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Betye Saar’s Assemblage

Betye Saar’s Assemblage

Mar 8, 2023 | identity, memory, story

The power of story told through Objects and Artifacts

Betye Saar has been creating art since graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1949. Now ninety-six years old, her body of work has been exhibited at so many museums and galleries and has received so many awards that it takes roughly seventeen pages to list it all on her CV. The New Yorker magazine has called her “one of the most significant philosopher-artists of the past century.”

Saar began her career in design and printmaking before developing her now signature style of visual storytelling through assemblage of found objects into sculpture and tableau. “I am intrigued with combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology,” Saar says. “It’s a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge.”

The photo of her at the top of the page, taken by photographer Michele Mattei, feels like a still-life assemblage of Saar herself. Posing behind the silver branch in her silver necklace, with her silver hair, she evokes both the wisdom of her years and the incisive social and cultural commentary of the pieces she has created throughout her career.

Since so much has been written about her, I will point you to profiles of her by The Hammer Museum at UCLA, Apollo Magazine, and The Museum of Modern Art, as well as to her own website to read more about her life and work if you are not familiar with her already.

In this space, I simply want to offer an acquaintance with her in her own words.  The first video, a two-minute studio tour, takes us into her space where she talks about how she finds objects and how the stories inside those objects reveal themselves to her.

In the second video, she describes making her sculptural tableau “I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break,” a moving piece that connects slave ships and the slave trade to an old wooden ironing board.

I make my art in silence. The materials conjure ideas. The ideas conjure images. The images conjure art. The art conjures feelings. The feelings are the goal.

Betye Saar

Story Triptychs

Story Triptychs

Feb 3, 2023 | identity, memory, story

A Story Triptych by Performance Artist Leslie Grasa

Colorado based artist, teacher, and healer, Leslie Grasa uses the term “Story Triptych” to describe the performance piece she shares with us here. As part of her Capstone project for her Master of Divinity degree from Naropa University, she performed this short telling, in which she recounts a single story from her childhood three different times. Each time, she adds new layers to the narrative. In doing so, she deepens her understanding of the event, along with ours, as she goes.

Seeing this piece reminded me of a writing prompt I worked with several years ago in a workshop led by spiritual memoir author and teacher, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew. Elizabeth asked us to take a familiar story from our lives and write it exactly as we’ve always told or heard it. After finishing this version, she asked us to “put on a different pair of glasses”—a new perspective from which to look at the event in question—and to re-write the story through that lens.

I had chosen a childhood story that always gets a hearty laugh, in which the punchline is that I was a precocious, mischief-maker as a five-year-old. My first thought when Elizabeth encouraged us to choose new glasses was Fear. But I sat for a long while with my pen motionless, not wanting to look at the story through those glasses. When I finally did, I had a moment of new awareness that stunned me. In the middle of a busy workshop, I had a transformative realization that helped me hear my own story, not the version that had always been told about me.

In Leslie’s performance piece, called The Fire Pole, this idea of reframing—of mining our memories for new understanding—is demonstrated with a warmth and fearlessness that draws me in immediately.

More about Leslie

In addition to being a performance artist, Leslie is a Reiki Master in the Usui Shiki Ryoho System, and has been initiated in the Hungarian Bacsa Shamanic tradition. She is also a Laughter Yoga Ambassador and Leader, facilitating laughter yoga for 150 people from around the world almost every night. “The magic of that process I can’t even explain,” she told me. “Language is not a barrier because it is unnecessary.”

Of her artistic mission, she says: “I weave the power of energy work, contemplation, and laughter with the world of theatre and story to support people in accessing higher levels of consciousness and remembering their Basic Goodness and the perfection of their own unique hero’s journey. Whether working with clients and students, or performing original work inspired by dreams and fairy tales, I am passionate about the ancient practice of using stories and ritual to bring healing to individuals and communities.”

For more of Leslie’s work, visit her YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@lesliegrasa9588/featured

 

Aliveness springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us.

Ann Belford Ulanov

A Story Prompt

A Story Prompt

Nov 29, 2022 | story prompt

On a walk this summer, I filmed a variety of short video clips to familiarize myself with a new camera. Reviewing the footage afterwards, I chose what I felt were the best of the visual results to play with and edit.

I had no intention of creating a story or insinuating a story line. I simply stuck what I considered the best imagery together in a one minute video⏤collaging one sequence and leaving two other segments spare. My purpose was solely to keep a record of the results. On a whim, I decided to add music afterwards.

For me, the music instantly turned the random scenes into a story. Not one I had intentionally envisioned, but one that emerged for me out of my own personal history once I experienced the imagery with the spare musical notes.

One of my professors had recently commented that we could put any imagery together in an exhibit and viewers would make meaning out it⏤that our desire for meaning is so strong we will make associations even among unrelated things.

If you’d like to put the theory to a test, watch this minute-long piece and let me know if you sense a story in it. And if you do, what might that story be?

 

Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell a story. Make some light.

KATE DICAMILLO

Dance and Bill T Jones

Dance and Bill T Jones

Nov 28, 2022 | Dance

“Movement begins to negotiate the distance between the brain and the body.”⏤Bill T. Jones

For a class in my MFA program in which we explored our identities as artists, we were asked to choose an art form we’d never tried before and practice it as a means to gain insight into our own art. This is how I became acquainted with Bill T. Jones.

Although there is a photo of me in a pink tutu as a three-year-old and I look quite happy in it, I have never considered myself graceful in movement or anything remotely close to a dancer. The idea of dancing in front of others made me so uncomfortable, I think it was the enormity of my fear that goaded me into trying it for this class. In the process, I found a story muse in Bill T. Jones.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/02/11/bill-t-jones-analogy-trilogy-ica

Born in 1952, Jones is an acclaimed choreographer, director, author, and dancer. In the early 1980s, he and his partner (in dance and life) Arnie Zane created their own dance company. Through their groundbreaking work together, they “redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form, and social commentary,” as noted by their dance company’s website. After Zane’s death in 1988, Jones brought his work to New York Arts Live and became its artistic director.

Still/Here, a 1995 dance created by Jones about people living with terminal illness, illustrates everything I love about his approach to story: he is astute at distilling complex narratives to their essence without losing the nuances of the details; he is brilliant at channeling emotion through his performances and his choreography; and he builds story by listening deeply to those with experiences relevant to his subject.

In an interview with Bill Moyers about Still/Here, Jones is shown working with the volunteers he recruited to help him create the dance. All were people living with terminal illness. With Jones’ tender and intuitive guidance, each person in the group was nurtured and encouraged to reflect on their life, even envisionoing their own deaths, and to translate their feelings into body movements. The experience is cathartic and transformative for all involved. These movements became the building blocks from which Jones choreographed the dance.

Jones’ work opened a world to me that I had ignored⏤the idea that we hold so much of our life story within our bodies; that our felt experiences leave residues within us which can linger long after we think we’ve moved on; that movement can unlock and express memory, emotion, and identity in ways not available in other art forms; and that dance is a healing story form every bit as powerful and maybe moreso than writing or any other form of story expression.

PhOTOGRAPH OF BILL t. JONES FROM WBUR.ORG Choreographer Bill T. Jones Brings Exploration Of Trauma And Oral History To ICA

That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.

MEREDITH MONK

Search for Original Face

Search for Original Face

Nov 27, 2022 | identity, memory

“Show me your original face, the face you had before your parents were born.”⏤Zen Koan

When I first read this Buddhist saying, I was startled. It was an “aha” moment, finding a term for something I felt I’d been looking for all my life. Even though I had never heard this idea before and had yet to study what it means in Buddhism, I began framing my own inquiry into memory and identity as a search for my Original Face.

Of course, this idea has been the subject of lengthy discourses ever since it was uttered by Zen Master Huineng in the 7th century, but for the sake of brevity here (and with the admitted risk of oversimplifying), I find Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Sutherland’s distillation of the teaching to be extraordinarily clear:

“Before the engines of thought and feeling start revving, before you’re making judgements or starting to act out of some motivation like trying to win or please…before the whole mad story of You heaves into the picture, complete with family legacies handed down through generations…who are you?” (from pages 66-67 of Sutherland’s book Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans)

Does this concept conjure reflections on your own life? If not, how do you visualize or think about inquiries into identity? For you, is it an exercise of looking into the past, your own, or generationally? Is it an exercise of looking into the future? A little of both? Or something else entirely?

Whatever you carry out of your province, you carry out in your face.

HERTA MÜLLER