Tangled Up in Art

#143: Here & Now; Wolfgang Laib, Ignacio Uriarte, Hisako Hibi, Faith Ringgold, Extreme Minimalist, 8 Extreme Artists; James Howard Young, Kyoko Kikuchi, & Asemic (band).

HERE & NOW

I’ve been experiencing an eczema flare-up. People who haven’t experienced flare-ups may find it difficult to understand the extent of the stress they cause, effecting you physically, emotionally, and mentally—even if the eczema is not visible or looks like a minor case.

I’m not sure why, but Native Americans and Asian and Pacific Islanders make up the largest groups with eczema. You can learn more about it at the National Eczema Organization. I don’t want to get into a lengthy screed about this, though—just telling you what’s up.

I write and edit for a living, and the writing I do for myself in my newsletters or personal research can sometimes get “entangled” with the workload and the mindset required to get into that mode (see Ignacio Uriarte in the Rabbit Hole section below for a sense of what my office work experience was like before I began working at home). Art and poetry, however, are healing and meditative for me. You will see more of both here for awhile. There will be less narrative writing and more art. There will be less explaining, less caring (on my part) about how “good” or “acceptable” or “cohesive” my art seems to others.

So I’ll post more creative stuff—more poems, more fun and perhaps even “bad” and “trivial” art, too. I will continue posting links, because browsing and curating are habitual with me. I will also continue my “family roots” updates, and occasionally post artist responses to the Six Questions.

The following are “bedtime” ink drawings. They are meditative, “spur of the moment” anti-scrolling pieces; what emerges can vary widely from night to night.

“Earth Portal Asemic.” Ink on bristol board (8/10/2021). By Jean Vengua.

“Loco-loco Asemic.“ Ink on watercolor paper (4/20/2024). By Jean Vengua

“Starry Midnight.” Ink on watercolor paper, 4/18/2024. By Jean Vengua

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RABBIT HOLE

This pollen can be seen falling like yellow snow in front of the cottage during early spring. Sweeping raises the pollen dust, affecting my allergies—unless I do it right after we get some rain.

• I had to pause when I came across an article on Wolfgang Laib’s art installations with pollen. I live next to a very large wattle tree (known as Acacia Cyclops because its red-rimmed seeds have an “eye”) that is extremely prolific in its production of pollen. I am also pretty sure that I’m very allergic to this pollen, and that it’s contributing to my eczema. So of course I had to watch this video. And now I’m looking at my old “enemy” looming above the house a little differently.

• Ignacio Uriarte’s rule-based art is inspired by the office environment of his dead-end job, and another employee’s “extreme and very strange idea.” I worked for many years as a secretary, with typewriters and filing skills as my main tools, and I find what he says to be both incredibly creative as well as tragic:

  “It’s like a bird that is inside a cage, and flies from one corner to the other, and does periods and tries everything you can do inside this very small space. And what does the bird learn from that? It learns the limits of its own freedom. So that’s what I do. I stay inside the cubicle and I try to find every imaginable language . . . and find every imaginable gesture or artwork that might derive from routines that take place in the office . . .”

• Hisako Hibi was a Japanese American artist who was interned at a camp in the Utah desert during World War II. Read and hear curator Melissa Ho discuss Hibi’s art and life.

• R.I.P. artist and quilter Faith Ringgold whose works became tributes to Black women and Black culture in America. Ringgold talks about her home in NYC and about being a woman artist:

• Interview with Japan’s “most extreme” minimalist. I suspect most of my readers would feel this is not for them, and I feel I’m getting dangerously close to hoarding, myself. But I think what this guy is doing—including how he “lives with” the city as part of his lifestyle—is art. In fact, he is a designer and incorporates his minimalist perspective into everything from his clothing to his frying pan. Everything he owns seems to do double or triple duty. Even moving into new digs about every other year seems to be an artistic challenge to him. (from Tokyo Lens).

• Actually, the minimalist’s lifestyle (above) sounds kind of soothing to me. But it did start me thinking about artists who have stood out for their challenging and extreme art, some of which have included bodily risk. This includes the artists mentioned in the Art Genome Project from 2016: “From Chris Burden to Orlan, How Eight Artists Took Their Work to the Extreme.”

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SOUNDINGS

• Bach’s “Little Fugue in G Minor” for low recorder quartet. Amazing how similar all these guys look . . .¹

• Painter and asemic artist Kyoko Kikuchi does asemic writing accompanied by some light jazz:

• For something a little more hardcore, here is Asemic, a progressive metal band from Bucharest, Romania.² Is that an eight-string guitar?

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1. It’s all James Howard Young, an American multi-instrumentalist musician living in Denmark.

2. Asemic’s current band lineup is Vlad Datcu - Guitar, Liviu Maxim - drums, Alexei Nichiforof - Bass Guitar, Tudor Scanteie - Guitar and Synth, Andrei Alexandru - Guitar.