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heritage and hillbillies
italy and michaelangelo
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history: distortion vs acuracy
specialization vs (well roundedness?)
indifference and greed
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words to strengthen the mundane
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3 comments:
Hi Shelby, Thanks for the posts, I haven't read both the interviews yet, I will do that next. I wanted to respond to your laundry list, ask you the questions that occurred to me on first reading:
The thing that stands out for me right of is that many of the items on your list are paired. Either oppositionally; history: distortion vs accuracy, or inclusively;
indifference and greed.
Does this pairing in any way reflect an idiosyncrasy in your thinking, and if so could you think about and tell me where that might be seen in your art?
Also, I am particularly interested in the pairing of heritage and hillbillies! Can you expand on this for us?
i will slowly expand on all the items in the laundry list at other times but i'll try to stick with your questions.
well, to be honest, there were a few paired items that were just paired because i thought to add them at the same time. but most pairs make sense for me just in a quick note taking sense. i'm big on paradoxes so opposing ideas play into my work (it is a little annoying for me to say that because probably every artist in the history of the planet has said that.) recently the pairing of opposites has been on my mind mostly in regards to scale. the tank and the tiny whittlings are the prominent example. i like to look at the intimacy of things close in set next to feelings i get when i zoom out on google earth and find that everything i know of is really fucking tiny. i do like trying to imagine the polarized versions of any issue for sake of being unbiased and thorough. sometimes i think of things as being somewhere on a line between two extremes. then sometimes that line is a circle. everything is some shade of grey. i wish i could draw a picture.
i actually had to look up idiosyncrasy so let me know if i'm addressing this question right.
i did the laundry list quickly so i don't know if the pairing is a metaphor for anything in my work. in brainstorming i just find two words more clarifying than one.
honestly the heritage and hillbillies part is inspired by joel. living with someone with such an obvious grasp on his culture has made me consider what mine might be. i don't exactly have a ton of traditions that trace back that far that i can recognize in my past. i came from artist parents and all their artsy friends, not really hillbillies in the old sense. but i did grow up with them (it is an endearing term for me) as school mates and friends and friend's parents. after closer inspection i came up with myself being a hybrid of liberal, ex hippie artist and introspective woodsy mountain folk. living in south carolina for 25 years has to do something to someone and i'm looking into what that might be. i guess i'll let you in on that as developments come.
thanks for the great response. I'm glad you brought up scale here, as this was one of the issues that seemed relevant to the Laurie Anderson interview you posted. I can totally/and viscerally respond to the shift of scale you describe, and there are several conversations I would like to engage you with about that. First, you say that it is a way of being more objective.. this seems really similar to what Anderson is saying, but I cant help thinking that this is really saying that what we do is so small that any objective scale we apply to it becomes calculated in units so small as to be functionally meaningless! I am not against this way of thinking, and I think it is pretty damn sane/true, but is this what you mean, is this what you think she means?
(I posed that as a question to you, but it is more of a real (lets have a conversation) question to you than it is an interview question. I do have a tendency to extrapolate....)
Also when I said I viscerally respond to your description of scale, I can back that up by explaining that a thing I have done since I was a wee girl, is to shut my eyes (not only in bed) and make things shrink and grow in my minds eye. The reason I mention this is that even though it is a really familiar thing to me, yet I don't address it directly in my art and you do! So I'm thinking that it is a really fundamental issue for your art.
Which brings me to another thing, I understand what you mean about every artist talking about paradoxes. But maybe there is a reason why..? The paradox (this is a word I have to look up over and over again, because the definition itself is a paradox!-it either means a statement that appears to be absurd or contradictory,but really is true, or something that is in fact self contradictory!! So that means what? It is no wonder that artists love it!
None the less, I had the opportunity to see another students laundry list in the mail room. I don't know who's it was, but they didn't pair things the way you did, each "item" was more of a phrase
or a thought. So whether it is "idiosyncratic" or not, it is not the same as everyone else.
I like your (non) explanation of heritage and hilbillies, especially how Joel has influence you. I look forward to talking about this more.
S
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