Responsive textabation #2 Theory to practice; practice to theory; it's messy

2.1
She, Griselda Pollock, lost me at…

…I have to work out to WHAT I shall be referring if I use the word Van Gogh.
Griselda Pollock, “Avant-Gardes and Parisians Reviewed” (pg 319)

How she intends for this statement to function vs how it functions within me as reader co-creating the text with her probably differs. Not only does this statement reveal the death of the artist/author, it strips artist/author of any residual humanity. The quote functions to highlight the dehumanizing dilemma of authoring (ha) a text or an analysis of an art object or artist when holding tightly to a theoretical model of approach. The situation is made humorous as she reasserts herself, her agency, her role as interpreter, through the repetitive use of the word “I”, which appears three times in the short string of text. The quote functions to reveal how unstable structuralist/post-structuralist theory can be in practice.

—- end of requested response ——

Writing is not a personal property or expressive medium for the creative self. It is cultural, social, historical, a field of codes and conventions in which meaning is produced through the play of its signs, within its traditions, through its connotative systems over which no one person can claim mastery. (pg 323) 

 A beautiful summation of how these theories play out and ring with a “truth”, yet in practice of analyzing the entity that channels an object/text, the non-claiming producer becomes dehumanized. The artist or object simply function as an X variable in an equation. Finally, moving beyond the dehumanized, Pollock arrives alongside of Raymond William’s idea of art as practice for her approach. Sigh. She wore me out as I sat on her should working together through the problems of various theory driven art writing approaches and finally to arrive at a satisfactory approach method via the practice of art.

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2.2

Anything we can read as a coherent
ensemble of messages constitutes a text.
Gerald Rabkin, “Is There a Text On This Stage?” (pg 151) 

After a real world discussion of the complexities of authorship, ownership, interpretation and text in the realm of theater, Rabkin revisits the basic notions of structural and poststructural ideologies concerning what is the text. He derives the above quote from these notions and sets this quote as a baseline from which he can then distinguish between a work and a text as they relate to the actual theatrical performance. In this case he is setting up the text as the performance from which the audience will read and the script as a work, a source document from which the performance was generated. The source document, the script, remains legally connected to the one who penned it, the playwright. For Rabkin to create a viable conversation around these topics in theater, he must at least temporarily throw down a line on the stage to define what is the text that is being read. Tomorrow he can draw a different line and we can begin again in this exploration.

—- end of requested response ——

 It is an interesting dilemma of where the text is even located when there are so many intermediaries between the source document (script) and the final reader (ticket holding audience). Who is generating the text for the audience’s reading—the playwright, the director, the performers? Is the audience reading a reading of a reading? And to whmo is the script actually written for? If one considers the structure of the script, one may question who the intended reader is—the director, the performers and stage designers, the ticket buyer? For whom is the work constructed, penned? So interesting.

new adventure that will require proofing and capitalization. dang

my intent to which they've agreed is to drive my bum, belongings, and my big ass art footprint out to the dust driven plains of academia in lubbock, tx to pursue my Fine Art Ph.D. in Critical Studies and Artistic Practice at the crossroads of Visual Arts, Creative Writing and Psychology. see i've already given way to proofing and grown up lettering...sigh...oh wait i was discussing my intent...here goes...not just my intent but also how i got to this intention...the adventure begins now that i've signed the dotted line on a multiplicity of agreements and funding (YAY!)...

the arrival of and my intention...

Hair matted and clinging, man-beater tank top saturated with sweat in embarrassingly feminine patterns, the salt and grime stings my eyes as my chica muscles finally give way to the working of these damn resistant and disobedient materials. At times, I make nine-foot vaginas, and I make a lot of them. I attempt compliance from these evolving gender specific beasts--stitch, weld, and suspend large masses of remnant rubber from gallery ceilings and walls alike. Even the pine of my microforest, unyieldingly bear my works weight. Initially in exhaustion, I would sit, scratching pen to page, unpacking my thinking, my methods, my mistakes, my making, my life. Somewhere in the space between visual making and plying this pen to page, writing has taken hold. I mistook this gesture as a respite of sorts, only to watch the centrality of my writing unfold as lead, the core of my making. I cannot get to the form without the writing. The working is an unruly pushing and plying, a raw and intimate play back and forth between text and artifact. It has taken me a while to grasp the role writing has taken. I’ve had the habit of leaving it as first draft, a mere trace of my making. My understanding of it now shifts. The ongoing act of writing, the dependence on it, the hunger and need for it, the resultant smittenhood of the art critic in reviews and residency directors in person who speak more to my online texts than my making, all drive my awareness of the needed shift. 

Consistent with my interdisciplinary practice there seems a constancy of writing in the life of visual artists whether it be the letters of Van Gogh, the essays of Donald Judd or Robert Motherwell, the journals of Anne Truitt or Annie Albers. Art journals, memoirs, diaries, anthologies of visual artists’ writings proliferate on the bookshelves. Yet, I’ve not found anyone asking why? Not why the all these published writings, for people generally are curious and a tad envious of the artist’s journey, but why all this writing from artists known as visual makers. What are the functions writing fills for the visual artist? Is there a key component in the writing, formal or informal, published or not, that sustains the visual making throughout a lifespan? Is there a correlation to success in terms of being “known” or remembered? Is this drive specific to a specific trait, introversion or extroversion, gender, learning style, art process, personality, or familial expectations? Am I just biasedly seeing a pattern because it matches my own process? In the field of the social sciences, researchers have been publishing studies linking writing to increased rates of physical, emotional, vocational, and spiritual healing and health. James W. Pennebaker’s research in linguist inquiry and word counting-LIWC seems a viable source and methodology to bounce my questions off. Other theorists and researchers, Kenneth Gergen, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Brene Brown, and Charles Duhigg, seem to come at the questions more indirectly, perhaps simply tangent relationships. Interestingly their primary mechanisms of data collection appear to be their subjects’ writings, self-reporting. Can the social sciences provide an avenue to peer into the writing practice of visual artists to identify its functions? As well, is there a parallel or a method of insight to be gained in the literary arts, writers writing about their own process of writing as seen with Thomas Merton, Anne Lamont, Phillip Lopatte, Madeleine L’Engle, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag?

My gut leads me to believe that there is a correlation between a writing practice and a life long sustained making practice. Through the vehicle of contemporary art history, the social sciences, and the literary arts, I intend to collect and analyze relevant writing patterns through the literature and the lives of contemporary artists via qualitative (leaning toward grounded theory methodologies) and quantitative (linguist inquiry and word counting-LIWC) research, and through my own process of writing and making. Additionally I intend to take the identified components of the writing practices and develop a series of cohesive essays, a book being desirable. I would also like to harness and test specific applications of relevant writing components within the academic setting for studio artists..

Finally, my teaching experiences as Visiting Professor of Art at Sam Houston State University [4.5 years] developing a contemporary interdisciplinary foundations program in conjunction with a contemporary art history lecture component [WASH] and as a teaching fellow, Graphic Communication MFA at UH [2003-2006], along with my writing and making practice equip me to competently develop a series of seminar courses for visual artists that introduce the writing practice beyond the artists statement—writing as sketching, writing as a sustaining practice for the visual.

I am thrilled to have this opportunity to pursue these questions with the Fine Art, Experimental Psychology, and Literary Arts Faculties.

Sincerely, Me.

PS I am very nervous about moving from my lush microforest and artist altered hermitage to the barren dusty plains of west texas and moving my big ass artistic foot print. feel free to buy any of my work to help me offload it!!! feel free to rent (or even buy) my magnificent hermitage in the piney woods.

without residual unruly regret.

at the periphery of perception, i extend my hand gropingly feeling for my dreams of future casting. i must have them, mustn't i? i facilitate workshops in which i guide the group into the gaps of peripheral space in hopes of pulling down into recognizable forms these their hidden dreams. i'd love to say i am so selfless, i am there as purely guide for other, but not so. in my own ego squawddling and skittering, i hunt for my dreams. many have smacked me in the face as an open palm plant to the forehead. they have come without my forerecognition, without the grope or hunt. no dream quest set upon. in the wake of even only the temporally near "has beens", they are easy to list when my palm is pulled free of face -- the dopt, the hermitage, the microforest, my WASH and WASHers, my BOXes and C.SAWs, my borrowed side sliced trailer tire that led me to tubular harvesting and stitching. i haven't asked, i haven't had to grope or fumble foolishly like an adolescent on his first date. the peripherally unperceived dream just arrived, gifts finally consciously unwrapped with that forceful facial palm plant. not a one could i have done without, nor one i count as earned, not one that could be passed off as anything but grace. no dream quest ventured upon.

there seems a cultural bestseller trend in the soft sciences that indicates i might accelerate this process of favorable foward motion, of future dream casting, that i might speed and direct the forceful forehead palm plants of fulfillment. i must simply pull down the damned dream, define it, askingly cast it into existence. a kind of positivism. if you build it, they will come. hmmmm. but heck, i don't know my dreams enough to grab hold and say this one. though the closest thing to which i am a true expert is on myself. i know that my expertise is lacking, even filled with wrong thinking and the nightmarish mental meanderings shaped by my shoulds and the deforming embracing of words and habits not my own. my expertise is clichedly muddied by should haves, would haves, could haves. the skittish dreams, like smoothered stars in the daylight, have been lost in the goods of and plethora of SHOULD ofs. there are a lot of goods. because of the lost skittish nature, the light smoothered stars, i cannot sneak upon or know my own dreams and visions directly. can i fully know my own mind? know what is best? what if my reasoning is actually irrational? for that matter, am i even truly a descrete entity that can be defined outside of other? what of my agency or if i ask for the wrong thing, the untrue thing, for which i am not wired? these dreams or at least my capacity to trust in them are so freakingly seriously skittish to the direct, hungry, or aggressive. i try to slide up to the unsleep driven dreams, my head turned just so, and i slide my groping hand up into the peripherial perception of these spaces filled with my dreamscapes and castings.

i am frightened at how my groping hands must release their current contents to touch these scaped castings. i am terrified to release my microforest and hermitage -- the crunch below my footfall as my gait swings out long upon the graveled lane, the meadowed and leaf foddered spaces in which i lay as the trees' canopies sing in whispered breaths, the hawks' soar stirs the kiss of wind upon my spring warmed cheeks and closed lids, the tendrils of grass caught hair stir gently cascading the curve of chin, the my mineral painted walls remain bare only to hold the entering and ebbing day's light in an almost wholy glassed hermit shelter. it's where my pup found me riding my red mulching bladed machine one Sunday taxed (an April 15) morning. i am terrified of leaving my corner of the forest for the barren dust ridden high plains of academia. i am terrified of leaving a space, the only space where i've so fully attached, its calling not just home, but womb. birthing is such a bitch!

may i lay my hand to these scape castings that are true to who i am. may i pull ones down that brim with meaningful purpose. may the things released be so without residual unruly regret.