and the moon rose up in front of the clouds
​
9 December 2014
Profs. Adam R Levine, Carol Keller, Justin Kimball, and Wendy Woodson.
Submitted to the Department of Art & the History of Art of Amherst College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with honors.
​
​
​
In hope that there will always be those
who aspire to be Human – to be
an artist whose medium is life.
​
​
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
​
​
It was the time of the month to stand on hilltops and wait for the moon to rise, expectant. Or not, for it was cloudy, but I waited, dutifully. And the moon rose up in front of the clouds. I was startled to see the moon, and in my startlation I forgot, for an instantaneous moment, that which I have been taught – that the moon was much further away from me than the clouds. And how joyful I was, that nature had jumped me over those “facts” that were cluttering out its mysteries. This is among my most valuable experiences. That I had received the world raw and known it through myself only. That I had a felt resonance with that which is most foreign to me and its mystery. And that this caused me to rethink my relationship to the world and the place of humans in the world.
And, selfishly, I would like others to have similar experiences. This body of work has been a way for me to attempt to prime others for these experiences, to introduce that mindset of wonder so often lost and to encourage new places to look.
​
My work this past year didn’t start with this goal. I had been working in plaster, making standing sculptures because this seemed the visual medium that was most fundamental to our humanity. And for the reason that it was more than visual – that it occupied physical space and stood up in it, alone, mirroring the bodies in which we find ourselves alone. That nearly every human could experience this work, tactually, and that it would resonate with him as a form mirroring his body. No, my plaster pieces were not of human shape, they were abstracted shapes, curving up into space, coming down to fold over upon themselves forming a tunnel, playing between hard and soft edges. But they stood and confronted you in your embodiment, and this is what mattered to me.
It was through a questioning of artistic values and a reevaluation of my responses to other artists that I came to shift the physical material with which I was working. Something standing to acknowledge your embodiment did not do enough to you for my liking. Work only seems worthwhile if it changes the audience, at least in some small way. I thought of my favorite artist, the writer Annie Dillard, whose non-fiction narratives not only bring me joy in their aesthetic form, but have caused me to wonder at pieces of the world, both physical bits outside of us and abstract bits of human minds.
I spent the second half of the spring semester making pieces that were composed solely of sound. I had come to this idea after making an abstract film piece, a fluidly moving color field and adding a voiceover text on to the experience. I suppose it was from this piece that I finally acknowledged the holding that text has upon me. And so Adam introduced me to the work of Janet Cardiff, who uses recorded sound to make an environment into which she places text. I was very taken with her work and immediately began making my own sound pieces that placed text, heard as my voice, into a space. They began as pieces very similar to that of Cardiff’s, but each week the new piece moved to a new focus, incorporated a new element, leaving me with experience using sound and text in many different combinations. These sound pieces were important to me, as they recorded my musings on the world’s mysteries. They were a way for me to celebrate wonder and spread it.
But I was missing imagery, so I took advantage of the research funding that I received from the Dean of Faculty’s office this summer to work on an extended video project, one that I would work on for the two summer months I was on campus. It seemed a good idea to work on a piece that would involve some stages of major revisions, having previously made a piece a week, coming to and moving away from an idea quickly. This rational for the project insured that it would be a new experience in making. It ended up being a new experience in making also in a different way. I had intended the movie to be about my experience two years ago of the restorability for which I had flocked to Fort River, sitting on a rock in the middle of it listening. I had a planned text which would accompany the images that I would gather from that spot in the river. Yet as I collected and edited footage, the text began to feel more foreign to the project. So the project itself suggested to me a new way of working. That of deviating from the goal with which I started, instead of excreting the piece from the beginning through the end in one swoop exactly as I intended. That the work itself suggested the way to move along with it, something I had always heard artists talking about, but had not realized I had experienced until writing this reflection.
In addition to bringing me into this new way of working, I find the river piece especially successful knowing it is a compilation of firsts for me. The first time using a GoPro for a project. The first time using the color and exposure adjustments in Final Cut. The first time making my own music. It was the use of these tools that brought a semi-abstract presentation from a very concrete source. Using the GoPro allowed me to push into the river in physical ways that film cameras cannot naturally do. I shot footage mainly in the river under its surface, abstracting it down to pattern and movement. Use of the color/exposure adjustments allowed me to push the raw footage further into the abstract, working with it as play between lights and darks. Adding composed sound-music instead of keeping the camera sound, separated the visuals from their watery origin. The differing sounds and patterns in the music emphasized the visual differences between the scenes, their commonality of water leaking away, leaving the images more raw as compositional arrangements of light and shade.
I left campus for a week near the end of my work on the river piece to attend the Media City Film Festival in Canada. It was an ideal opportunity to research the international scene of contemporary experimental film and video. I was attracted to Robert Beavers’ piece Listening to the Space in My Room, for the quite use of text, both spoken and visual, scattered throughout the film. I liked the two works that I saw by Ben Russell, his heavy use of text, spoken in the work, but sometimes using subtitled text that was incongruous with that which was spoken. I was surprised by my reaction to the projector piece performed by Bruce McClure. I was enthralled by the assault of light and sound, the elements in nearly empty form, no image on the film to filter the light, no music or text, just pounding noise. The performance caused me to reflect on human and non-human made light and sound and my place living within all of it, a reflection I did not expect from a text-free source.
The fall semester started and back to that method of working with my river piece I came, ready for it, so not working towards a preset goal but out of intuition and reaction to the work. Sequencing images with attention to their inherent qualities rather than setting them to a script. It felt freeing to work this way. I was more receptive to surprise and chance, and I think the pieces communicated this freshness.
In my most recent piece, the 16mm film “Who Painted the Sky with Wispy Clouds?,” I went back to working with a pre-existing text out of which I wanted to make a film. But my process was informed by the discoveries I had made while working on the river piece. Although the images did visually correspond to the section of text to which they temporally corresponded, I let the visual elements of the images dictate their sequencing within each section.
After talking with my advisors and upon reflection, I find that my textual pieces and my visual pieces compliment each other by presenting the audience with the two different ways with which I seek to prime them to have transformative experiences like that which I had with the moon. The textual pieces call attention to points in the world that I find to be full of wonder. The visual pieces encourage new places to look and new ways to receive the image of those places. I can present the viewer with these tools, but ultimately it is my experience that I would like others to have, so perhaps I need to give a little of my self or at least communicate part of myself through my work. Which would entail no loss of self, but rather an opening of myself to the world.
Postface
​
During the conversation of my thesis defense with my three current advisors, Adam asked me if I believe this (as stated in the second paragraph) as the reason why I make art. And really, I don’t know. Talking to Adam after the defense, I thought of a passage from Rudolph Steiner’s Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts that I have held with me: that some “feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst.” Since my birth, I have become comfortable with addressing my reoccurring bodily hunger and thirst. It is only since arriving at Amherst that I have begun to feel questions, lightly, slowly at first, later overwhelmingly. Perhaps making art is the way that I respond to these questions. It seems odd that to address our bodily hunger and thirst we take into ourselves temporary nourishment, but to address our mental thirst we output the temporary nourishment. And perhaps it is only the process of making that is fulfilling the thirst, and so nourishing to one’s self only, but the outputted product must somehow bring together those of us humans searching to make art out of our life.