What I'm Reading: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Summer seems to have gotten away from me and this blog has been neglected.  For that, I apologize.

I have no excuses for not maintaining this blog, but I do have my reasons--first being a new house (yay, I feel so grown-up!) as well as a new job (yay, I have a regular paycheck!) and a new creative venture (Yay, I'm acting in a show again!).

I've also discovered the world of grilling in my back yard. 

But I digress.

I just finished reading Steven Pressfield's little book THE WAR OF ART.  If you are an artist/writer/poet/creative dreamer or just someone who wants to start a diet/exercise program or frankly anything that might be good for you in the long run, then you must read this book.  In fact, it should be required reading for everyone in college.  Any college, not just those studying the arts.

Without giving too much away, Pressfield delves into the idea of "Resistance".  What is Resistance and why does it always rear its ugly head when we desire to change, grow or create something good and unleash it into the world? 

This isn't a book about writer's block.  It's a book about how even professionals face this Resistance, sometimes in the form of fear or procrastination, but they persevere.  Every day.  This is not a "how to" book.  This book doesn't give you tips and tricks for overcoming your daily dose of Resistance.  It does give guidance and wisdom from the guy who was written many books (including The Legend of Bagger Vance). 

The book was a nice reminder to me to get to work.  If you are an artist, you define yourself by creating art, not talking about it, not thinking about it, but doing it.

So, like that Nike ad says...just do it.

The Human Variable...or...Oh, the Horror!

"Computers are useless. They only give answers."
-- Pablo Picasso

Can a computer make art?

This is one of those existential questions philosophers have been tossing around since the computer's invention. It's up there with "can robots feel emotion" and/or "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"

(Thanks for that, Philip K. Dick).

Microsoft seems to think that an algorithm can make music. They have created a new program called Songsmith, where anybody, and I do mean anybody, can sing along to a drum track and this program will create a chord sequence, aka a song, to accompany you.

Not only is it like having your very own Karaoke back-up band, but its perfect for those fun projects like making elevator music and/or your very own backing music track to your home-made porn!

Seriously, it could be really fun, if you're ten.

Of course, GarageBand on the Mac does almost the same thing, except you have to actually make the choices yourself. It takes a little longer but the results are much better, and so is the music.

Here's what one genius decided to do on this program, matching David Lee Roth's vocals from Running With The Devil and plugging it into Songsmith.

Warning! This audio clip may damage your sense of hearing.

One of these Presidents is not like the other, not like the other...

White House Appoints Office of the Arts?

This just in from artnet.

"The transition team of President-elect Barack Obama is keeping a firm hand on any appointment news, but the buzz in art-and-politics precincts has the new administration seriously considering the idea of an official White House Office of the Arts, overseeing all things having to do with the arts and arts education. The new arts czar wouldn’t be a cabinet-level position -- too complicated and too limiting, say insiders -- but rather a liaison with the president with real access to funds and power."

In other countries, it's quite common to have a Ministry of Culture headed up by someone in the Cabinet who's sole job is to promote the heritage, culture and the arts of that country.

We are not that kind of country.

Yes, we have the NEA, but it was only created relatively recently in our country's history, in 1965, and operates as an independent agency of the federal government. Yes, funding comes from the government, but there is no person in the White House Cabinet who has the job of overseeing our arts and culture.

Why not?

Good question.

We like to spend billions of dollars on tanks and missiles and invading other countries, but for some reason, don't want to spend even 1/100th of that kind of money on the arts (or education for that matter). Because what's really important is blowing people up, not making art.

By the way, it's positively mind-boggling to me how enraged the general public can become over a small percentage of government funding that is used for what people deem as questionable art, like "Piss Christ", but nowhere near that kind of emotion when they realize that billions of your tax payer money pays for guns, bullets, missiles, planes and tanks that KILL people. What they don't realize is that when they cut NEA funding they are also cutting funding for public programs like free Shakespeare in the park, Shakespeare festivals, symphonies, music education programs, art supplies for schools, etc.

(Okay, I'm ranting again. It's been a busy week and I haven't seen the sun in a really long time.)

The buzz around Obama is that he is going to appoint someone. Now, there are pros and cons to this argument of whether or not he should. I will not pretend to be smart enough to understand all the economic and political sides to this equation. I don't know. We could be headed for another Federal Theater Project (which put a lot of theater folks to work) or other type programs that were popular during the Great Depression. Again, lots of pros and cons here.

And I know we have a lot of problems in the world today, most prevalent being our sucky economy. I know we have world health problems.

But art and culture is what differentiates us from animals and machines.

And I don't want to just be a healthy and wealthy automaton.

Art is Alchemy

Dario Robleto, At War With The Entropy of Nature / Ghosts Don't Always Want To Come Back, 2002, Cassette tape made from carved bone and bone dust from every bone in the body, trinitite, melted and dissolved audio tape of an original composition of military drum marches and soldiers' voices from battlefields of various wars made from EVP recordings (Electronic Voice Phenomena: voices and sounds of the dead or past, detected through magnetic audio tape), metal, screws, dust, Letraset, 5/8 x 3 3/4 x 2 1/2 inches, Collection Julie Kinzelman and Christopher Tribble


“If you don’t know the history, you’re just making a jumbled mess. So sampling actually offers a way out of the criticism of this generation because sampling insists that you know your history. That you actually engage with it. That’s why I’m so compelled to know my history.”
-- Dario Robleto

Over the weekend I went to the Frye Museum to check out an exhibit that the designer working on the show 7 Minutest to Midnight recommended to me.

All I can say is, I’m so glad he did…

Dario Robleto is the most exciting artist I’ve seen since I discovered Matthew Barney years ago at his exhibit in the Guggenheim. But where Barney works more with myth and biology, Robleto deals with transformation, memory, and war. They both use alternative substances for creation of their installations, but Robleto is bravely embracing the controversial memory of war in American society.

At first glance, that cassette tape is just a cassette tape with an interesting title of songs on it...but then you read the list of materials and a narrative starts to emerge. You realize the tape is made with dust from all the bones in the human body, trinitite (the glass made from the heat of the first atomic test, Trinity, in the desert sands of New Mexico, that the tape is made from audio of military marches, soldiers voices from the battlefield...and suddenly the frame upon which you view this tape is altered. There is a connection to history, to war, but ultimately tied to the present becuase of the package (a modern cassette tape). It hits you on an intellectual level, but also hits you in the gut and in the heart...Maybe you're repelled by the fact that it was made from human remains, sure, but you can't escape the fact that the artist is reminding you about the history and legacy of war...and how we view it now...as if it were a mix tape.

It's like post-modernism with heart.

To learn more about Robleto, just google him, or check out this interview here.

I liked the exhibit at the Frye so much, titled Alloy of Love, that I bought his book, with photos of the peices, but also some essays and interviews. One comment he made is about how some people view his work as “destructive”. He usually uses old vinyl records which he melts down and restructures into something else (like making buttons out of Billie Holiday records). He takes old love letters and grinds them to a pulp and remakes them as “love pills” and puts them in a bottle. He took the unabomber's manifesto, cut it up and made his own "love manifesto" which he sent to random friends. He’s taken old letters from soldiers in the Civil War, or taken lead from bullets collected at Civil War battle sights and transformed them into wedding rings for a piece. He’s even made a magic wand out of trinitite.

He doesn't view this as destruction, but rather transformative. He uses material that first of all, ethically, is not in desperate need from archivals, but is still historical--things you might have in the attic that have meaning on a small level, and then gives them even greater universal meaning. It's like turning lead into gold...so really, he views his art and process as alchemy. His gestures are positive, not embracing the cynical, but filled with hope, turning the remains of violence into something beautiful.

And he uses art as if he were making a mix tape, or creating music, or “sampling”, like a DJ.

And I wonder, how can we play with these ideas in our show this fall? How can we transform the destructive forces of the atomic bomb and make something hopeful?

I realized that I've always been very much interested in art that transforms suffering into hope (its certainly there in Beckett, Shepard, Shakespeare, etc.). Perhaps all art does that, I don't know.

As Robleto says:

"Hope is everywhere in my belief and I hope that comes through because I’m not a pessimistic person. I want to stress the point that my work is ultimately about hope. It’s about acknowledging the horror of the past and the present but suggesting that we’re not powerless against it. We can be proactive about changing things, and that’s where the hope comes in. The fact that you would even think that you could change something is a hopeful act."

Whitman--not just a candy!

I just really dig these ads from Americans for the Arts.

Hola mi amor

If you can't make art...

Make paella.

My wife wants everyone to know that we made this on the weekend.

Okay, I admit it. We didn't make it. She did.

But I did help with prepping by chopping vegetables.

Not only is she a great cook but she can also pontificate on Shakespeare, theater during the Spanish Golden age, and/or Marxism at the same time.

Try that, Martha Stewart!