Image courtesy: Georgia Marsh
During my first weeks of wading through the archive I was dizzy trying to make sense of all the information I was ingesting. I instinctually categorized artists by their field (music, film, painting) and then I made subcategories (political lesbian musician, aging foreign filmmaker, crunchy environmentalist abstract painter). The interviewees seemed so at home in their chosen fields and so sure of what they were trying to say. This week, though, as I was scrolling through the articles I noticed, instead, a sort of pervasive restlessness that came to light when the artists spoke about their process. In almost every interview there was talk about the search for inspiration, self-doubt during early training and the importance of artistic fluidity. When I looked through the 15 articles (!!!) we uploaded this week I noticed that each artist spoke about his or her own struggle to get inspired or find a vocation, or about some kind of cross-pollination between their art and the seemingly alien outside interests that inform their work (children’s books, science, strip clubs, soap operas). It seems that all artists are constantly struggling to find the balance between their left and right brains, always trying to find the place between their subjective world and the real world where they can make their own reality understood.
Below is a quote from each artist welcomed into the archive this week, each one speaking not as a “painter” or a “playwright” but as a person with a constantly changing point of view and an open mind. Click on a quote and be transported:
Philippe Demontaut “A long time ago I made paintings, then collages, then sculptures. Then sequential drawings in perspective. When I got to the U.S. I realized that I was no longer interested in the form in which I made these things. In making this film I had the feeling that I was reconsidering my old work although it reappeared transformed.”
Michael Tetherow “It was a very subtle, gradual change that happened over a period of two years. This summer is when it finally blossomed and developed. I started working outside, not with the idea of painting nature, but literally working with nature.”
Becky Johnston “Well, I’d been reading a lot of Bataille and so called pornographic literature. I wanted to do something with the idea of using pornographic language but never fulfilling the usual expectation by providing pornographic imagery.”
Georgia Marsh “I started to permit myself to do landscapes because I wanted some other possibility to come into the paintings. Because eliminating possibilities as a method means that you have to permit yourself to go outside of that method. You have to allow other things to come into it…it’s like throwing a monkey into the works. It’s the joker in the deck.”
Zhang Yimou “For me, all stories are old stories. There are no new stories. The most important thing is to be able to convey your own experience…What I want to do through this old story is to convey a new feeling for the Chinese audience, to stimulate them, so that they can make associations.”
Raul Ruiz “I am always trying to make this connection between different ways of producing: film, theater, installations and videos. I started with the American B-movie and Commedia dell’arte in Italy, which…work[s] in the same way as Shakespeare, Calderon, Lope de Vega, using a mixture of luxury and poverty. It’s what I like about the B-movie, an expensive look with no money at all”
Louis Edwards “Ten Seconds started out as a short story. In the short story, I was supposed to capture a moment of déjà vous when it first occurs…The short story that I wrote is now the opening section of Ten Seconds. (This transition from short story to novel sounds typical, but that’s how it happened for me.)”
Ralph Lee “I look for something that’s dramatic. That you could make into a theater piece. That has wonderful interchanges between characters, or the possibility of constructing some amazing visual image that can also have a dramatic purpose.”
Rob Weiss “I have my stereo on, my TV is on, all the lights are on, a bottle of fuckin’ Johnny Walker or Jack in front of me. Some of the really good scenes I wrote when I was drinking…Now I’m writing in topless places on cocktail napkins”
David Del Tredici “I’ve been setting Alice in Wonderland to music for more than twenty years now, so I guess it has become an obsession…Gradually I was drawn into the story behind the story-why Lewis Carroll wrote the book and for whom…I needed a new kind of music to show this real Lewis Carroll.”
David Greenspan “[I] acted in plays off-off-Broadway. A couple of years after I arrived I began performing monologues I’d written. I also collaborated with choreographers, putting together dance-theater pieces that integrated monologues, short dialogues and dance. Eventually I wrote scripts that stood independent of dance. And for a period of time I directed and acted in my own plays…Yeah, I like to entertain.”
Stanley Greaves “I am a maker of things. In the early days, I found empty matchboxes, cigarette boxes, bits of string, wire, empty boot-polish tins, whatever, and made things. Drawing was just another activity, and it still is…My hitherto secret preoccupation with writing poems, which has now come to light, is another form of making…I was asked if the paintings influenced the poetry, and I said, “No, they come from the same source.”
Jorge Volpi “When I was 13, I decided that I would be a historian, a medievalist. I even wrote my first “text” at that time: the prologue to an immense, and impossible, History of the Middle Ages…For me, the novel is a way to investigate the world that is as valid as science or history, and it possesses a tool that the others don’t: imagination.”
Eddie Bobè “I walk around with a nucleus of knowledge, so that I can go in whatever direction. Whenever I need to add information or material, I do so by researching and accessing. In addition, I practice mentally all the time because playing occurs first in the mind; your ideas must manifest themselves in your mind before they manifest themselves in your hands.”
Eduardo Galeano “My certitudes have doubts for breakfast. I distrust full-time optimism. But there are diverse movements in the world that are answering the message of universal power-movements based in solidarity and mutual respect…it brings me great joy to feel like I contribute to these changes.”
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