TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "the image"
Lynda Barry, “What Is An Image?”
This Lynda Barry presentation at the Cusp Conference 2009, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL is probably the best video online of her images talk. You’ll love it.
There is something common to everything we call the arts. What is it?
It’s not aesthetics. I’ve seen a squatting guy at a Minnesota ‘Renaissance Faire’ perform Romeo and Juliet using just a cigarette butt and a bottle cap for the actors, and I’ve seen Romeo and Juliet performed by Shakespearean actors in full period costume, and both times this ‘it’ I’m talking about was there.
This ancient ‘it’ has been around at least as long as we have had hands. It’s something I call ‘an image’ and this class is about using our hands — the original digital devices —- to understand the location, function, creation and use of images.
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When we are kids we might call this interaction with an image ‘playing’ and when we are adults we might call it ‘creative concentration’ but it seems that there are similarities in the state of mind that comes about during the creation of and interaction with an image.
This state of mind is not plain old thinking. Its existence is tied to manipulating something in the external world, usually with our bodies, our hands or voices – a piece of cloth, a series of musical notes, a drawing, a written piece of dialog- The route to creating images seems to be more physical than thinkable. A reliable way to understand and experience images is to make things in series, which is what we’ll be doing in all of our writing and picture making sessions.
If you missed the NYTimes writeup of Lynda’s workshop, go read it.
…it was an images class, so there were sculptors painters and photographers in the class, and people who drew, and there were only 20 of us. My teacher Marilyn Frasca, her idea was that there is no difference between looking at a picture, making a picture, writing a story, that it’s all about this state of mind, the serial state of mind. I wish she had told me that earlier on, then I would have had a bigger clue.
In order to be in her class we had to do ten finished paintings a week, we had to write five pages a day, we had to memorize poems, and we had to learn how to look at pictures; for instance, the critiques in her class, when somebody would put up their work and nobody was allowed to say anything. We just had to learn how to look at something for 15 minutes and then it got longer to where it was an hour. That will get the frame of mind I was talking about, the thing where you go from looking at something and knowing what it is, to being very bored, to finally the picture looking back at you, where it’s reciprocal.
….Marilyn’s idea was once you understood what it feels like, like the serial, the form you give it is up to you. I was convinced by the end of the two years I studied with her that I could do anything; whether it was writing a novel, or making a painting, or doing a comic strip, or making a play.
Ebert posted video of a discussion between the two filmmakers:
Herzog’s advice to a young would-be director: “Read, read, read, read, read, read. Read.” As for Morris, he offered no advice and cheerfully implied he doesn’t have a clue what it takes.
There’s an interesting point in the conversation where they talk about the importance of “reading off the beaten path” and Errol Morris mentions the book, Letters To Strongheart [Google Books link], which is, quite simply, “letters to a dead dog.”
This is a point that doesn’t get hammered on enough: originality is simply a matter of what you mix together, so no, you shouldn’t completely ignore the canon, but you should also seek out books that nobody else has read—you can’t get a unique mixture without unique ingredients.
