hollow rituals
and cosmic dust
I had planned to update the newsletter last week but just wasn’t feeling it after my post-election update the week prior. But I’ve been mostly ignoring things since so I’m back on my bullshit this week:
I finally finished reading through the 113-page Google document compilation of blog posts I wrote during the 4 years I lived in Boston for art/grad school! The first comments I made in the document were from August 2022, then again a handful of comments a year later, and more recently got back to reading a post or two a day earlier this year. From the comments I made I wrote out a small stack of index cards (did you learn to write papers this way, too?) and from those I’ve created an outline that will in the short-term most likely become a blog post about the benefits of art school (specifically MFA programs) and how you can maybe achieve all the same benefits without actually attending and most importantly paying for art school. We’ll see. I had hoped to have it done in time for this week’s newsletter but alas, I’d rather take my time than rush it. Hopefully it’ll be ready in time for the next newsletter update in a couple of weeks.
I was reminded, reading the above blog posts again over the past 2 1/2 years, of the afghan I slowly crocheted during the time (about 6 years) between degrees, starting it the summer after undergrad (as a gift for this undergrad mentor…by the time I finished it we’d grown apart) and finishing it right around the time I received my MFA degree. I love the idea of the creation of this woven fabric spanning the time between those two life experiences (and the fact that Amy Wilson, an artist I met in the context of my grad studies who introduced me to the work of Sunny A. Smith (f.k.a. Allison Smith), an artist I’d later meet while working at CCA, has since worked in knit and crochet is the kind of delightful discovery that’s made this process and project so enjoyable).
Another thing I came across as I was reading through the last of the Boston blog posts was this post about personality tests (interestingly also in the context of the upcoming US presidential election at that time). I then listened to this episode of Science Vs which I found pretty interesting (back then at least I was an INFJ; which personality type are you?).
I am one of those people who recently traveled to Santa Fe just to go to Santa Fe (and visit Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio about an hour away, of course). I’m not sure how we didn’t notice any of the visual clues about this annual tradition there, in which they burn a giant puppet in order to “purge anxiety and promote a reset.” I love that the giant puppet is “stuffed with slips of paper bearing woes” and this description of the “hollow ritual”:
Despite the grand talk of excising gloom, for many in the crowd, the burning is essentially a hollow ritual; basically an excuse to drink and witness legal arson. But the beauty of rituals is in their very hollowness. “Ritual actions do not produce a practical result on the external world,” the sociologist George C. Homans wrote in 1941, which “is not to say that ritual has no function.” Ritual, Homans explained, “gives the members of the society confidence; it dispels their anxieties; it disciplines the social organization.”
Speaking of puppets, did you know that in the small Japanese village of Ichinono mannequins are used to “replace” young people who’ve moved away. How sad and beautiful.
OpenAI’s first artist in residence Alexander Reben “gained early access to the start-up’s Sora text-to-video tool, which instantly generates videos up to a minute in length from written or spoken prompts.” From Reben: “I got a closer view of how innovation happens within an A.I. company, and got a better idea of why it’s important to push the edges and try new things.” As my current day job is in the general world of technology, it’s so interesting to think about the role an artist (in residence or otherwise) can play in technology companies. “OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, says artists like Mr. Reben help it understand the potential of its A.I. tools. His projects ‘showed our technology in a new light, inspiring our teams to see the creative possibilities of what we’re building,’ a spokeswoman for the company said in an email.” Articles about Reben and his residency are here and here, respectively. I wrote about this sort of thing with respect to my particular day gig here.
Speaking of artists in offices (and grad school!), artist and archivist Janine Biunno, a friend, former fellow MFA student (we did our MFA shows at the same time), and one of the guests on my podcast, has work in The Met’s annual show of staff-made art. Check it out on or before December 1st if you’re in NYC.
I’ve always wanted to learn to read music and play an instrument (something I wasn’t really exposed to as a kid, aside from one semester in middle school of guitar and keyboard) and lately I’ve really wanted to learn to play the drums (it’s all this inner rage). Add it to my growing list of things that I like to think of as having the same effect as “screaming in a socially acceptable way.” And if drummers really do live longer, well then definitely count me in.
My 11 year old daughter and I recently distributed some rocks painted like ladybugs around our neighborhood. A couple of days later I walked around to spy on them and found that most of the rocks we distributed around the elementary school were gone while the rocks along the business district were still there. I love the idea of little kids pocketing them, don’t you?
I enjoyed the above mini project so much that I’ve decided to revive Cosmic Dust, a participatory project in which you fill out a form and I send you a little something that I’ve made for free (e.g. an original screenprint or a digital print of a painting). You can optionally sign up for this here newsletter, if you don’t already subscribe, and I promise to never use or sell your info for any other reason. Feel free to share the form with anyone you think might be into this sort of thing.
Finally for this biweekly update, the inspiration behind the ladybug rocks:
