these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.

thank you for meeting me here in such tall grass.


my artist website is here.

Jul 22, 2010

wondering, wandering, wondering...

yesterday, i had the same conversation with three different people about how to define a "body of work". what is the criteria?

materials? concept? aesthetic? serial? a combo?

one friend offered up the word Time as part of her personal approach to grouping work together and calling it a Body- that the work in the collection is representative of a particular time in her life... a time (or era, moment) defined by particular concerns... not necessarily whether or not the work LOOKS a certain way. another friend offered up the phrase "themed accumulation" which i really like. and again, nothing really about the LOOK of individual pieces but rather the concerns of the work. there is freedom in that. i like it. but it also starts complicating my already complicated issue.

my practice is, by nature, full of multiplicity. though i speak to the same concerns in all my work, the voice changes. multiple personality disorder, for sure. and though i joke about that a lot here on the blog, when sitting down to the task of putting things in order, i get lost pretty easily at first.

right now, as i continue to wind my way through all my portfolios, taking pictures and seeing what i've got, i find recurrent themes or modes or LOOKS that guide me in putting all this work in to Bodies... but i also see how these Bodies are really body Parts... and how they relate to one another and how i got from point A to point B, shifting through voices, making the issues deeper, more complex and multi-faceted. like Sharon Olds' book "Satan Says".

i see how i do not stand firmly in either camp: critical vs. emotional. my work is a blend of the two. i care about both spheres equally. i think both are necessary. the union is necessary.

and so... how to group things? since the aesthetic i operate in is so strong - black and white - i have to be very careful when putting things in a line. they all LOOK good together because they are unified by palette. but just "looking good together" isn't enough. we black and white artists run the risk of looking "slick" if we go off looks alone. and, in art-speak, SLICK is not a good thing to be called. it means the work is superficial.

and so grouping work based on looks alone isn't going to work for me.

also, i very rarely stumble in to a "series". when i try to force a series, the inspiration for it dries up pretty fast because i start feeling like i'm just making the same painting over and over and over again and not really investigating anything. i'm much more interested in artists like Banks Violette who create collections of work rooted in concept, who trust the intelligence of the audience, who understand that the audience is entirely capable of seeing (or even making) the lines that connect one piece to another... that the audience can see the corollary between a painting and a drawings and a quilt and a found object thrown on the floor. it doesn't need to be ALL drawing or ALL painting or ALL sculpture. the audience does not need everything spelled out to them that way. to me, it's so interesting to see artists working across disciplines, embracing different modes and means of creating an image or object... giving substance to an idea by whatever means suits it best.

when i was first at CCA, i said that to a teacher and the teacher said "if you attempt to be a jack-of-all-trades, you'll be master of none". at the time, that statement was definitely warranted. definitely. i was all over the place in a very uninteresting way at that point. the work looked amateurish and floundering. and that's a stage everyone spends a pretty big hunk of time in. also, i didn't have any real conception (at that point) of what art is good for, how it can be harnessed, what its Past has been, and what it is up against now (thank you critical theory!). also, i really had no clue what I wanted to use art for... what I cared about and wanted to speak about and wanted to wrestle with. now, i do. and 2 years later, that same teacher totally encouraged me to let a painting be a painting and a drawing be a drawing and YES go ahead and nail a rope to the wall and a doll head and a rope of my own hair and see how these things function together. see how these seemingly "disparate" items speak to one another, see what dialogue arises. and it is so compelling (i think) to work that way. i love seeing other artists take that approach within their practice. it creates multiple layers of meaning. so much meaning that everyone, no matter what camp they belong to, can get something out of the work. it's an inclusive way to work.

the audience trusts the artist. artists who reciprocate that trust, artists like Banks Violette and Kiki Smith and Jordan Kantor, create spaces for experiences that are amazing and deep and i admire that so so much.

and so, as i go through this huge documenting phase, i continue to make new work too, getting inspired over and over again by having artwork spread all over the house. and i see that the lines connecting one piece to another are totally there, that the audience will see them too, and that my job is to not overload the issue... to not appear slick, the keep it sincere and meaningful and to really wrestle with the ideas i investigate by not compromising the work to any degree. especially not by sticking to the easy connections: all drawings on one side of the room, all paintings on the other. it feels false for me.

but tell me- how do YOU define a body of work? what criteria do you use? what assumptions do you discard? and how big must a collection be? could a collection consist of only 4 pieces? can it be small? do writers allow themselves the luxury of saying "these 4 poems or pieces are all it takes. finished!" visual artists do that all the time. if it is cohesive, it's cohesive. does size really matter in that regard? "narrative" will occur no matter what when you put two pieces of art side by side, whether or not they are similar.

so how do you group things? how do you define a body of work? what strictures do you impose? what is your governing logic? tell me. i am eager to learn.

6 comments:

Hannah Stephenson said...

At first, with my writing, I was very (overly, perhaps) concerned that my writing felt disparate--all these different voices and projects and levels.

But I'm really changing my thoughts on this. I recently went through all my poems and collected what I thought were the 75-80 strongest of them, and though they are on different ideas and play with different themes, there is definitely a continuity since I wrote all of them.

But time seems to be somewhat relevant...the vast majority of the poems were from the two years, and over half were from the last 6 months.

So it's funny, because what I'm writing now doesn't necessarily feel like it would "go" in that manuscript...even though I know I arbitrarily (somewhat) assigned this.

So maybe it's about tricking oneself to ease up and gain authority...

I'd love to hear what you end up thinking, and others' thoughts, too.

Marylinn Kelly said...

It is not a task I have yet faced, but as I picture you sifting through your work, I feel strongly that this is a question that can't be answered ahead of time. Not until you have the photos (assuming you will work from them) or the pieces themselves ready to spread out and rearrange, many times as I imagine it, will you know what story you will tell. I believe the process will reveal itself and give you the order which has meaning for you.

angela simione said...

hannah, i love what you say here: So maybe it's about tricking oneself to ease up and gain authority...

i think that is probably one of my biggest problems when it comes to deciding what stays in and what gets kicked out of a group- i second guess myself a lot. i begin fearing that my "vision" won't be perceptable to others which is simply untrue and just my assumptions/anxieties talking.

i think Time does need to be somewhat a factor, as well. since the beginning of the year, my interests and motivations have become much clearer to me and i've let go of a lot of my prior hang-ups. also, i don't have much of my privios work left in the house so i'm sort of forced to focus on all new work... which i think is a really good thing. there's only so far back i can reach.

angela simione said...

marylinn, after sitting with the work today i couldn't agree with you more. there's lots of shuffling to do and lots of patience to practice. changing out a single piece changes the over-riding narrative completely and so i think you are right: the order of things will reveal itself as long as i just sit with the work and really look hard at what is happening between all these pieces.

art all over my little house! and the computer desktop is loaded with images being grouped and re-grouped. ha!

Elisabeth said...

Angela

In response to your questions here you might like to look at Jim Murdoch's ideas about his latest collection of poetry: http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/ This is his latest 'body of work'.

I have never attempted such a compilation, perhaps because to me it has a quality of being dead or nearly dead about it. But that's just me.

It's probably different for a artist.

angela simione said...

elisabeth,

i can definitely understand why you feel that way. once we have "enough" work TO be compiled, a lot of it is work that we've moved on from. or maybe the act itself of compiling forces us away from it, to detatch from it in order to see it as a critic or editor would?

but i think it is a bit different within visual practice, as you say. the individual pieces adopt different meanings and speak/function differently depending on their arrangement. also, a gallery space can be taken in all at once by a viewer. a book cannot. it MUST be worked through in order to see it "whole". in that regard, the order of things seems much more important when compiling a manuscript. very hard work. i can easily see myself feeling like the manuscript in my hands is "dead" after undertaking such a process. i've heard a lot of writers say they feel totally disconnected from their book once it's done being shuffled around and is at the printers.

i will definitely go take a look at jim's blog. it's always good to get insight in to how someone else sets about doing these things. thank you!