Text/Image Collaboration Project

This was our first extended collaboration project. A visual artist was paired with a writer and they were to create a work that combined text and image but text was to be privileged. They were to consider and account for a primary delivery structure or site of text, ie, a book, magazine, signage, text, etc.

Images from the bookmaking workshop

             Rachelle Chuang, book artist and workshop instructor

Sublime

                                                                   D. Callis, Sublime, oil on canvas, 2001

Perhaps another image to consider in light of the Percy essay. 

Walker Percy, Loss of the Creature: the mediated experince

Casper David Friedrich's, Wanderer above the Sea Fog, 1880 and Roger Minick's, Woman w/scarf at Inspiration Point, 1980 seemed to be a good set of images to go along with our discussion of Percy's essay. Percy explores the relationship between language and understanding, between the sovereign experience, mediation, and human agency. In these works we witness the what is to be the sovereign experience but in both cases to what degree are those experiences being mediated?

Today / This Week!

Today, our class was visited by Rachelle Chuang, a bookmaker and instructor of book arts (and other design courses) at various colleges around Southern California. (Please check out her website.) She brought a bunch of material and instructions for how to do a number of different kinds of bookbinding. She walked our students through the Three-Hole Pamphlet Stitch and the Japanese Binding Stitch. At the end of class, our students had each made two lovely books of blank paper. Photographs are forthcoming.

~

Writers/Artists Touched On This Week:

Joseph Cornell
Piet Mondrian
Robert Motherwell
Marianne Moore
Terry Eagleton
Walker Percy, "The Loss of the Creature"
Nick Waterhouse, "Time's All Gone"
Eddie Vedder, "Guarantee"

Writers/Artists Touched On Today in Class

Fishbone, "Housework"

Christian Bök, Eunoia

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Marianne Moore, "The Fish"

Marvin Bell, "To Dorothy"

Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt--Oblique Strategies

Alan Kaprow

Ad Reinhardt

Frank Stella

Ellsworth Kelly

Ed Ruscha

Spring 2012 Final Projects: Site-Specific, Found Object Installations

 Fishing for a Story

Love Song (Wounded Tree)

Open Endings

 Music on a String

 Word Processor Pi-->ñata

The class, or most of it

Wes Anderson and Joseph Cornell

Cornell, a mainstay of this class, gets a shout-out in Anthony Lane's elegant, even moving, review of Moonrise Kingdom: 

[Anderson] is often spoken of as an arch-geometrician, drawn to cinema by the orders of symmetry that it allows him to impose. However, when I watch those graceful sideways tracking shots of his--through the Bishop residence, at the start of the new film, or along the train carriages, at the end of "The Darjeeling Limited"--what I sense is not a technical tic but a pressing need to bind people together even as they threaten to pull apart. (Anderson's parents, we may note in passing, divorced when he was eight.) Certain makers of musicals, like Stanley Donen and Vincente Minelli, were fêted or decried for their organizational verve and a fetishistic appetite for color; only with time did it emerge that what they sought was a shape for emotional longings, and that could happen here, too. Who knows, we may look back on Anderson's works as we do on the boxes of Joseph Cornell--formal troves of frippery, studded with nostalgic private jokes, that lodge inexplicably in the heart. 

- from this week's New Yorker (the science fiction issue)

Individual Practice - Robert Kirkendall

from "Five Exempla"

1. The Young Man and the Dog

There was once a young man enrolled in college near his hometown. His parents had friends from church, an older couple, who one day decided, “We are going on vacation to Hawaii. We have never been, and it is high time we got away.” This family asked the young man’s parents if he would take care of their dog. The young man’s parents explained that he could help himself to food from the fridge and stay in their house overnight. It would be like a vacation for him, too.

The young man agreed. The old couple would be gone for two weeks. He fed, walked, and played with the dog daily. He helped himself to food and slept in their bed. He attended daily classes at his college, a five minutes’ drive.

Two weeks passed and the young man’s parents called. “They have decided to stay for another week. They have never been on such a vacation in their lives. They deserve it.” 

He stayed another week. He fed and walked and played with the dog. He relaxed with the dog and the TV in the evenings. Summer was coming, and the dog began to shed. Every night he nudged the young man for scratches and pats, then retreated to a corner to sleep. 

His parents called after that week. “They are staying for another week. They really need rest. They have invested so much. They are sending you a check, enough for groceries and a bonus.”

So the young man stayed. The dog slept a lot. It became less hungry and would not finish its food. It began to drag behind on walks, and the young man would have to tug him forward with the leash. The dog stopped nudging for scratches and pats, and just slept in the corner.

His parents called again. The couple was staying for another week. By this time, the dog was not getting out of bed or eating and would not go for walks. The young man and his parents finally took the dog to the veterinarian. “The dog has cancer,” the veterinarian said. “It is in its final stages. He needs to be put down.”

The dog was put down. The old couple never left Hawaii. 

Individual Practice - Rachel Kudron

from "Unbecoming"

"I hate men! All of them! In all of their different shapes, sizes, and occupations!" My best friend, Stephanie, yells into the receiver. "I mean would it kill them to call or text of send a friggin' smoke signal three days after a date?"

"I take it Mr. Mark James isn't on your good list right now, is he?" I ask as I try to refrain from smiling.

"NO! He won't see that list for a very long time!" She sounds really beaten up about this.

"Listen, I'm sure he's been busy. Don't take it to heart. Look, I gotta go. Love ya."

"Yea, love you too. Later." The line goes dead.

I place my phone back in my purse that sits, waiting, in my shopping cart. I absentmindedly walk through the aisles half looking for canned green beans and half just enjoying being out of the house. It's been so long since I've been out on my own. Mom thought it would be too hard on me; that everyone would stare at my scars. But I just don't care. I'm just happy to be alive. And out.

As I pull into aisle eight, I see the canned corn, then the canned peas. The green beans must be next. Then I feel my cart crash into something. Just before the flashbacks can start, I duck my head, apologize to whoever or whatever I hit, and rush out of the aisle.

I turn the corner, and start to catch my breath. Maybe I should just leave. I examine my cart. I have almost everything I came or, plus more than I intended to get. And I don't really need green beans. I don't even like green beans. I look over my cart one more time. Yea, I'll just go.

Individual Practice - Jenna Guthmiller

from "Awake"

A light flickered. Her green eyes opened and she found herself staring at a gray sky. “Where am I this time?” she thought as she partially sat up, reclining on one slender forearm and brushing her brunette bangs back. A quick glance around her at the dilapidated, graffiti-covered warehouses looming overhead revealed the answer. 

Her eyes welled up and her heart sank. “Crap, not again. Why am I here? How long has it been?” As she took a deep, wracking breath to calm herself, the girl’s mind involuntarily flipped through her memories of that place in quick succession. Waiting on a black swing for her father who never came. Hugging Michayla for the last time. Rubbing an silver, oval locket in her hand.

She quickly pulled her legs under her and stood, a wry smile on her face. The girl recalled that she was known here as Raelyn. “I always did like that,” she thought. “but somehow it still doesn't seem to quite fit.” A light flickered. She glanced at the sky wondering if she had seen a flash of lightning but the sky was peaceful.

Sucking in and releasing another big gulp of air, Raelyn began to wind her way in between the buildings toward the heart of the swarming city. Her only option was to visit Lena, a middle-aged woman who lived in an apartment overlooking some local shops. “As much as I hate going to see her,” Raelyn thought, “she’s helpful when it comes to figuring out how long I’ve been gone and where I can find Evey. Lena is the one thing that remains constant. Well, there’s nothing for it. I am here.”

Screwing her face up into a sort of smile, Raelyn knocked. Almost as if she had known exactly when Raelyn would arrive, Lena slid the noisy deadbolt back, flung open the door, and pointed her cane, which she didn’t really need, at Raelyn. “Where in the world have you been for so long this time?” she demanded.

“Ooh, she is not happy. Not happy at all,” Raelyn silently noted. To Lena she replied, “I… well, let’s just say it’s the same old long story, shall we? May I come in?” A light flickered. Raelyn glanced over Lena’s shoulder into the shabby apartment and stared fixedly at the unlit dining room chandelier.

“That is completely unnecessary,” Lena retorted, pulling Raelyn out of her trance.. “You are just here to find out where that girl is. If she’s really your best friend why do you go running off on her like that?” Shaking her head, she continued, “Kids these days, so ridiculously irresponsible. Next time you got a hankering’ to go away for nearly two years you might want to, oh, I don’t know, tell her before you just disappear. Anyways, you should be able to find her at the same place. She hasn’t moved since you up and vanished.” With that she poked Raylen’s belly with the cane. “Go on now.”

Raelyn smiled in relief and made her way to the subway station, boarded a train, and got off after a few exits. "I can't wait to see Evey. She is the one of the only good things about this place. Everything else is just...painful," she mused as she walked two blocks over to the right and entered and older building.

Individual Practice - Zach Mendelson

King of Insects

Stylus-like fingers style like stingers—

Twisted fists twist bits; twist tattered tips to fits,

Inebriating yet alleviating.

A contamination of dreams,

Very similar to verisimilitude.

Reaper

Calcareous caulking,

Carelessly calling,

Barely balking,

Bury us

Bawling

Angler

The facetious transition,

Is a faceless transmission.

And one finds no shame,

In this selfish ambition;

This fashion for fishing.