Kids are great. They don’t ask you what art is-

they tell you:

“It’s a cave.”

“It’s a fort. ”

“It’s a castle.”

“It’s a house.”

“The lights are snakes. “(?? very interesting…)

Adult comments:

” What did you mean by doing that,

by building the Tumulus?”

“Where can I get some adobe bricks?”

“Can I have your adobe bricks?”

“What are you going to do with the adobe bricks?”

“Will you give me the bricks when you’re through, huh?”

About two dozen people have asked for the adobe. I’m sorry, but the adobe is going home, to the back alley whence it came. If you google the phrase “making adobe” one of the hits will be this wonderful pdf file from the State of New Mexico extension service on how to make adobe. Two pages. The process is very simple. It is also labor intensive and time consuming. Give it a try!

My installation work is an intercession of the corporeal.

A Natural History diorama creates a loss of viewer interaction. Nature is preserved and glassed in. The viewer is only that: a bystander, not a participant. In this position, the viewer cannot catch the glassed in, formaldehyde-pickled frog between his/her hands, cannot feel the muscular squirm of a live frog as it tries to flee, smell its viscous yet delicate skin, peer at the bronze filigree in it’s iris. There is a veil of glass, poison and death between the viewer and the once live frog. The diorama or simulacra, while easily kept, is a replacement for visceral reality, the interaction between subjects in time and space within a dimensional environment (without glass). The diorama creates a layer of distance, of abstraction between the viewer and the subject.

What creates this distance? The Post Modern allegorical denial of death? Attempts to suspend one moment in time (suspension of death)? Disavowal of physiological interaction by making life too safe (avoidance of potential death)? The wolf in a diorama will not eat the viewer, an IMAX audience won’t fall off a precarious cliff, no matter how many times the film shows such a scene. The lack of physiological interaction with subjects has created a situation of abstraction - a one degree removal from visceral reality. The viewer can see the simulacra, can watch and look, but not taste, feel, smell or get eaten by the same. As corporeal entities, the human being interacts in a corporeal world, and that same corporeal world interacts back. In the diorama situation, however, human interaction is limited to the gaze only, and even this is a one way interaction.

“There are no singularities in nature, and entity and its action cannot be separated, and vice versa, action can only occur as initiated by an entity.” (Fenellosa, pg 14-15) If a red bird flies into our field of view, the bird has entered our visual and corporeal space in time. The bird is acting upon our space as we act upon the space of the bird.(ibid) Even unmoving, geological features share this space time component. A subject drives to the Grand Canyon, parks at an overlook and peers at the canyon from the car. Consider the car as the equivalent of a moving vitrine; air, temperature and light are filtered. The car as a containing field for the viewer is an artificial construct which limits human interaction to the gaze. Even the act of walking through space is obliterated, all interaction is filtered through the vehicle. However, once the subject leaves the glassed in zone of the car and walks to the edge of the cliff to peer into the canyon, the canyon’s rock, gravel, convected air currents, heat, humidity all act upon the subject, as the subject acts with their body upon the environment, immediately displacing gravel or squashing a bug or plant under the passing pressure of their feet.
What I am considering here is a quantity and quality of interaction versus passivity, or lack of interaction. The more the human species limits the effect of the environment upon his/her safety to the point of encapsulating themselves or conversely, bits of the world within glass cases, the less visceral any experience will be. The more the human interacts with his/her senses in space, time and with other subjects, the more danger and unknowns that human will face, but at the same time this human will have an interactive, visceral, experience.

Dioramas result in death and objectification of the subject, death of the visceral experience, the suspension of death of the viewer. This is a dreary, unexciting, unaffecting, situation. These considerations have made me reexamine why I dislike the pedestal as presentation for my own work. How do I prevent my work from becoming a deathless diorama? As I pull many ideas from botanical readings and microscopic photography, the work could easily fall into the diorama mode of presentation. How can I make sure that the work goes beyond the realm of the gaze? I would like the art to serve as a tool to encourage the curiosity of the viewer, encouraging viewer interaction, reaction and thought. Enticing the viewer into coming in for a closer look.

Even though it’s just art.

–

pandra williams

Work Cited:

Fenollosa, Ernest. Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry .
ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991.

Grotesque: Beauty
Disgusting! For some people, body humor is not considered to be in the realm of appropriate or polite behavior. The carnivale and humor of the grotesque in medieval Europe was considered “low,” of the earth, of genitals, bowels, sex, defecation and death. (Isack, pp 19-23) In this unofficial and unapproved behavior and language form, lay the power of shock, of owning and honoring (in a bizarre fashion) the peripheralized. Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art: the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, shed much light on the reasons why peripheralized populations of the present time may adopt “shocking” or “unofficial” speech forms in their vernacular and art forms.

The carnivale institution preceded the strength of the Christian Church in Europe. This three-month winter festival was used by the masses to exert power over the onerous circumstances of subjugation and poverty. The Law (of Church and State) was suspended and a festival of “misrule,” of no holds barred satire and ridicule was instituted. (Humphrey, p 1) This may have originated as a safety valve for society to let off some steam in a manner less destructive than outright revolution and massacre. (ibid) However, the Church and State gradually suppressed the festivities in both length and frequency, until the three months of festival was no more than a few scattered days here and there. (Issak, pp 19-23) Could this backfire? Could the suppression of the grotesque and the venal actually end in increasing the power of these subversive elements?

The act of suppression by Authority is an acknowledgment of fear; fear of the power of the subversive, fear of losing control, of losing power, of losing authority to those who were/are denied power. Today, carnivale still pervades Western society. It isn’t hard to find expressive forms that utilize this vehicle. A diverse range of peripheralized populations use carnivale in their expressive vocabulary: humor, writing, performance, and art. The use of these verbal and visual languages by such groups mocks and undermines the status quo, the authority of the ruling class. Every attempt to squash subversive expression only ends in acknowledging its strength.

I enjoy participating in an ongoing historical critique of society and humanity, joining others who have participated in carnivale humor before me. I have embarked on a visual journey with a grotesque body humor “toolkit” of fruit, animal, and anatomical references. These references blend the human body with fruits or animal forms and bring up the associative powers of each referenced object. These associations are pitted against each other in a tug of war for possible meaning.  If a form is, at first glance, beautiful in color form and texture, it may lure the viewer up for an initial inspection. Without verbal input, the viewer must make up his or her own mind as to humor or disgust factor, whether or not the form in front of them is vegetable or animal, and whether or not there are “naughty” or impolite activities being depicted. “What is this form? What is going on? Why is this going on?” Are the questions I hope to stimulate in the viewer.

A few questions have come to the fore concerning my own direction. Do I wish to deal more with marginalized nature as an entity as full of sexuality and complexity as humans, or with human psychological balance, as in anima/animus the internal balance of male and female qualities in a persona? How much can I balance these concerns? When will the work suffer from an overload of input, creating a muddy over-referenced situation? How much content can I pile onto a piece and maintain coherence? How focused does work need to be? Or, perhaps, are there several future series of works lurking in all these concerns?

Works Cited:
Texts:
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Translated by Helene Iswolsky, Rabelais and His World. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1984.

Isaak, Jo Anna. Feminism and Contemporary Art: the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter. New York: Routledge. 1996.

Online Publications:

Humphrey, Chris. “Carnival and History: Bakhtin and the Dynamics of Medieval Misrule.” University of Sheffield. Last updated 30 August 1998 http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/bakh/humphrey.html