This week’s readings came from a variety of backgrounds—Chef Batali’s road to success, Sarah Ruhl’s contemplations on playwrighting, Robert Irwin’s work on light and space, letters written to a hesitant young poet—but each said things that were very relevant to the practice of art and to my investigation this week.
In The Secret of Excess, the author talks about Mario Batali’s experiences in different kitchens under different mentors. In each place, he learns something vital about what it means to be a chef, taking in that mentor’s unique way of cooking and tasting but ultimately leaving with his own convictions about food. In 100 Essays, Sarah Ruhl talks about the power of hatred, failure, and bad plays as sources of “visceral and profound” experiences, deep reflection, and a loosening of the mind and then demands more of those things. What I got from these parts was that although we must be receptive and humble to the input of others, there comes a time when we must develop enough of a standpoint to disagree. That is to say, it is oftentimes only in the face of opposition that we discover our own voices. This is especially true for me, both in my experience with the Furniture Department and in this GISP. I am realizing how heavily my progress depends on the push-back of others and my own response to that push-back rather than simply accepting something as true. I often find clarity about myself through opposition. Sometimes the hard part is in recognizing when the response is out of obstinacy or honest disagreement, but I believe that as long as there is a level of engagement and dialogue with the opposing side, it will be productive in pushing ideas forward. And so, I think that being taken off guard, deconstructed, lost, and confused by others is not so much about removing you from a state of certainty as much as it is about forcing you to pave a new, better road as you find your way back.
Several of the readings, including 100 Essays, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary, and my own personal reading Kinetic Systems talk about the idea of art as being in the experience rather than the physical object. As Weschler puts it, “The experience is the ‘thing,’ experiencing is the ‘object.’ All art is experience, yet all experience is not art. The artist chooses from experience that which he defines out as art, possibly because it has not yet been experienced enough, or because it needs to be experienced more.” Ruhl says, “The audience helps to create the aesthetic object through process of biofeedback. When the loop is disrupted, there is no art being made.” I think this is something I need to think about more seriously considering the path that my investigation is taking, where the focus ought to be more on the interaction with the object than on the object itself. In the past, my focus has purely been on the object/the craft/the machinery while the human has merely acted as the engine; it’s an incredibly one-sided relationship, and if I claim to want to bring “life” into the things that I am making, it is not enough. A conversation is necessary, where the human and the art can have some kind of exchange—a flow of energy, action and reaction, a “biofeedback.” Chau quotes, “’A sculpture that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent processes . . . A system is not imagined, it is real.” In the same way the Gaia system makes every aspect of the inorganic world feel connected and alive, I want my own object “systems” to do the same.
Bridging the Gap 