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Fleeting acts of self-expression hold special power

8/1/2014

Zen Garden, Buddhist Temple, Japan

The first time I saw a "dry landscape" Zen garden in one of the hundreds of temples in Kyoto, my brain sort of short-circuited.

This was the mid-'80s, and here was a Zen Buddhist priest meticulously raking the gravel against a lurid neon backdrop of sudden affluence and an alarming amount of consumer waste, often un-used and in its original packaging.

Now, of course, we get it. We have been seduced by the easy acquisition of stuff, then oppressed by all our stuff as the economy contracted (and nearly collapsed in the U.S.) We realized the two-car-garage life was not for us and now we spend a lot of time and angst trying to figure out how to part with our stuff. We have been hoodwinked by marketers who prey on and play up our inadequacies, even inventing a highly lucrative shopping 'holiday', Cyber-Monday.

Leah Biggs photo

There's an entire genre of art that reflects our dis-ease with all the stuff (see 10 visuals here) and painters have had to re-think their practice (of eking out a living) now that 'original' oil paintings sell at Winner's for $39.99, straight from Dafen Village, China.

What is emerging is a conversation about what really matters, which inevitably concludes with 'experiences.' It would be nice to think this shared revelation is rooted in our own free will, but really, the marketers have shot themselves in the collective foot. A rampant, speculative real estate

Beck's fleeting design at a French ski resort uses snowshoes and clotheslines.

market has forced mortgage-choked folks into smaller quarters where there is just no room for more stuff. Car-ownership is being increasingly seen as a hangover from another marketing era and self-expression is no longer synonymous with the home-decor category. Expression is becoming a participatory practice, enhanced by that one burgeoning consumption category — the ubiquitous personal screen and all its accompanying non-object data packages, games and apps. Mobility-marketing promotes an era of impermanence. Photos are as fleeting as the gravel-raking or the daily rice-flower Kolam drawings of South Indian women (see video, at bottom) or the snowshoe-patterns created by Englishman Simon Beck (left).

Carlyn Yandle photo

Retail therapy is slowly being replaced by escape therapy. We balance rocks and create Calder-esque mobiles of driftwood. We take pictures, we post them on our blogs. We have amassed nothing but memories of that mindful, meditative moment of exploring the surface and mass of natural objects. We share them and are inspired by others' sharing.

Priceless.

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The most powerful art might be made of garbage

11/22/2013

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Carlyn Yandle photo

The astronomical private art-investor feeding frenzy at prestigious auction houses is light years away from art. It's a greedy need for prestige, worlds apart from the hand of Picasso or Andy Warhol and, most recently, Francis Bacon and the other Important Artists who conceived those coveted works.

Art is outside the billions of dollars sloshing around the world's art investors; it's in the streets, provoking those who hold the purse strings and the power. You can see it in humble objects, like the garbage monster that prowled around the anti-pipeline rally last weekend at the end of False Creek, towering over the thick crowd, snapping its messy maw at excited kids. It's not pretty, and it certainly has no retail value, as it's made of the usual stuff that ends up in the Pacific Gyre, but it functions as art has and always will. It provokes us to think differently, to re-consider, step out of our complacency and see the world for what it is and where it is headed or could be. This is the power of the visual object.

The makers (presumably the two operators) of the garbage monster were compelled to express themselves through their creativity and labour, with no profit or prestige motives in mind. The object serves to contest the ways and means and plans of those in power, in this place, at a time when the news broke that Canada is dead last in climate change policy in the developed world. It may be a small gesture, but when combined with other creative forms of expression, can turn the tide.

Carlyn Yandle photo

The prevailing discourse was there in the form of an image-object of an actual SUV receiving a giant lethal injection, during Car-free Day on Commercial Drive this past June. The only motive behind this gesture was a need to comment. The high visual impact is art in its purest form and the makers are indisputably artists. And those artists are probably not getting rich if they're spending much of their creative effort on an expression outside of the system of capitalism.

That pretty much has been the history of artists. Their work may have no cash value, but their value to society is priceless.

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Art trumps ads by just a whisper

11/1/2013

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They say if you want someone's attention, whisper. Or maybe that was just a line from a Whisper pantyhose commercial back in the '70s.

Whispering to get attention isn't easy in an image-packed urban landscape where slick marketing messages infiltrate our entire field of vision, from pop-up ads on our screens to the clutter of billboards.

There's so much of it that we subconsciously absorb, dismiss then ignore each image as we move through the visual bombardment. And we wonder why we're mentally exhausted at the end of the day.

That's what makes the experience of public artwork in the city landscape so compelling. No call to buy or to back a product or political organization or private enterprise. With no aspirational words (Believe! Passion! Simplify!) or branded images, logos, phrases or text of any kind to cue our automatic-piloted brain to overlook the visual image, a slight confusion sets in. Whoa. What the hell is that?

First comes the double-take, then out comes the smart-phone camera. The proof of the attention-grabbing power of commercial-free artwork on the city environment can be measured by the number of similar google images. You'd be hard pressed to find that Telus panda ad on a Flicker photo stream, but you'll run across multiple images of a single public artwork, like this giant macrame-esque installation created by Jasminka Miletic-Prelovac, at the only tall building (for now) at Main and Broadway. Or Edward Burtynsky's images on Pattison billboards (spotted along West 4th Avenue, below).

These message-free images that appropriate buildings and billboards are enough to compel viewers to investigate further. Turns out Miletic-Prelovac's work was this year's commission to highlight the livable laneways movement. And Burtynsky's images are from his latest book and new documentary, Watermark.

No logos. No brands. No text. These are whispers that can create a small roar.

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Put down that Blackberry and go get some blackberries

8/1/2013

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I so adore this old World War I royalty-free poster created for the Canada Food Board that I post it in my kitchen every year during the putting-food-by months, already underway.

I love the displayed array of fresh produce that would never be pushed by a private enterprise (where's the profit margins in stuff you can grow?) and the chief goals of saving and not wasting. So anti-capitalist. There's nary a scrap of the patriarchy in this national call to action. You want to live well? Listen to what your grandmother's got to say, girl, and you'll be wanting not.

It's propaganda art you can really sink your teeth into.

There's an art to putting food by without relying on electricity, and an art to harvesting what's wilding in your environment, also known as foraging. We do it with intention (in jeans and long-sleeved shirts, with hook, snips, and yogurt containers) or without intention (leaning one's barely clad beach-bound body into the thicket for a few juicy morsels).

We are not wanting for blackberries in this corner of the world, to put by, or put in a pie — and not just for the fruit. In what should become an extension of this very Vancouver (and Vancouver Island) activity, the ubiquitous rogue species of Himalayan blackberry can be harvested for their durable 'vegetable leather.'

David Gowman photo from The Georgia Straight, straight.com

The time of this writing is the perfect time to reap a particular harvest, according to local artist
Sharon Kallis. It's late enough in the growing season for the canes to reach the thickness of a baby's arm and shoot 10 feet in the air in search for cyclists to take down or paths to take over. But it's not so late in the season that the menacing-looking vines are too woody to be able to be stripped. That hits around mid-August.

Why would want to strip the canes? It's a rhetorical question for anyone who likes to make something out of nothing, and this is even better: make stuff, while hacking into this invasive species' ability to turn diverse urban woodlands into a thorny monocrop.

Kallis, whose special interest is in social engagement, shows how to strip blackberry vines (or watch this video) to wrestle down this barbed invader and amass some very usable material that can be used immediately or stored for later to make useful things like baskets or privacy screens, and useless, more interesting things like installations. Some inspiration from the prolific American sculptor Patrick Dougherty:

Crossing Over, American Craft Museum, New York, New York, 1996.

Dougherty installing at the North Carolina Museaum of Art, 2009.

Summer Palace, 2009. Morris Arboretum, Philadelphia.

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A childhood of risky business inspires

7/5/2013

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My nephew is about to launch. Freshly freed from high school, he'll soon be flying high at the National Circus School in Montreal.

If there is one kid who would run away and join the circus, Domenic is it. Long before he pushed the physical limits of the human vessel, long before there were even any apparent muscles on his skinny little frame, he was destined for something different. His mind has always been a playground, his outlook wide-eyed and sunny. From him I’ve learned that play is not just fun but work, and that devotional practice comes in many forms.

He has easily devoted what Malcolm Gladwell has suggested is the 10,000 hours it takes to master a skill, and his motivation comes from his own wonderment. He spent his childhood wondering how high and how long and playing with the limits of muscle and bone. He can't wait to carry on the body experiment among others in the same pursuit from around the world.

“Experimenting with your own life is the most fundamental medium we have,” says scientist/environmental artist Natalie Jeremijenko, whose ‘design systems’ include the Mussel Choir: sensors connected to bivalves that can inform humans of the health of the East River through sound.

Jeremijenko on her 'wing swing'. Image from New York TImes Magazine

This is why I'm compelled at this time of year to grab random high school graduates by the arm and say: Go away! Go see the rest of the world! This is not everything! Things are not everything! Don't let comfort hold you back!

“Inconvenience yourself” is the prevailing take-away in The Blue Zone, Dan Buettner’s book of studies in longevity throughout the world, and it’s a good first step toward getting out of emotional and physical ruts and jump-starting experimentation. Bus instead of car. Paddle instead of cruise. Make instead of buy. Outdoors instead of indoors. All these little decisions of inconvenience, these tiny risks to our comfort, lead to new paths and new outlooks. (One routine-breaking idea: taking in one of the free nightly Bollywood, Bhangra and hip-hop yoga classes or the Indian Summer in the Park as part of the Indian Summer Festival of Arts, Ideas & Diversity, on now through July 13 in downtown Vancouver. See promo video below).

I think about the many, small social and physical tests my amazing nephew took on that brought him to where he is now: fierce, if a little afraid — just where he likes to be.

I am inspired.

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Fleeting acts of self-expression hold special power

The most powerful art might be made of garbage

Art trumps ads by just a whisper

Put down that Blackberry and go get some blackberries

A childhood of risky business inspires

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