Monument, metaphors, interdisciplinary studies

Just down the hill from our house in Woodland Hills stands this fine piece of installation art. Or is it garden art? Or, as I've wondered more than once, is it a monument to interdisciplinary studies gone horribly wrong?

Well adorned with live and artificial flowers, guarded by a watchful plastic pig, fronted by plush rabbits and the proverbial pink flamingo, announcing that it's time to go back to school, the rusty green pickup stands (slumps) as a creative advertisement for the Hiatt Construction Company.

So far so good.

But as a monument for interdisciplinary work, it can only serve as a warning. 

Say you're working on a problem, like the question of how language both enables and disables us (the problem Alex Caldiero and I will address with a group of humanities and integrated studies and communications students this fall). If you think the problem additively (which is the methodology of the pigflamingoflowerrabbittruck) you'll end up with a hodgepodge, unfocused and superficial and unsatisfying. We're nervous about this and are working hard to use the tools we jointly have to get at the basic problem without slipping away toward yard art. Linguistics and poetry, literary criticism and history, anthropology and religious studies will all play parts in our investigations, and if we use the tools of these disciplines skillfully, we'll know a lot more about how we speak language and how it speaks us than we did when we started.

If the piggydodge is the anti-image, perhaps these photos of sunflowers are better indications of how good interdisciplinary work proceeds. Different views, different focal lengths, different sunflowers -- and the same question: sunflowers and light?

Art and Writing, Images and Contemplation

An article in this morning's New York Times, after new snow fell during the night, has put me in a contemplative mood.



The article is a review of "'Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings,' a spare, studious show that offers, along with many stimulations, a retreat from worldly tumult — the religious fervor, the courtly pomp, the expressive self-promotion — that fills much of the museum." What struck my eye, as so often, is the intersection of visual and written images.

With a few lines and a little color, the artist depicts a man standing in a pavilion looking out over a quiet landscape. I wonder what is in his mind, and imagine there is pleasure and peace. With a different set of lines, this time drawn according to calligraphic conventions, he creates written characters, windows into his mind. Over the years since the painting was created, various scholars and artists have added their seals to the work, stamping the painting with their approval.



The article cites a15th-century Chinese writer's wish list: “A nice cottage. A clean table. A clear sky with a beautiful moon. A vase of flowers. No cares of the world.” And this drawing reflects that clarity, that simplicity, that focus. Here the characters and the landscape are so visually intimate that written text and drawn trees feel like the same species.

I return to the work by Zarko Radakovic and Nina Pops (their response to a text by Peter Handke featured in the previous post) and feel again the textual beauty of a painting and the painterly quality of text.

And then I remember an exhibition Zarko and I saw twenty-five years ago in Cologne, Germany, and my accompanying thoughts:

Driving rain in the night. This morning delicate clouds veiling the mountains remind me of Tao Yuanming’s poem “Return Home”: The clouds rise aimlessly out of the mountains, / The birds, tired of flight, contemplate their return home, and of Li Zai’s 15^th-century drawing after those lines.

For the rest of the Times article, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/arts/design/14asia.html

Writing about Alex Caldiero

I've had the pleasure of writing about the art and poetry and performance of Alex for more than a decade now.

"Intermittent Conversations" is the beginning of an essay written for the 1994 exhibit at the Salt Lake Art Center of works by Alex and 4 other artists under the title of "The Unclosed Hand."

I just posted this essay on my professional page, along with several other publications on performance and art and poetry. With Alex, if you worry about generic purity or about how to categorize his work, you're already a day late and a dollar short. He's got a whole set of interdisciplinary genes, inherited from his Sicilian parents, mutated by his Brooklyn upbringing.



Today in our class about LANGUAGE, Alex wrote the first two letters of the word "cry" on the board and declared that the C was the mouth, the r the tongue.

Here a couple of his drawings from that Unclosed Hand show that illustrate the visual nature of Alex's sense for words: