Other Ways of Doing Things

I gave this lecture to Mitch in the kitchen. In person, you can see me do this little shuffle, walking-around thing that you can't via blog post. Stay with me, though. I'll try to make up for it.

I've been watching the Lizzie Bennet Diaries! It's a webseries. The first episode is the YouTube video above. It's an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The main character, Lizzie Bennet (Elizabeth Bennet in the original), is a modern-day 20-something in grad school who is keeping a video blog.

It's pretty fantastic story-telling. I cried during many of the 70s episodes. (There are 100 total in the main storyline.) But aside from that, three of its aspects were relevant in my kitchen-lecture to Mitch. 1) it's in a new medium (webseries). 2) It's a fictional work copying a non-fictional format (vlogging). 3) Other people weren't making stuff like this before.

I elaborate:

1) The setup is cheap: people who make vlogs - video diaries of their lives - don't have a lot of money to work with since they are one person casually posting for the internet. Since this is the form the series is fictionalizing, it means that they get away with having a stationary camera, few characters, and obvious exposition.

2) Its premise is close to a non-fiction reality. Unlike TV shows or other webseries, it's not trying to make its audience feels as if they are in the room with Lizzie Bennet. They're just asking you to pretend she's a real person talking to you, the internet. It's much closer to reality - less of a stretch - making what happens in it feel more real, more intimate. At times in the story, I felt like I was intruding, like "shouldn't these people turn off the camera and talk about this in private?"

3) These days it doesn't take a huge budget or any sort of permission to make something TV-like. It's an exciting reality, but it takes more than just the possibility to make it happen - it takes an idea.

(Lecture Time!)

I feel like, in life, people are looking for other people to tell them what to do. It's not our fault, really, that it happens this way. We're started off going to school, one level leading to the next. Structure. Structure. Structure. And then there are cultural/social life benchmarks we find out about: driving, dating, marriage, children, home ownership, retirement. We all shuffle through life in a line, following the person in front of us.

The crazy thing, though, is that there are a bizillion possibilities in life. But in practice, we only have as many options as we realize we have. (idea = an option realized) That's why I'm so impressed with the creators of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. They veered out of the shuffle line. They saw an alternative means of creating something and took it. Because they did, I also realize that it can be a way of doing things, an option in life.

Art makes the world bigger, folks. It gives us some more options.

(For more, here's a link to a Nerdist Writers Panel interview with the LBD creators. Good stuff.)

This is Not a Church, the Art of Roger Ballen

When Mitch and I were in Copenhagen, we came across a church building with a large vertical banner that read, "This is Not a Church." So, naturally, we went inside.

It was an art gallery featuring the American photographer, Roger Ballen. It cost some money to get in, but it was in Danish krone so nobody could tell how much.

Ballen has lived in Johannesburg since the 1970s, and has taken pictures of some of the poverty there. His early work has more of a documentary feel, something like what you'd find in National Geographic. Of those early photographs, this one stood out to me. 

Man Shaving on a Verandah

I love this type of photo. I grew up tracing ones like it in my parents's National Geographic coffee-table books. In such photographs, the dirt makes the walls more interesting. The weathered skin and hardened eyes of the subjects tell stories of suffering. There's more individuality in photos like that than in ones of boring rich people. 

The problem is that there's a voyeurism to taking or looking at these photos. I, with money, am able to look into your little-money life through this fancy coffee table book. It's an issue. Imaginary tourism to underprivileged classes. 

Ballen's later work does something about this. 

Sick Room

He fictionalizes the work. He sets up scenes. He lets the subjects become actors. He turns the photo around to where the joke is on the audience.

The photos are much more uncomfortable - or even scary - to look at. When I was looking at them, I felt like Ballen was solving something. And while the images were interesting and even beautiful, I felt, rightly, that I would not like to live there.

Call Me Maybe

I've been thinking ahead about which albums I want to put on my list of "The Top Ten Best Albums of 2012." Of course, I am not an expert on music, I aggressively listen to new albums only some of the time, and I really just pick what I like. But in thinking about this, I got so excited to defend and elaborate on one of my choices, I decided to do it early.

Introducing a sneak preview to the Westovar(ian)'s top ten! Drum roll...

I'm not even sure if Carly Rae actually made a whole album to go with this song. It doesn't matter, it doesn't need one.

I find myself listening to it over and over. It's the one song at the gym that I actually like.

For a while part of its charm for me was associating it with Arrested Development - as in, call me Maeby:

But while Arrested Development tends to be considered good television, I don't know... Call Me Maybe doesn't seem to have what it takes to be considered properly good music. It's not complex, it's not saying a lot, it's very accessible, and it's not sung by a thin man wearing black pants and some beard stubble. It just doesn't smack of great genius, great art. I almost feel ashamed to be listening to it so much. (Except I tell myself, "Amy, you can like whatever you want. You stick by your preferences!" until I don't feel bad any more, mostly... maybe.)

Distinctions about what makes something good and what makes art ART are tricky. People have a general sense about it, for the most part, but when it comes down to specific standards, to laying down rules, it gets murky and stressful, especially since I put stake in my ability to recognize beauty and to be able to dismiss some or most of what's out there. The prospect of having to take every piece of music, visual art, or literature seriously makes my brain feel like it might explode.

From my painful forays into this territory, I've only come up with one distinction I'm fairly comfortable with. I think art begets more art. Really quality stuff is that which inspires other people to also create. And this song has clearly done that.

Paper Folders

Creativity is not so much more than problem solving. - Cousin Becky


Part of the same family -- my aunt Susie is a wonderful quilter, my cousin Becky is a professional potter, my mom makes costumes and sets and other large-scale decorations. There is a lot of artistic or at least craft talent on my mom's side of the family. But I want to talk about my cousin Aaron and my uncle Jim in particular.

Uncle Jim has been folding Origami for a long time. When my family would go to Indiana for Christmas he would teach us, as kids, how to fold stars and boxes, and he'd make us rings out of dollar bills. When Aaron was old enough and got interested, Jim's interest also picked up. They joined a folding group -- IRON Folders (Indiana Regional Origami Network of Folders), and they occasionally go to conventions or to meet with the authors of origami books.

I wanted to get them to talk more about their hobby, since to me it seems sort of obscure. (I was not one of the cousins to pick up a profound interest or talent in it.) And Jim talked about how he didn't consider himself creative or artistic -- he is an engineer by trade. He just likes to fold.

He talked about a guy, Robert Lang, who was a physicist and well-known folder, who NASA contacted. They needed him to find a way to fold a large lens into a rocket so they could send it into space.

He talked about when my cousin Angie (Aaron's mom) was in the hospital. "For sanitary reasons, we weren't allowed to bring in any real flowers or fruit for decoration. But we could bring in paper," he said. Jim knows dozens of ways to fold flowers.

"I guess that's when paper folding became more important to me."

one where I tell you what to do

I'm gripping my pencil too tight, like I'm afraid the little fucker's going to get away. My drawing teacher wants us to pick the line we want and make it, no sketching allowed. She's got a tricycle for us up front with some croquet mallets and balls for extra complication. And I'm making indents on my drawing pad, digging my B pencil into its guts, trying to make the right line.

She keeps telling the class, "Draw what you see not what you know." She explains it this way:

if you give a small child a can to draw, he will draw something like this:

He starts with the body of the can, the rectangle, and then he knows that the can has a circular top and bottom. He can't see those circles from his vantage point, but he knows they are there. Drawing shapes and their relationships as they actually appear is what makes a drawing look realistic and three dimensional. But it's difficult because our brains ignore much of what we see so that we don't get overloaded. For the sake of efficiency we know can as two circles and a rectangle.


A step further. What we know, often times, is something we've never seen. We think in some generalities, symbols, stereotypes even if we've never encountered a particular to match. For example, this is how most people would draw a house:

I've never seen a two-story structure with a huge door, one window, and an isosceles triangle for a roof. But I know this as "house" because it is my symbol for house.

People are very good at picking out small differences in faces. As a painter, getting an expression right is beyond my skill -- this portrait turned out to be of a mild half-wit who's just sat in a puddle, okay -- because every stinking millimeter of line can change it in a profound way. But the viewer sees it instantly, we are very attuned to those details.

And still, I submit that we have a hard time seeing people. I want to talk about the way women see other women, especially. (There's a Picasso painting at the Chicago Art Institute in which the nude woman's breasts, crotch and ass are all visible while she reclines on the sofa. It seemed telling. The way men see women is terrifying and I try not to think about it.)

The symbol for beauty's most important aspect is large eyes accented by larger eyelashes. As important is that the eyes are hedged in on all sides by a dark solid line. The nose doesn't draw any attention to itself; it's best, actually, if only nostrils are present. This is the image by which I will judge every woman and myself.

The first time I think I really saw a person was one of the times I was looking through my book of National Geographic portraits. The photos were lovely in themselves because of color and form and did not depend upon the beauty of the people in them. When I came to a black-and-white picture of a woman, dark skin, heavy and topless (saggy boobs), decorated in a costume of dead silver fish. She had hold of a little boy's hand and she was scowling like nothing I had ever seen. She didn't look anything like my symbol of beauty, and yet I looked at her for a long time. She was interesting. It looked like she had a story and life and emotion.

I decided she was thrilling to look at -- and that, I figured, made her beautiful -- once I actually saw her instead of making quick notes about how closely she matched the women on the magazine racks.

And I'm wondering, folks, if you even know what you look like. Or if billions of dollars are spent, expectations for the future arranged, and standards set for friends and boyfriends based on how closely you can get your face to look like my silly drawing. Go look in the mirror and try to tell what it is that lets your friends know you from strangers. See genetics and your parents and your acne scars. And the real shape of your eyes and the lines by your mouth and maybe a booger that you should take care of.

Draw what you see, not what you know.

Raw Materials

Mitch and I were in the process of missing the eleven p.m. train. It was a Saturday, and he had told me specifically that morning that he did not want "to be in the city forever." The "L" was simply not going to get to the Metra station in time, and there was nothing we could do about it.

I had The New Yorker out on my lap, reading, in an attempt to make the best of things. In it there was an article about a Dutch engineer/sculptor who makes huge mobile "beach animals" out of PVC pipe and zip ties. Ultimately, he wants them to be able to, powered by wind, shovel sand from the ocean shallows up onto the beach dunes. Holland is very low-lying and it seems in danger of massive flooding if the water rises just slightly. For now the Strandbeests just trot around.

I keep thinking about something Theo Jansen, their sculptor and creator, said:

"The walking Strandbeest is a body snatcher. It charms people and then uses them so they can't do anything else but follow, and I am the worst victim, you could say. All the time I think about them. Always I have a new plan, but then it is corrected by the requirements of the tubes. They dictate to me what to do. At the end of my working day, I am almost always depressed. Mine is not a straight path like an engineer's, it's not A to B. I make a very curly road just by the restrictions of goals and materials. A real engineer would probably solve the problem differently, maybe make an aluminum robot with motor and electric sensors and all that. But the solutions of engineers are often much alike, because human brains are much alike. Everything we think can in principle be thought by someone else. The real ideas, as evolution shows, come about by chance. Reality is very creative. Maybe that is why the Stranbeests appear to be alive, and charm us. The Strandbeests themselves have let me make them."

I'm not a fan of motivational posters. Slogans, "Attitude is everything," "Everything happens for a reason," etc, strike me as willful delusions undertaken to make the world more friendly and coherent. That said, I also do not prefer to be absolutely fatalistic or to admit only bleak beliefs(which, at least, do not smell of sentimentality) into my personal canon because I do not want to be depressed and petrified in earnest -- I only want to seem that way cause it's edgy.

Jansen's quote, therefore, has worked itself into a nice little corner in my brain. What he's saying makes sense to me, and I had not thought about it before. He talks about the relationship between him and his surroundings, the raw materials that he has to work with. For him, it is his subject's limitations that enable him to make something fresh and astounding. Whimsical, even. A leap in creativity and innovation precisely because he does not have materials that are exactly suitable to his needs.

Extended, he could be talking for me. I have a supportive family, wonderful friends, degrees in English and Physics, and some talent and a love for art, but little direction and less experience. In true form, I could say that I've been stupid and naive or that I've been lied to about the nature of reality or that the world is cruel and there's not a place for me in it. (Don't let those edgy people convince you that there's not sentimentality in being pessimistic.) Or I could see those as my raw materials and be thankful that they insure me a life that looks different than the standard career launch and race to acquire things of escalating price. It says to me that creativity thrives when possibilities are obstructed.

I just hope that this damn beest will let me make it.



*Top photo by Lena Herzog

White, Color, and Liquin

I had done paintings on three small canvases. They were my experiments in color. I coated each canvas in a different color -- red, yellow, purple -- the ones I use most often. And I gridded them into twenty one-inch squares starting with four different solid colors in the middle -- yellow, red, blue, purple. In one direction I added white to the colors, and in the other I added liquin (a substance to thin the paint). (When Bud saw my Altoid tin of liquin he asked me why I was saving my loogies like that.)

I showed them to the art group and told them about what I did. Liquin, you know, is mildly toxic, and it reeks. I've read about life-long painters who suffer major health issues, lung and brain cancers, because of it. My apartment is not ventilated and sometimes I think the fumes are going to give me a bloody nose.

Judy, Pauline's daughter, said, "Oh, I love liquin because when you're done the room smells wonderful.

"Nothing brings me back to my childhood like the smell of coffee and Turpentine."

The Art Group

I went to an art group the other night. Pauline, a retired Whitworth professor, had started it in her home. The only rule was that you had to bring something to critique.

Pauline said over the phone that people worked in all different mediums. I envisioned sculptures made out of wire and pantyhose, one person revealing her newest self-administered tattoo, and another showing a short films on guppies. The folks, in my mind, were edgy and eccentric. An art group!

I arrived toting my three oil paintings--Pauline was excited, on the phone, that I painted in oils. Apparently there is some rivalry in the group between them and acrylics. There were about 15 people in Pauline's sitting room, and I was the only one who could menstruate. 13 of the members professed to having grandchildren and the 14th was a man a little older than myself. I sat down on an open chair next to him and his mother.

After the preliminaries, including the I-kid-you-not comment: "Is it your house where the mailboxes get us lost, Pearl?" We took turns showing our creations. One woman had paintings of cows including one of a long-haired steer.

"He's the only one with horns. He'd tear open the feed bag and boss everybody around. He's in the freezer now, but not before I got some pictures of him."

Another woman had incredible pictures of swirled, dripped, and splattered paint. She said she listened to music while she painted and sometimes stood back with her brushes and flicked color onto the canvas. I said she reminded me of Maude Lebowski, a comment which was lost on everybody.

Afterwards we had decaf coffee and pineapple upside down cake with whipped cream on top. I was flushed and overheated like I always am in rooms with lots of people.

Julie, Casey (the mother-son combo), and I looked at Pauline's book of Chuck Close's work. He takes photos of people's faces and grids them. He fills the small squares with abstract images. A portrait is often times the size of an entire wall.

He's still living, Pauline explained, but his health is so bad that he rides a lift to do his paintings anymore.

Taking Art Seriously

The audacity! The irony! The “Up Yours!” to artistic snobbery and pretense, maybe. Or the exact opposite if they’re serious. They being the artists featured in the Museum of Modern Art.

Mitch said, “I could have made that.” About one piece: a trapezoid made out of string with two corners fastened to the wall and two to the floor.

“But you didn’t.” I said. But supposed he did? Maybe Mitch makes various geometric figures during his free time or while watching sporting events. Should his art be submitted to and accepted at the MOMA? Am I marrying a vast artistic talent? Maybe. But maybe he doesn’t get much past octagons. At any rate,

we saw a utility sink without the faucets, a hay bale, and a four-by-four stack of bricks two-bricks deep along with two helicopters, some Pollock and Warhol and Picasso, and Starry Night.

It made me suspicious about the value of art, or at least our definition of it. All the exhibits took creativity, but not all took talent or even time. It could summon the end of taking art seriously.

But maybe that’s the point. Irony, sarcasm, and insincerity show up in art a couple of decades before they infused everything else in American society. That’s my interpretation, of course; these artists could be 100% sincere about their rowboats made entirely out of purple pillows or whatnot. And if they are serious, it seems to be all pretense.


In an episode of Sex and the City, a man in Charlotte’s art gallery asks to buy the fire extinguisher, thinking its a piece of art. He ends up being a douche bag and a moron—not an exceptional fate for the male fare in SATC. But it’s not such a dunderheaded move when around contemporary art.

Andy Warhol said, “If everything’s not beautiful, nothing is.” Including fire extinguishers.

It’s brilliant, actually. For years artists have been looking at things and trying to capture their beauty—more so, they are trying to capture a bit of what those things are. Trying to get a crack at reality. The abstractionists, with their colors and strewn paint and violent shapes, are trying to evoke rather that depict. I mean, for “sadness” you could draw a picture of a girl frowning, but the abstractionists want to make you know sadness, to call it up.

Van Gogh could have painted some excellent hay bales; he might have. But, audaciously, Cildo Meireles takes it further and puts a real hay bale in a ritzy museum on 53rd street. Its presence there dubs it “art.”

Artists try to give viewers the thing itself, not a symbol of it or a description of it, but it. Contemporary artists have done that... here, have a fire extinguisher. And it gives the viewer a choice: to say “bah, art, rubbish” or to become the artist and say, “Hay bales are worth looking at.” or “I could make that.”


For more about the MOMA: New York Times art review