Right now I'm drawn towards Dreamscapes, both the literal place where I exist as my dreams are unfolding, and the fantastic landscapes of the dreams themselves, the strange sequencing and illogic that guides the imagery in my head at night. This might be in part because the graphable function of changes in my sleeping patterns, from easy sleep, to hyperactive dreaming which trumps sleep for restless adventures, to calm dreamless nights where I lie awake in complete stillness, to deep but hollow drug-induced slumber, to complete exhaustion, to last night's good sleep again. I think I'm going to try to start dream-journaling again, esp. if I can get my dreams on track to where I both get rest and have some memorable fun. Unfortunately, I think it likely that one comes at the price of another.
Other compulsive fascinations. . . I've found myself photographing mannequins and cutting from magazines pictures of the same. Often it's a clothed person posing with a nude mannequin or even a nude statue. I have one photo that's sort of I'm-trying-to-make-this-artistic black and white of a business man casually leaning against the stone torso of a well-endowed armless sculpture. Sort of like "it wouldn't be appropriate for me to appear in this magazine naked, but if I stand next to this model, well. . .you get the idea." A very strange sort of substitution/symbolism. I'm toying with the idea of nude people next to clothed statues, just to switch things up. How would people respond? It's the same anatomy on display. A performance piece, taking off one's own clothes to dress a statue?
After reading an interview Ellen Dissanayake (author of Homo Aestheticus: Where Art comes from and Why), I've been thinking of creativity as a basic human desire, an evolutionary impulse. She basically says that making art is a biologically innate need as fundamental as the need for warmth or shelter. But with art so cordoned off into the "art world" and seeming to exist only in the gallery space, what channels do ordinary people have to express the instinctive need to "make special?" In this exploration, I was particularly drawn to cooking as a channel for creating, and I see my own spectrum from the more-than-mud-pies I made with berries and other mixtures carefully and aesthetically wrapped into little leaf packets and served on bark platters beside the stream that marked the boundary between yard and forest as child . . . to the boboti I must soon learn to make so I can pass this enormous ceremony of a South African meal on to my own children.
Children, too, might be an area. I watched for a long time as several siblings scattered confetti around. Now I see the little bits of paper everywhere and I always like to imagine the little girl in the pink coat skipping around with her big bag. But even for all the fun and innocence of this activity, it's interesting that we teach children early to litter and leave messes behind without being concerned with who will have to clean up later. As we get older, we graduate to beer cans and oil spills, but we're still scattering markers of our passing.
The city also makes me think more of man vs. nature themes, and found objects. Or, transversely, lost objects, objects which retain some identity of their previous owner even when they are found by someone else, like the many gloves I stumble across.
Anyway, we made short videos in the city earlier this week in theme sequence. Earlier that day, we had created newspaper sculptures, and I made a pillow and blanket which I then slept on with the pigeons in Piazza San Lorenzo. It was quite fun. I added some cookie crumbs to invite my feathered friends to join me. Youtube links to follow.
