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Yogic Aphrodite/action
During a conversation one of my close friends, who often calls me Aphrodite, pointed out that the Greek goddess in her original configuration is pretty neurotic and therefore not befitting my intentions for either my art or my life.
Playfully having chosen Aphrodite as my email name and, more importantly, writing about her in my work, I saw that her capriciousness, vanity, and ill temper, her neurotic tendencies, clog the intention of my project, which is to advocate for beauty, especially in the forms of creativity, love, and eros. Also, Aphrodite never grows older, and I do! Lightheartedly, my friend addressed me as “Yogic Aphrodite,” and I thank her for her humor and insight. Yogic Aphrodite is a more complex, useful, and satisfying model than is the sometimes spleenful ancient goddess. Read more
- July 29, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 0
Amplitude
At my home the other day a close friend commented about one of my self-portrait photos. She’d seen it many times before and thinks that it’s beautiful and complex. She comes over often, so we hardly talk about the piece every time. “Your eyes look sad” in the photo, she told me, “like you’ve just been crying or are about to cry.” I responded that I’d never seen the sadness and hadn’t intended it during the photo shoot. I saw a number of different expressions in the pictures from which the photographer and I selected for reproduction and exhibition only the one that, through the perception of my friend, I was seeing anew. Interpreting the photo’s iconography along with the emotional tone, she added, “You seem to be looking at someone who hurt you deeply, who betrayed you.”
Removed/refreshed
I deleted my Facebook account last week. I’d been wondering for a while what to do with it.
I opened the account in December 2008 thinking that Facebook would be fun professionally more than personally. I said to friends soon after I’d begun that it was “fascinating and dorky.” Read more
- May 28, 2010
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 1
Photos
I’ve never been one to take snapshots. If I want to document my life or remember the past, for the pleasure or retrospective revelation of it, I turn to journals, which I’ve written mostly since midlife and when I travel. On my first international trip, to Europe when I was around 20, I took a camera, probably bought for the journey. Early on, the camera broke, before I’d shot even one roll of film. I felt bad at first, but that had more to do with how I should be feeling bad, I should want those pictures, and I should buy another camera right away than it had to do with the loss of either “memories” or the camera itself. Submitting or catering to the tribal tourist–who must take photos. Quickly, the fairly shallow mourning disappeared and the tribal tourist gave way to the solitary writer. I’d brought a journal, and its images and insights as I wrote and when I read them later satisfied me just fine. Also, I have a very good visual memory, so I easily recall people. (I also easily remember people’s voices.)
I love the gorgeous solitude of writing, even in a botanical garden in Belfast or Melbourne, a restaurant in London, a gazebo in the jungle of an Indian ashram, and poolside drinking a lot of coffee at the Arizona Inn in Tucson (where I stayed several times while living in Reno before moving to Tucson). In each of those environments people walked by, close or at a distance, I heard them speaking, sometimes to me, and I observed and listened. Observing and listening, which can happen for hours at a time, give me great pleasure.
Honest
Recently I gave the keynote presentation for an Art History graduate student symposium held at the University of Arizona. The conference was organized by AZ grad students in Art History and included papers delivered by them as well as by their peers who had come from distant schools.
I was checking sound, lights, and computer equipment a couple days beforehand with the assistance of two helpful students, one of whom casually mentioned that a professor of hers had spoken of me as a “provocateur.” The student who introduced me at the keynote event said in his introduction that he’d contacted 2 art world figures for some words about me. One of them is an acquaintance who I met in the 1970s, an artist. In her words of praise she referred to me as an “iconoclast.”
I felt odd being named a provocateur and an iconoclast. I’m sure it’s not the first time someone has called me those names, but now I heard them applied. I’m also sure that some artists would love being seen as both a provocateur and an iconoclast, or as either one, because those words may connote powerful and revolutionary creativity and effect.
Teaching and intimacy 2
When I was teaching as a professor of Art History my lectures had an air of spontaneity in the way I departed from my notes and responded to an art work that I was showing or to an idea that suddenly popped into my head or to a student’s question. My mind spiraled in enthusiasm. The creative freshness of spontaneity excites me, and spontaneity allowed both for the flourishing of my passion for teaching and for thinking out loud in a classroom.
Spontaneity is essential to intimacy. Sticking with a syllabus interrupted intimacy, and though I felt for many years what I called “professorial guilt” when I proceeded more and more slowly, which was more and more spontaneously, through a syllabus, I did my best to free myself. Guilt is a rare feeling for me, so experiencing it as part of teaching, which I love, produced a suffering Joanna. When I pushed to try and cover all the material on a syllabus, my body “rewarded” me with anxiety. I was doing what I didn’t want to do.
Teaching and intimacy 1
“So you want us to be intimate.” Those words could have been a question, but a student in my performance art class had stated them. He knew more clearly than I had one of my intentions for the semester: in their performances and in our conversations about them, I wanted all of us to be open, generous, vulnerable, genuine, emotionally and intellectually truthful, and loving with one another–intimate. That diverges from the usual studio critique, which students and teachers often praise with the word tough.
I felt my classmates’ excitement underneath the nervousness of their quiet laughter, and I remember that I paused a few instants before responding because the acuteness of the student’s perception had taken me aback, and he had so sensitively articulated my own desire. I smiled and said, with tentativeness giving way entirely to delighted surprise, “Yes, I guess so. I want us to be intimate.”
Not driven
Early today over tea I discovered this: I’m not driven anymore.
Professionally I’ve lived in the art world and academia, which harbor highly driven people. Ambition is fine with me. But there’s ambition with generosity and there’s ambition that’s everything-for-me. The latter clangs and screams in the professional worlds with which I’m most familiar: individual status, making a name for oneself, telling others how great you are by touting your publications or exhibitions or speaking engagements, asking your “colleagues” what they’re doing so that you can compare your accomplishments with theirs and come out feeling superior, though you may well end up feeling inferior.
Ambition with generosity produces a desire to help others. Because of whatever success or status has come my way, how might I make the path easier for a younger colleague? What have I learned through and about my intellectual and bodily disciplines and practices that I can give? How do I share what I know and what I continue to learn? Read more
- February 2, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, My work
- Comments 1
Selling, creating
Today’s email included an “ad” from someone with whom I attended high school. For an online interview about his new book. He sent the email to the alumni list. Ads like that, from books being touted by authors to courses being offered by instructors to exhibitions by artists about to show up at the opening reception, arrive all the time. In your email, I’m sure, as well as mine.
Can’t say that I’m an exception to self-promotion, as I’ve sometimes advertised my performances and new books in the currently common manner. Not to mention that this very blog and website, in which my intentions are to give information about my work, to present ideas and experiences about various topics, from love to everyday life, and to enjoy a kind of conversation with people who respond to the posts, can all too easily be categorized as publicity in the name of self-representation–because commodification of people into image and product rings truer than generous intentions in a society overwhelmed by an orientation towards surface and celebrity rather than soul, imagination, and creativity. People selling themselves–it’s full of puffery and false promise.
So . . . I question the goodness of the intentions that I note in the previous paragraph and wonder if indeed ego is masterminding them. In that sentence, ego means the false self critiqued in various spiritual practices–the ego that clangs and clamors for attention, that aggresses on the planet and the heart, that leads people away from happiness. I understand the need to make a living, the desire for a satisfaction in one’s work that comes from people’s appreciation of it, and the healthy narcissism that is an element of self-confidence. The false ego overrides healthy narcissism and drives a person into unconscious self-absorption.
At any rate, the idea, feeling, and activity of selling myself have become especially distasteful. Creating myself, as usual, feels a lot lot better.
Habits
We think of everyone as having habits and we think of monks and nuns wearing them. We think of performers, whether in Shakespeare’s plays or in the circus, wearing costumes. Costumes indicate a role, or something other than what one really is, and a habit (presumably) indicates something that a person truly is, the monk and nun having chosen to serve the spirit every instant of their lives.
The habits of religious orders are distinctive. The clothing of monks and nuns declares them to be different from other workers, communities, and mini-cultures, who wear everyman and everywoman attire, like suits, or jeans and a T-shirt, or any of the wide array of casual or semi-dressy outfits that we see in the workplace and on the street. Of course, the iconic clothing of religious orders is long, flowing, and supremely simple, and that clothing is worn every day.
- November 11, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind, My work, Pleasure
- Comments 0
