merleau ponty

It's about time I learn me some Merleau Ponty...

according to wikipedia:
Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and his insight that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call “indirect ontology” or the ontology of “the flesh of the world” (la chair du monde), seen in his last incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind”.

http://www.biolinguagem.com/biolinguagem_antropologia/merleauponty_1964_eyeandmind.pdf

"All flesh, and even that of the world, radiates beyond itself. But whether or not one is, depending on the era and the "school," attached more to manifest movement or the monumental, the art of painting is never altogether outside time, because it is always within the carnal. Now perhaps we have a better sense of how much is contained in that little word "see." Seeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself...

Cartesian can believe that the existing world is not visible, that the only light is of the mind, and that all vision takes place in God. A painter cannot agree that our openness to the world is illusory or indirect, that what we see is not the world itself, or that the mind has to do only with its thoughts or another mind. He accepts, with all its difficulties, the myth of the windows of the soul; what is without place must be subjected to a body—or, what is even more: what is without place must be initiated by the body to all the others and to nature. We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we touch the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—"I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun"—or freely to envision real beings, wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone teaches us that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"; which is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives. Robert Delaunay says succinctly, "The railroad track is the image of succession which comes closest to the parallel: the parity of the rails." The rails converge and do not converge; they converge in order to remain equidistant farther away. The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, to be a world. The "visual quale" gives me, and is alone in doing so, the presence of what is not me, of what is simply and fully. It does so because, as a texture, it is the concretion of a universal visibility, of one sole Space that separates and reunites, that sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and future, since there would be no such cohesion if they were not essentially parts of the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it is given as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is that the hallmark of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence. "In their time, our erstwhile opposites, the Impressionists, were perfectly right in electing domicile among the scrub and stubble of the daily spectacle. As for us, our heart throbs to get closer to the depths.... These oddities will become...realities...because instead of being limited to the diversely intense restoration of the visible, they also annex the occultly perceived portion of the invisible. " There is that which reaches the eye head on, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below—the profound postural latency whereby. the body raises itself to see—and that which reaches vision from above like the phenomena of flight, of swimming, of movement, where it participates no longer in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments. Through vision, then, the painter touches both extremities. In the immemorial depth of the visible, something has moved, caught fire, which engulfs his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement, and his hand is "nothing but the instrument of a distant will." Vision is the meeting, as at a crossroads, of all the aspects of Being. "A certain fire wills to live; it wakes. Working its way along the hand's conductor, it reaches the canvas and invades it; then, a leaping spark, it arcs the gap in the circle it was to trace: the return to the eye, and beyond." There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that here nature ends and the human being or expression begins. It is, then, silent Being that itself comes to show forth its own meaning. Herein lies the reason why the dilemma between figurative and non figurative art is wrongly posed; it is at once true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever what it is in the most figurative painting and that no painting, no matter how abstract, can get away from Being, that even Caravaggio's grape is the grape itself. This precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is—this is vision itself. And to give the ontological formula of painting we hardly need to force the painter's own words, Klee's words written at the age of thirty-seven and ultimately inscribed on his tomb: "I cannot be grasped in immanence.""

(emphasis by me)

two more

pigmented cast belly button, false eyelashes, and wig hair - approximately 3x3"

wig hair and hot glue - approximately 3x3"

alina szapocznikow

I like her drawings SOOO much more than her sculptures!!!

updated statement

Evocations of the flesh - in material, form, and manner - signify a meeting point for dualisms of all sorts. My studio practice is rooted in the notion that a richness can be found in the blurry space between alternatives: what is there formed by what is not, and what is not there formed by what is. I like to invert and/or blur the boundaries between these two states in attempts to evoke feelings of familiar ambiguity, comfortable tension, and reluctant desire.

Skin is a barrier, a wall, denoting interior from exterior (subject from object), yet it’s full of its own physical intricacies, hollows and bumps that muddle those very distinctions. Just as the material of our bodies is made up of many layers, so too are the flesh's various associations. A subtle surreality is evoked, whereby the flesh functions simultaneously on physical, psychological, metaphorical, and metaphysical levels.

My work is influenced by an existential understanding of holes, which is rooted in an ontological (and thus pre-sexual) desire to fill voids. While the Freudian model speaks of an “original” hole that renders subsequent holes only metaphors, the existentialists suggest that, in a sense, all holes plead obscurely to be filled. They are appeals to the triumph of the full over the empty, of existence over nothingness. 

Thus the physical finds its parallel in the spiritual: the body functions as a microcosm, continually giving glimpses into the beyond. Flesh acts as a tangible metaphor - at once a barrier and a carrier of matter and meaning.

new work-lings

hog intestines, fiberglass insulation, false eyelashes, rubber band

scrunch/scratch

beef intestine, cotton batting, acrylic fingernails, and chewed gum

hair cuts

Since starting to mess around with hair extensions and wigs in the studio, I've been reminded of these cut-out locks of hair stashed in my collage materials - I started cutting them out a while back, but never really found a use for them. But now it seems entirely appropriate. I like the loaded simplicity of them. 

tail hole

 pvc, fiberglass insulation, hog intestines, and 100% human hair extensions

hairness

Thinking about introducing some new materials... It comes with a lot of baggage but I think I'm up for it.

doodle do

most recent assessment of my work...

In attempts to articulate why I make the things I do, I shall begin by breaking things down into a few over-arching (and overlapping) categories. I should note, however, that the idea of categorical distinctions comes up quite frequently in my work - particularly in my desire to make works that simultaneously acknowledge and abolish such distinctions and the tensions therein. Nonetheless, I shall break things down, if only to weave them back together once more. 

Three primary influences on my studio practice include biology, psychology, and theology. Each area of study functions on its own level yet all three find a common denominator in my work. They do so particularly in my dealings with the flesh, which signifies for me a meeting point for dualisms of all sorts. Flesh is a barrier, a wall, denoting interior from exterior (subject from object), yet it’s full of its own physical intricacies, hollows and bumps that muddle those very distinctions. The flesh is also the toughest and most sensitive of organs, a vessel through which we experience both the most painful and most pleasurable of sensations. I choose to work with the flesh because it’s what we all know best – it is a charged imagery to which every bodied being can relate on some level, be it physical, metaphorical, or metaphysical. “Man is the meeting point of two worlds.” (Nikolas Berdyaev)

My studio practice is rooted in the notion that a richness can be found in the blurry space between alternatives. Opposites exist, yes, but very rarely do we find them in isolation of the other. One may only exit a space, if first it is entered. A cup may only be emptied, if first it is filled. Relational verbs such as these are defined by their opposites and couldn’t exist without the other. “What is not there formed by what is. What is there formed by what is not.” (Bruce Hainley)

Herein lies the significance of casting processes in my work: positives shapes and negative spaces, constantly informing one another. I like to invert and/or blur the boundaries between these two states in attempts to evoke feelings of familiar ambiguity, comfortable tension, and reluctant desire.

Though I’m quite willing to acknowledge that the gaping orifices and protuberances in my work may become imbued with a certain pycho-sexuality, I’m much more interested in the existential opinion that the Freudian model is merely a localization of an original, ontological (and pre-sexual) fascination with holes. While the Freudian model speaks of an “original” hole that renders subsequent holes only metaphors, the existential model suggests that, in a sense, all holes plead obscurely to be filled. They are appeals to the triumph of the full over the empty, of existence over nothingness.

This recalls a symbolic notion of lack (“manqué”), which Jacques Lacan suggests is the root of all desire. C.S. Lewis speaks of a similar yearning to which he refers by the German word “sehnsucht.” He echoes both existentialists and theologians past when he admits, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for an other world.”

Søren Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism suggests that the universe is fundamentally paradoxical and that its greatest paradox is in the transcendent union of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. Not one or the other, but both. Opposite, yet the same. Now, but not yet. Christian theology (religiosity aside) is made up of conflicting, colliding, and coalescing alternatives that find their resolve in the oneness of Christ. 

Thus physical oneness becomes a metaphor for spiritual oneness. Flesh acts as a metaphor, but is tangible nonetheless- at once a barrier and a carrier of both matter and meaning.

1/2 way to MFA

sketches/experiments/castings,/etc.

Here are some shots from my studio post-critique. It feels good to have things cleaned up a bit. Most things are in progress... I'm waiting on some more beef intestines to come in so I can finish that sculpture a few photos down. I love how thick the beef guts are compared to the pig ones! They're also more stinky!! My final crit went pretty well... there was a lot of talk about materiality... how are my materials furthering my concepts? How can I be more intentional/deliberate about every little thing? Every material comes with its own baggage... and the thought of that can be slightly paralyzing at times. But I'm up for the challenge! 

my laboratory 

a new approach - made of chicken wire, paper mache, plaster, fiberglass insulation and resin

some new collages - much more labor intensive than the others

my office

some books I'm reading/thinking about

I'm working on a more concise artist's statement (that was actually due yesterday...) - I've got a lot I'm trying to articulate... more on that in the very near future...

on creativity and christianity

As both a committed artist AND a committed Christian, I often feel as if I'm floating somewhere between two extremes. Current culture (and general consensus) tells us the two are mutually exclusive... so for someone like myself, who considers herself fully both one and the other, articulating HOW the two influence each other makes for a somewhat sticky explanation. Will my professors/classmates/etc be able to take the work seriously if they know I'm thinking about Christian themes? What will fellow Christians think about my work if they find out how weirdly sexual it is? My work isn't overtly spiritual in the sense that many "Christian artists" strive for: art-making simply as a mode of worship - it's much more complicated and nuanced than that, and its hard to explain. I'm working on breaking things down (thesis, here I come)... in attempts to better articulate how my faith and belief in Christian theology really is central to my studio practice. And in the same manner I am perpetually reminded of how this urge to create, to make something of the world, is simply an expression of my humanness. I am made in the image of the Creator, therefor I too shall create.

Below are some books I've been reading... some of the better ones on the subject, I think.

"Creativeness is a work of man's God-like freedom, the revelation of the image of the Creator within him."

Nicolas Berdyaev in The Meaning of the Creative Act (p. 93) 

"Culture is the result of man's creative activity within God-given structures. So it can never be something apart from our faith. All our work is ultimately directed by our answer to the question of who - or what - our God is, and where for us the ultimate source of all reality and life lies. So our resulting 'culture' can never be something separate from our 'faith.' This is just as true for those that do not acknowledge the true God, the Creator: their cultural activity is coloured by their basic non-Christian faith. For the Christian the problem remains of how we have to deal with the culture around us, often the fruit of a non-Christian point of departure. But then this is dealt with at length and depth in the Bible itself: it is even one of the main concerns, and bound up with its teaching on sin, redemption, and sanctification."          

 Hans Rookmaaker in Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (p.36)

"We make sense of the world by making something of the world. The human quest for meaning is played out in human making: the finger-painting, omelet-stirring, chair-crafting, snow-swishing activities of culture. Meaning and making go together - culture, you could say, is the activity of making meaning."

Andy Crouch in Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (p. 24) 

"But aside from the rare exceptions, religion is seldom mentioned in the art world unless it is linked to criticism, ironic distance, or scandal. Art critical of religion is itself criticized by conservative writers, and it is noted with interest by art critics, but sincerely religious art tends to be ignored by both kinds of writers. An observer of the art world might well come to the conclusion that religious ideas are not relevant to art unless they are treated with skepticism."

 James Elkins in On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (p. 16)

sartre on the pre-sexual nature of holes (i'm freaking out right now)

... it should be said that I can now see more clearly something that I've long guessed at: pre-sexuality. The Freudians rightly saw that the innocent action of the child who plays at digging holes was not so innocent at all. Nor that which consists in sliding one's finger into some hole in a door or wall. They related it to the faecal pleasures which children take in being given or administering enemas. And they weren't wrong. But the core of the matter remains unclear: must all such experiences be reduced to the sole experience of anal pleasure? I shall point out that this supposes a mysterious divination of instinct: for the child who holds back his faeces in order to enjoy the pleasure of excretion has no means of guessing that he has an anus, nor that this anus presents a similarity with the holes into which - immediately - he seeks to put his fingers. In other words, Freud will consider that all holes, for the child, are symbolic anuses which attract him as a function of that kinship - whereas for my part I wonder whether the anus is not, in the child, an object of lust because it is a hole. 

 And certainly the arsehole is the most alive of holes, a lyrical hole, which puckers like a brow, which tightens in the way a wounded beast contracts, which finally gapes - conquered and ready to yield up its secrets. It is the softest and most hidden of holes, what you will - I have nothing against the Freudians composing hymns to the anus - but it remains the case that the cult of the hole is anterior to that of the anus, and that it is applied to a larger number of objects. And I'm quite prepared to grant that it gradually becomes imbued with sexuality, but I imagine that it is initially pre-sexual: in other words, that it contains sexuality in the undifferentiated state and extends beyond it. I think that the pleasure a child takes in giving enemas (numerous are those who play at doctor to have this pleasure: in my own case, one of my earliest memories is of my grandmother's arms raised to the heavens in a hotel-room at Seelisburg, because she'd just caught me in the middle of giving an enema to a little Swiss girl of my own age) is pre-sexualL it's the pleasure of poking into a hole. And the 'poking into a hole' situation is itself pre-sexual. By this we mean it is neither psychological nor historical; it does not suppose any connection, realized in the course of human experience, between orifices and our desires. 

But as soon as man appears in the world, the holes, the cracks, all the excavations that surround him become human. The world is a kingdom of holes. I see, in fact, that the hole is bound up with refusal, with negation and with Nothingness. The hole is first and foremost what is not. This nihilating function of the hole is revealed by such vulgar expressions heard here as 'arsehole with no buttocks' - which means 'naught' or 'nothingness'. To call an enemy an 'arsehole with no buttocks' is to annihilate him, to treat him as an empty idiot, a zero. For in popular imagery, of course, the buttocks form the rims of the anus. I notice, to, that people are bothered by the idea of the bottom of the hole. They talk about a 'well of stupidity', and about 'bottomless stupidity'. There is a seductive ambiguity here, a kind of shimmering of the finite and the infinite; in ever hole one expects to find a bottom - since it has rims - but on the other hand Nothingness is an infinite, since it could be bounded only by itself. So there is a lure of Nothingness - an ambiguous lure. Whence the game of hidey-hole. To enter a hidey-hole is originally to bury oneself in a hole, to annihilate oneself by identifying with the void that constitutes a hole. To protect oneself, it will be said. No doubt. But to protect oneself by annihilating oneself, by withdrawing into the invisible. 

Thus the hole's nothingness is a nothingness of man; it is at once death and freedom, negation of the social. One day I say a Fredian mother gazing tenderly at her little daughter crouched on all fours under the table. She was convinced that this liking of the child's for dark hidey-hole was a desire to return to the pre-natal state; she felt flattered, as if the child were knocking at her door and wished to return to the intimacy of her womb. I suppose she was already preparing to part her legs. But this is all nonsense. The vertiginous thrill of the hole comes from the fact that it proposes annihilation, it rescues from facticity. This nothingness is the attractive element in what is properly termed 'vertigo'. The abyss is a hole, it proposes engulfment. And engulfment always attracts, as a nihilation which would be its own foundation. Of course, attraction for the hole is accompanied by repulsion and anguish. But the hol's nothingness is coloured; it's a black nothingness, which causes another nature to intervene here, another cardinal category - Night. The nature of the hole is nocturnal. That's what confers upon its shady, mysterious, sacred character. And precisely because it is nocturnal, it conceals. Daytime holes are slishes of night. In the depths of the night there is something. The hole is sacred because it conceals. It is moreover, the occasion of a contact with what one doesn't see. The particular situation of the man who delves into a hole is that his hands meets enemies which his eyes cannot see. His ares are still in the kingdom  of light, but a whole blind part of himself has already gone down to hell. 

I have already mentioned that the hole is often resistance. It must be forced, in order to pass throguh. Thereby, it is already feminine. It is resistance by Nothingness, in other words modesty. This is obviously why it attracts sexuality (will to power, rape, etc.). But at the same time, in the act of poking into a hole - which is rape, breaking in, negation - we find the workman's act of plugging the hole. The child who sticks his finger into a hole in the ground experience the joy of (ful-)filling the hole. In a sense, all holes plead obscurely to be filled, they are appeals: to fill = triumph of the full over the empty, of existence over Nothingness. What is involved here is a craftsman's act. Expressions like 'plugging the gaps' or 'stop-gap' indicate clearly enough the human concern to achieve plentitude - in contrast with the vertiginous thrill of annihilation that is black magic. 

To plug a hole is to transform the empty into the full, and thereby, magically, to create material possessing al the features of the holed substance. If I plug a hole in a brick wall with earth, I have made a brick out of earth. Whence the tendency to plug holes with one's own substance, which brings about identification with the holes substance and, finally, metamorphosis. The child who sticks his finger into a hole in the ground becomes one with the ground which he plugs; he transforms himself into earth by his finger. 

At the root of these sorceries I rediscover the craftsman's idea of fitting-together - primitive aspect of necessity. Two bodies which fit together are made for each other. Fitting together magically entails fusion. One can see that the nature of the hole (pre-sexual_ will be very well suited to polarize almost all of sexuality, when the child will be able to think that he himself is the hole which is penetrated, on on the contrary that he can penetrate and plug with his own flesh a hole which lives hidden in a living body. But one can also see that - far from sexuality giving to holes its appeal for the child - it is, ont he contrary, the categorical nature of the hole that will constitute the basic layer of signification for the various species of sexual hole: vagina, anus, mouth, etc. And this doesn't at all mean the hole is not in itself an object of sexuality. It must be noted, however: 1. this this sexuality is undifferentiated, fused in the ensemble of human tendencies and of the human attitude towards the hole; 2. that it isn't directed to the hole derivatively, because the latter's analogy with the anus, but directly as constituent of its very structure. The hole - nocturnal female organ of nature, skylight to Nothingness, symbol of chaste and violated refusals, mouth of shadow which engulfs and assimilates - reflects back to man the human image of his own possibilities, like sliminess or flakiness. There can be - there is - human enjoyment that is not properly speaking sexual in filling a hole, just as there's a human enjoyment in scratching a flaky substance and breaking pieces off.

from War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War (1939-40) by Jeane-Paul Sartre - p. 149-152

student drawings

Susie B.

For the past few weeks in my Drawing 1 class (in which I am the TA) the students have been working on these lovely perspective drawings. I was responsible for leading this segment of the class and designing a project to go along with the lessons... so I assigned an architectural perspective drawing, using ink! Here are some of my favorites - didn't they do a great job?

Jean K.

Emily M.

Lily S. 

Yeeun L.

Laura R.

the first of many?

I think I'm onto something with this painted steel armature... must make more!

painted steel wire, fiberglass insulation, hog intestines, and silicone rubber

mount

There's something odd about this one...  but in a good way (I think). The pink part was just a piece I chopped off of another sculpture - I literally just hung it on the wall as is and stuffed some hair behind it... it's like a weird head/face/bust - kind of like a deer head mount or something of that sort. It watches me when I'm working at my desk!

on the wall

new in the studio

It feels really good to be getting back into the metal shop- sometimes I forget how quick/easy steel is to work with!

pheobe washburn

a great lecture by Phoebe Washburn... love her! and a well-done interview...

freya jobbins

doll faces by Freya Jobbins: so very kitsch, but I can't help but love em!

studio shots