Frame of Reference
#139: Here & Now (embodiment), Art (asemics), Judith Blackstone, Austin Kleon, Sal Randolph, Alex B Artistry, Lia Pas, Anne Ylvisaker, Trevor Jimenez, Ashkhen Gevorkian, and Pomplamoose.
HERE AND NOW
I’m writing this on Friday as I watch storm clouds move in to obscure the blue sky of Spring. Oh well, that’s March in California for you: dire warnings that will likely bring a few raindrops and winds that try to bluster like this is Kansas, but don’t quite make it. At the moment it’s only raining pollen and my allergies are starting to react to it. I’m hoping for a solid rain that will wash the pollen balls off the roof and down into the gutter.
Update (Friday): At almost 7 pm, I looked outside at the darkening clouds, and was reminded of being in a motel swimming pool in the middle-of-nowhere Kansas. Noting the disturbingly dark, funnel-like clouds on the plains, I began to think, “Maybe I should get out of the pool before I get struck by lightning or eaten up by a tornado.” Update (Saturday): The rain came down quite hard (such that I checked my phone for flood alerts), but all seemed well in the morning, albeit the nasturtiums looked battered, and one had mysteriously uprooted itself and had moved about 6 inches away from where it was planted.
The Tiny Art Giveaway went really well! By the next morning I had no leftover art to distribute to “clandestine locations,” although I may still find a way to do that. I’m thinking that I may do a seasonal Tiny Art Giveaway, because it feels right and it doesn’t cost much for postage (because: tiny). I’ll schedule early summer for the next one.
Recently, I found some Substack writers (see Rabbit Hole, below) who have written about making art in relation to the body and the process of sensing. The articles caught my eye because I’ve been reading some work by psychotherapist Judith Blackstone, who writes about “inhabiting the body“ in relation to Buddhist practice. Her extensive experience in several lineages of Buddhist teachings led her to realize that some of the paths (though not all) emphasize a focus that some interpret as a disengagement from material, embodied experience. Yet our bodies are integral to our being and to sensing and knowing this world and our journey through it. At the same time, she does not see the fully embodied path as separate from the spiritual—rather, they can be experienced as one.
ART
Previously I mentioned using brush and ink in order to “loosen up.” Part of this involves experimenting with asemics using these tools (and occasional dip pen)—something I began exploring years ago that I want to continue. The “frames” (loosely stamped with a piece of cardboard) around the asemics came from my frustration with using painters’ tape to make neat, clean margins around my work. No matter how tough the paper I used, portions of the paper margins were often torn in the process. So I thought, “Why do I need to have such ‘neat and clean’ borders around everything anyway?” It all leads back to the expensive (for the artist) process of framing art for buyers, in order to help them imagine the art “decorating” their walls. To hell with that!
While I think asemics are often beautiful and mysterious, I always experience them with a subtle “hitch” of frustration in my diaphragm; we want “letters” and “words” to communicate something, but these are indecipherable. I could make them “mean” something and say they are about discontinuities of language (my parents always spoke Tagalog to each other, but they refused to teach me the language so that I would speak only English in the U.S. and thus become a “real American”). I could say they are also about disjunctions of culture/place (due to war and my parents’ migrations), and that borders and frames figure metaphorically into this experience. But perhaps they are also about the joy of mark-making and the mystery of language. And you, as the viewer, would find your own meanings, too.
RABBIT HOLE
Substack Newsletters:
Substack newsletter writers often lead me to other writers and artists, who then lead me to others in this mycelium-like network of communication. Austin Kleon’s “HandMind is Artwork,” focuses on the importance of making art by hand, while leading us to a great article by his friend Alan Jacobs, who quotes a character from a novel by author Ursula LeGuin.
Artist and writer Sal Randolph writes about “Ways of Seeing: Kinesthesia,” one of many thought-provoking articles in their newsletter The Uses of Art. Randolph also introduces the work of Natasha Myers and her collaborative art Becoming a Sensor.
In “I don’t have a solid system . . . I just do it,” painter and collagist Alex B Artistry writes about making art as healing for her mental health despite all the distractions of life, weather, and work.
More Artists:
I encountered the work of multi-disciplinary artist Lia Pas on Mastodon.art. She suffers from ME/CFS and processes her bodily symptoms through embroidered art, with titles like “body map” and “paresthesia,” and musical compositions such as “The Hum.” Her embroidery, as well as her sound art is visceral and rich with the body’s awareness. Below is her 2006 videopoem, “Susurrations” (CW: a real, disembodied heart is visible in this video):
I recently met author and multimedia artist Anne Ylvisaker at a local artists salon. I checked out her website and loved the playfulness of her art, from micro-graffiti and object portraits, to the mischievous “Monsters of Monterey” digital collages, some of which I noticed are in my own neighborhood! Below, Ylvisaker reads from her forthcoming book, One Alley Summer: A Novel About Friendship and Growing Up:
Last night I watched Filipino-Canadian filmmaker Trevor Jimenez’ short animated film, Weekends, on the Criterion Channel. I loved this touching and surreal 15-minute film based on his own experience of growing up in a divorced family, and hoped I could feature it here, but I could only find trailers. However, it’s easy to find articles and short videos about the Oscar-nominated film. I decided to show a short interview with the filmmaker describing his process (with clips of the animation); it’s not the type of film where giving away the plot would be an issue, anyway; it’s his approach to the topic that provides the surprises. In any case, if you have access to the Criterion Channel, or can get the video from your public library, do check it out.
SOUNDINGS
Thanks to the Mysterious M. for pointing me to these two virtuoso performances! Note: why do we always call a musician’s exceptional playing of a classical composition a “performance,” while exceptional performance of someone else’s “popular” song is called a “cover“? Pomplamoose1 performs popular music, and to my mind they are virtuoso musicians.
Ashkhen Gevorkian’s focus is almost trance-like as she performs - J. S. Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D Minor:
Pomplamoose performing Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” Vocalist Nataly Dawn notes briefly at the end how challenging it was to sing portions of this work that was originally created with a vocoder, which was developed to create robotic sounds for recording (and which doesn’t need to breathe)!
Another issue out before midnight!
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The group’s name is a purposely misspelled version of the French pamplemousse (grapefruit).
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