how all of the above mentioned works communicate that their point is climate change.
I’m also considering a few installation works that make their message in close to entirely black-and-white terms. For instance, in Reduce Speed Now (2019), Justin Brice Guariglia placed ten large solar powered LED highway message boards throughout the courtyard of London’s Somerset House that broadcast messages about the climate crisis in the words of Greta Thunburg, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton and other concerned thinkers and writers.
What I find interesting about this piece is that it isn’t in the slightest afraid of bible-thumping of being “didactic.” On the contrary, it’s purposefully hitting us over the head with its message in the most direct way possible. These are highway signs — their sole purpose is to convey a message that is essential for our safety or the safety of others. What a perfect medium for conveying the dangers we are facing with climate change.
Another installation that broadcasts a very clear message is Climateclock (2020) — a large (60-foot wide) digital clock counting down how much time we have remaining before we’ll have burned through our “carbon budget” that would keep the world to “only” 1.5 degrees average warming. Photo source.
Here, scale is important to the work. In terms of aligning this to performance-type actions, I think of Extinction Rebellion’s projects where they scale buildings to drop banners with their logo or other messages. Once again, this is work that could be called art if the organizer wanted to…
Olafur Eliasson’s Icewatch (2014), while problematic (carbon footprint), is also understood with very little-to-no explanation. but for those who don’t have climate change on their mind, I’m assuming that some text, even just the title, would be necessary for them to know the significance of the work. Photo source.
Again, these are very straightforward pieces to understand — a quality that I’d like to emulate in my work going forward. As for whether I’ll incorporate ceramics into performance, I’m not sure yet.
I can imagine ceramic installations on the subject of climate change, such as Courtney Mattison’s (written about in “5 Art Installations about Climate Change We Should Be Talking About”) more easily than I can imagine combining ceramics with performance on this subject, but I’m sure that’s just because I’m too exhausted right now to come up with any idea of what that could really be. Photo source.
All in all, this is a great question, David, and likely one that I’ll be considering for a long time.
Rob Truszkowski’s question:
I think you’ve started to address this…. it may possibly be on the minds of others. Is art the best way to reach a wider audience? How do you know?
This is an excellent question and one I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve asked myself if I should quit spending time doing art and devote all I’ve got to hardcore activism. If I had more time on my hands, I’d get things moving with Extinction Rebellion in Saskatchewan. (I’m one of a handful of people trying to do this, but there just isn’t the people-power at the moment to get it anywhere right now). Or perhaps I should become a politician? The founder of EnviroCollective just became a city Councilor because she believes this is the best way to make the most change one person can make.
So why devote so much time to building myself up as an artist? I have two parts to this answer. The first is simple: I enjoy making art, and I think I am good at it (or getting there at least). As I told the Grad Committee at my review, I especially miss making stuff. I don’t want to give that part of my life up.
My second answer is that art can be an effective form of activism. Throughout this semester, I’ve been gathering websites of organizations and artists who use art for activist purposes. I’ve come across the terms “artivist” and “craftivism.” I see this marriage of art + activism as not only a way for me to continue producing art, but also a way for me to affect some positive change in the world.
I’ve learned this semester that that the latter point is controversial. David asked me what my goal is with my art. Looking at my notes from my Group Studio class on October 23rd, I see he put it something like this: “If your goal is to fix climate change, you’ll fail.” He told me that art is futile at achieving a goal (example: reducing climate change). Instead, my goal should be participation (if I’m undertaking participatory art). I know, however, that others disagree (nothing new there). For instance, there is an organization called The Center for Artistic Activism:
The Center for Artistic Activism trains and advises organizations, artists and activists to help them increase the efficacy and affecacy of their artistic activism. We conduct innovative research to figure out what exactly efficacy and affecacy mean when it comes to artistic activist projects. And we share our trainings and research findings broadly, to provide the broadest possible access.
Artistic activism thrives in the contemporary landscape
Artistic activism has been used throughout history
Artistic activism creates openings
Artistic activism is accessible
Artistic activism stimulates a culture of creativity
Artistic activism energizes people and organizations
Artistic activism is about the long game
Artistic activism is peaceful and persuasive
I see value in these reasons they give for why art can be an effective form of activism. I understand that this doesn’t automatically mean that activism can be art or that all “artivism” is good art, but that’s an entirely different point.
Another group I’ve discovered is Artists and Climate Change. Their “about” page begins with this paragraph that sums up what I’ve been feeling is the reason why art should — must — be involved in the fight for greater climate change action:
In 2005, in an article titled “What the Warming World Needs Now Is Art, Sweet Art,” 350.org founder Bill McKibben wrote that although we knew about climate change, we didn’t really know about it; it wasn’t part of the culture yet. “Where are the books? The plays? The goddamn operas?” he asked. An intellectual understanding of the scientific facts was not enough – if we wanted to move forward and effect meaningful change, we needed to engage the other side of our brains. We needed to approach the problem with our imagination. And the people best suited to help us do that, he believed, were the artists.
A group I’ve admired since I discovered them about a year ago is Project Pressure. I LOVE this group. It’s a non-profit designed specifically to support artists whose work represents or responds to melting glaciers. I’ve quoted from their “about” page in past presentations I’ve given:
Project Pressure is a charity with a mission to visualize the climate crisis. We use art as a positive touch-point to inspire action and behavioural change. Unlike wildfires and flooding, glaciers are not part of the weather system and when looking at glacier mass loss over time, one can see the result of global heating. This makes glaciers key indicators of the climate crisis and the focus of our work.
There are so many other organizations I could list here, but the above three should suffice to show that there are certainly people out there who believe that art is an essential tool in the climate change action-inspiring toolkit. On top of such organizations are the many artists whose work is on this subject, of course. I’ve created a long list of artists whose statements or other writing on this topic I could quote here. I’ll just pick two.
I remember reading a New York Times article in the summer of 2019 (thanks, Mike) about the work of David Opdyke. The title of the paper edition, which I have up in my studio, was “Feeling Dismal? Do Something.” In it, Lawrence Weschler writes, quoting Opdyke:
“For years I’ve been feeling the need to do something about the dismal future into which we all seem to be sleepwalking. And yet,” he paused before continuing, “I’m constantly haunted by worry. Can such artistic gestures ever really make any difference, especially given the sheer scale of the challenge?” Reminded of Auden’s line to the effect that “Art makes nothing happen,” Mr. Opdyke seemed to rally, countering, “Yeah, but Eudora Welty says that ‘Making reality real is art’s responsibility,’ and maybe that’s what most needs doing now: making the stakes involved in our current crisis real and tangibly visible for people. One ends up hoping that pieces like this might propel the urgent changes in vision, one person at a time, necessary to provoke an appropriate mass response.”
All of us know the experience of being moved by a piece of music, a book, or a painting. Such works of art serve as an impulse that leaves its mark on us. Experiencing art is not a matter of learning something new; rather, it allows us to discover something in us with which we suddenly identify, and through the connection we establish, we are better able to express who we are.
I believe in this, and my guess is that nearly all artists do. In our Group Studio course on September 18th, David said (quoting directly): “most art makes us see things we already know in a new way.” Perhaps, then, he does see the potential for using art as a form of activism? I’m not sure. I’d also like to ask Rob more about his opinion on this subject.
In addition to these organizations and artists who view art as an effective means of activism, I’m also aware of a growing body of theory and criticism on this type of work, such as:
“Climate Change and Visual Imagery” (2014) by Saffron J. O’Neill and Nicholas Smith
“Climate Change and the Imagination” (2011) by Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys.
“Representing, Performing and Mitigating Climate Change in Contemporary Art Practice” (2012) by Gabriella Giannachi
Just to list three articles.
There are also, of course, entire classes being taught on the psychology of climate change (I never did have a chance to speak with Dr. Katherine Arbuthnott this past term… perhaps in the next). There are so many resources out there for one such as my self who wants to know how to “use” art (but still actual art) to help with this cause, that I’ve just barely skimmed the tip of the iceberg.
Rob’s follow up comment:
I’m thinking through… is there a middle path? Is that a path you even want? Swing hard to activism that uses art/activism that uses art, to all the way to the other side — solitary practice, make things, that personal connection. Is there a middle path, or is that what you want? Not asking you for an answer. It’s just really clear, even in how you’re articulating what you’ve been doing and even what you want to do… it’s an ongoing struggle and one you’re going to have to contend with. I look forward to seeing the answer to this question in another semester from now.
That’s another great question/point, Rob. Actually, it’s the basis for the question I asked the committee myself: Is it feasible to become good at using two different media/approaches to art-making in a MFA program? Should I attempt to use more than one medium (ceramics and performance for now, perhaps others later) because I feel that it’s necessary to engage in different practices for different but equally necessary purposes (nourishing myself; spreading the word to as many people as possible)? I hope I’ll have an answer to this question soon — at least an answer that is sufficient to see me through this program, as I’m sure you’re right that it’s a question I’ll be asking for a very long time.
Larissa Tiggelers’ question:
You’ve talked about failure. Can failure itself be a subject for you? Rather than the question of escaping failure or if failure can be generative beyond creating more questions. Can failure be generative?
A very interesting question, Larissa. I answered during the review that I’ve thought about failure this semester, and that’s true — I’ve thought about the failure of my performances, but also about our collective failure to address climate change when we needed to (at least 50 years ago) or sufficiently in more recent time (and even now… we continue to fail). However, I hadn’t actually thought about making failure the explicit subject of my work. I think Stein Henningsen is also considering this subject when he attempts to create a glacier by bringing pieces of ice that have broken off of one back to their source (How to Build a Glacier (2014)). Thank you for the question — I’m going to hold onto it.
Holly Fay’s question:
I’m wondering if some of this is the need to give yourself permission to be an artist that is interested in making art.
As I said in the review, Holly, this is a very loaded question. The short answer is: yes. I’m someone who was raised to take care of others: I took care of my severely mentally ill mother in what was supposed to be my childhood. I still like to take care of people, and perhaps my environmentalism is connected to that impulse. Therefore, doing something just “for me” (throwing pots in this case) would go against that impulse. On top of that is the fact that I am sincerely very concerned about the state of our planet. Actually, I’m sickened by the situation. If I can make even a tiny move (“one inch”) towards changing it for the better, I’d rather do that than do nothing. The question is, how to be effective but also sustain myself at the same? Believing that I’m “doing good” may give me a boost (I don’t believe in altruism), but it’s frankly not nearly enough to make up for how terrible I feel about our environmental destruction, and facing that topic with all my energy is as exhausting emotionally as jumping hurdles is physically.
SherryFarrell-Racette’s question:
A couple of things. One is I don’t think it’s a binary, not a question of two opposites that you need to choose or even that there’s a middle ground. You are a whole person and you have these expressions. When I was looking at performance art… as art maybe it wasn’t awesome, but as a performative action they were really interesting. The labels are important. I would encourage you to think about… I’m a beader… right? and being an activist… being an aware of the grim facts environmentalist in this moment … is very similar to being an Indigenous woman in this moment… it’s hard to hold onto hope. It’s hard to find the path hang onto hope… when we look backward we look to our ancestors… For me, making, is the way we put ourselves back together. It’s not one or the other. If this is how you are in the world… If you look at your making… it’s the way you put yourself back together. These things are related. When you showed inspiration photos… that communicates how you want to honour the earth. This is as important as attending a million meetings… if you can create an enhanced awareness… It’s like Georgia O’Keefe. I don’t see the split or it’s a choice. You are a whole person and this is how you are in the world…. I’d like to see you move forward. Don’t see making as “making.” Maybe making is what you need to do now. But you’ll never stop being environmentally concerned. It’s a cycle of creativity… out into the world, back into the clay, into the world, back to the clay.
We also have to look after ourselves. Throwing ourselves against the glass wall. Just move things over an inch. Think of different ways of doing it. Don’t underestimate the power of art to introduce ideas. It is often subtle and takes a long time. But I encourage you.
Wow. I was blown away by this feedback. I don’t know how to respond it it more than I did in the moment by saying that I agree we are complicated, and the situation (climate change) is complicated, so therefore neither can my response to it be simple.
More than anything, I felt a tremendous honour to be spoken to in this way, as though I really am an artist. When you said that we can’t constantly be “throwing ourselves against the glass wall,” I couldn’t really believe that you and I are in the same category as I’m still not able to consider myself an artist (not even close), but I definitely did feel encouraged. Thank you, Sherry.
Ruth Chamber’s comment:
Remember how long it took you to throw pots? If you put that time into performance, they will get better. I wouldn’t write off performance. I would draw that analogy between how long it took you to gain that skill…. That is also tied to your pairing with the material….. performance idea. The performance ideas are going to be as hard to arrive at without a lot of work. I just wanted to point that out. Not a question.
As I said in reply, (quoting Raegan’s notes of what I said), I don’t understand how you become good at performance… I feel like I could have a great idea that hits the mark, or I could have many ideas come to me that are not so great. Should I carry out those ideas? Is it like clay that you learn from doing… or is it futile to do so?
David’s follow-up comment:
Ruth has it exactly right. You have to do 500 performances to get as good as 500 pots. The idea is not the thing, its only part of the thing. I have pop song ideas…. Lol… However, you already have a strength you’ve worked up. You can parle that over. For instance, you could walk all the way to clay banks and you could come up with a solar kiln that doesn’t work… you can replace friends’ plastic with ceramics. That’s a life practice. It is not about the practice, it is a practice doomed to failure. It’s an enduring thought. Every artwork is failed project! The notion of modern art being failed projects… Climate change is the subject of your practice, not the point of practice. Blow yourself up if you want attention. That is not the subject of art. It’s just a possibility of art. If so, make it the documentation.
Your practice begins with ceramics. You have the therapeutic, you have the conceptual practice… It was never finished. It has extended life. It’s a performative object: it’s fragility; its domed failure. It was good conceptual art but bad pottery. Paul Mathieu was on about that. How to make something eloquent and also deconstruct at same time.
A robust practice here. You can separate them into good performance art and good activism and good pottery but by setting a task to bring together with different forms (object/performance/writing/broadcasting) it can be more holistic. It can be a more elegant problem to solve. The lead of the crafting is so important. Skill is important. And notion that skill is important. You can’t just go in with a good idea.
The truth is, David, I don’t really understand what you mean by saying that “every artwork is a failed project.” I’ve heard you all term nudging me to continue with ceramics as I’ve already developed some skill in that area (the soup kitchen analogy…). I think what you’re saying is that I need to have that same level of skill for each approach I take in my work, but also that I should see all of these approaches as one holistic practice. That’s all that I can get from this… and I hope to have the chance to speak with you more to better understand what you were saying.
Sean Whalley’s comment:
The most important thing is there is a real disconnect between your expectations, what you believe your art practice to be and the outcomes… These need to come together in a holistic way. Maybe the trips come in to the practice? Being in the space could be your practice. You have to acknowledge that that is enough. Living in a way that resists what you are raging against…. is an act in itself. All of those things are acts. You can’t separate those things out. You keep wanting to separate those things out.
Pick something that you really want to focus on. Ex. Another type of performance piece. You could try to cut Wascana park with scissors. Polluters… lawnmowers. Maybe you need an objective to focus on.
As Sherry said, the best ways to garner attention is to get attention. If you become the best at something, you can advocate for it. Don’t re-invent your practice or your thinking. Really big challenge.
A very good bit of wisdom, Sean. I think there are parts of what you’ve said that I don’t fully understand. I think that in some way at least your point is similar to David’s — to understand myself and my practice as interwoven and holistic. I would love to get the chance to speak with you some day in the near future. Regarding the disconnect between my expectations and my outcomes… I know. I have much to work ahead of me.
Risa Horowitz’s question:
We’ve been working very closely together. We began conversations in summer. You your original studies had nothing to do with art…. did the Post Bac on ceramics, and where you go to after House on Fire was — I can’t extract more from earth for art. I put a strategic challenge to you which was, well, what if you didn’t? You hadn’t thought about performance before that. I challenged you to try something immaterial, and you rolled with it with courage and rigor/vigor. no one has said, why are you don’t performance. Question – do you have regrets trying these immaterial practices?
How could I (MUFFLED)
Strategic challenge: to try something that was immaterial. You did it with courage… So, you’ll notice no one has said why are you doing performance?
My answer, which I hope you predicted, Risa, is “no.” I don’t regret trying performance.
Quotations from: Mathieu, Paul. “Object Theory.” In The Ceramics Reader, edited by Andrew Livingstone & Kevin Petrie, 268-76. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Object making is probably the oldest making activity of humankind and we can speculate that it preceded the development of language and the making of images. (268)
Yet the history of art is still largely the history of images, of things that are visually experienced, or visual art. Objects are quite simply ignored. (268)
An image, in the narrow yet specific definition I am using here, is a cultural (as opposed to natural) phenomenon experienced through sight alone, visually. A painting is an image, a photograph is an image, a sculpture is also an image, a tridimensional image but an image nonetheless. (269)
In the world of material/visual culture (all those things humans do to nature), there is another category of things that are not experienced solely through sight, visually, and which do not necessarily necessitate language either, but which require other senses, primarily but not exclusively touch, for a complete experience and full understanding. These things are what I call here “objects.” (169)
If there is a remaining place where ignorance, prejudice, discrimination, segregation and censorship still exist within the experience of art, it is specifically where handmade objects are concerned, and although this is slowly changing but there is still a significant way to go for parity. (269)
This visual experience is one of distanciation, of removal, of separation. Sight establishes difference as rupture, as an oppression. This is even more truth within representation. (270)
Objects are of two main types: TOOLS, which are active (the conceptual aspect of tools is function) and CONTAINERS, which are receptive (the conceptual aspect of containers is containment; that is to say, they establish a transition between interior and exterior, but it is important to keep in mind that this transition does not imply an opposition but a continuity). (270)
What is the main characteristic shared by all objects (with the exception of those objects which are primarily tools) in whatever form they take, independent of materials, of the process, tools, equipment and technologies used in their making, or even when and by whom they where [sic] made? My answer is that at the CONCEPTUAL level, all objects are CONTAINERS. They are articulated around the transition between exterior and interior. Containment has to do with the relationship between the object and its environment. Containment bridges an object with its environment. (270-71)
Objects are always inherently material, inherently abstract and inherently conceptual and these three aspects are equally important and thus, they resist hierarchisation conceptually, beyond market value and consumerism. Of all material practices, ceramics is the most intimately informed by this theoretical and conceptual framework, in its conflation of a volumetric form with a distinct surface. (271)
Here again ceramics is particularly sensitive to this relation to time, in its amazing permanency as possibly the best archival material ever devised, as the memory of humankind. (274)
Handmade objects contest the contemporary and void the apparent cultural consensus. In handmade objects we find the last traces of what we use to call “work” (beyond agriculture, yet for reasons as vital as producing food) and the last place where effort in use still exists, non-mechanical and non-mediated. And the last place where contestation and subversion is still possible in the cultural sphere. To make an object by hand is a profoundly political act. (275)
[Objects] imply a complexity that exists beyond language and beyond theory, this beyond the reach of those who are confined by language and by theory. Images are complicated, they need to be explained, to be fictionalized and they are thus the privileged domain of theory. Objects are much less complicated but much more complex. And this complexity resists language and resists theory. Yet a theory of objects, and object theory remains essential if we are to reexamine and reevaluate , reassess and reposition the important role played by objects within culture. (275)
Quotations from: Burisch, Nicole. “Craftivism: Reevaluating the Links Between Craft and Social Activism” In Contemporary Ceramics Practice, edited by Ruth Chambers, Amy Gogarty & Mireille Perron, 155-172. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008.
Recent writing about craft theory and history includes references to historical connections between craft and social justice issues, suggesting ways in which contemporary craft practices can continued to be considered this way. (156)
The growing number of people using the term “craftivism” also suggests that it is time to consider what this new movement might mean for contemporary craft practices as well as its effectiveness as an activist strategy. (156)
[…] craftivism has encouraged something of a democratization of craft, creating a situation in which anyone can participate and in which distinctions between “high” and “low” craft are purposely subverted or ignored. (157)
I have chosen to take the most inclusive view possible of what constitutes activism. Calgary activist Grand Neufeld suggests that activism can take place in many different forms and can also involve many small actions. […]: “someone who encourages their neighbor not to put pesticides on their lawn is an activist, someone who calls up their city councilor and says they would rather see more money go to bicycle paths than to roads, their an activist. People doing what they’re able to do … buying local, fair-traded objects, voting with your dollars, slowing down” (Neufeld Interview). (158)
William Morris wrote extensively about the conditions of workers and the rights of all people to have “work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious” (Morris “Art and Socialism). (159)
By practicing craft, people could work outside the dehumanizing effects of factory labour […]. Hand-crafted objects and those who make them could thus be seen as opposing machine-made goods and the factories that produced them. In this model, fine craft objects and an important symbolic role: they represent the possibility of work that is not “over-wearisome,” that is creative and fulfilling and nothing like the drudgery of working in factories. (159)
This symbolic view of craft, though significant, has little to offer in the way of actual tools or strategies for how to use craft practices to remedy problems of the factory system. (159)
Notes the example of Gandhi “using spinning as a way to protest British control over the Indian textiles economy at the turn of the twentieth century.” (160)
[…] craft’s suitability as a tool for opposing and critiquing the dominant capitalist/consumerist model. (161)
[…] it is perhaps more useful to think of the voting-with-your dollars strategy as one possible component of an activist approach, and to acknowledge the enormous significance of proactive hands-on involvement with other political or humanitarian actions. (163)
Alternatively, reducing overall consumption and waste by investing in high-quality reusable goods — using a ceramic mug instead of Styrofoam, for example — is both cost-effective and sustainable. (163)
The idea of voting-though-spending places the power — and the responsibility — with the consumer. Although it involves the participation of the crafts producers, it does so indirectly, and it still does not answer the question of how craft producers themselves can respond to issues of responsible/conspicuous consuming. (163)
Lisa Barry: “Random Acts of Pottery” (163-64)
While Barry sees these muggings as an excellent opportunity to introduce people to the aesthetic merits of handmade objects, they also represent a way of subverting the values of the current consumption model […]. (164)
The face-to-face interactions created through these muggings provide a space for dialogue and education. Barry has found a powerful tool with these muggings, a form of ceramics-activism that positions her mugs to address issues ranging from over-consumption to ecologically sustainable products to ways we value objects. (164)
One important question that remains about viewing ceramics through the lens of activism is the ecological impact of making things in this way. Granted, reusing a ceramic mug is a far better choice than using Styrofoam, but what are the ecological costs associated with mining clay and glaze ingredients, using gas to fire kilns and using water as it is often used? (165)
Regardless of whether ceramics is to be included as an activist activity, ceramics — and all craft producers — must consider how their materials are obtained and processed and the cumulative impact of their studio practices. (165)
Although I do not have the space to address the issue fully here, there is undoubtedly a need for further investigation of the ecological impacts and concerns of working with clay.
Mary Ann!
Robert Lyon — “mixes dextrine, a starch derivative adhesive, into his clay so that he does not have to fire his pieces (Joiner 31). His work addresses issues of recycling and natural processes, and he aims through his work “to foster an awareness” of ecological concerns (Joiner 32). (165)
About an ethical consideration of “fine craft”: “There is a great discrepancy between the economic and cultural value of a basket made by a craftsperson in the West functioning within an arts marketplace and a basket from an anonymous maker in the developing world (equally labour intensive) purchased for a few dollars at a dollar store or local market” (40). *Ingrid Bachmann — “New Craft Paradigms.” (166)
Although Matt Nolen uses traditional ceramic forms, the surfaces of these forms are covered with images addressing various political and social issues from credit card debt to depletion of the ozone layer. (167)
[…] Canadian First Nations artist Judy Chartrand, whose ceramic lard pails and spray cans reference stereotypes in advertising and labelling in order to critique the portrayal and treatment of Native Americans. (167)
[…] Adelaide Paul‘s mixed-media ceramic works subtly question how we treat and view animals […] (167)
I would suggest that the use of ceramics as a vehicle for analyzing, discussing, critiquing and subverting particular social issues by certain artists qualifies them as activists in the broad sense of the word. The emphasis in their work in terms of activism, however, is less on the materials of their craft and more on the messages they communicate. (168)
While some fine crafters engage in craftivism through the content of their work, many activist crafters focus instead on how their work is deployed. (168)
These creative approaches can bring an element of fun and theatre into what often ends up being “quasi-militaristic marches culminating in placard waving outside locked government buildings” (Klein Fences, 125) (168) *Klein, Naomi. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. New York: Picador, 2002.
Grant Neufeld points out that when he is knitting, and people approach him to ask him what he is doing, he is able to initiate dialogue about activist issues outside of a protest context. (168)
Parallel’s Eve S. Mosher’s statement about Highwaterline.
Many of these textile-based craftivists rely on the suitability of their particular material or processto help promote their cause. Textile work seems to be one of the most easily transportable, affordable, teachable and accessible forms of craft to use for public protests, teach-ins and discussion groups. I have yet to encounter any examples of ceramics being used in a similar way, although I would not dismiss the possibility. (169)
Clay has been used to subversive ends in Lost in the Supermarket project. […] to recreate in clay various standard supermarket items like bottles of dish soap and cans of dog food. The asymmetrical and distorted recreations were snuck back onto the shelves of the store. (169) […] Possibly, they prompt a moment of shock or surprise or an increased awareness of the packaging, marketing and production of these commodities. (170)
The spirit of this anthology derives from the editors’ shared belief that craft practices — in this case, ceramics — contribute to the development, support and diffusion of speculative models and creative endeavors that envision a better world. By framing particular ceramic practices as “utopic impulses,” we hope to foster new and stimulating conceptions of their contribution to the social and political fabric of their time. (ix)
Example of Cedric Price’s proposed project, “The potteries Thinkbelt” (1964-65) — “converting the declining English Potteries into a comprehensive, high-tech hands-on think tank, a visionary model for learning, living and working in a post-industrial society.” (x)
Medalta is another example of a socially conscious pottery project: “It similarly recycles and redeploys the apparatus of a bygone industrial era, making it available to the public […].” (xi)
The renowned cultural critic and theorist Peter Dormer (1949-1996) argued passionately for the value of craft practice as a living archive of tacit knowledge. Dormer distinguished tacit knowledge, acquired through the hands-on experience of doing things, from explicit knowledge, which allows one to talk and write about those things (147). *Dormer, Peter, ed. The Culture of Craft: Status and Future. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
The French curator Nicholas Bourriaud argues that all works of art produce “models of sociability.” Those works exhibiting relational aesthetics invite viewers to dialogue with the work in order to “learn to inhabit the world in a better way (13).* While encouraging participation, a number of these essays and projects advance pressing agendas and political perspectives, challenging stereotypeical notions that craft should comfort or placate. (xiii) * Relational Aesthetics 1998.
Quoting Claire Bishop: “[…] without the concept of utopia there is no possibility of a radical imaginary (66). (xiii)
The essays and projects in Utopic Impulses participate in a wider critique of aesthetic, political, ethical and social impulses worldwide. Echoing Jacques Ranciere, they call for new forms of participation and spectatorship modelled on viewers who are active interpreters, who “link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamt.” Ranciere calls for “spectators who are active as interpreters, who try to invent their own translation in order to appropriate the story for themselves and make their own story out of it.” *Ranciere: “The Emancipated Spectator.” Keynote address, 5th International Summer Academy, Frankfurt, 20 August 2004. Online. 30 March 2007. http://www.v2v.cc/node/75 [page not found]
Note: I can’t believe I found a book on ceramics that brings in Bourriaud, Bishop, and Ranciere. Obviously, their ideas need not only apply to “participatory art” practices…
Quotations from: Margetts, Martina. “Metamorphosis: The Culture of Ceramics.” In The Ceramics Reader, edited by Andrew Livingstone & Kevin Petrie, 215-17. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
The choice of materials and techniques, fusing exposed elements with covert messages, has poetically reconnected art to nature, inviting a metaphysical rather than a literal response. (217)
Human aspirations and nature can be related to alchemy, to the notion of transforming nature’s prosaic elements and our prosaic selves into a condition of harmony and fulfillment: in this respect, the choice by these artists to use clay is especially appropriate, since it, too, involves the transformation of raw earth through fire into special things of permanence. (217)
The unique versitiality of the material, which is able to interpret a great range of styles and ideas whilst retaining its own intimate identity, imbues ceramic works with a particular resonance through time. (217)
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