Art makes society - an introductory visual essay

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My love is folklorish        Dwinderling around        A pan for your fancy         And a hip movement        A girl shouldn’t muster        Unless her community had taught her to        Born with a backdrop    Of Gaelic     No, I don’t want to do Irish dancing     A grandmother        It’s stupid     With jet black hair     And me,      I wished my head were more red       Now              As my name         And my grandmother        Had a mother        A galloping skirt
……………………………….
Those women have thick bellies       The ones dancing their way around the North           And the Southern Mountain       Desert       Drum      Nougat      Freckle       Potato      Nose      Like mine       But nothing about me      Is      Enveloping enough       I’d been plain Janed      Long ago      And now       A percussive       Sound      And home      Feels       Like home    Feels like         Don’t kid yourself          You’d do well in heaven      You’re not fierce enough for the gypsies        A bonfire       Spirit       Tucked up       In a bonnet       Eyes       Like    Vermeer         Skin like         Paper        Hair like       Straw        No pony      No pony               I never called my father         Daddy         He never called me       Honey        Til now     No pony          No pony        Lost in the Sahara?        How ever far you go        You continue to live in your own…       Giddy up        Giddy up         In your own…        Oh dark is the night!             Of knights           And donkeys tears        Up my thigh         Who’s hand?           Went up the waist line?               No            Not the right question       Who’s hand         Do you remember?        In your own...               Shit


Leiko Ikemura Honigtasch

Introduction: Art is doing, not viewing!

John Dewey Art as Experience – ethereal things and I

While sitting, pondering the ideas I might use to write an essay such as ‘Art makes society’ I organically began collating the words , thoughts and expressions of artists, makers and thinkers that have come up since the start and maybe just before I started to study again formally again under the title ‘Art, nature and Society’ it must be said that the choosing of this course of study triggered and enabled a new collation of inspiration or a new holder for those whom or those whose work I ‘like’.  Or might it be said, it was in fact the invisible link that tied things already together. By way of ‘making things’ for many years now it had occurred to me that in ‘making’ anything I would always have to be ‘losing’ something else or that the art object would require a sacrifice or even a kind of death to the liveliness of life, I do not say this as a given but perhaps as a personal and subjective identification with art as such, or perhaps art just formalised. Why should I name blog mourning and drawing anyway, I bet you were wondering what that was all about? Well as I said… putting things down felt like multiple little deaths, sometimes exquisite kinds of deaths but deaths all the same. Pages of little white dwarfs stars… and here we are. Through the organisation of this essay a few notions in particular seem to have arisen to the surface such as disindentification, withdrawal and most importantly subordination, and yes this word often comes up in the name of feminism of course but if I may simply here I am namely talking of the subordination of one thing for another, though I do not doubt that patriarchy has something to do with those diversions, or separations. At the opposing end you’ll see a pull towards the experience of art from intuition, voice, breath, body, atoms, space, leaves. At the end of this essay we’ll find ourselves in a room full of plants and I get the feeling you and I might both be pleased to have made a lucky escape, from being put on a plinth.


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In his text ‘Art as experience’ John Dewey 1934 claims that ‘in order to understand the meaning of the artistic products, we have to forget them for a time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as esthetic’ He uses the example of the Pantheon as well as many others as an object which has esthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for the human being or other such places which hold civic commemoration. He describes the collective life that was manifested in war, worship, the forum that knew no division between what was characteristic of these places and operations, and the arts that brought colour grace and dignity into them. Painting and sculpture were organically one with architecture, as that was one with social purpose that building served. Music and song were intimate parts of the rites and ceremonies in which the meaning of the group life was consummated. Drama was a vital re-enactment of the legends and history of group life.

 

“Today most European museums are among other things memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism.” Think too of Opera houses, galleries and museums those erect shows of wealth and power.”

 

Towards Dewey’s depiction of the artworks in his chapter ‘The Live Creature’, he points to common conception; that the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting or statue in its existence apart from human experience and in his words, the very perfection of these objects, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions to get in the way of insight.

 

Art then is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort.  In his opinion it is our task then or the task of the curator of art history to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience, that are works of art and the everyday events, doings and sufferings that are universally recognised to constitute experience.

 

‘Mountain peaks do not float unsuspended; they do not even just rest upon the earth’

 

Automatic art = fine art

John Dewey himself valued the experiential substance of the arts. Recognising the indistinctness of mind and body, and their ensuing codependence in artistic activity.  ‘Modern taste tends to reckon as higher the fine arts that reshape material, where the product is enduring instead of fugitive, in contrast with the limitation of singing dancing and oral storytelling to immediate audience.

But the movements of individual body enter all reshapings of material. When these movements carry over in dealings with physically external matters the organic push from within an automatic art. They become, in so far, ‘fine’.”

Something of the rhythm of vital or natural expression, something as it were of dancing and pantomime, must go into carving, painting, and making statues, planning buildings, and writing stories.


Art as material culture

Cabbages and starfish


Art as action

Carla Lonzi. Out of Art!  A tool in thinking against ourselves

 

Carla Lonzi (Florence, March 6, 1931 – Milan, August 2, 1982) was an Italian art critic and feminist activist, who is best known as the cofounder of Rivolta Femminile (Feminine Revolt), an Italian feminist collective formed in 1970. Lonzi’s critique of art – considered as a sum of institutions, power relations and forms of sociability – is the basis upon which she developed a feminist practice of disidentification. Her continuous search for valuable forms of disobedience against the patriarchal organization of life is based upon the refusal to comply with the male mechanisms of reputation and success. Lonzi’s desire to establish non-hierarchical relations and communities explicitly counters the patriarchal emphasis on success and competition. Lonzi’s withdrawal is thus not merely a stepping aside. Rather, it becomes a challenging project which engages a desire for a transformation in which life, creativity and self-expression can exist in radically new ways.  Lonzi’s writings from the late 1960s and the early 1970s demonstrate the significance of her withdrawal from art for her elaboration of a feminist subjectivity.

 

In Taci, anzi parla subjectivity is sieved by the practice of feminist consciousness-raising (autocoscienza) is the true protagonist of the book. The journal is a document of experimentation within relationships and a recollection of the profound changes that arise from it. Its subject matter is intangible, since it tries to retrace an amorphous and protean form of life, one stripped of its professional and social veils, reduced to its pure potentiality for revolt and freedom. 

 

“Existential nudism,” a desire for truth at the limit of obscenity

 

She liquidates professional positions, even political ones, because they are toxically compromising: anything that accumulates and shines, like an electric device, must be dismissed. Lonzi’s own writings don’t exist to prove something or to inscribe themselves in a pantheon, a genealogy, a constellation. They come from the exploration of the abyss of solitude and pain, and they seek out the frightening emptiness of freedom.

 

‘Deculturation’, - the endless process of breaking the ties binding the subject to a given, gendered identity.

 

This notion of art as an activity encompassing all aspects of life, and the ensuing refusal of art’s allocated spaces (the museum, the gallery, the collector’s private homes), was a decisive aspect in the 

contestation of the modernist legacy.



The collectives:

In 1970s Italy, women developed collectives that were characterized by a new-found determination to gain full autonomy of expression. Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi and Serena Castaldi formed Rivolta Femminile (Female Revolt), a radical group that created space for women to question not only their interactions with the world, but most importantly to raise awareness of the self. Many similar feminist groups were formed at that time such as Libreria delle Donne di Milano (Milan Women’s Bookstore), Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) and Anabasi. They proposed alternatives to patriarchy’s oppression of women in all its social relations, including within left political parties, trade unions and social movements.

While these autonomous feminist collectives raised issues of domestic labour and alternative models of collective care, campaigning for a salary for housework, they also explored the different roles of women in sexual relationships. The tactic of self-awareness (autocoscienza) became key and led to a self-determined and self-directed element of social and class struggle. Αutocoscienza was the feminist practice that aimed to reclaim women’s relationships by beginning first and foremost with the self, while also engaging with the complex differences that exist among women. The process of creating collectives became a way to question anew both the construction of the self as an individual subject and the collective meaning of performing common women’s experiences in the public sphere.

Αutocoscienza presupposes both an abundance of the self and an intimate acceptance of the other through a collaborative force: it is a feminist tactic of practicing trust. The collaborative gatherings initiated via autocoscienza indicated relationships in which a woman entrusted herself to another woman (affidamento) by narrating her personal stories and private experiences. Through the stories that women were confessing and revealing to one another, they were also articulating “their own existence and personal identity” (Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 2000). In this practice of self-awareness and consciousness-raising, the desire to express oneself, when shared with others and their experiences, is transformed into a political act that demands space outside the realms of the private and urges sociocultural change. Collectives thus created a political space, and at the same time a zone of trust that was finally able to host and give voice to women’s narratives and experiences.

 






‘The artist – she writes in her diary – is far too loaded with myth.’

Lonzi’s most famous test translated to English include ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’ and ‘We are all Clitoridean Women’


From left to right: Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, Luciano Pistoi. Taken by Anna Piva in Alba, 1966.

Art creates sites of activity

Dancescapes, drawings & atoms

 

Anna Halprin (July 13, 1920 – May 24, 2021) was an American choreographer and dancer. She helped redefine dance in post-war America and pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to herself as a breaker of the rules of modern dance. Here I wish to focus mainly on her move out of the city together with both the inward and outwards changes this caused, and this bringing to the field the notions of the ‘dancescape’ or dancescaping.’

 

Writing from New York, Halprin confided in a letter to a friend her hopes about her urge for “wild open spaces”. “I want to be left alone, live a normal resourceful life with a connection to the soil and to the common pulse of the ordinary people.” Disenfranchised by the New York art/ dance seen which she said created ‘a warped kind of dance’ she was eager to regenerate her work from the ground up.

 “I’m only interested in creating out of the soil and the people a healthy fresh dance that is alive and vital."

Moving to the woods of Mount Tamalpais she soon recognised how her surroundings affected her kinaesthetic awareness. In this she became aware that as she says ‘it is in our nature to become part of a bigger nature.’ Turning her artistic practice to the botanical and geological processes around her, crafting her movement much as a landscaper responds to the earth. This deeply reconfigured her subsequent use of space and force, task and form, improvisation and imagery- and ultimately her sense of self. The focus was on potential and process, yielding participatory events. Modelled as investigations and empirical problem solving, exercises led dancers to think on their feet and to work ‘from the bone’. OR as Dewey had earlier said:

Reshaping outer material through an “organic push from within”

What the outdoor location enabled was boundless experimentation with gesture and nature, thereby undoing precepts of cause and effect, and determine ordinary task as formal structure.

In 1972 Halprin experienced a life-changing moment when she depicted a tumour in her abdomen. Her survival of it and its recurrence three years later was entwined with the process of picturing her illness and overcoming denial and fear by dancing her self-portrait. Since then she began to incorporate drawing more and more into her practice and oeuvre both independently and collaboratively.

Dancing  = Drawing

 “Drawing as akin to dancing” is a “cognitive indecipherability manifested in performance” that is both “tantalize our capacity to deal with wholes and parts, continuity and discontinuity, synchrony and succession”  Alfred bell

Teresa De Keersmaeker describes drawing as “a way of organizing the space and time” as well as a means of “visualizing its empty spaces”

“The daily practice of drawing is a kind of handwriting . The fact that our practice of writing by hand is disappearing has consequences on our thoughts.”

“Visualizing voids and measuring the earth”   Teresa De Keersmaeker


What are my atoms doing?

Mary Overlie (January 15, 1946 – June 5, 2020) was an American choreographer, dancer, theatre artist, professor, author, and the originator of the Six Viewpoints technique for theatre and dance. Here I focus on an interview intended for the ‘Schizo-Culture’ issue of Semiotext(e) said to supposedly be followed by Duchamp’s Musical Sculpture. In describing and differentiating herself from other big names at the time she follows a line of movement as relayed and recalled and experienced somatically.

Overlie: The point for me is how the molecular structure of the body is functioning. I look upon movement not as a pattern in space and not as a structural pose and not progress across a surface. The level I think of dance is on is atoms moving in accord with eachother – out – or they rise and expand. They cause movements. I have an arabesque where atoms start squeezing at the toe – with transfers of pressure in the body.

What are your thoughts on narrativity of dance?

Overlie: In manifesting awareness, I’m telling you a story only about what you see, not boy meets girl. The audience waits to see what the next step is and hangs on it. They know they’re taken on your line, but you don’t know what’s going to happen until after it’s happened.

The question is can life absorb art?

Overlie: The answer is yes, and very fast. Contact (improvisation) is self-destructive art.

You mean it doesn’t leave any trace? Doesn’t produce an object but materialises an idea.

Overlie: So every time it produces itself there’s no art. It transcends body discipline – opens incredible pathways with your bones and muscles. It’s forever unpredictable, forever engaged. Its performance of the level of watching a sunset – because that’s what you’re watching, you’re watching nature, not an artist…’

I am dealing in connections rather than championing forms. When it works it can become both – life and art.  When it doesn’t work it either becomes life, or when it becomes art, it dies from the other end. Form doesn’t work because you start choosing. Therefore I can use everything that exists in the world.

The Kitchen, Mary Overlie

So how can I bring us back? How can I bring these notions back into the notion of ‘art makes society’ well perhaps it is a wish, to explore, to engage to leave behind or self-destruct on the part of the art I have been known to make. It is about an art that is made from the manifestation of awareness to make, grow, produce or inhabit something that takes its place in the bigger whole without damaging or exasperating particular political forces, to reach an end in some way, or not? How about art as a process of renewal without the trace of it needing to be necessary?


Art is participatory

Leiko Ikemura & Valentine on Rabbits, Cosmic Beings and spaces too domestic




You might be wondering why, in a section called ‘Art is participatory’ I am not showing you dances and groups of people as before, but still things, drawings and sculptures. Well, I do have a reason of course. Here and you may have noticed at the beginning is a drawing by Leiko Ikemura, a postcard I picked up some moth ago at the Whitechapel gallery in London, I’d gone there to see the solo Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy which focused on her lesser known collage work, apparently transforming the everyday into the extraordinary. I have plastered this image all over the page to illustrate the relationship I have had with it for the past months, you could say that every time I looked at this image I decided I wanted to make art again, however slender, weedy, lilth, delicate, ghostly, anxious, scarce that was going to be. When I doubted my next steps (I’d spent previous years exploring the Moroccan Mediterranean) I found the post-code as a friendly reminder and when I’d forgotten and I went back to my mums house, there it was. Me. The interaction I’ve had with this drawing has ultimately been back and forth and continues to be an interaction; it is my smallest and noblest example of perhaps not how art makes society, but how makes me. And in the sense of what I will later present in the work of my favourite film maker Chantal Akerman that the change on a micro level is the best way to mess with the shape and form of the macro. This picture made me want to draw, to do automatic drawings, to stroke my dog and to savour the taste of something, maybe life. I wasn’t too interested in her missing arm, it didn’t bother me and I can’t find out information on this drawing, but of course I found out some information about the artist and her world.

Ikemura’s bronze sculpture Usagi Kannon (Rabbit Bodhisattva of Mercy) the takes the form of an anthropomorphised rabbit with a bell-shaped skirt big enough for a person to shelter beneath, it affords visitors refuge under its voluminous metal skirts. Ikemura created Usagi Kannon in response to the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011, which caused a devasting tsunami and triggered the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Ikemura is described as an artist ‘who seeks out the interconnectivity of all matter, of all life forces, pointing to a world where beings and forms of all kinds are worthy of love and respect.’


Usagi-Kannon, Leiko Ikemura


Lying in White, Leiko Ikemura

Thoughts Omaha, Leiko Ikemura
White head with trees, leiko Ikemura

Valentine Schlegel

Her sculpted interiors were too immobile to be displayed in museums, and yet too domestic to be appreciated as architecture.

Parisian society had little time for women using media not sanctioned as high art.

This Woman Could Sleep in Water, which took place at CAC Brétigny in Paris, reintroduced one of France’s most spirited and multifaceted artists to the world. The exhibition took its name from a comment made by one of Schlegel’s fishermen friends, who was in awe of the sea-loving artist’s ability to nap just about anywhere.

Schlegel was born in 1925 in Sète, a port city in south-eastern France. Growing up in a family of artisans informed her relationship to tools and her love of the handmade. After studying drawing at the fine arts school in Montpellier, she worked for an arts festival in Avignon where she alternated between roles as a costume designer, props specialist, set painter and stage manager.

Schlegel worked constantly with its vernacular materials and toggled between Paris and Sète. Her oeuvre drew upon her Mediterranean roots and her travels to Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

After a period of experimentation, she created a series of ceramic vases using a coil technique, mostly executed in the 1950s. The gestural contours and fantastical volumes were inspired by organic outlines of trees and birds, and evoke the freewheeling, jubilant shapes of Henri Matisse’s paper cut-outs. Schlegel’s mastery of various crafts enabled her to make a range of everyday objects: mahogany serving utensils, a stoneware whistle shaped like a bird, painted terra-cotta figurines, leather gladiator sandals and—arguably her greatest achievement—sculptural plaster fireplaces.

“A pot is designed to hold flowers. Without flowers, it’s nothing. To have a life of its own, it must also be a sculpture” Schlegel insisted in an interview published in the catalog of one of her Paris exhibitions that she believed in creating sculptures à vivre: dynamic objects that possessed their own sense of folklore.

Art as cultural capital - Re-enchanting the familiar and the functional — Les Lalanne

 

1.      The most dynamic husband-and-wife duos of the 20th century, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, whose surreal sculptures and exquisite decorative arts are now more coveted than ever.

2.      The 1970s ushered in a renewed interest in nature and the organic — exemplified by the works of François-Xavier (1927-2008) and Claude Lalanne (1924-2019). 

3.      Courted by Surrealists and celebrities alike, their distinctive blend of fine and decorative arts, which was based on naturalistic forms, has made their work highly prized by contemporary collectors. 

4.      When Claude passed away in April 2019 at the age of 93, French president  Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, released a statement of condolences, speaking of how the couple kneaded together ‘imagination, humour and poetry’ to create works that ‘re-enchant the familiar and the functional’.  

5.      François-Xavier’s first private commission was a sculptural bar for the home of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé. at Christie’s in 2009, and sold for €2,753,000, more than 15 times its low estimate. 

6.      In 1976 the singer Serge Gainsbourg named an album after Claude Lalanne’s sculpture L’Homme à Tête de Chou, or ‘The Man with the Head of a Cabbage’, and placed it on the front cover of the LP.

7.      They rarely collaborated on individual pieces; François-Xavier’s creations were more often inspired by the animal kingdom while Claude favoured the botanical. They were, however, united in their love for historic French craftsmanship, the surreal and the humour they brought to their fine and decorative art. 

8.      Both François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne believed art should be part of the everyday, an idea that shines through in their sculptural yet functional creations. Even the sheep are intended to be used as furniture. 

9.      During their long and successful career, Les Lalanne became darlings of the fashion world. In addition to working with Saint Laurent, Claude was commissioned by Hubert de Givenchy, Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, John Galliano and Reed Krakoff, among others. 

10.   Their early works were swatted aside by the critics. Yet Les Lalanne refused to conform, and soon their work was everywhere, from photoshoots in magazines to Paris’s most fashionable galleries. 

11.   Their work appears in major collections including the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, the Museé Nationale d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Museé d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

12.   Their legacy continues to resonate in the fashion world, with pieces being installed in Chanel, Dior and Tom Ford flagship stores. Collectors include the decorator Peter Marino, who used François-Xavier’s sculptures in his designs for Chanel’s fine jewellery shops, and Reed Krakoff, the creative director of Coach.


Art as a medium of exclusion, resistance or layered meanings, Chantal Akerman, feminine endings

 

Whatever story she was filming, Akerman always let it develop from a distance. For some— including many of her admirers—it seemed that her lengthy, often static shots were meant to be grueling or tedious to watch. Eric de Kuyper, the semiotician who co-wrote Je tu il elle and two of Akerman’s later films, once praised her movies for the “slow and diffuse boredom” he thought they induced. Her early films in particular succeed in part because they test our patience and make us weather their long takes of, for instance, the cleaning of a tub or the making of a roast. “Never before was the materiality of women’s time in the home rendered so viscerally,” the scholar B. Ruby Rich wrote about Jeanne Dielman in 1983, when it finally had a theatrical run in New York. Its tempo, she said, was one “of endless time, repetitively restoring itself.” Bracing for long scenes of potato peeling or bathroom scrubbing, many viewers have tended to approach Jeanne Dielman and the films Akerman made around the same time as if they were unpleasant gauntlets to run.

 

In Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, her self-portrait film from 1997, she compares her movies to a lean, bony cow that a desperate farmer tries and fails to sell. That line was her characteristically self-deprecating way of describing an important feature of her style and politics. What interested her was not the sprawling indefiniteness of boredom but the nervy tension and clipped rhythms of anxiety. The women in her films pass through worlds that can’t accommodate them and set them on edge. They end up imprisoned in suffocating domestic arrangements, like the young woman locked up by her paranoid boyfriend in La Captive (2000), a loose Proust adaptation; they get abandoned by men they trusted or reencounter men they used to love (Golden Eighties); they project independence as well as precariousness, like the two underage friends who traipse through Paris in the short J’ai faim, j’ai froid (1984). For the most part they come off as runaways fleeing the cozier, more settled domestic arrangements that their parents—and, in particular, their mothers—might have wanted them to inherit.

 

By the 1990s Akerman was increasingly inclined to talk about her movies as if they were tragicomic Jewish parables. She took inspiration from Singer and Kafka. “I feel very close to him for many reasons,” she said about Kafka in 1983. “He always wanted to get a fiancée, and he never could; finally people like us can’t do it. Another point is that Kafka doesn’t make pathos.” To not “make pathos” was perhaps the closest she came to a definite statement about her ethics as a filmmaker.

 

She wanted to play with despair, render it both deeply and with a cutting irony. To introduce any distorting or melodramatic devices into her movies would entail ruining that tone and violating the viewer’s trust. She talked about this prospect as if it were equivalent to breaking a divine commandment, sometimes the second“I am fighting against idolatry,” she told two interviewers in 2011—and sometimes the fifth. Whenever she pictured herself facing down another person from behind the camera or confronting a viewer through the screen, she thought: “Thou shalt not kill.”

 

“When the films are finished it’s as if I’d made nothing but mist”

 

“When other people talked about me using my first and last name I knew that they were talking about a person who for them had made more than mist but something like an oeuvre. I didn’t want to contradict them,” she wrote. “So I said nothing.”

 

But starting with La Chambre 1 (The Room 1) and Hôtel Monterey (both 1972), space and time become the subject of Akerman’s films, or are given equal prominence, due to a range of formal and stylistic techniques. The films eschew close-ups and shot/reverse-shot sequences in favor of longshot framing and deep focus, in which most if not all of a person’s body is visible along with much of the surrounding environment; this forces the viewer to scan the space of the shot for relevant details of behavior and setting. Symmetrical frame composition, with the camera placed at the same height perpendicular to the setting, creates a noticeable rectilinear patterning from shot to shot as well as a high degree of uniformity, sensitizing one to subtle changes over time. The long take coupled with dead time produces a feeling of anticipation: The viewer waits for something significant to happen, and becomes acutely conscious of that waiting. Whole films are organized around spatial and temporal structures. Akerman’s repeated pan of her apartment in La Chambre 1 refuses to privilege the filmmaker lying in bed as it takes in the surrounding space and its contents.

 

Akerman pushes dedramatization even further than her cinematic forebears, fully reversing traditional narrative hierarchy and focusing on microactions.

Saute ma ville, Chantal Akerman ( Blow up my town)


Plants – Plants are highly collaborative and generous, both within their own species as well as through interspecies relations with fungi, insects and mammals. How can I learn to become a plant?

Potted plants illustrate the perversion of our current social and cultural relations to nature. Aesthetisied as décor and given meaning through the lens of fashion and style. Separated from any local ecology, they are celebrated for their individual physical characteristics, which get homogenised through marketing. There is a violence of separation since plants have intricate and lively systems of communication that largely happen through their roots and mycorrhizal networks. But potted plants are completely dependent on the care of their human “owner”. They cannot grow in search of water and minerals as they would do outside of pots. Furthermore they are completely cut off from any possibilities of communication, community, interaction, or support. The plants become prisoners.
 
Ghosts
 
Haunted by, and haunt us with, the absence of their ecosystem.

Vegetal life is ghostly in many ways. A plant sometimes takes hours or days to react to an impulse.

And we have plant blindness

Becoming a ghost and a plant is a cautious and humble attempt at rehearsing different ways of relating in a time and place
 
Responsibilities are overwhelming
 
There is no easy way of navigating the haunted world we find ourselves in

Conclusions

So far I have no conclusions

We spend the majority of our time as adults in ways that fuel the motor of production and consumption.

 

 
 













 



 

 






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