March 2024: Looking carefully

Danielle and I are slowly making our way through Sarah Urist Green's You Are an Artist, and recently completed an art assignment modeled after the practice of Nina Katchadourian's marvelous Sorted Books Project. We were told to look at someone's book collection and pull out titles and stack them, making a found poem for books' owner. Danielle and I each made some stacks for each other. Here are a few of them:

How to do nothing / self-care in underwear

Recovering from emotionally immature parents / and yet / ocean beach / the right word / homegoing

Mornings like this / take me with you

On beauty / "I really don't believe you need to have a ton of money to create a space that means something to you"

Nina Katchadourian created a stack that is quoted in Green's book, which says, "what is art? / close observation". This stuck with both of us and bobbed along as a theme in our making and conversation this month. We must interact with the world in an inquisitive and welcoming way: eyes open, fists softened, willing to wait. Something will spark us if we do not rush along to the next thing.

This applies to the apple and the tire and the chip in the brick wall. We can also turn our attention to things with a life of their own, take note of their energy, their resistance, the parts that are growing and the parts that are dying. We can focus on quiet objects and listen carefully. We can collect up the leftover bits, sort them, notice how they crumble.

We can also turn that attention to the inner world. One way to begin to reconcile with overwhelming feelings is to observe them, finding a part in ourselves that can step back and see where the feeling is rooting in the body, where it wants to move to, and hear what it is saying. I think of much of my work as observational art in this way: