Art's Artifice

Glass is Massacre

2009-06-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

I went to see an animated movie in 3D with a friend a few days ago. Wearing 3D glasses in the theater gave movie-watching a completely different feel. I've always enjoyed the atmosphere of a movie theater - a few dozen strangers sitting together in the dark, watching the same screen, listening to each other whisper, laugh, scream. But as soon as a script across the screen instructed viewers to put on their 3D glasses, that atmosphere evaporated. Each person was instantly shut into a private compartment within the frame of the glasses. Whenever I turned to my friend to exchange a look I couldn't see him, and he didn't even notice that I was trying to get his attention because images were flying into his face, consuming him inside some kind of vortex. All I wanted to do was run at every person in that theater with a pair of scissors and puncture their lenses. I wanted so badly to communicate, to feel that familiar sense of movie-watcher solidarity. When I left the theater I found a bin of used 3D glasses and took a handful so that I could go home and do just that in the privacy of my own room. It felt so good. I felt the way an artist might feel after he or she empties their self into a work. A motif within this project for me has been the image of the universe. A few weeks ago my friend Abigail told me about the images that the Hubble telescope captures...images that are so big they make our entire universe look minuscule. After ripping apart the lenses of my 3D glasses I was wondering what would happen if I had actually attacked the people in the movie theater, what would happen to their eyeballs. I went to Google images to search for pictures of eyes, but none of them looked accurate. I strayed to pictures from the Hubble telescope and realized that at a glance, the tiny lights that compose multiple universes look like the light that escapes from human eyes when they cry. So I pasted sections of a Hubble telescope image to each lens that I removed. Artifice is defined as a crafty but underhanded deception; a trick played out as an ingenious, but artful, ruse; a strategic maneuver that uses some clever means to avoid detection or capture. When an artist creates, the artist builds artifice. The purpose of art is to disguise the self so that it can be emptied. 3D glasses are an example of a physical artifice, a protective covering that traps the movie-watcher inside a universe. When the lenses are removed the universe falls out. That is art.

Ai

2009-06-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

1/2 Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern, Cheyenne, Comanche

2009-06-03T06:54:00.001-07:00

The collection of poems in the book Sin by Ai is a meditation on power and male abuses of it, and where God belongs in the midst of it. She takes on the personas of various figures in her poetry, such as the Kennedy brothers or a priest who falls to sexual temptation or a child killer not in a personal theraputic manner, but almost like a vengeance. Her writing is primarily intended to be a reflection on the people of the world and her political feelings, but as with most works of art, the process she chooses to follow when creating a work exposes her self.

All information on the internet about Ai is fixated on the changing of her name. I've decided that this is quite possibly because the tension of Ai's being is condensed within her name change (from Florence Anthony to "Ai," which means "love" in Japanese) and exploded in her poetry. As the only child born as the result of a love affair, Ai states:

"I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father's identity from me; I feel that I should not have to be identified with a man, who was only my stepfather, for all eternity."

Ai's mother met her lover, a Japanese man, at a streetcar stop. If Ai resents the connotations of her conception, why did she choose to change her name to a Japanese word? After reading a good amount of her poetry, I've decided that it has something to do with her unusual ability to empathize. The poems in Sin that are the most powerful are consequently the most disturbing. In the case of this collection of poems, Ai writes to expose the cruelties of human nature and her confusion about God's justification of it. This intention translates to an overall fury within her, but it also speaks to her supply of compassion. Ai's name change parallels the altering of her identity in writing in that both have been done out of empathy in order to prove a belief.

Aside from the blatancy of disguising her physical self in foreign personas, Ai's writing style disguises her inner strength and allows it to escape into the minds of her readers.

Artifice Exposed

2009-06-02T20:21:00.000-07:00

Regardless of the intentions an artist may have with a creation, the final result of the artist's work is a reflection of the artist's self. Visual art presents an unusual challenge for the artist because it's purpose is to be seen and judged. The decisions the artist makes regarding how the piece is to be presented reveals truths about the artist. Last year I took a photography class and was assigned the burden of capturing a self portrait. A self portrait is different from other forms of visual art because the artist's intentions cannot possibly be hidden. In this photograph I chose to expose my shoulders and I chose to make my eyes move in different directions. Those choices suggest truths about me not only as a photographer, but as a piece of art, as a person. This picture implies that as a photographer I find substance in oddities, as a piece of art I am willing to be exposed, and as a person I feel more comfortable marketing myself as strange than as ordinary. The artifice of a visual self portrait is the extreme, unforgiving version of the artifice of literature. In literature the writer has the privilege to manipulate the amount of their self that they include, and the amount that they choose to include is revealing. When creating a visual self portrait the artist has no choice but to arrange themselves blatantly, and the manner in which they do so is revealing.

Fernando Pessoa

2009-06-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

In French "Pessoa" is translated to "personne," which means
"person." However, in French the phrase, "Je suis personne" means "nobody."

Pessoa's Trunk

Fernando Pessoa: A Little Larger than the Entire Universe

2009-06-02T19:47:00.001-07:00

Fernando Pessoa believed that Fernando Pessoa did not exist. In his poetry he demonstrated this idea by splitting himself into multiple personas and writing from their perspectives.

Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. He lived there until age 7 and for the majority of his adult life. However, from age 7 to 17 he lived with his mother in Durban. It is likely that his existential self doubt was inspired at a young age by the clash of cultures and language he experienced when he moved to Durban. Pessoa expressed his being in Lisbon through the voice of Alvaro de Campos. In published articles and literary magazines Campos often criticized Pessoa for being too rational, and for the "mania of believing that things can be proved."

"I don't believe in anything but the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not even of the outer universe conveyed to me by those sensations. I don't see the outer universe, I don't hear the outer universe, I don't touch the outer universe. I see my visual impressions; I hear my auditory impressions; I touch my tactile impressions. It's not with the eyes but with the soul that I see; it's not with the ears but with the soul that I hear; it's not with the skin but with the soul that I touch. And if someone should ask me what the soul is, I'll answer that it's me." -From Alvaro de Campos's Notes For the Memory of My Master Caeiro

The reason for Pessoa's creation of Alvaro de Campos was both the need to confront the part of him that starved the senses by searching for reason, or to indulge the part of him that maintained that ability/curse.

"It's before I take opium that my soul is sick.
To feel life is to wilt like a convalescent,
And so I seek in opium's consolation
An East to the east of the East.
This life on board is sure to kill me.
Fever rages in my head day and night.
And although I search until I'm ill,
I can't find the spring to set me right."
-from Opiary by Alvaro de Campos

vs.

"Whether I'm happy or sad? ...
Frankly I don't know.
What does it mean to be sad?
What is happiness good for?
I'm neither happy nor sad.
I don't really know what I am.
I'm just one more soul that exists
And feels what God has ordained.
So then, am I happy or sad?
Thinking never ends well...
For me sadness means
Hardly knowing myself ...
But that's what happiness is ...
-20 August 1930 by Fernando Pessoa

The clear difference between these two writers is that Alvaro de Campos is tormented with feeling and Pessoa is tormented by questioning and analyzing. Campos's writing style is passionate and rich, while Pessoa's style is a simply written stream of consciousness.

Throughout his life Pessoa indulged in the habit of focusing on theoretical problems (the existence of God, good vs. evil, the meaning of life, the meaning of death the limits of consciousness, the concept of love, etc.) instead of the process of simply living. His alter ego, Alberto Caeiro, was uneducated, lived in the country, and strived to "see things as they are, without any philosophy."

"I'm not a materialist or a deist or anything else. I'm a man who one day opened the window and discovered this crucial thing: Nature exists. I saw that the trees, the rivers, and the stones are things that truly exist. No one had ever thought about this. I don't pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world. I made the greatest discovery worth making, next to which all other discoveries are games of stupid children. I noticed the Universe, The Greeks, with all their visual activity, didn't do as much." - From an interview with Alberto Caeiro

I wonder if it was on purpose that Alberto Caeiro's beliefs come off as intensely philosophical. Alberto Caeiro's poetry is written by Pessoa to contradict his own fixation on existentialism. Although contradictory, both methods of thinking are philosophical.

"I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don't think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn't made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren't well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.
I have no philosophy, I have senses...
If I speak of Nature it's not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is."
-from The Keeper of Sheep by Alberto Caeiro

vs.

"I don't know who I dream I am...
Suddenly all the seawater in the port is transparent
And I see on the bottom, like a huge print unrolled across it,
This entire landscape, a row of trees, a road glowing in that port,
And the shadow of a sailing ship older than the port and passing
Between my dream of the port and my looking at this landscape,
And it approaches me, enters me,
And passes to the other side of my soul..."
-from Slanting Rain by Fernando Pessoa

Caeiro often focuses on word choice and repetition in his poetry. In the poem above his choice to use the word 'because' repetetively reflects his ability to answer questions. Contrarily, Pessoa's poem is poses a question and demonstrates thematic detail instead of careful planning.

Pessoa's third heteronym, Ricardo Reis, was a physician and classicist who wrote poems about the need to accept fate and odes to the vanity of life.

"I was born believing in the gods, I was raised in that belief, and in that belief I will die, loving them. I know what the pagan feeling is. My only regret is that I can't really explain how utterly and inscrutably different it is from all other feelings. Even our calm and the vague stoicism some of us have bear no resemblance to the calm of antiquity and the stoicism of the Greeks." -from Ricardo Reis's unfinished preface to his Odes.

"Time passes
And tells us nothing.
We grow old.
Let us know how,
With a certain mischief,
To feel ourselves go.
Taking action
Serves no purpose.
No one can resist
The atrocious god
Who always devours
His own children.
Let us pick flowers.
Let us lightly
Wet our hands
In the calm rivers,
So as to learn
Some of their calmness.
Sunflowers forever
Beholding the sun,
We will serenely
Depart from life,
Without even the regret
Of having lived. "
-From 12 June 1914 by Ricardo Reis

vs.

Everything, except boredom, bores me.
I'd like, without being calm, to calm down,
To take life every day
Like a medicine -
One of those medicines everybody takes.

I aspired to so much, dreamed so much,
That so much so much made me into nothing.
My hands grew cold
From just waiting for enchantment
Of the love that would warm them up at last.

Cold, empty
Hands.
-6 September 1934 by Fernando Pessoa

Juxtaposed, these two poems illustrate the argument Pessoa has with himself over the relevance of time passing, the relevance of existing. Reis writes poetry with concise statements. He is bluntly knowledgeable. Pessoa writes with long sentences, suggesting incomplete thoughts.

The fourth, and least accurate heteronym was Fernando Pessoa himself.

"I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I'm less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all." - Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa believed that his singular being did not exist. He embraced the idea that he was composed of multiple beings.

Unlike Virginia Woolf, Pessoa did not channel his emotions and thoughts into characters or the suspension between literature and reality, he channeled them through his own self. Pessoa acknowledged the different elements of his person and used writing as a way to separate them.Woolf's writing is code while Pessoa's poetry is therapy. However, both writers used the process of writing to evade the chaos of confusion within the self.

Son of Sam by Elliott Smith

2009-06-02T19:44:00.000-07:00

David Berkowitz, infamously known as Son of Sam, was a serial killer in New York City during the 1970s. Berkowitz was told that his mother died during childbirth and was adopted at a young age. He felt an intense sense of guilt for his mother’s death and isolated himself from his family. When his adoptive mother died of breast cancer in 1967 Berkowitz joined the army. While there he had his first sexual experience with a prostitute and contracted a venereal disease. After returning home he found out that his birth mother was alive. Fantastic paranoia in the form of demons took over him. On Christmas Eve, 1965, the demons threw Berkowitz into the streets with a hunting knife to find a victim to kill. He confessed to stabbing two women, one woman’s case could not be confirmed, the other survived. Berkowitz moved to a new home. In his new neighborhood howling dogs prevented him from sleeping at night. As his senses collapsed Berkowitz became convinced that the dogs’ howls were messages from demons instructing him to kill women. Son of Sam was born.

Elliott Smith was found dead in his apartment on October 21, 2003. The cause of death was two stab wounds to the chest, presumed to be intentional. He left a note on a Post-it:

“I’m so sorry --love, Elliott. God forgive me.”

Like Berkowitz, Smith had a damaging childhood. It is speculated that he was sexually abused by his father, which he illustrates in a few of his songs such as "Some Song"

Smith wrote and performed "Son of Sam" either as a confessional for his own sake, or in an attempt to explain to the outside how unsettled he felt on the inside. The fact that Berkowitz killed people with knives and that Elliott Smith killed himself with a knife implies an even greater connection, which suggests that Smith's music was a hauntingly accurate form of expression. In Smith's case, music served as a means of admitting truths indirectly, with only the distraction of melody as a protective disguise.

Virginia Woolf

2009-06-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf

2009-06-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson's relationship with the concept of death is similar to how I perceive Virginia Woolf's to be...the notion that death is simply the next step, and yet it is a fixation.

Dying by Emily Dickinson

Hypothesis Contradicted

2009-06-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

Virginia Woolf's last publication, The Years, is revealing in a way that I did not expect after reading her other works. Instead of writing to vacate her self, The Years is written like a confession. The novel focuses on the private details of select characters over the course of fifty years. Each chapter is defined by a singular day of that year. Each year is characterized by a particular quirk in the cycle of the seasons. The novel takes place in London, the environment in which Woolf belonged. In 1923 after living in Richmond with her husband, Woolf insisted that they move back to London, saying:

"I can't be happy in this quietness."

I wrote before about the silence of water and the seductive calm of drowning. Perhaps I was wrong...maybe it's more like an explosion.

The first section of The Years is to me the most relevant. It begins with Colonel Abel Pargiter's visit to his mistress, Mira. Pargiter thinks about his invalid wife, Rose, two times throughout his visit...fleeting thoughts about what he will have the liberty to do "one of these days," referring to when Rose dies. This led me to think that he would be enthusiastic about visiting Mira, but Woolf captured his demeanor with judgemental thoughts and passive movements. The scene was starved for passion. Woolf's writing style in her last novel is particularly contradictory to her style in earlier works, such as Mrs. Dalloway. In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf streams together memories that feel like they belong to the Clarissa Dalloway. In The Years her characters and choice of detail seem to be direct presentations of her worries. Partiger is reminiscent of Leonard Woolf and the parallel between Rose and Virginia Woolf cannot be argued. The relationship that Partiger has with the idea of his wife mirrors Virginia's fear of driving away her husband with her unsteady mental state. Her fixation on the ability of the seasons to govern human life suggests that she feels a lack of control over her body. In the novel Rose's daughter, Delia, feels smothered by her mother's mental illness and looks forward to when she dies. Rose takes a stubbornly long time to die. In addition to weather, death is a dominant, all-encompassing theme in the book. Delia's character is reminiscent of Woolf's unusual awareness of her own condition and the inevitability of death.

Woolf's suicide note to husband, Leonard:

Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

It is clear that Woolf wrote The Years with her personal self in mind. It is important to consider the difference between the writing style used near the end of her life and the techniques used earlier in life. All of her works are written as a stream of consciousness, but most of her early works disguised the stream by building it inside a character's brain. The Years is a stream of consciousness coated with a very thin artifice. Thesis: In her early works, Virginia Woolf wrote to distance herself from her self. When mania accumulated control she lost the desire, or maybe the ability, to be distant, and wrote in an attempt to explode.

On London: Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours

2009-06-02T10:53:00.000-07:00

Writing Weaponry

2009-05-31T19:39:00.000-07:00

Throughout her life Virginia Woolf suffered from manic depression. 'Mania' is defined as violently excessive reaction. In Greek mythology, Mania was the personification of insanity. In Roman and Etruscan mythology, Mania (or Manea) was the goddess of the dead. Depression is defined as a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity. Definitions combined, Woolf's condition could be compared to a female deity of disorderly lethargy. In the biography The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Manic Depression and the Life of Virginia Woolf by Peter Dally it is asserted that, "Virginia's need to write was, among other things, to make sense out of mental chaos and gain control of madness. Through her novels she made her inner world less frightening. Writing was often agony but it provided the 'strongest pleasure' she knew." This suggests that Woolf depended on writing as an artificial act to avoid being captured by the chaotic realtiy of her mind.

In 1941 she wrote in a letter to her husband:

"I feel certain now that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time ..."

She then walked to the river bank near her house, weighted her pockets with stones, and submerged her self in water. Her suffocated corpse was discovered by children three weeks later.

I've always thought of mania as a fickle companion...a looming presence that permeates it's self into it's habitat. The closer one becomes to their companion, the deeper it permeates. I think that the concept of drowning is interesting to consider in Woolf's case. The process of suffocation via water is reminiscent of a need for silence, a need for sedation, the contradiction to Woolf’s companion.

My hypothesis is this: In writing fiction, Virginia Woolf strived for a contradiction. She used fiction as a method of stifling her companion and organizing the chaos that she sensed increasingly as she aged. The last work of fiction that Woolf produced, The Years, was written at a time when her condition was beginning to usurp her self constantly. To prove my hypothesis I am going to read the work and attempt to trace her process.

2009-05-20T05:04:00.000-07:00