Thesis Update

. . . as if there haven't been enough of those already. There have been. No, I'm not finished yet. Why? Who knows?

But I do have a really good idea where I'm headed with it at least. That makes a difference. But I feel sick inside just thinking about it. Yuck. I think I need to go do some positive visualizations and affirmations and then maybe . . . if I'm lucky . . . I'll have it in me to finish it. How I would love to deal it a deadly blow.

Yet Another Thesis Update

I haven't done a thing on my thesis in nearly a month, and today I've decided to put a stop to that nonsense. Oh, such a saga. I mean, come on. Aside from the obvious, what's my probelm?

Say it like an Art Historian

Shortly after Dandelion was born (a mere 20 months ago) I was up to my eyebrows in the highly theoretical texts that eventually lead to my thesis. As I read and reread, I found myself looking up the same words again and again. So, I started keeping track of them, and whenever I read I refered to and updated my list. Some of these words are now very familiar and I actually use them without feeling strange or somehow dishonest. Others are so new to me that I still forget what they mean without my handy list.

Here is a short version of my list; the words you definitely need to know to read about art:

Agonistics: The science of athletic combats, or contests in public games.
Bifurcation: Forked or divided into two parts or branches, as the Y-shaped styles of certain flowers.
Countervail: To act against with equal force; counteract. ~or~ to compensate for; offset.
Desideratum: Something considered necessary or highly desirable
Diachrony: Change occurring over time.
Elide: To omit, cut short, abridge, eliminate, strike out.
Fealty: the fidelity of a vassal or feudal tenant to his lord
Hegemony: The predominant influence, as of a state, region, or group, over another or others.
Hermeneutic: Interpretive; explanatory.
Heterogeneity: the quality of being diverse and not comparable in kind
Heuristic: Of or relating to a usually speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation or solution of a problem
Metonymy: A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.
Obscurantism: A policy of withholding information from the public.
Paralogy: False reasoning; paralogism.
Performativity: optimization of the global relationship between input and output, the true goal of a system.
Polemical: Of or relating to a controversy, argument, or refutation.
Polysemic: having more than one meaning; having multiple meanings
Quixotic: Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality.
Reifying: To regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.
Shoah: The mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis during World War II
Sublate: To negate, deny, or contradict.
Sublimation: An unconscious defense mechanism in which unacceptable instinctual drives and wishes are modified into more personally and socially acceptable channels.
Synaesthetic: a concomitant sensation
Telluric: of or pertaining to the earth: terrestrial.
Vituperative: Using, containing, or marked by harshly abusive censure.

Permission

Sally Mann has given me permission to use her images for my thesis. I've requested seven of them, spanning about 15 years. I might end up asking other artists for one or two more (to contrast Mann's corpses with other artists' representations).

My first e-mail from Sally Mann was back in April. I think that was the first time I have ever been truly star-struck. It made me feel the way I image normal 12 year olds felt at New Kids On The Block concerts. I never was a normal 12 year old.

Thesis Update, Again.

Grrrrrrrr.

I'm editing again.

Maybe I should rename this blog "watch this moron get a M.A.", and I'd be the moron.

That might work.

I now have feedback on the first three chapters (three more to get feedback on), and it was good, fine, ok feedback. I'm taking it.

And I don't have permission yet to use the pictures I want to, and all I can do now is wait.

I feel like my whole cognitive being has been put through a food processor. Or a paper shredder. Or a meat grinder.

Memory Art

One of the central ideas in my thesis is that memory influences art in unique ways. As a concept, memory seems simple enough but it is actually complicated and problematic in unexpected ways.

Think of an intense memory from your childhood, or some other distant period. What is that memory made of? A smell? A feeling? A mood? A chain of actions or a single scene? Is the significance of the memory bound up in these things or in something else? Can you differentiate between the way you felt at the time, and the way you feel now as you remember it? If you were to share that memory, how would you ensure it was accurately transmitted?

First, memory is its own medium, like music, language, or vision. When you try to translate that medium into something else (like paint, photography, etc.) content and meaning are lost or modified, as they would be in any translation. Memories can never be totally shared.

Unless they are collective memories, which are tied to groups with similar ideas about a thing or event that resides in the past. Within Judeo-Christian theology, there are many references to doing things in memory of God, which points to the very big difference between your memory of something and a thing you do in memory of that thing. There is a kind of collective memory that is indicated by, communicated through, and perpetuated in monuments, memorials, and memorial acts.

And then there’s another kind of memory. The memory of your dead grandmother, for example is something independent of what you remember about her. It is more like her legacy. Our individual memories take us back in time, or do we draw the past into the future by remembering? Where dead loved ones are concerned, as we hold them in memory they are propelled into the present.

A final form of memory is pretty close to the monuments and memorials mentioned above. Physical things can be described as memory—like a souvenir not of a vacation, but of the past. Unlike the ‘official’ aspect that monuments frequently have, materials are incidental, chance, less contrived and as such, may be a more accurate window into the past.

What, if anything does this have to do with art? Well, memory has become a significant force in the social sciences, history, and literature as a remedy, cure-all, or counterbalance to oppressive, totalizing, and limiting historic discourses. Art has long been influenced by these ideas that surround history, and with memory’s blossoming there, it won’t be long until art is singing memory’s song.

I don’t mean for that to sound as condescending as I think it does. Memory is a beautiful, mystical, unfathomable thing. I welcome it into art’s expansive domain.

Thesis Update

Last week I submitted my second 'official' thesis draft to my advisor. She is fairly confident that it will be ready for the other readers in July and ready for the Graduate office's editing check shortly thereafter, and ready for the university library to bind in good time (September?) meaning that I will likely qualify for graduation in December.

I still haven't decided who I should thank and who I should not, but the dedication page was decided even before my topic was. And I don't know if I should bother with a preface.

If any of you want a copy, you can have it for $20. Just let me know, and I'll have an extra one bound for you. This is a one-time publication, so it’s now or never. And by now, I mean any time before the library gets it which will maybe be in September, so you can take your time making this decision. I know it’s a tough one.

My thesis will likely be titled "Death, Memory, and the Photography of Sally Mann", and will include 7 images, if Ms. Mann approves my use of them.

There are no good writers . . .

. . . only good rewriters. Yeah, yeah.

I'm in the middle of rewriting chapter 1, per my advisor's very apt criticisms. Maybe for the time being, I should quit Imparting Art, and start giving all my devoted readers (both of you) a blow-by-blow account of how amazingly much my thesis makes me wish I could cease existing.

I'll write about Confronting the Lebanese Gaze soon. It sure has been fun.

Update

Hello April!

The thesis, yes. It is still dominating every moment of my life (and my husband's life, and robbing my children of time with their mother). It is still costing me my sanity, my other interests, my ability to socialize or even have fun.

But WAIT!

It is slowly, methodically, achingly getting written.

Looking into the future to the best of my ability, I predict that it will done by the end of the coming week. Then give me another week to pick up the pieces of my life and do some of the things I've not done in ages, and then, maybe, I'll start posting again.

Ciao

Impart Art - Daily hasn't exactly been daily ever since the end of November. Sorry and all that, but since that isn't likely to change any time soon, and I have a thesis to complete before the first of April, and a host of other things, you'll have to make due with the archives for now.

Enjoy.

Fine Art and Death

I've been re-acquainting myself lately with the work of Sally Mann. The more I read about her most recent exhibit (the series What Remains) the more interested I have become in the ideas it is built upon. This series of photos has to do with death and the aftermath of it. Death, dying, and the dead have been around as fine art subject matter for a long time. I’ve compiled the following short list of common death themes in art history:

a. Religious—death and resurrection
b. Memento mori (and all the morbid stuff it entails)
c. Noble death— death of Socrates, Marat, other heroes
d. Death of the enemy—dying Gaul (which is also symbolic death)
e. Romanticized death—depiction of dying beauties/lovers
f. Struggle between life and death—war scenes, mythological, historical, etc.
g. Scenes of murder (Judith & Holofernes)
h. Horrors of dying, Munch’s Sickbed, others like it

Mann’s use of, or response to death seems to represent a major departure from the foregoing list of way artists have dealt with it as subject matter. Particularly in the past (I am still exploring this point) death seems to have always been employed in some kind of massive statement about life, society, history, religion, etc. It is my opinion that Mann’s work doesn’t do any of this. What Remains seems to address death without putting it to any moralizing task.