An Alt-Art History

Anyone else fighting through their Saturn Return? This year is cyclical and I am taking advantage of the writing time. My speech is broken because I am splitting my language into two halves (three if you consider visual). What dreams?

Like clockwork, we’re nearing the end of our first lease on the studio space. This is my first political act (other than the poorly-spelled signs I made in 2017). A declarative strategy, maybe madness, building on itself through context. Re-reorganizing thoughts that had taken hold before the last era frightened us all, like a bad dream.

Like Water

Anybody else pre-order an ebook a month in advance, just to take care of their future self? Wading through Lev Manovich’s latest book, Cultural Analytics, and thinking on the politics of art history. I was reading a novel by a poet with precise vocabulary, which really messed with my Arabic lessons. What does “غريب” mean on a granular level? I need to know the boundary, so I can smudge it or erase it. My bravery toward writing poetry in Arabic has only extended to the labels I make for my studio materials: غريب/weird fabric (yet to learn the word for fabric).

I dream about visiting eternal springs in the Californian desert. Packing and unpacking dirty laundry, making breakfast for forty with only my 6-cup French press and the slowly crazing cookware from my childhood. Sharing studio space with strangers (أستاذ غريب) and blind to what I am working on.

Beat

Two months later and I’m still exploring how to illustrate time in different ways. Let’s revisit cutting out squares of fabric and connecting them with a common cotton core, stacked strata and growing steadily. Or look at collections of photos, the changing picture planes as a back-and-forth flipbook. We can move up and down, or charm and strange, within the same universe that has Dolly Parton, Miley Cyrus and Jack White singing “Jolene.” A place that shares sunlight with those who turn their faces toward it.

On Meditation

“Fate has dealt you a blow,” Carl Kurtz told our Foundations class in 2011. We sat in a circle around him on traffic-yellow drawing horses. It was the first day of undergrad for us all, in the temporary building the freshmen took their studio courses in. Ours was outfitted with a small loft and a side closet, a green chalkboard and plenty of pockmarked white walls. Carl says we are inheriting a confusing and chaotic world. We were not allowed to listen to music collectively or individually during our daily 4-hour period of class. Carl’s class was unique in regard to this, that he insisted on complete concentration on our charcoal and newsprint and subject matter. We all respected this rule and bent over our drawings, the room filled with scratching and sighing and mumbling while we made art. He taught us how to measure, how to use a utility blade, how to use hot glue and bamboo, how to sharpen a pencil. Most importantly, he taught us to work without distraction so our mind and bodies could focus wholly on the task in front of us.

Note from Carl Kurtz to read “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri and “The Shape of Content” by Ben Shahn.

Saturn Returns

Will another new planner band-aid my stress? Probably not, but it’s helping me whip stitch my life together. Slowly, I fill my empty notebooks with daily morning pages and lists of gratitude and goals. Working to close the gap between who I think I am and who I want to be. Practicing and honing and carving out the time to do the work. I acquired a new studio space in lieu of going to graduate school, and this unique claim was easily forgotten in the shuffle of life. I remember the insane pace of undergrad, and the growing pains that came with it. By contrast, the “school of life” is slow and steady and appears when you squint.

If Beyonce’s college was Destiny’s Child, then why can’t I name my own space as such?