Over the long weekend, during a game of Trivial Pursuit (Masters Edition) with friends, someone mentioned Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest tome The End and another person suggested that he might suffer from a condition known as hypergraphia–an uncontrollable compulsion to write.

We often think compulsion lessens the value of expression or the authenticity of an artwork. Words used to describe something done compulsively tend to have negative connotations. If the art or the action or the decision isn’t the result of informed intellectual thought and planning, then we consider it more naive or careless or rash.

To me, there can be so much beauty in visual art that results from compulsion. The artists’ vulnerability, despair and hope accumulate outside their bodies. In Palm Desert, I visited the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Sculpture Museum, ten acres of assemblages Purifoy created entirely from discarded materials. I stepped onto the grounds and felt the physical pull of each singular piece and was very moved. It’s a project he worked on for fifteen years, though some mark the 1965 Watt’s Rebellion as the true start, because after the violence was over, Purifoy started making sculptures from the debris and never really stopped.

Over the past year, I’ve started watching reality TV. I didn’t watch it before (save for competition shows Project Runway and RuPaul’s Drag Race) because I did not understand the allure of watching normal people get rich for fighting with each other onscreen. Though I have always been interested in the affairs of other people–colloquially referred to by many as ‘a gossip’–it never occurred to me that the safest and most satisfying place to focus my curiosity would be the scripted settings of manufactured drama coupled with the real emotions of the human players obliged to play through the storylines of each season.

Things in my life have changed and now I am drawn over and over to the petty and serious ruckuses that unfold between men and women contracted to spend portions of their lives together in public and creating intrigue. I like to imagine I can discern between real emotion and fake, spontaneous action and scripted, actual dialogue and lines that have been added in post-production to create the verisimilitude of narrative. I used to think I understood human relationships very well. I now know I do not. I watch Reality TV as part of my re-education. I ask questions: who can be trusted? Who is lying? Who benefits from the lie? Who should I watch out for? Who is unsafe?

The first thing you see when you enter the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012). The boulder weighs 340 tonnes. Several years ago, a custom-made transporter carried it at a speed of seven miles per hour from Jurupa Valley to LACMA–as the bird flies a distance of fifty-five miles, but 106 miles in total to avoid any overpasses too low to allow clearance. Once in the vicinity of the city, hanging street signs and traffic lights had to be lifted and swung out of the boulder’s way. Its slow pace and disruptive size caused a lot of fanfare, and the final miles of its journey attracted thousands of spectators, footage of which you can see on the museum’s website. Now, the boulder hovers in the centre of a long concrete corridor, allowing visitors to walk toward it and then stand beneath it, feeling the energy of the suspended weight above them, imagining how it would feel to be flattened by granite. The first time I saw it, I realized that this is the experience I have of all art that stays with me long after I’ve left the gallery; it has the ability to overtake me, and the tension, the thrum, the movement that the work causes within me is the quiddity of that possibility.

It was an oversight to visit Los Angeles for eight days and not take more intentional photographs of the palm trees that tower over the city’s residential neighbourhoods. I’ve visited this area five times now, and every time I find myself talking most about the palm trees, thinking most about the palm trees, and then, when I leave, remembering the palm trees.

More specifically, the Mexican Fan Palm (pictured here before my friend Tara), the tallest species in Los Angeles. The oldest Mexican Palm Trees in Los Angeles still standing today were planted in 1870 in a place now referred to as the Avenue of Palms (pictured below). The majority of the other Mexican Fan Palms were planted in advance of the 1932 Olympic Games. Their ubiquity belies the fact that they are not native to California and when they die out (which they are) they will be replaced with trees that provide a better canopy and require less water.

It’s the Romantic in me that loves the palm trees. Because they are unfamiliar, they spark my imagination. They dominate the skyline despite their thinness. They are a sharp line and then a burst of unruly form. When the sun is setting, they are awash with gold and pink. Against a twilit sky, they cut abyssal silhouettes. They don’t belong here, and yet.

Wikipedia Commons

“Discovered”

“The Train Seemed to Take Forever to Come, a Trick of Perception”

Yesterday, I woke up with an intense urge to re-read one of my favourite short stories of all time, “Writing in Light” from Doretta Lau’s strange and memorable collection How Does A Single Blade Of Grass Thank The Sun? I first read this book in 2014, and I remembered that I’d enjoyed “Writing in Light” for the narrator’s singular voice and for Lau’s deft weaving of fictional storytelling elements with art theory. At the time, I was new to my process of art autodidacticism (still am, probably always will be) and she helped pique my interest in both narrative craft and art history. 

“Writing in Light” follows a young woman on a New York City subway ride from her apartment (where her ex thinks perhaps an episode of Law and Order was filmed?) to a small art gallery (that the narrator had read about months before in the The New Yorker and remembers only that the owner resisted the exodus to Chelsea). As she journeys, we learn about her encounters with a particular artist, Jeff Wall, and some of his works, namely Double Self Portrait, Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party October 1947, and The Destroyed Room. We learn how her curiosity about and study of staged photography has helped her settle some conflicts in her own mind about performance and appearance–what sort of work should she, a descendent of manual labourers, do? What sort of social life should she, a self-proclaimed awkward introvert, have?

We are aware throughout the piece that the narrator is, like Wall, also constructing an image, a life. We sense she does this not in order to ‘impress’ or ‘cope,’ but in order to ‘pass,’ unnoticed, akin to how a Jeff Wall image can, at a cursory glance, pass as documentary photography instead of what it actually is: meticulously planned, intensely staged, the final image selected from what could be hundreds of different shots from different angles.

I’m reminded of this passage from the essay “Lightbox Paradox” by my friend and photographer David Evans, about the impact the advent of conceptual photography had on the medium in general: “Photographs are very disturbing. When we want the truth from them they deceive us, and when we want beauty, they can be cold and objectifying. People are not always happy to be confronted with the unvarnished truth, especially those for whom the truth might prove embarrassing. Photographs makes us a little uncomfortable because they are machine made, beyond human control. The vast majority of photographs, (snapshots of family, friends, and pets, travel souvenirs, and of course, selfies) are essentially unmediated. Advertising photography, and cinema is, of course, entirely staged. For the most part, I would argue, people are able to discern the difference quite easily, just as, face to face, people are able to distinguish a forced smile from a genuine one.”

I think here, Evans gives “people” a little too much credit. Perhaps he pays enough attention to know when someone is forcing a smile (and he does), but I would argue (and maybe Lau’s narrator would, too), that for the most part, we don’t.

“You Shall Make Me Feel What Periods You Have Lived”

On Sunday evening on my way home from a birthday celebration where I drank very good Lambrusco and waited for but never received a tarot reading, I came upon this sign affixed to a tree. Each of the quotes pertains to nature, which I thought showed an impressive perspicacity on behalf of the (I’m assuming) child or children who conceived of the idea. Narrowing the focus of the wide world of inspirational aphorisms and sage admonishments to one central and timely (the sky filled with smoke) theme showed a precocious knack for branding. I chose the Emerson quote, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

Out of context, these words are motivational: “Plant the seed of your skills and talent now, and who knows what legacy you’ll leave behind?” Within the context of Emerson’s essay “History,” they mean something…more. The thousand forests represent all of history, and the acorn represents one individual’s mind. For Emerson, this universality is, well, universal, as he repeats the pattern throughout: “(A) poet makes twenty fables with one moral,” and “Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws,” and, et cetera.

He finishes the essay with a sort of call to action: “Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, — if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes.”

Afterward, I stopped in the cemetery and took photos of the anemones, the cosmos, the dahlias and–framed by a Douglas fir and larch–the fiery setting sun.

“The Truth Matters”

This week, former Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault has been releasing compromising recordings of President Donald Trump and his staff leading up to the release of her book about her time in the White House, Unhinged.

In response, Trump has called her a “dog” and a “crazed, crying lowlife.”  Today, CBS’s Gayle King told Manigault that her release of the tapes “almost feels like a form of blackmail.”

“I’m not asking for anything,” Manigault responded.

Except for a few more people to buy her book, perhaps. Which–unlike blackmail–isn’t a crime.

Omarosa Manigault on CBS this morning, August 14 2018.

“To Yield and Not Break”

In Hannah Gadsby’s avant-garde comedy special Nanette, she uses art history as an unexpected rhetorical device illustrating two truths: the legacy of misogyny in popular culture and the incredible ability of abuse victims to “yield and not break.” Without giving away one of my favourite moments of her performance, I can say that, weeks later, I’m still thinking about how she flipped the script on the “tortured artist” stereotype and reframed it as a misconception: artists make art not because they are in pain but because they have enough of a support system to encourage their healing.

The other day my student and I were reading about Yayoi Kusama, and I watched her eyes grow wider and wider as she learned about the various abuses Kusama withstood throughout her lifetime. From her 2003 autobiography, Infinity Net: 

Themes of sex and fear show up in a significant amount of Kusama’s work, and we don’t have to guess at their meaning; she writes and speaks explicitly about art as a way of coping with the traumas she’s endured. As a child, her mother forced her to follow her father when he left the house to meet one of his many mistresses. She wanted Kusama to spy on her father having sex, but he always managed to evade her before reaching his destination. Kusama says she witnessed a sex act as a toddler and that, due to her having been taught that sex was shameful and something to hide, she perceived it as inherently violent. She made phallic-centric art as a way of healing through self-obliteration: “I make them and make them and then keep on making them until I bury myself in the process.”

Yayoi Kusama, Compulsion Furniture (Accumulation), 1964

The point is, before Kusama made this art in NYC, she lived in Matsumoto, Japan. One day in a secondhand bookstore, she found a collection of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings and was so excited by her work that she traveled six hours to Tokyo to the American Embassy to seek out O’Keeffe’s address. Miraculously, she found it. She wrote the artist and included several of her own watercolours. When O’Keeffe responded with encouragement, Kusama became determined to move to America. She left Japan in 1957.

She was very poor when she arrived in New York City. She lay awake winter nights underneath one blanket, no heat, next to a broken window. She ate discarded fish heads and rotten cabbage soup for dinners. In 1958, with no more money to buy art supplies, she wrote O’Keeffe again and invited her to her studio. Again, O’Keeffe answered and, upon seeing what Kusama was working on, brought her own dealer, Edith Halpert, who purchased one of her pieces. With that money, Kusama bought canvas and paint and created her first Infinity Net, a piece that led to her first solo show Obsessional Monochrome in 1959.

The point is, artists make art not because they are in pain but because they have enough of a support system to encourage their healing. Romanticizing the effects of abuse allows us to tolerate abusers, which is probably one of the reasons we do it. It’s much easier to tolerate abuse, to normalize it, to look away, to say “thanks for the art it gave us,” than it is to intervene.