Thoughts on Bill T. Jones at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Bill T. Jones spoke at the Chicago Humanities Festival! And I went to see it! I have not seen anything he has made, as a matter of fact, but I knew it had to be good, as trusted friends ensured me of his... genius, or something of the sort? 

Image found here.

It was a great talk, or conversation. I don't know what to make of what they were talking about - it spanned from his growing up to the trauma narrative (which I didn't know about before yesterday) to self-management, or rather directing ourselves to be managed by someone, and also the fact that the conversation happened on the South Side of Chicago - but I want to write about what it made me want to do, which I had largely forgotten since this summer! 

(or what I want to think about and write about and make work about)

- ritual and memory, and how we distort memory, or how memory is distorted time, crumpled up in all sorts of weird ways; I recently had a strange discovery of my own memory being "false," meaning that I do not entirely trust my own memory of something anymore; things happen that make us reconsider the present, the future, and also the past, which is quite scary. where do we put the trust in time?

> this above point is connected to beadings, since they are about memory, for me. what do I remember of this one person, or this one moment, and how do I change it? since I work on it for so long, does my memory of it change during the process, and how can I see that?

- ritual and repetition; DANCE, WEAVING. Textiles and movements are already married faithfully in my mind, and they live together there, but now I need to take it out of my fingertips, somehow. 

- labor of love? labor-intensivity? invisible labor? ; in relationships, family relations, love relations: how do we labor and how is it seen? I like to think about love although I am afraid of it.

- music, and more so, sound. I need to read the Whitechapel-book Jordyn gave to me about sound, alongside with Memory, Failure and Chance. how can I express my brother's music in a weaving? how can I express someone else's labor through my own? will write more about this as weaving progresses and project is revealed. 

- organizing the dance workshop at Låke summer 2014. will write more about this when I am more certain of things, but don't want to eat my words later.

- technology, weaving, dance, performance. list over people to research: Bill T. Jones, Lee Blalock. list to be expanded as research deepens. 

- a dance as a treatment; sterilization in the meaning of being free from bacteria, and cleanliness, sterility.

will come back to this.

Piercing through skin

Fine, I already wrote about beading and even about this specific editorial (I think?), but I really needed to show this again. I wrote about it, I believe, in the context of a harness, but I wanted to write about it again in correlation with beading and pearls and embellishment (such a delicious word, I have to think about it more, roll it around in my mouth, and so on).

Images found here.

There is a sort of Smaug-TLOTR-creepiness going on in the image at the bottom, but pearls and embellishments and the model totally looks like Tilda Swinton as The White Witch in the Narnia-books, and MESH FACE MASK, and just, so many beads... I think about armours and covers and part of me wishes I was in fashion but I know I would slowly kill myself and then starting to hate clothes... But now all I want to do is embellish clothing so it is really, really heavy and not like the soundsuits, but to make the beads abstract the person wearing them, and change them, somehow. 

The beadings on paper are only covering faces and body parts, but I want to cover something else entirely in clothing: the face is not so interesting, and I am not too keen on masks (it just... no, not for me, I think), but the rest of the body. Embroidering

Contour lines, topographical lines, bodies and weaving

(All photographs are taken by me; the top one is taken at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the bottom ones are taken at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

This is beautiful to me, and this idea is something which feels just beyond my reach (not in a bad way, but I will explain): lines of the body coming together and apart, as if he, the falling man (I can no longer remember exactly the title or the artist, but I think they were plates depicting the fall of men, somehow - horses were also falling in this one) was enmeshed in a net that perfectly contoured his body.

Can we do this with cloth? Or, is it possible to do this again, to make another skin? It comes back to what I have written a little of before, La Piel Que Habito, but a little differently? The body as a landscape, and these lines like the lines of a topographical map. 

Image found here. It is so large so you can actually see what is going on, but it is so similar to me. I tried making something like this on a figure study, cutting paper to be like mountains, a landscape. Also, I was thinking about... something like this during high school in Hong Kong: how a human face (and the body, also) can have lines in it that speak of something else. Something we don't know already! And it is not in the wrinkles, as they tell of experience, but rather... a secret language of the body! A language we speak without even knowing it! It is not body language either, but very different, in the very veins that lie in us.

Another reason for posting the photographs I took at the Met is that I really like muscles. I have been trying to get some of my own... Don't know if my body is made for that, but it is interesting nonetheless. Anyways, so I like muscles, a lot, especially on girls. It just looks so interesting and unexpected, I suppose because female bodies are "meant" to be soft. These images of Lisa Lyon, a female bodybuilder, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, are really interesting to me:

This is one of them, I found it here.

Because:

1. the image from the Met is of a very muscular person. 

2. I enjoy muscles. They are great, and I think they are beautiful, also.

3. bodies and writing and people and mountains: I really like photographing mountains, and people in them. I showed someone a photograph I had made this summer, and it was of the mountains. They said, with the snow, it looked like a great Orca whale.

I don't know where this is going, but body + topography + maps + landscapes + language is probably already greatly explored in art, but I like it, so I will keep thinking about it. 

I also feel as though my posts disintegrate more and more the longer they get...

Well, tomorrow I might write about colour!

About beadings and embroideries, embellishments, etc.

Well, so as I am thinking about embellishment and beading, as the title of this post suggests, I got a suggestion to look at the Catacomb Saints. You may have heard or read about them; they were just discovered in different churches across Europe, and they are skeletons covered in jewels, gold, and various ornamentations. It reminds me of something I saw in Rome several years ago: a monastery where the bones of the dead nuns were put up in little... cavities, so to speak. They created strange patterns with the different skeletal parts, and seeing the pelvic bone was especially odd.

So, I am thinking about these in relation to what I am making. I don't know if I am embellishing memories or denying them, but I want to cover some surfaces completely in beads. It is a meditative process, and it is one of the things I enjoy doing most. 

And then, Nick Cave, which was how I first thought of doing it:

Images found here, here, here and here.

I don't know why, but I really really want to put beads and sequins on surfaces to cover them completely. It doesn't make sense. Which is of course why I am writing this; lacking the patience or the impetus to create a workbook like the ones we made in Hong Kong, I am trying to make a digital 'version' of it, or form, or something along those lines.

What I have been thinking is this:

1. I showed my class one of my beadings on paper along with this song. Now, we have to write down feedback for everyone in our class when we have some sort of critique. This works to some extent - the really good thing about it is that you will have something from everyone, although most people are afraid to speak. Someone wrote that the strings in the harp Joanna Newsom is playing is like the strings I am using in my beadings... which in turn makes me think about weaving, and how those strings come together. I thought it was a beautiful connection, and one I did not make myself. 

2. Should I try to hold on to things I have been working on from before, ideas which have "worked," and which I feel safe around? This would mean that I shape my work as it is right now in a mold I made when I was 16, 17, 18 years old. As I write this, I don't think it's a good idea. Then I would say: "I consider things that are minute and things that are modular and comprised of many, many little, similar or identical pieces, and mass thinking. Beading is just like this: many little, similar pieces coming together to form a larger picture." 

There is nothing wrong with this way of thinking. Is there? I am not sure, but I don't think it is a good idea to hold on to our ideas because they have worked for us in the past, so I think I'll let go and see where this takes me. That also means, realizing that I am not making the same kind of work that I made when I was 17 years old. Although I am proud of it, and it is a big part of me, it is not what I am making right now, and so I will (try to!) let go. That, in turn, means that I will write about things which interest me right now. Post to follow, enough writing for one post.

Beads and seeds

Samples of the mask, and how to display it! The three photos farthest down are of my embroidery in progress. The second image is of the embroidery from the back. 

It is now much farther along, and more photographs will come, in my attempt to document my work and be able to think about it in fluid lines again.

Someone that I knew some time ago. I am beading on a sheet of sketchbook paper, a little larger than letter size/a4. The beads are seed beads, and the string is normal sowing thread.