Double Artist Talk Think Posts

In the past few weeks, I had the privilege to see an artist and art historian give talks at Lawrence. The artist was Colleen Woolpert who works with stereography. The art historian was Joan Rothfuss who discussed Nam June Paik in a lecture entitled "Striptease, Robots, and Videotapes."

Colleen Woolpert

The most interesting concept to me that Woolpert brought up in her talk was about the artist's role as an inventor. With her stereographic work, she had to invent a new way to view stereographs due to them not being completely accessible in a museum or art gallery setting. While working on her goggles for this, she came to a realization that as an artist, she invents. While creating the goggles, she was inventing in the more traditional sense, but even before, she was inventing. Ideas. Ideas have to be invented in many cases. People seem to bring up the artistry in scientists and inventors a lot, but rarely the inverse. There's a sense of a discovery in art, and sometimes it can be clinical and more "inventor-esque" than "arty." That's fine.

Joan Rothfuss

A ways into the lecture, Rothfuss brought up Paik's view of music simply being anything bound by a sequence of time—meaning dance, moving images, sonic work, and more. Freeing. Too often we limit ourselves by thinking in only one medium. Or how one medium interacts with another. Or thinking what makes mediums different. Try thinking about music in the way Paik does. What can you create, bound only by time?

Kernels

As my big final project/performance/writing/concert/etc. that will conclude my time here at Lawrence, I am working closely with Copeland Woodruff (who's guiding me in opera studies, theatrics, staging, the list goes on) and Matt Turner (who's guiding me in improvisation, songwriting, poetry, the list goes on) to shape something that blends my passions for many mediums into one thing. I am also getting help from John Shimon in digital visuals that will play a part in this production, and it is this last component that I will be focusing on in these blog updates throughout the term.

To begin writing and planning this production, Copeland advised me to figure out the kernels. The concrete concepts that I wanted to convey through the project. They could be autobiographical, but that doesn't mean that the performance would have to follow a narrative of any sort. But the kernels would greatly inform pretty much all other aspects of the project—the music, lyrics, poetry, visuals, staging, acting, the relationships between all these mediums, and beyond. As of now, the primary kernel is the different ways I have created throughout life, with a focus on now and as a child.

What we're reading in class, Jean Baudrillard's Simulations, fits in well with this idea of creating a multimedia project that evokes these feelings and thoughts because, in a way, the final product will be a simulation of them. I don't want it to be a simulation of solely or specifically my life and creative process, but rather a more general concept, stripped away from its creator, in an effort to instill in its audience something that they will learn to be, or already know, universal. In a comparison to a Borges short story in which cartographers create a map so detailed that it is the same size as the thing it details, Baudrillard claims that "it is the map (the simulation) that precedes the territory (the original concept)." While some of my territory comes before the map, I'm sure the process of creating this will lead to maps detailing a nonexistent territory, and that is an exciting prospect.

I know I didn't talk about the visual or any specific things besides the ideas behind it, but these will all come later I'm sure. For now, I'll leave you with three albums that I think will influence a lot of this project (and not just its music).

Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out

Palm's Rock Island

Björk and Dirty Projectors' Mount Wittenberg Orca