by Drew Martin I was at a company holiday luncheon later this afternoon in TriBeCa and one of the topics discussed was the yolk-to-egg white ratio. A young colleague, who is an engineer, was arguing that the yolk should be bioengineered to a fraction of its size. So to my surprise, walking back from our department gathering to my office in SoHo, I passed the Kate Werble Gallery full of sunny-side-up fried egg sculptures: LIVESTRONG by Christopher Chiappa. The 7,000 resin and plaster eggs (584 dozen plus a few extra) cover the floor and walls of the two-room gallery. Although I was in a bit of a rush, the eggs were playful and inviting so I stopped in for a few minutes to have a look and take some pictures (posted here).
The show is surreal and makes me think about the use of eggs in the history of painting (egg tempera) and of artists who have represented eggs: Salvador Dalí and Claes Oldenburg first come to mind. The multiplication of the eggs also conjures up sci-fi references, like the classic Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles, when furry, featureless pom-pom creatures reproduce at an alarming rate and threaten the integrity of the Starship Enterprise.
Aside from the immediate fun of this installation, the deeper meaning is of course in the idea of reproduction. The eggs we consume are unfertilized and sexless, and a chicken without a rooster can yield an egg a day. In the classic paradox, Which came first the chicken or the egg?, this installation offers a situation in which the chicken has been bioengineered out of the equation and the eggs themselves continue on through asexual reproduction.
It's a great show that put this little gallery on the map for me. I look forward to seeing what Kate has planned for this space in the new year.
by Drew Martin I just watched a new documentary about an old debate. Best of Enemies is a fairly new release about the televised debates between the politically and morally clashing intellectuals William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the ABC News coverage of the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. The climax is Buckley's rage to Vidal when he loses it and spouts: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face, and you’ll stay plastered.
It's a moment that changed the course of television: the gloves were off and any chance of legitimate debate was trumped by this kind of caustic banter.
In the epilogue of the tenth debate Vidal offers, "I think these great debates are absolutely nonsense. The way they're set up, there's no interchange of ideas, very little, even, of personality. There's also the terrible thing about this medium that hardly anyone listens. They sort of get an impression of someone and think they've figured out just what he's like by seeing him on television." One commentator says the debate was the harbinger of the unhappy future of television. And in response to a question to Buckley, "Does television run America?" he responds that "there is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating."
Television as the public square was over. A commentator suggests, "The ability to talk the same language is gone. More and more we are divided into communities of concern. Each side can ignore the other side and live in its own world. It makes us less of a nation because what binds us together is the picture in our heads. But if these people are not sharing those ideas they're not living in the same place."
by Drew Martin Last night I watched a really good documentary about the artist whose surreal and bleak futuristic imagery influences us more than we can imagine - Dark Star: H.R. Giger's World. Hans Ruedi Giger (1940 - 2014) was a Swiss airbrush painter who created a world of biomechanical creatures that cycle through themes of sex, birth, and death. It is easy to look at his work and dismiss it as a certain sci-fi fantasy style, but it's a look he introduced to the world and created from his dreams. In the documentary he talks about dreams, and laments the unfinished erotic dream from which one is unfairly pulled away to awaken to reality. Look closer and you will see the skills of his years of study in architecture and industrial design combined with an intuitive grasp of anatomy and references to Egyptian art. A friend of his, who does not believe in the occult, says he feels like Giger was channeling another world for us to witness. A psychiatrist in the film calls Giger an artistic reporter for the darkness in us. It was always a personal fantasy of mine as a kid to be able to bring something physical back from my own dreamworld, and Giger did just that. A delightful aspect of the film is that it shows his chaotic, overgrown house, which is a labyrinth of rooms full of his images, sculptures based on his world, curious artifacts and skulls. As a child Giger was scared of a mummy at a local museum. His older sister teased him about this so he returned every day until he got over his fear. Likewise, his father, a pharmacist, was given a human skull by the Ciga-Geigy pharmaceutical company. At first it scared the younger Giger but then he started dragging it by a string around town in order to show that he was no longer afraid of it. Perhaps this is part of his attraction for his devoted fans: no matter how much fantasy Giger creates in his images, there is an overwhelming sense of morbid reality, which is not sugarcoated and he is a totally uncensored artist, without moral apologies. His work has an honesty to it that is unparalleled. In one of the final scenes we see Giger shortly before his death signing books and drawings for his fans. Many of them extend an arm for him to sign. A few of them pull off their shirts to reveal tattoos of his work. These same, rough-looking individuals profusely thank him with such emotional intensity that they break into tears.
Giger's paintings sold well as posters and he was hired to do album design for musicians such as the American punk band, the Dead Kennedys. The first time I saw his Penis Landscape, which is featured on their Frankenchrist album was in a friend's dorm room in college. It is an impossible motif/collage of stacks of buttocks, and penises copulating with vaginas.
Giger broke out on the world scene when Hollywood discovered him and he was hired to create the look of the creatures and their ship in the 1979 Academy-Award-winning sci-fi horror film, Alien, by Ridley Scott. It's an aesthetic that continues with Blade Runner in 1982, and we see used countless other times in sci-fi films such as The Matrix. The term "airbrushed" shares the same cultural meaning as "Photoshopped" as a kind of digital makeup/plastic surgery but this film restores it to the original source and has some nice scenes of Giger airbrushing his work without any preliminary sketches. It's a lost art where natural arm movements are now replaced by bezier computer curves. From a graphics point of view, the documentary is worth viewing for those moments alone.
Pictured top is Giger with Swiss actress Li Tobler. They were together for nine years before she shot herself. Tobler's face and nude body are featured in much of his work during their time together. The image second from the top is representational of Giger's biomechanical creatures. The third image from the top is his design of the alien spaceship in Alien. And finally, the last picture is an interior he created for one of two Giger-themed bars in Switzerland.
Over the past week I watched a six-part, South Korean-made series about physics, called The Physics of Light. It is a well-done and engaging introduction to the scientific conceptual leaps made by Galileo, Newton, Einstein and other famous scientists.
Some of the concepts are quite complicated, especially when it ventures into Quantum Mechanics, and five variations of String Theory rolled up into M-Theory. Don't feel bad if you find these ideas difficult to understand, Einstein himself could not wrap his head around Quantum Mechanics and everything that came after that. Fortunately this series is witty and clear. At times I could not tell if it was being dumbed down a bit for a younger audience or if it was simply a cultural difference; that a South Korean approach to education might purposefully be repetitive with explanations. I always tell people that I went to college to study medical illustration (ended up getting a degree in fine arts after studying "pre-med" for two years) but more accurately I was going to focus on scientific illustration. At school I contributed to the college daily newspaper as an editorial illustrator, which, like scientific illustration, brings clarity to a subject. This is still a big interest of mine, which means I have a keen eye on what is being shown to explain a system, whatever the field. All the images here are from the series. The top diagram is used to explain how Newton applied his first law of motion to explain how the inertia of the moon keeps it constantly "falling" around the Earth, while the apple on Earth will fall directly to the ground. Newton is hands down the most brilliant scientist to ever live and the series does a good job of showing his range of interest, and profound, independent thoughts. I do not have a problem with the way the series explains his thinking. My eight-year-old was watching this section last night and was able to comprehend his laws of gravity through the graphic explanations and analogies. I do have a problem with how Einstein's special theory of relativity and Hermann Minkowski's space-time is often visually explained. The middle picture here is clear, though exaggerated, if you are discussing how light would bend around objects in space but it fails as a substitute in explaining how it has replaced Newtonian gravity. While many complicated theories in physics must be explained mathematically, they are often conceived of visually, but they are more visual concepts that do not translate well as visual analogies. This is not so much a fault of the documentary as it is about the scientific community and its inability to properly edit graphics. The most humorous example of the disconnect between visualizing and visuals is the when leading physicists are asks to draw the strings of String Theory, and they end up drawing simple lines, as pictured in the bottom image.
by Drew Martin I watched a documentary today about Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway (no, he did not die by driving one off a cliff). He is also the founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, which brings out the engineers in students through arena-style robotic competitions) and the SEE Science Center, a hands-on learning museum in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The documentary is called SlingShot, which is the name of a water distillation machine he hopes to distribute and install around the world in order to bring clean water to communities who are in need of potable water. He chose the name SlingShot because of the story of David and Goliath, which fascinated him as a kid. While most people focus on the small, less-powerful David overcoming Goliath, his giant adversary, the take-away of the story for Kamen was that technology (the slingshot) is cool, and empowering. It also complements one of the many adages he expresses in the documentary: that a really big person helps everybody else be big and to not keep them small.
Kamen has devoted his life to technology; specifically to technology that saves lives, including SlingShot as well as a home dialysis machine, which actually led to the development of SlingShot in order to provide medical-grade water for dialysis. Like most of us, I probably looked at the Segway as more of a recreational scooter, but Kamen approached it as a real people-mover in order to solve the problem of car-congested/polluted cities and as a segway between walking and driving. While technology is king for Kamen, and he has filled his dream house in New Hampshire with beautiful machines such as a 150+-year-old steam engine from an old tugboat, and a real helicopter in a glass-walled garage, which he flies around, he does see shortcomings to its promises, such as the social contradictions of how it is used as well as unattainable dreams including his desire for a time machine. Another adage he says is that truth is transient, especially with technology.
To this point Kamen suggests that we do not have an education problem in America, but rather a cultural problem in that we do not pay much attention to the great minds that contribute to the betterment of society but are amazed that someone can perform slightly better in a sport, and get a basketball in a net. He says that unless you are doing something that inspires you and wake up ready to embrace each day, you are cheating yourself of a happy and meaningful life.
Kamen's intelligent humor shows through in many moments of the documentary, such as when he takes off the housing of a SlingShot model to explain its inner workings and points to the location of its expensium, unobtainium, unreliabilium, and icantmaketwoathem.
While he has had many successes, he also explains the difficulty of implementing innovation and warns his staff at his company DEKA of resting on their laurels, which he expresses as taking a nap on the bear-skin rug before you are sure you shot the bear. Kamen is concerned by an attitude towards aid work that something of no cost has no value but his drive to solve world problems through technological solutions is unyielding, and with his wit promises that he will be an overnight success in twenty years.
On a hallway wall in his house he has hung drawings of great scientists and thinkers, which his father drew: Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein, who he refers to as Big Al. While responding to a comment about his own genius, he is flattered but explains he is a very slow learner with dyslexia. He says..If I am a genius then I am the slowest, dumbest genius that you'll even meet.
I recently finished reading Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3
Acts. I was immediately hooked on Thornton’s writing when I first read her
Seven Days in the Art World; a clear-headed, and clearly-written look at the
art world. 33 Artists in 3 Acts continues her inquiry into what makes the art
world tick, through her anthropological approach, which spares the reader from
art-speak and breaks from what she calls the binary way of thinking typically
expressed by reviewers.
The premise of the book is to tease out of artists what
it means to be an artist. While Thornton likes one response she got, that the
artist is a myth, she is still fascinated by the individuals who adopt and
perpetuate the myth. I liked reading this book very much but while Thornton
gathers interviews and anecdotes of creative personalities, she never quite cracks
the nut. You never get into the mind of an artist as you do with writings such
as Keith Haring’s Journals, Anne Truitt’s Day Book, or particularly Robert
Irwin’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.
I think there is a myth of the stereotypical artist, but I
would never deny that there are individuals who are propelled to create, and or
interpret the world around them in a new and meaningful way. A proof of this is
the very essence of the book. If you are an artist, you have a particular way
of thinking, and your conversation with another artist has a very different
feeling than Thornton’s writing. For example, a conversation with my friends
with whom I went to school, or with whom I have exhibited is typically, and
creatively about source and process. In most cases, the most creative
conversations have nothing to do with “art” but are about the nature of things.
33 Artists in 3 Acts reads more like conversations heard at art openings about
a lifestyle, status, and a product (even if it is a performance). There is a
desire to be artistically creative by association, which is what I feel has
fueled Thornton’s writing career with the arts. In my mind she is a welcome
guest and I totally appreciate what she adds to this booming art world. The
problem here, however, is in the selection of her character studies. I think
there is a fantastic range to show what kind of artists exist, but it’s not
the right gathering of individuals to dig deeper and really answer her question.
Jeff Koons, for instance, is not an artist. He is a businessman who manages a
portfolio of art products. Sure it’s a creative role but part of his
elusiveness is an inability to think as an artist, which is why you only get sound
bytes from him, and art-book-entry references. I think he wanted badly to be an
artist as a kid because he liked what he saw of that lifestyle and the
attention it earned so he found a way to call himself an artist through a very
formulated process. Ai Weiwei is also not an artist. He is first and foremost a
political activist who uses art as his form of communication. Of course, there
are artists in the book; I am not going to go through them all. The most
peculiar entry is of Lena Dunham. Thornton includes her parents Carroll Dunham
and Laurie Simmons, and even her sister, Grace. The whole section of this
family clan seems like a personal favor, and that of Lena, in particular, as if
she is trying to be a cool mom, or to appease and pull in the audience of
Lena’s godparents Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, two of the most-read art
reviewers in the world. There are other instances of nepotism, such as Gabriel
Orozco, who I really like, and am happy she included him in two of the acts,
but Orozco has the soul of artist.
I have a gut reaction to many of the people
she interviews. Thornton does too. For example, there is mistrust of Koons, and
tension with Damien Hirst that is felt in the temper of her writing. My
personal reaction to and judgment of Thornton’s roster is actually the best
part of the book, although I do not think it is by her design. By this I mean
that as I read her book, my own ideas of what and who is an artist were stirred
up and challenged. One of my favorite results of reading this book came from a
passing comment about Tracey Emin. I was familiar with a few of her pieces, but
with a closer look, especially in one presentation she gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia, I
quickly grew to appreciate both her work and her way of thinking about art:
In conclusion, there is no grand theory, or formula, but rather a diverse
splattering of answers about artists and art such as…
A conceptual artist is a leader, a painter is a peasant.
Art is not a job for an artist, just as religion is not a job for a priest.
Art is not supposed to repeat what you already know. It is supposed to ask
questions.
You can take photographs or you can make photographs.
Artists have varying degrees of repetition compulsion or a drive to repeat a
singular impulse over and over again, trying to get it right, or “righter.”
The most fun time to be an artist is when you are young, and when you are old.
There are good real artists (i.e. Bruce Bauman), bad real artists (i.e. Jasper Johns),
good fake artists (i.e. Francis Alys) and bad fake artists (i.e Ai Weiwei)
If the critics don’t like something, just make more. [Warhol]
The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic.
Artists should be the oxygen of society.
The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the
universe, to open consciousness and elevate the mind.
An artist is a myth. Most artists internalize the myth in the process of their
development and then strive to embody and perform it.
They say that there are three kinds of artist: the perverse, the neurotic, and
the psychotic.
One of the core fantasies of artists is unconditional love and the associate
unconditional value attributed to anything that we produce. It’s about love, attention,
recognition, regard…and freedom from shame.
I can teach someone to make my last artwork but not my next one.
Craft can be taught but whereas art is about self-realization.
A lot of artists are really bad craftsmen and most craftsmen are really bad
artists.
The big burden for artists working in the art world is self-consciousness.
We’ve lost our innocence. We’re constantly looking at ourselves making art.
It’s one of the many appeals of outsider artists; they don’t give a damn about
what people think.
There are moments when artists are artists and then they are not anymore. When
they are not thinking, they become craftsmen of their own art.
Humans want something beautiful to live with. That is not a shallow desire. It
affects our well-being. With decorative art, this is a need to aestheticize and
exteriorize their thoughts and feelings.
While a desire to communicate is a key artistic motivator, a fear of being too
direct or didactic also prevails.
A category of an artwork is a “ghetto” or prison.
I’m not unique. I’m just a particular instance of the possible.
And, one of my favorite, not in the book, which an older
artist friend of mine in Poland once told me, “Anyone who is not an artist is
crazy.”
The Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney is an
impressive fifth-floor-gallery-packed show that opens your eyes to a lifetime
of his work. I have appreciatively walked by Stellas a few times a day for the past fifteen yearsin my lobby at work, which could stand in for very similar
pieces in this show. Stella’s work moves from precise, flat, minimalist
paintings, to high-tech, space-hogging, carbon-fiber sculptures. The in-between
is an explosion of colorful, intensively-constructed works that straddle the
fields of painting and sculpture. Sometimes they are constructed as sculptures
but work as paintings. Other times they are sculptures disguised as paintings.
After circling the gallery with a friend last night, she remarked, “I am surprised you
aren’t taking pictures.” I happened to have my good camera on me so I
circled the gallery again and took up-close shots of the work to detail his
mastery of materials.
by Drew Martin Ed Snowden's last name is relevant to me in this day and age considering that we used to call the static of television snow; when no distinguishable information was getting through.
I just watched Citizenfour, the documentary about Snowden's whistle-blowing on the National Security Agency, for whom he worked via Booz Allen, and where he was involved with extensive the metadata-driven information gathering on (basically) everyone. The film documents the arranged meeting in a hotel room in Hong Kong after five months of encrypted correspondence with filmmaker Laura Poitras and lawyer/journalist Glenn Greenwald. I have not been following this case so it was amazing to get the bulk of the story served up as it was originally captured before the information became top news.
It is fascinating to virtually be in the hotel room with the three of them discussing the strategy for how the story would be revealed by Greenwald through The Guardian. The core questions of freedom, freedom of speech, surveillance, and privacy come to a head in this film.
That being said, knowing that my electronic correspondence and conversation is being gathered for national security reasons is less offensive to me than the day-to-day information gathering that results in spamming emails, and advertising. My mother called me while I was watching this documentary to see if I was coming over her house tomorrow night for lasagna. I am totally fine with someone capturing that information if it also means a terrorist act can be avoided. I just don't want to see a targeted ad the next day for lasagna noodles and pasta sauce when I go on the Internet.
A good
friend invited me last minute to an art opening today that his girlfriend
organized for Giuseppe Blasotta, an Italian artist who lives in Heidelberg,
Germany where he paints and also studies classical philosophy and Italian
literature. I brought a friend from work and to our surprise the show was in
a hotel room, where Giuseppe displayed a couple dozen paper fashion bags that he had painted in an abstract
style.
I would not have thought much about them in passing, other than their being
pleasant to look at but earlier today I read an interview with his fellow
countryman Maurizio Cattelan, the infamous prankster artist, which prompted me to approach the work with
a curious eye. I engaged with Giuseppe - a very animated, youthful, and dapper
man in his early 40s. We had a good conversation about his work and my minor
insights were met with an enthusiastic "Bravo!" every so often.
Artists, who so often have to explain themselves, love to not only be understood
but to be expanded upon.
So let's approach these painted paper fashion bags from a
different angle. They actually pose a very interesting question: does a
painting diminish itself by existing on an object meant for fashion shopping
that is in fact disposable? Yes, and no.
A deeper thought I had in front of the
pieces was more about abstraction. Opposite to the illusion of
"realistic" painting is that there really is no such thing as an
abstract painting because your brain is always actively
trying to make connections and once it believes it sees a meadow, a tree, a body, etc. that image ruins the abstraction.
It's interesting that the traveling Giuseppe
is carrying around these objects meant for carrying other objects. I think it
says something about the history of bags and crossing borders. For some reason my thoughts jump to a list of food items I once saw that my father's relatives had to bring with them for their ocean crossing from Europe to America in the mid 1800s: sacks of potatoes...and how we first perceive these bags to have practical and functional real-world presence but they are actually more like concepts of bags when compared to burlap sacks.
What I like most
about Giuseppe's use of the bags is how they are both flat paintings when fixed to the
wall, and at the same time sculptural objects when opened. Additionally, I like how the string handles look so purposeful when taut and used to hang the bag, but then silly and
pointless when flopped over and flaccid, which you can look with Eva Hesse's work in mind.
When
Giuseppe told me the show is called Made in Occident, I thought he was trying
to say Made by Accident. It is this kind of understanding by misunderstanding
that serves as a sub-theme of the show. It's an idea that perhaps we should approach art not from what we know or want to know but what we come to understand about something,
somewhere, someone. Bravo Giuseppe!
by Drew Martin I had a very out of body experience on Friday at work, which may have had something to do with only having two hours sleep the night before. I was sitting in a meeting with some pretty smart people and although I was engaged in the conversation, I felt like I was watching it happen. I was consumed by the thought that our ideas were formed in and projected from what's inside our skulls.
It's quite remarkable that inside our thick skulls, there is a handful of gray matter that makes thought possible, and organizes our bodies through eye contact, speech, hand gestures, etc. to express our thoughts. This all came to me as I listened to one fellow across the table from me. I was most surprised by all the space around his head. It's like our brains are living planets in an otherwise vastly empty universe. I started thinking of the brain less as a central thought generator, or even the hub of a human conscious-style Internet, but more of a processor of one's total environment.
The human brain is still such a mystery. Even though we are getting a much better understanding of how it functions, the extremes of what it can do are mind-boggling, to say the least. In the past couple days I watched two films that made me think quite deeply about what makes us tick. The first documentary I saw was The Drop Box, which is about a South Korean pastor and his wife in Seoul who have a drop box at their house for unwanted babies. Dead babies found in the trash and the alleys of Seoul, and abandoned babies left outside their gate on freezing cold nights inspired the drop box as a way to save the little, helpless lives. Most of the mothers who leave their babies in the drop box (and then take off before they are seen) are teenage girls. And many of the babies have Down's Syndrome, mental issues, or are physically deformed. It is a heart-wrenching film.
The second documentary I saw was Project Nim, about the 26-year roller coaster life of Nim Chimpsky (yes, after Noam Chomsky) who was taken from his chimpanzee mother and raised by a series of human surrogate mothers and teachers as part of a Columbia research project to see if a chimpanzee, given the right nurturing human environment could acquire the ability to communicate at a human level through sign language. Doomed from the start, the physicality of the maturing male chimp brought a swift end to the project, which began a personal hell for Nim: first, being returned to a prison-like environment, and then even worse - being sold for a scientific research project where he was used as a lab animal for testing Hepatitis and AIDS drugs.
Both films explore the depths of what it means to be human through the cruelest actions to the most compassionate souls.
by Drew Martin Love Thy Neighbor is always interpreted as an open-armed, peaceful embrace but I have never heard objection to the premise, which is one of land-ownership and material isolation that is bound in the word neighbor. This word does not exist if there is no unnatural division.
I have tried to love my neighbors but there are physical boundaries such as property lines, doors and walls, and cars; and, there other boundaries such as elitism, unsynchable schedules, loaded guns in their closets, and fears. The fears are about losing things that were accumulated and about what life might be like without one's personal bunker - nothing short of Mad Max. So what we then have is a justifiable yet unwarranted prestrike of self-defense: a constant defensive life. My daughter who is soon to turn 17 recently said to me that humanity ended once people settled down and started developing towns. It is something she read, and it is actually quite true. The compromise of our freedoms starts with land ownership and division of territory, and it leads to slavery, unfair accumulation of wealth and territorial warfare. Sounds awful, but at the same time it is hard for us to imagine what life would be like without the boundaries of time and space.
For the most part, when we speak of nomadic peoples we are discussing ancient humans, or movements that have been extinguished in the past century, such as the shepherds of southern Poland.
Fortunately, for humanity, there are some humans walking the earth, and sleeping in a different spot each night. Each day is more important than the past or future. Fortunately, for us, a young French traveler named Raphael Treza, has documented the Hindu Kalbelias tribe of Rajasthan, North Western India with his film Cobra Gypsies. At times it feels more like a music video than a documentary, but it is hard to say that Treza romanticizes their lifestyle even though it often reads that way, especially coming from a Westerner, who in one part of the film drums up the European colonist fantasy: to be the first white man these natives have ever seen. None-the-less Treza's closeness with and acceptance by the Kalbelias is endearing and, after all, for our voyeuristic benefit. It is more like he presents us with carefree but hardworking nomads in such a raw way that we, ourselves, automatically idealize them. I think this feeling has less to do with the exotic, and more to do with a genuine freedom they have combined with great artistic whims and style. Watch the full documentary here:
by Drew Martin There is a big place in my heart for the Amish people, which has nothing to do with their direct religious belief and their rules, but rather about how this translates into their simple lives, and their relationship to the land. I connect with that more than our explosive entertainment culture, constant distractions, and self-importance. And so, any time I see a decent-looking Amish documentary online, I pull up the ironing board and watch in fascination. Tonight I watched The Amish: Shunned...Your Freedom or Your Family, which takes a close look at the shunned Amish who, as one of them expresses, is "lost between cultures."
The title of this post, The Loudest Silence I Have Ever Heard, is a quote from a shunned former Amish woman who attended her father's funeral (typically not permitted for people who leave the community) and how powerful the silence was when she and her non-Amish husband passed by the open coffin with more than 400 Amish looking on. This woman, and others featured in the film, plays a role in the periphery of the community by taking in younger Amish people who leave their families and need a place to stay and a surrogate parent. Early on in the documentary she comments on how the Amish do not permit to have pictures taken of them and how hard it is for our culture to comprehend what it means to only have mental pictures of your loved ones. One of the ex-Amish featured in this film is a young woman who felt it was God's calling for her to become a nurse. She comments that while putting herself through college to become a nurse makes her a good daughter/person in our culture, it led to her own shunning from the Amish community. One thing I have found interesting about a lot of the ex-Amish I have seen in such documentaries is that they remain quite religious. They want to know more about Christianity and to interpret the Bible on their own. They question the Amish rules, not the foundation of the faith. From a media perspective, I think they have a unique understanding of worldly media. Is our abundance of images of each other more important than a good mental picture? While I certainly appreciate such documentaries who is the real audience? Watch the full documentary here:
The Museum of Peripheral Art explores how we interact with and interpret art and media, in order to provide a unique experience, which the original might notconvey.
The Museum of Peripheral Art is about serendipity, insight and contemplation. - Drew Martin, Director
