pg. 217 "He argues that 'man's' main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but reather to see a meaning in his life. Our fundamental drive, the motivational engine that powers human exsistence, is the pursuit of meaning."
This applies so much to my life/ want I want from my future- I want to be able to say that I helped somebody live...and I have been thinking, that if I do go into medical, then what about Doctor's without Borders? Yet, I want to start now, and that too, without making excuses.
pg. 219 "But there are 2 practical, whole-minded ways for individuals, families, and businesses to begin the search for meaning: start taking spirituality seriously and start taking happiness seriously."This is for me...I really can't explain.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
This is the Marina Ambrovic article I was talking about...
Upstairs from the child-friendly wonderland of the Museum of Modern Art’s Tim Burton exhibition, and from the placid, chapel-like room devoted to Monet’s water lilies, the new Marina Abramovic retrospective can be heard before it is seen, and it doesn’t sound inviting. The artist’s screams and moans roll out from the sixth-floor galleries in endless loops, a warning nearly as clear as the three signs advising that the show ahead “may be disturbing for some.”
Such visceral, unsettling art used to generate disgust, outrage and the occasional police visit. Yet a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days.
“It’s — what shall I say? — yes, it’s crazy, but not as crazy as I thought it would be,” said Jens Buss, 30, a graphic designer visiting from Munich, who had come to see Tim Burton’s artwork but read about Ms. Abramovic and was intrigued. He stared into a large room where a highly illuminated naked woman was on display high on a wall, perched on a small bicycle seat with transparent blocks beneath her feet to support her, a re-creation of a 1997 work called “Luminosity.”
“I was kind of thinking, ‘You know, I would probably do that,’ ” Mr. Buss said. “I was wondering how much she’s getting paid to be up there.”
Throughout the day, a slightly sleepy Wednesday at the museum, the Abramovic galleries were nearly always crowded, with an audience that skewed young but that included the usual array of weekday art patrons: elderly couples, college groups, parents pushing strollers and even a few families with children, like the Frensleys from Nashville. Susanne Frensley, a high school art history teacher, was on vacation with her husband and two daughters and dropped by MoMA not knowing much about Ms. Abramovic’s work.
Standing with one daughter, Eliza, Ms. Frensley explained that, in an excess of caution, she had dispatched “Daddy” to go in to check out the show first before telling her daughters what to expect inside and asking them if they wanted to see it. Both did, though Eliza, 12, with a green shamrock sticker on her cheek for St. Patrick’s Day, was looking a little oppressed toward the exhibition’s end.
“A lot of it is interesting, but it made me feel awkward, I guess,” she said, adding that of all the difficult-to-take work, a grainy video showing a close-up of Ms. Abramovic’s face as she screamed was the most unsettling for her.
“I don’t know why,” Eliza said. “Maybe because you couldn’t see what was going on and couldn’t tell why she was screaming.” (The video shows the 1975 performance “Freeing the Voice,” in which Ms. Abramovic screamed until she lost her voice.)
Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition — generating headlines like “Squeezy Does It” in The New York Post — is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them. Throughout the day at MoMA, some people did submit to the squeeze, with both men and women generally turning to face the female performer when there was a male-female pairing at the door.
But easily two-thirds of MoMA patrons moving from the first gallery into the second stared over at the flesh-flanked doorway — some people staring for an inordinately long time — and then decided to take the art-free route, through a plain doorway that required no bodily contact.
“I just can’t do it,” said Maria Gabriela Madrid, a fiction writer from San Antonio. “I feel like it’s too personal, too much of an invasion of their space.”
She was making her third visit to the show and had demurred every time when she was egged on by a good friend, Midge Dembitzer, a museum volunteer, to pass between the naked performers. (Ms. Dembitzer noted that while some people she spoke to talked of not wanting to bring their children to the show, one of her friends remarked that she was not bringing her husband: “Too many naked women.”)
By afternoon, the crowd had begun to take on a pronounced Kelly green hue, as some revelers from the nearby St. Patrick’s Day parade somehow found their way upstairs. The glittery plastic bowlers, balloon hats and shamrock-antennae headgear made for a strange juxtaposition with a big stomach-churning photograph of Ms. Abramovic scrubbing the blood from heaps of cow bones.
Rather than shock or disgust, though, the overall mood in the galleries tended to be one of great seriousness, occasionally verging on reverence.
Sefu Simms, 28, an aspiring performance artist, described being humbled in the presence of the work. Henk Abma, a former Dutch Reformed Church pastor who said he had followed Ms. Abramovic’s work for 30 years, began his visit by spending half an hour sitting across from the artist herself, who is installed at a table in the museum’s atrium, where she will sit silently all day, every day, barely moving, for the entire run of the show. (The performance will add up to more than 700 hours of sitting if she can complete it.)
But if there was an ideal patron for Ms. Abramovic — who has written of the importance of the “moment when the performance becomes life itself” — the one who came closest was probably Paco Blancas, 48, a New York makeup artist who spent seven uninterrupted hours sitting across from her last Saturday, during a preview of the show. He had returned to the exhibition’s galleries every day, creating a kind of personal performance piece (and becoming so familiar to the guards that they smile at him and say hello.)
“When you sit across from her, and look into her eyes, you feel the public but you don’t see them anymore,” he said. “It’s almost like you are alone with her in this big museum, which is like being a part of the art yourself.”
For more than a generation, nudity, pain, grueling endurance tests and even bloodletting have been elements of a certain strain of performance art, one Ms. Abramovic helped pioneer. But they have never come together in New York quite as boldly or publicly as they have since the opening this week of the Modern’s new show.
Such visceral, unsettling art used to generate disgust, outrage and the occasional police visit. Yet a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days.
“It’s — what shall I say? — yes, it’s crazy, but not as crazy as I thought it would be,” said Jens Buss, 30, a graphic designer visiting from Munich, who had come to see Tim Burton’s artwork but read about Ms. Abramovic and was intrigued. He stared into a large room where a highly illuminated naked woman was on display high on a wall, perched on a small bicycle seat with transparent blocks beneath her feet to support her, a re-creation of a 1997 work called “Luminosity.”
“I was kind of thinking, ‘You know, I would probably do that,’ ” Mr. Buss said. “I was wondering how much she’s getting paid to be up there.”
Throughout the day, a slightly sleepy Wednesday at the museum, the Abramovic galleries were nearly always crowded, with an audience that skewed young but that included the usual array of weekday art patrons: elderly couples, college groups, parents pushing strollers and even a few families with children, like the Frensleys from Nashville. Susanne Frensley, a high school art history teacher, was on vacation with her husband and two daughters and dropped by MoMA not knowing much about Ms. Abramovic’s work.
Standing with one daughter, Eliza, Ms. Frensley explained that, in an excess of caution, she had dispatched “Daddy” to go in to check out the show first before telling her daughters what to expect inside and asking them if they wanted to see it. Both did, though Eliza, 12, with a green shamrock sticker on her cheek for St. Patrick’s Day, was looking a little oppressed toward the exhibition’s end.
“A lot of it is interesting, but it made me feel awkward, I guess,” she said, adding that of all the difficult-to-take work, a grainy video showing a close-up of Ms. Abramovic’s face as she screamed was the most unsettling for her.
“I don’t know why,” Eliza said. “Maybe because you couldn’t see what was going on and couldn’t tell why she was screaming.” (The video shows the 1975 performance “Freeing the Voice,” in which Ms. Abramovic screamed until she lost her voice.)
Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition — generating headlines like “Squeezy Does It” in The New York Post — is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them. Throughout the day at MoMA, some people did submit to the squeeze, with both men and women generally turning to face the female performer when there was a male-female pairing at the door.
But easily two-thirds of MoMA patrons moving from the first gallery into the second stared over at the flesh-flanked doorway — some people staring for an inordinately long time — and then decided to take the art-free route, through a plain doorway that required no bodily contact.
“I just can’t do it,” said Maria Gabriela Madrid, a fiction writer from San Antonio. “I feel like it’s too personal, too much of an invasion of their space.”
She was making her third visit to the show and had demurred every time when she was egged on by a good friend, Midge Dembitzer, a museum volunteer, to pass between the naked performers. (Ms. Dembitzer noted that while some people she spoke to talked of not wanting to bring their children to the show, one of her friends remarked that she was not bringing her husband: “Too many naked women.”)
By afternoon, the crowd had begun to take on a pronounced Kelly green hue, as some revelers from the nearby St. Patrick’s Day parade somehow found their way upstairs. The glittery plastic bowlers, balloon hats and shamrock-antennae headgear made for a strange juxtaposition with a big stomach-churning photograph of Ms. Abramovic scrubbing the blood from heaps of cow bones.
Rather than shock or disgust, though, the overall mood in the galleries tended to be one of great seriousness, occasionally verging on reverence.
Sefu Simms, 28, an aspiring performance artist, described being humbled in the presence of the work. Henk Abma, a former Dutch Reformed Church pastor who said he had followed Ms. Abramovic’s work for 30 years, began his visit by spending half an hour sitting across from the artist herself, who is installed at a table in the museum’s atrium, where she will sit silently all day, every day, barely moving, for the entire run of the show. (The performance will add up to more than 700 hours of sitting if she can complete it.)
But if there was an ideal patron for Ms. Abramovic — who has written of the importance of the “moment when the performance becomes life itself” — the one who came closest was probably Paco Blancas, 48, a New York makeup artist who spent seven uninterrupted hours sitting across from her last Saturday, during a preview of the show. He had returned to the exhibition’s galleries every day, creating a kind of personal performance piece (and becoming so familiar to the guards that they smile at him and say hello.)
“When you sit across from her, and look into her eyes, you feel the public but you don’t see them anymore,” he said. “It’s almost like you are alone with her in this big museum, which is like being a part of the art yourself.”
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Kim Possible
Please don't laugh, but, oddly, I was thinking about how much, as a child and even now, I loved to watch Kim Possible. And I realized that the reason for its appeal, is its message...that kids can be anything they want to be- you will not be stopped for doing what your heart says, but instead you will be honored. From the start, society has sent out the message that in life, do what your heart desires, and nothing else. But, you know whats weird, as we get older that changes- but to an extent, in my house it isn't so (kinda). Some of my friends' parents tell them that they have to do _________ because it pays good or its benefits are good. And whenever I talk to family friends about my future they always recommend things that i may benefit from. Except, I don't agree, sometimes I feel yelling at them, that money is not everything. In life, I don't want to be greedy for money- I understand that in this day and age, money is an essential part of survival, but I don't agree with that being your priority. I want to be able to get up every morning, and go to work with a smile on my face. I can't stand this anymore- its frustrating and its DEFINITELY NOT RIGHT.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Charcoal, STAC Art...
I (surprisingly) love drawing with charcoal. It allows you to "draw" without boundaries or worries of whether it will look like "art." It allows you to have fun and put all your hearts' desire out on paper.For some reason though, I especially had fun drawing in expressionist- style...it was fun portraying your message in a way that even YOU could never have dreamt of. Even though, mine weren't "done," I brought them home because after a long time, I was proud of something I had done. And this is sort of funny because I have been feeling like that lately regarding my art- they are not fabulous, but they please me. This reminds me though, that during STAC Art, I saw my corer values, literally jump out at me (and please comment if you think that I may be right, or if it may be a bit different)...
- innocence vs. growing up
- organization
- and standing out, but still blending in.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
What I Want to Do....
In STAC, I really want to learn these few things or pick up form others:
- good computer programs for editing, pictures, movies, etc.
- how to identify certain things in movies
- how to identify if a certain technology is good (do you know what I mean?)
- and so on...
It can be seen that technology really interests me- I like learning about programs, and playing around with them. But the only problem is that my dad is not very computer savvy, so I have to usually "dig" around for information. I want to take full advantage of my time in STAC and absorb as much as possible :).
P.S.....
- good computer programs for editing, pictures, movies, etc.
- how to identify certain things in movies
- how to identify if a certain technology is good (do you know what I mean?)
- and so on...
It can be seen that technology really interests me- I like learning about programs, and playing around with them. But the only problem is that my dad is not very computer savvy, so I have to usually "dig" around for information. I want to take full advantage of my time in STAC and absorb as much as possible :).
P.S.....
Monday, March 1, 2010
Book Reflection Thingy
Mr.Luke- All I can say is thank you. This book, The Creative Habit, taught me some amazing lessons dealing with creativity. This may be unknown to you, but my biggest problem with creativity is that, I cannot let ideas flow- I either turn them done too early or they just don’t come; which I can positively say is almost everyone’s problem as well. Except this book helped solve that- and so will show you what I want, that I learnt from the book, to implant more in my “process/ work”(in no specific order). Firstly, I learnt that everything/ anything can only be achieved through hard work and the desire to do it. It said on page 9 "No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding." and pg. 173 "Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft."Only after you put your heart, soul and sweat in something, can you see the results- only then can you feel proud of having accomplished a feat. I don’t know if this sounds quite “repetitive” of what is already known in the World, but I am telling the truth. Sometimes, I can get lazy, and just do something half heart-heartedly, and other times, I try and put all my efforts into trying to get “past the moon,” and this kind of acts like a reminder for me. Secondly, what many people may define me by: fear. I can be brave at times, but at other times, I get nervous, and partly of others/ what they think, or even what God may think. In my book there were a couple of pages, that really made me confident… pg. 32 "There's nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks." and pg. 213 "But there is a therapeutic power to failure. It cleanses...Private failures are great...The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public." This reminds me of the Indian movie I told you about; everything has another side to it- one through which you can learn, so it kind of makes me look at life a bit more positively. You know, at one point, I was actually quite positive, and then I don’t know what happened, but these quotes kind of made me feel good about life in general, especially creating – I feel as if I will try something new, something that I may not actually “want” to do- and I feel I have done a bit of that in STAC Art; I created/ am creating a drawing that I usually wouldn’t do. Plus, she targeted specific fears, which I absolutely loved…. pg. 22 "Someone has done it before?....Get over yourself." and pg. 23 "Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind?...But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds." and pg. 89 "My solution for them: This isn't working. Free yourself. Get out of this box. Out it away for another day and start a new box...You can always come back to it." Now, before I go on, I want to apologize for kind of just stating the quotes and not explaining them to you regarding context, but I have a lot to say, and want to keep it as short as possible :). Solitude. I find this scary, to tell you truth. She writes on pg. 31 "You're seeking thoughts from the unconscious, and trying to tease them forward until you can latch onto them. An idea will sneak into your brain....Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product." I don’t know what it is about that, but I literally might start crying if I ever have to stay in seclusion; I want to say it is something to do with self-confidence. So I am not asking for pity, but instead will work on re-connecting with myself, and maybe I will allow the juice to flow in my head- allow ideas to come out without any fear :). So, this is where I stop about this….I told you about me wanting to work harder, gain more courage, and even confidence- and these three, will definitely help me use it “my art-” I hope I was able to explain to you fully what exactly I learnt; sorry, this is kind of new to me :).
Now, on to my blog, I actually like this. Okay, so some days, it feels like, ahhhhhhh! but then other days, I really enjoy it because you learn so much! I “technically” missed a day based on the calendar- and am now up to my 19th day; which even though is much, I am proud. I accomplished keeping something up for more than half a month. Oh wait! I forgot to explain to you exactly what I was doing! So I am reading books (regarding creativity of course) and posting my favorite quote(s) and reactions of mine- which doesn’t sound much, but it helps a lot in viewing what exactly I learned. My goals for the future with this, is that to make it continue. To be able to say that I have a blog in which I write every day, dedicatedly. As a parting word, I have to say that this really helps in implementing what you learn from the books you read, in your “work.”
I’m not sure if I did this right, or if it is good, but this felt good; it’s nice getting your thoughts out in the open (sometimes).
-Kadambari
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