Episteme

"When sex becomes the subject of self-improvement, when couples monitor the frequency and intensity-the regularity and reciprocity-of their erotic contact, it becomes as dull a drudgery as their day job, as boring a routine as biceps curls."

Say what you will of bicep curls, Cristina Nehring writing about a new book about sex, marriage and ourselves, is right. I find myself keeping mental logs of these things (well, we did it twice last week, once this week -- OMG! there must be something wrong if we're not humping every day!), and am embarrassed to say as much because it's really foolish and neurotic.

But I've been reading almost every column, article, blog entry I can find on women, sex and marriage. I'm not close to being married and even farther from kids (something I find complicated and terrifying) but I can't help but wonder how women are doing it -- marriage, kids, personal life, sex, careers -- without ending up divorced and destitute when they are 50 or completely giving their identities to marriage. Are any of them doing without those problems?

What ends up being our choices? A frigid horrible bitch, like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada or the anonymous but ubiquitous soccer mom. I wonder how Simone de Beavior handled it (wrote amazing books on philosophy) or Margaret Mead (if you read Betty Friedan, Mead really fucked it up for the women's movement)?

And there's Britney's crotch shots and Paris Hilton's sex tape and I get totally confused -- are they liberated or just stupid, entitled sluts? Is that where post-feminism is leading us or is that another incarnation of the "feminine mystic"? Nehring cites Walt Whitman (who knew a thing or two about sex and self) and says simply "We all...contain multitudes." It's layers upon layers of ourselves that crowd our thinking and even being with family, going home to the most familiar human beings on Earth, it seems like I know less and less of them because we spend little time together throughout the year and these aren't subjects we broach in the politest of terms.

Posted by Dawn at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As strange as it sounds, my life in the weirdest place on earth is getting a little mundane. Age, like Dawn says, changes you - it's not university classes and growth so much anymore as doing the little things we need to do to keep living. So much of life seems to be just that, maintenance. So what about the higher meaning, expression, sacredness? How can we live in a space like that if we're not artists, or monks, or philanthropists?

With the daily repetition of it all, it feels like we get used to things that aren't really consistent with the way we saw the world before. What does it mean when we see people suffering and don't or can't help? If a poor person is begging in the street, should I give her money or not? How do you weigh personal risk along with the idea that you might just be perpetuating begging, and the fact that you just might not feel like digging in your pocket for change? Helping people just doesn't feel convenient anymore, walking by is easier. Then the routine doesn't change. Just outside, inside, eat, sleep, out again.

There aren't many answers in Mexico City's main cathedral. It was built in the 1600's and has some of the most impressive and intricate architecture I've ever seen. On the outside it might not be the Notre Dame, but it's really, really big, and when you go in you are overwhelmed by all this gold and glitter everywhere. That's obviously just material stuff, even down to the craftsmanship that results in beauty which leads to a feeling of awe similar to what we feel when we look at a mountain or a big canyon. I suppose that bigness supposed to approximate a divine force. But in the end anything we build is just ephemeral, even if it lasts four hundred years and doesn't look like it's falling down anytime soon. All we have access to is the material and even what was divine in our own selves, like the desire to give to the woman in the street with the barefoot children, gets glossed over by business and stress and resentment that she's blocking your way to the Dunkin Donuts.
But I don't want to end this entry like that. Human beings are capable of everything ranging from the horrid to the holy, and I think we can choose which side we want to be on. I think a smile is divine, a joke that makes your friend laugh, a picture that makes you pause, a child's effortless, innocent beauty. When we get wrapped up in daily life we can forget those things, but an instant of opening your eyes can change a day that started as a series of repeated actions into something that means and teaches more.

Posted by Kim at 03:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

These past few says, huh. My car wouldn't start because I didn't drive in a few days and it's been cold (for California). I hate being ignorant about things I own and to be honest, my car terrifies me. I wouldn't know what to do if it broke down other than throw money I don't have into fixing a problem I probably could have solved if I knew a little more than I know now.

I already feel winded by age - this entire year having gone by before I could even really get around to do something with it - and now it's the holidays, which make facing the revolving calendar even more difficult. But over time I've slowly come to accept this and not be so fearful of the changes when I can't see them coming for what they are. War won't make me famous, famine won't make me a star and in those sentiments I am reminded by what Ernest Becker explained as our innate, inexplicable desire for immortality bound up on our fear of ourselves and dying.

And the year always makes me wonder if I should be setting off on a different path, working some place new, talking with a new accent or maybe dye my hair and get glasses. I found a poem I write in the car when I was cleaning it out after getting fixed so it would start (cars make me completely mental. I hate being ignorant about something I own and use everyday and I can't even fix it if something basic is wrong!) but now I've missed place it. I want to post it here, my amazing poetry because, well I've never done that before. But that for another posting.

So when I feel completely mental from my mechanical inferiorities I think of this picture of Lake Vaeleren in Norway from my friend's cabin. I know this stuff, travel, hiking, lakes. I can do those things. And it makes me realize I'll be fine, just fine.

Posted by Dawn at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have a small notebook some where which lists the titles of various works of art. I came up with the ingenious idea while taking pictures of works of art for myself and for this blog. Of course, like all things with meaning, it has somehow become lost, somewhere. I actually still think it's in my suitcase, though I don't know. In any case I can remember where I took this, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art just outside Copenhagen.

Yes, I remember it well. It was an arrestingly beautiful day and the museum sits by the sea so at times it the views better outside than in. This is painting by Gerhard Richter. It has order to it that my life does not and it has a sense of simplicity and structure that my life does not. I don't say those things with any sense of longing, it's not things that are so unstructured I can barely hold down a job or anything, but you know I see the lines and the space and color and there's harmony. But whose life has all those things anyway?

OK, so that's not what I'm trying to get at. This work, the name I don't know right now, is a magnificent grid whose patters manipulate space and rhythm of the universe. It's truly wonderful, the colors and the apparent randomness of those colors but they aren't, there's logic and order.

Posted by Dawn at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of all the works to photograph at the Tate Modern, this was the one I chose. I remember that night, not long after playing music with my ass, and walking all over the place and being generally tired from two weeks of running like mad from country to country all in search of friends and familiarity. Yes, that night in mid-September was truly tired but possessed by what I saw: a yellow t-shirt.

These series of photographs (untitled, 1998) are by Erwin Wurm from Austria, who I really know nothing about other than these pictures. What I like right away is how the shirt hides the obvious characteristics of the body by being shaped by those same characteristics. It's a soft, ephemeral sculpture composed of simply the shirt. I wonder who first thought of the idea: the woman in the pictures or Wurm. I wonder what is his relationship, if any is to her.

It's also such a simple idea, so simple I'm embarrassed I hadn't thought it myself. It makes me think of our bodies are transformed through clothing and what it means to be naked, how critical we are of our naked selves, and how we dress ourselves in variety of ways to express a variety of meanings (Britney Spear's no panty parade included, though I don't know what she was trying to do, well I do but I barf a little in my mouth when I think about it).

But here the shirt shapes the body, not the other way around, and the body's unexpected shapes are the most surprising.

Posted by Dawn at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After eight months alone in a foreign land with no sign of my normally intrepid relatives, my family is starting to visit in droves. My brother came a few weeks ago, then my dad came last week. This is enriching me culturally because honestly I could just sit around and eat and watch movies all weekend if I didn't have to look knowledgeable and industrious to my relations. You have to keep your dignity in these situations, and a good way to do it is by developing a guest curcuit of the city. While it might seem like it would get boring, the hidden benefit of the guest circuit is that you actually learn stuff from seeing it over and over. The Museum of Anthropology no longer seems to me a hopelessly immense expanse of ancient history that I can't put together - now I even know how to tell people where the cool rooms are, where the cafe is, the bathrooms... No, seriously, I have been enjoying my growing ability to put together the whole picture, starting with the first human migration from Asia to the Americas.

The neat thing about that concept, and I think my dad really appreciated this, is that you see how the Native Americans and the indigenous people of Northern and central Mexico are related. The climate is similar and the people traded with each other - there were the communities like those of Snake River and Chaco Canyon in the US, then Paquime and other cities in what is now Mexico. As far as I can tell these were not the Anasazi, who came before the Native Americans, but rather the civilizations that died out with the coming of the Spanish. You can see in the museum the types of things they traded with one another and you get a feel for the economic and cultural links in the region. Put that together with the fact that it was only in 1846 that Mexico lost half its territory, to the US (this land is now California, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, among other states), and the current northward migration doesn't look like such a big deal. Instead it seems like a natural population shift that follows historical patterns. But that's the big picture.... more later on a new museum that focuses on Mexico City: public intellectual Carlos Monsivais' Museo del Estanquillo.

Posted by Kim at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a white Lego paradise in Oslo. Nearby the National Gallery, thousands, may I hazard millions, of Legos where left out in a public square for people to assemble. It was part of another public exhibit encouraging people to construct buildings, real and imaginary, from Legos in a makeshift city of skyscrapers, futuristic domed dwellings and rather fantastic towers. What I appreciated most was how none were vandalized or destroyed, though some in were in various stages of disrepair or disassembly.

After a few drinks with a group of friends, we came upon the eerie white constructions late one evening. Maybe is was the drinks I imbibed but I was taken with the wonderful site and amazed that people constructed replicas of the TransAmerica Pyramid and Eiffel Tower on these folding tables laid out along this square.

My horribly shot photos don't do the exhibit but kind of capture the scale of the display - there were hundreds of these buildings and thousands of white Legos strewn about the place. Sure, I tried putting something together, but my childhood experiences with the building blocks taught me that my natural architectural skills are crude and rather limited.

The works here were all anonymous and I don't know if all were constructed by passersby or artists associated with it but I wanted to know who put what together and the time they devoted to doing it. Seeing those Lego towers in the middle of the city center was exciting and it instantly changed the way I remembered Oslo and how Legos can be used. I don’t think that these public exhibits will rid the world of disease, warfare or end global warming, but I do believe they can make us (or least me) consider our relationships with the city blocks we live on and how we related to people in those spaces. Jane Jacobs, in her book, talked a lot about how neighborhoods need to have many layers of meaning for their inhabitants before people feel safe where they live and those places become vibrant with a culture all their own. She didn’t talk about public art works like this but did talk about the need for gathering places that connect intuitively with people’s homes and give a reason for them to return again and again.

Posted by Dawn at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh the art! I've been thinking about the art, the art from Europe, the pictures I took surreptitiously while away, in all the many weeks I've been lamely absent (but always thinking about posting). Those gallery guards would turn their backs and I'd snap a photo - BAM! - inside that small contraption, an image, frozen of something meaningful to me. The art I love, always so simple, always so very much what it's meant to be, which I don't always know but I know it's good because I can feel it. Some of the very best art I saw while in Europe was in the public sphere, meant to be engaged by anyone. There's something so grand yet straightforward about public art projects, especially the good ones, which are rare, alas.

In this exhibit I participated in, you make music with your ass. Quite literally. This was one of my favorite examples of the public art projects I saw, this time in London on Sept. 16.

The idea was very simple: the more people who sit on the cubes the more instruments played to the music. It was a classical piece - I don't know which - and each cube represented an instrument, a violin, a cello, whatever. The fullest sound was created when all the cubes were occupied, with people actively participating in creating something together.

The experience was enjoyable because the people participating, myself included, sat for a little while and jumped off the cube to let someone have a go and then popped back when on a seat was vacant. There was a constant stream of people running back and forth from cube to cube and each time the music would change with the addition or subtraction of each instrument. This exhibit was on the Thames - we encountered it on our way to the Tate Modern, which was open late for some reason I now can't remember.

Look! As content as children! And listening to music they are creating in space that takes on meaning. San Francisco, where I lived for many years and return to regularly, could learn something from this. It's a city that failed to produce any public display of art as interesting as this. So city officials and hunky mayor Gavin Newsom, I have an offer for you - hire me as your public arts director and I will dream up and produce exhibits residents will love, or at least I will.

Posted by Dawn at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)