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Richard Avedon Event at St. Mary's College of Maryland
Intro to Hannah Finlator's talk
...And this evening’s visiting artist is no different – in some ways, Hannah Finlator and her work – provide an ideal example of what this program can offer. Hannah is a painter first, a painter who continues to find ways to reinvest art history - or a wonderful alternative to it – with valid and engaging contemporary issues.
She is a determined historian, she has lectured on forgotten or marginalized 15-17th century female painters – not to prove their equality per say, but to uncover their innovations, their visual language, and maybe more importantly – their suppressed and sometimes subverted narratives.
Hannah grew up in North Carolina, and finished her undergrad work in Washington, DC at the Corcoran. Hannah chose the Corcoran for a couple reasons, but the museum culture in DC was certainly top of her list. She was known as “that strange person who stands for hours at a single painting, scratching away at a pad of paper” – she haunted the National Gallery for hours, days, and weeks during her years at the Corcoran - which was a telling sign – as it was NOT the Corcoran collection (with it’s American focus and it’s close proximity) that she studied – but the National Gallery’s European collections that enthralled her. So it came as no surprise that Hannah chose graduate school overseas - She was accepted to Newcastle upon Tyne University, and she finished her master’s degree in Fine Art (with merit, no less) in 2002. Since then she has had shows at Henshelwood Gallery in Newcastle, UK in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2007. She also has had solo shows at the Fairfields Gallery in 2007, as well as her more recent solo showing at the Biscuit Factory in 2008. Several of these shows have had catalogs, and her work has been written about on many occasions. She also has curated a show, "Surface Tension", that include her work as well as two other women. It opened in 2005.
She also has been a Lecturer in Painting at Newcastle upon Tyne University, and is currently a visiting lecturer in drawing at the school of Architecture.
In closing, I’d like to offer a couple of ideas about Hannah’s work – things which have continued to resonate for me over the several years that I have known her and her work.
Hannah does not pillage art history – acting or reacting like a cultural tourist - she interprets art history. Or rather Hannah reinterprets, reinvests, or reimagines it. Quite possibly, as you will soon see, she does all three. Hannah’s work is not old school for old school’s sake. While it’s obvious she is invested in 15th and 16th century processes, Hannah brings a refreshing 21st century sensibility of narrative and playfulness. Unlike the painter John Currin, with whom Hannah may share some surface qualities with, her work deepens art history’s connection to our daily lives by investing the personal, and the family - back into post-modern concerns, without the easy irony, the easy one-liner. Whereas Currin’s paintings depict women’s bodies as a vessel for post-modern irony and caricature, Hannah embeds and redirects art history’s lessons – her women’s bodies are active, aware, and determining their own narrative.
That is not to say Hannah’s paintings are forthright, in fact they are full of mystery, puzzles and clues. By combining her family history with figures, characters, and metaphors from centuries before, Hannah provides fresh insight to the hidden stories both in her own personal narrative, and in that of her forebearers. Her work becomes both meditative and active. It can reinvigorate the past, by continually shifting time frames, landscapes and symbolism into something alive, both for her, and for us.
Her work in the widest sense, transcends some of the common assumptions of post-modernism by reintegrating the social with the personal and by genuinely exploring and appreciating certain cultural traditions, rather than dismissing them outright.
ART vs STOCK
Today in the NYTimes:
"Today people believe more in art than the stock market. At least it’s something you can enjoy.”
The Death (suicide) of David Foster Wallace
I don't think there is anything more to add to this disturbing and sad moment. Wallace was a fine Liberal Arts professor and a leading voice in contemporary prose. His essays in particular gave this reader solace in the face of our current state of cultural priorities. Below is the transcript of Wallace's commencement speech, and in some small way conveys his unique and insightful way with words:
Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005
David Foster Wallace
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
sounds from the first half (or so)
Tape: Luminarium
Simply the most playful, sublime release thus far. A real treat.
Bersarin Quartett: s/t
Surprising in so many ways - lovely, spooky, and eccentric - plus best cover art so far: 
The Notwist: The devil, you and me
A slow grower, but ultimately, a fantastic summation of the ideas and sounds put forth on Neon Golden
Shearwater: Rook
In some ways the weirdest, most eccentric record I have heard in quite some time. A voice of an angel, but the songs of a bedeviled soul.
The Declining Winter: Goodbye Minnesota
My most anticipated release so far, the Hood fellows find a fertile place between their day job in Hood and more further out ideas of the Moteer stable.
Halves: haunt me when I am drowsy
A complete surprise, and the most beautifully packaged release in years. MP3s be damned!
Tomasz Bednarcyzk: Summer Feelings
I have to admit that I spend a great deal of my music browsing looking for the next Harold Budd - The Pearl, kind of silly really, but it is one of my favorite recordings of all time...Summer Feelings gets as close to that as anything I've heard in a long time. I listen to it ALOT.
Samamidon: All is well
Nico Mulhy: Mother Tongue
Both these releases get a great deal of playing time. Neither is really my normal cup of tea, but I really find these addictive.
Remaining favorites:
Sun Kil Moon: April
Aerial: 2532
Thomas Feiner & Anywhen: the Opiates
Nemeth: film
our sleepless forest: s/t
phillip jeck: sand
grouper: dragging a dead deer up a hill
Christopher Bissonnette: in between worlds
July Skies: the weather clock
ALSO:
These two sites have remarkable "mixtapes" for free download...check them out...
play my tape
lowlight mixes
more of this, and less of that
Notes from Szabo Symposium
Below are my notes from the introduction to the Symposium held at Hemphill in conjunction with the Huckenpahler exhibit "Mindless Pleasures". It seemed to be a success on all fronts, and bodes well for an upcoming, fuller program in 2009. Stay Tuned.
Good Morning, I’d like to begin by thanking Hemphill – George and his staff – for graciously willing to host this event. Also, I’d like to explain this morning’s format: After a short introduction to today’s concerns, I will ask the artist, James Huckenpahler to I’d also like to take a moment and explain what exactly the Szabo Symposium is. Last spring we held a small fundraiser here at Hemphill to help establish both a new wet darkroom facility and a Photography Symposium at SMCM. It was a wonderful evening, and because of the seed monies raised, and the excitement generated, SMCM opened a new 14 station wet darkroom this past fall, and has committed to host the first Szabo Symposium in Fall 2009. Joe Lucchesi (my colleague and co-organizer at SMCM), and I were already in the planning stages of this event, when it occurred to us that James Huckenpahler’s deeply provocative and show “Mindless Pleasures”, which opened two weeks ago, could provide a wonderful opportunity to begin to layout the emerging issues and concerns that we hope to address with our upcoming Symposium in 2009.
While I’d like to tell you more about that endeavor, that’s not why we are here today. We are here today to discuss how the shifting definitions to what constitutes a photograph are both affecting the perceptions of the medium, and shaping our responses to it’s ability to transfix us. As artists continued to expand and incorporate photographic rhetoric in various art making practices into the 21st century, (175 some odd years from photography’s inception), how we think about the photograph, and indeed how we define it - has become less and less important. Or at the very least – less pertinent. Maybe by looking less at the ever shifting technologies that are integral to making the photograph, as ways to define it, maybe it is time to not look forward, but reflect back onto why and what established it as a viable form of expression from the beginning. The fixing of actual time and light in a supposedly static form might be one way of describing it. The result of the combination of several gadgets and gizmos might be another. However we, YOU – define it might be very well be like the nature of the photograph – ever-changing – shape shifting.
More THIS & THAT
This and That (with apologies to covert city)
TONY WILSON RIP
Thinking about Huckenpahler
While walking through the Dutch show at the Portland Museum in Oregon, I came across this small 5x7ish etching by Rembrandt, "Self portrait at a window", from 1638. It is mesmerising. The lines are compact, but they leap out at you, the scratchiness of the mark making somehow does not indicate a searching action, but more of a excavation. The intensity of Rembrandt's etched gaze, looking out towards the viewer, seems filled with forthrightness. The act of this particular gaze seems to challenge the viewer. It becomes that much more remarkable when you consider that Rembrandt is not looking at you the viewer, he is looking at a mirror, he is studying not you the viewer, but himself. While this washed around my head, it occurred to me that the lines and the contrasts of blacks and whites that notated the space and gave form to this remarkable etching, reminded me of Huckenpahler's newer pieces. And while James is not looking in a mirror persay, he is studying a reflective computer screen.
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