Cave Art and Graffiti

Cave Art and Graffiti
Student Chosen Topic
Maggie McBrady

    In class we talked about ancient cave paintings and how the people of the time viewed the cave as the womb of the earth.  By painting on the cave they believed they were communicating to the womb the animals they needed to survive.  As I was thinking about the cave paintings graffiti popped into my head.  I am by no means an expert on the use and history of graffiti but I do know a little about a very famous graffiti artist named Bansky.
   Bansky is a political and social activist who has chosen graffiti as his medium.  As a disclaimer, the large hype about Banksy may only be due to the mystery surrounding him but some of it is merited.   As I said I am not a graffiti artist but usually graffiti is used as a way to claim territory for a gang but Bansky has taken a different approach:  activism.  His graffiti serves no purpose for his own gain.  
   Now back to the cave paintings.  Could Bansky be using the walls and buildings in the same way the ancient peoples used the cave?  Is he attempting to communicate a need to higher power?  Or is painting on a wall simply the easiest way to get people talking about an issue?  I think there is some overlap between Bansky and the ancient peoples.

the person of beauty

The more I ponder beauty and Beauty, the more I realize that Beauty is a person; the person of Jesus. All beauty and its expressions have their origin in Him. He is beautiful in appearance (Rev. 1), in  perfect love, in perfect justice, in perfect mercy. C.S. Lewis writes that we desire to be united with the beauty that we see and experience. I believe this is true also in the sense that we desire unity with the person of Beauty. We crave unity with the divine and are not eternally satisfied with anything else because eternity has been set in our hearts.

A lovely poem

    This morning as a group of my friends and I were sitting around the table about to enjoy breakfast together, our friend asked if he could first share with us a poem that he had read recently. He read to us a poem by Billy Collins titled “Eastern Standard Time,” in which the author expresses a feeling of kinship with those in his same timezone. He wrote of how they do their morning activities together, they awaken at the same time, begin the showers at the same time, take their vitamins at the same time, and so on. He goes on about how everyone else in the world is doing something different (just sitting down to dinner, going dancing, crawling into bed at the end of a long day). Because of this, the rest of the world is either a little bit ahead or a little bit behind.

    Though difficult for me in the morning, I focused on what he was saying, listening to the poem. Soon being mentally present was no longer difficult; I was lost in the poem. In my mind I was picturing everything the author described; I saw individuals waking, getting ready for the day, spreading jam on their toast. Immediately before he began reading, I was worried about my scrambled eggs getting cold. Yet soon after he began, I was totally held fast by the words and forgot about breakfast altogether, let alone its temperature. Realizing after the poem was read, that I had been utterly swept away by its words and rhythm, I was reminded of van der Leeuw’s words on the poet and poetry. I had experienced the fixed power of poetry that van der Leeuw spoke about. Because of this, I desire to introduce more poetry into my life, especially the Psalms. The poet, according to van der Leeuw, receives his song from God and sings back to God. I cannot think of or imagine a more fitting example of this description of a poet than the poet-king of ancient Israel, David.

beauty of the trees in winter

    The drive home for Christmas break was lined with trees that looked dead. This, aside from the bone-chilling cold, is one of my least favorite things about weather. I have never thought that trees in winter were beautiful unless covered in a layer of snow. When driving past the trees, somewhat lamenting their lack of foliage, I was wondering if some people consider trees in winter (without the snow) to be beautiful. I unconsciously challenged myself to be one of those people, to find something about it that I thought to be beautiful.

Surprisingly, it didn’t take me long to come up with an answer. Their beauty is in their strength and endurance. These trees, that appear dead, are indeed alive. They are equipped to last through the harsh winter season, enrobed in strength for longsuffering by the Almighty. Once I viewed them this way, I started to perceive the trees as pillars of strength, in possession of beauty and worthy of my respect and admiration. I expect this enlightening experience in the car will likely prompt me to continue challenging myself to have fresh eyes and look for the beauty in things I usually don’t notice or consider to be lovely.

Perception

    Today while painting with friends I noticed that the paint color looked different the longer and more closely I looked at. I was painting with a light gray and light yellow. After looking at the paint so long, I started to perceive the yellow and gray as closer to white. I was so convinced that my perception was reality that I asked my roommate when she walked in “does this even look yellow to you?” Surprised by my question, she responded “yeah, it definitely looks yellow.” Because of this, I began to think about how often when we are close to things (physically, emotionally, ect.) it changes our perception of them. We no longer see the thing we are close to objectively and as it truly is.

    This realization caused me to wonder about how our proximity to and time spent with various things or people often affects our view of it’s beauty.  Often I find that when I find something beautiful, like a painting for example, and introduce it into my daily life (i.e. putting it in my room), I am no longer enraptured by it as I once was. Even upon intentionally pausing to look at it and admire it, I do not get that same feeling as I did upon first glance. Somehow, because it’s become a part of my everyday, some of it’s charm has faded and cannot be recaptured.     I begin to take it’s beauty for granted.

    Conversely, I find the opposite is true with close friendships. The more time I spend with a close friend and the closer we become in proximity, the more beautiful they and their friendship become to me. Despite the knowledge of the yucky, imperfect things I come to know about them (their faults, mistakes, tendencies) somehow I always find them more beautiful. Being open and fully known, with nothing hidden or withheld,  is such a powerful and beautiful thing. I pondered why it is that I view friends as more beautiful when I know them in all their weakness as well as their strengths, and it’s not the shortcomings and mistakes that I perceive as beautiful. No, the beauty is in their story, in their trust, and in the great hope of redemption available to each one, no matter their story.

Search for Beauty

I remember the first day of class very vividly.  I can remember my anxiousness and my fragility.  Like the feeling of packing the day before you embark on a journey that you know is going to take you somewhere you've never been before.  I remember how alone I felt opening the door to my new apartment before the semester started.  Reality had sunk in.  I had left behind everything that was familiar to me, everything I knew, my job, my friends, for something unknown.  And for the life of me I couldn't figure out why I had to do this, I just knew that that was what I was going to do.  I don't think my experience was unique in any way.  I think we all have moments when we recklessly leave safety behind because whatever safety was wasn't cutting it.  It's a pretty simple concept.  It could just be called "going out on a limb".  But what isn't simple, is getting there.  Stepping out onto that limb.  This is what I realized on the first day of class.  Like I said, I couldn't for the life of me remember why I had decided to go back to school, or pick philosophy for a major.  There was no rational answer in my head.  And then Kip walked in, and without saying anything, wrote, "What is beauty?" on the board.  And then all the sudden this sense of relief and joy sunk in.  I remember having a powerful aesthetic experience.  That "aha" moment that almost made me laugh out loud.  I remember saying to myself, "oh, that's why I'm here".  It was just my search for beauty that had gotten me here.  I remember looking back on all the things I'd done to get where I was and felt like the hard part was over.  The unknown wasn't scary anymore, it was magical and ready to be explored. 

Body of Art - Maggie McBrady

Body of Art - Phaidon Editors
Outside Reading
Maggie McBrady

     Body of Art is a collection of art pieces filled with pieces of art that explain what it is like to be human.  My personal theory or art is that art can be used to convey a message.  The message Body of Art is trying to convey is the uniqueness of the human experience.  An article on the book says that the one uniting factor of the human experience is that we all have bodies.  To capture the human experience the Body of Art is filled with different depictions of bodies.  The inspiration for the book came from the lacking of representing how the human body has changed over time and how it has become the "canvas on which and through artists talk about the human experience".
     I see beauty in the Body of Art not only in the art work within its pages but in its message.  The Body of Art is uniting all people through depictions of all different bodies.  All people are represented within its pages and can relate to the human experience.  In a way I am stunned that this idea hasn't been thought of till now because it seems so simple.

Art as Simulation - Maggie McBrady

Art as Simulation - Jean Baudrillard
Assigned Reading
Maggie McBrady

"We have finished with the end of representation, then, with the end of aesthetics, with the end of the image itself in the superficial virtuality of the screens."

     Baudrillard is criticizing the direction art is taking by comparing it the the current human desire for the "hyperreal".  The hyperreal is when images become more real than the actual objects they represent.  For example, an explosion in an action movie seems more real, hyperreal, than an explosion in real life.  We have become so used to the explosion we are presented with in movies that we would not be impressed if we saw one happen in front of us.  The explosion we see in the movies is the simulacrum.  The simulacrum is the substitution of the real object for what we desire in the hyperreal world.

     I cannot tell if Baudrillard fears what is coming for art or if he is simply stating what he thinks will happen without emotion.  According to Baudrillard artists will cease to serve a purpose because the art they produce won't produce an aesthetic pleasure because we will become desensitized to it and desire the hyperreal.  We will no longer look to art to fulfill a greater meaning because all that is left will be images.  Baudrillard cites Andy Warhol as evidence that this is already happening.  Warhol's famous Campbell's can is just the presentation of an image yet it was well received.  The cans don't produce an aesthetic pleasure but are simply there.
     I'm not sure I completely agree with Baudrillard.  I think, like all things in life, we are in a phase of art.  Modern art is seen as hip and so it is payed great admiration.  But once we grow tired of a canvas being painted with a single blue strip we will seek out aesthetic art.

Reliability - Maggie McBrady

In Class Discussion on Reliability

Student Chosen Topic

Maggie McBrady

     In my notes I have that art doesn't put forth a purpose like most objects in our lives.  So if art doesn't have a purpose why do we utilize it so often and place such large value in it?  The answer as we discussed in class comes from arts ability to change our way of thinking.  Reliability emphasizes the importance we place on an objects purpose.  The shoes above are only shoes if they serve their purpose.  When the shoes fail to serve their purpose they are no longer shoes because they no longer have their reliability.  However, if we paint the shoes then they cannot serve a function because they reside in a two dimensional painting.  They only represent the reliability they would have served in the real world.  The purpose of art then becomes to show the reliability we place on objects.  By looking at a painting of shoes we can be told a story about their owner.  If the shoes are heavily worn then they might be the only pair the owner has, if the shoes are covered in mud then the owner must work in the fields, in contrast if the shoes are clean and well kept then the owner probably has multiple pairs and doesn't have to do strenuous labor.  Art presents objects not for the purpose they serve but for the meanings they hold.  Art skews reliability into telling a story.

Art as Communicable Pleasure - Maggie McBrady

Art as Communicable Pleasure - Immanuel Kant
Assigned Reading
Maggie McBrady

"There is no science of the beautiful, but only a Critique"

     While writing my research paper on feminist art I came across an article that said feminist artists try to breakdown conceptions of fine art by not following fine arts "rules".  A few of the rules mentioned were not using crafts in fine art and fine art being the work of a lone genius.  I was initially confused and thought "Shouldn't art just be art not matter what form it comes in?".

    Kant and I are in agreement.  In the section of Fine Art Kant writes that "There is no science of the beautiful, but only a Critique".  If science were involved then there would be requirements and steps that needed to be taken to prove beauty.  Beauty would fail to remain a "judgement of taste".  If we ascribe rules to what is beautiful we are restricting beauty.  Kant defines an object as beautiful if it pleases apart from all interest; if you can look at an object and appreciate it for what is being presented to you.

     A second definition Kant offers is agreeable art.  He defines agreeable art as those that have "mere enjoyment for their object".  The examples he offers are hosting a dinner party where the guest sit around the dinner table in "unrestrained and sprightly conversation".  I think agreeable art shouldn't be a type of art but an attribute that art can have.  If looking at a piece by Picasso gives you the same giddy feeling then agreeable art should be an element of it.

     For if the purpose of art is to escape into the wonder of beauty happiness or gaiety as Kant mentions should be a welcomed element in all arts.

Holy Words - Maggie McBrady

Holy Words - Van der Leeuw
Assigned Reading
Maggie McBrady

"The beauty of words does not reside in their meaning, but in their rhythm, in their meter."

   A common saying I have heard and used many times is "It isn't what you say but how you say it". Van der Leeuw explains this common saying through the importance that humans place on formulas.  Rhythm and meter, are among the easiest of formulas for us to understand and implement in our lives.  Van der Leeuw explains that the only time something becomes alive for us is when we have found a formula for it.  So since rhythm and meter present obtainable formulas we latch on to them and ascribe a large amount of meaning to them instead of the individual words.
    To connect this to modern life I though about music.  Dubstep and Electronic Dance Music (EDM) rely heavily on strong varying rhythms and meter.  When Dubstep and EDM first began developing many people didn't understand the point, there were hardly any words just a bunch of sounds and beats.  They were both initially dismissed.  But the quickly built up a strong following and have established themselves as music genres.  I don't think Van der Leeuw would have been surprised.

"Rhythm compels the movement of the soul, even the soul of the Gods..."

a culinary dance

I love to cook. As with most anything, cooking is a much richer, more joyful experience when shared with ones you love. My most cherished memories at CNU to date are cooking with friends; I love the collaboration of it.

    One of my favorite memories came with the outrageous amount of snow we got last semester and the cancelling of classes. A house of boys that I befriended about two blocks away did not have a working heating system when the snow and freezing temperatures came, so decided to get snowed in at the house I lived in. We were happy to have them. They brought their groceries in and, as dinnertime was approaching, we took inventory of our collective items to see what we could come up with. Chili. Two or three of us undertook the task as the less culinarily inclined engaged us with their conversation. We went round and round sharing things that nobody in the room would have previously known about us; going on a tangent every now and then returning to the game. Music was played and the cooking - and dancing - began. Cooking together often resulted in overly spicy food, as one friend in particular would get so swept up in the music, dance, and joy of the moment that he’d get carried away with the cayenne. But it was always a good meal especially, maybe entirely, because it was shared.

When reflecting on these wonderful memories the other day, it struck me how cooking is so much like a dance as Van Der Leeuw describes it. He describes dance as a game, one that requires participation in order for it to be understood. This is certainly true in my experience of cooking with friends; it’s very much a game. Ingredients are tossed from one person to another, knowing glances  are exchanged, laughter ensues. The meal we made was always dependent on the participation of the whole group. Each brought what they had to share, and something grander was created from our collective resources than we would have come up with on our own. In step with Van Der Leeuw’s description, this culinary dance was not a performance. Rather, the participants got swept up in genuine dance, loosing from themselves the heaviness of being bound to earth. Worries and stress relating to our studies or other things seemed to slip right off our weary shoulders, leaving us free and burdenless in the joy of dance. It’s almost as though we danced our meals right onto the plate, every moment in preparing the meal beforehand was both so free and so deliberate. This reminds me of Van Der Leeuw speaking of dance as exploding and controlled passion. I wish to enjoy more meals prepared in such a beautiful, exhilarating manner.

Ancient Art and Ritual

Ancient Art and Ritual - Jane Harrison
Assigned Reading
Maggie McBrady

A point of Harrison's that I really enjoyed was the need for emotion to be present during ritual. Harrison says that ritual's desire to "recreate emotion not to reproduce an object".  As a member of the Greek community on campus ritual is something that is supposed to be held near and dear.  However I feel that most people often leave out the importance of emotion during ritual and have fallen into the trap of simple mimicry.  Without emotion ritual becomes a dull lifeless action of people just acting with no real concept of what they're actually doing.  I think mimicry is the greatest insult to ritual.

van der Leeuw on the Imago Dei

Van der Leeuw writes in his section, "The Image of God":

"The image of God, which most unequivocally attempts to approach the other and the mighty, is the clearest example of formation of images in general. As we have seen, the primitive artist is intensely interested in what he represents, and this interest is neither purely sentimental (romantic), nor purely visual (aesthetic); his interest is, rather, conveyed by his entire personality, directing itself toward the entire being of what is represented"(162).

Debates of iconoclasm or representation of God aside, which is what van der Leeuw discusses later in this section, I was just particularly struck by this paragraph as a life vision of an artist or a seeker of beauty. We are to be the primitive artist, intensely interested in what God represents. We are to allow our entire personalities, our entire essences of being, to be about understanding, dwelling in, and seeking the face of God and the beauty which He is.

Redemption in the Sunflower

I used to hate sunflowers.

I lived in Kansas for three years, and I can unequivocally say that they were the worst three years of my life to date. I attended a school full of terrible human beings, experienced crippling loneliness, and had to learn how to stand up for my older brother as he was bullied by his classmates. We were 10 and 11 years old, respectively.

The state of Kansas is obsessed with sunflowers. Enter any mall in Kansas and you can be sure that there is an entire store in the mall entirely dedicated to sunflowers depicted in a multitude of ways. The sunflower is the Kansas state flower, and I hated Kansas so much that I used to find sunflowers hideous. I had never truly found them particularly appealing or beautiful before in the first place, but the negative experiences made me find them particularly disgusting.

The first time I ever found sunflowers beautiful, I experienced abject wonder at them. We were driving as a family through the mountains of Colorado, and we drove by an entire field of sunflowers that has just managed to grow wildly and communally on their own, with no rhythm or reason to their growth. There appeared to be a small infinity in that field of sunflowers, and I remember feeling breathless just looking at them.

Now, somehow, sunflowers have turned into my favorite flower. I love how gigantically joyful they are in color and size. I love that they are lovers of the light and turn their faces upward towards their Creator, setting an example for us humans. Now, I buy sunflowers at the grocery store every chance I get. 

Musical Language

Maggie McBrady
Musical Language Podcast
Assigned Topic

This podcast was very interesting for me.  There are many times when I have heard musical sounds and thought I heard words in simple sounds or have turned a simple repetitive beat into a complex tune inside my head after listening to it over and over again.  The crosswalk from main campus to east campus are constantly beeping and saying "wait".  All year when I wait at the crosswalk this beat gets stuck in my head and I find myself joining along and turning a simple beep "wait" rhythm into this elaborate piece inside me head.  In high school I remember learning about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and how it caused the audience members to riot.  The podcast explained that since humans are patterning searching animals the brains of the audience members were working on overdrive to find a pattern in a piece that had no pattern.  Since the neurons couldn't find a pattern they began releasing large amounts of dopamine which caused the audience members to fall into a brief schizophrenic episode which caused their rioting.

Leave Home (Steal Like an Artist 3/3)

At the beginning of Steal's chapter entitled "Leave Home," Jonah Lehrer is quoted, saying:

"Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything"(93).

Kleon elaborates on this concept in agreement after:

"Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder"(94).

I am in strong agreement with this, comparing my artwork pre-college to during-college. I honestly thought that I would never be able to leave Northern Virginia, having gotten emotionally attached to it over the past six years of life residing in one constant place, but when I moved to Newport News and started to experience expanded ideas on literature, art, and faith through my community and through my studies as an art major, my artwork started improving. It improved on a technical level, surely - but the greatest curve of improvement I noticed was that my art began to look more like something that I, Ellie, would create. My friends started remarking on how very "me" my artwork was, and how it was beginning to appear distinctive from the rest of the world's art. I strongly encourage any artist of any kind to leave, simply for the purpose of their art becoming more "them" than it was previously.

Use Your Hands - a Crossover of Literatures

I found a great connection between Steal Like an Artist and Van der Leeuw's Sacred and Profane Beauty. Kleon believes that there must be a ritual element to making good art, saying:

"You need to find a way to bring your body into your work. Our nerves aren't a one-way street - our bodies can tell our brains as much as our brains tell our bodies. You know that phrase, 'going through the motions'? That's what's so great about creative work: If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking"(54).

Likewise, van der Leeuw argues that it is the participation in the ritual that brings forth art, and that this happens naturally, even when it isn't necessarily desired. In his section entitled "The Work Song," he speaks of words as rhythm adding new meaning and force to whatever work is being done, saying, "words exert a force...the words generate a certain power which is fixed, controlled, and concentrated by the rhythm"(115). 

These two literatures provide an interesting synthesis: that motion exerts a force on creativity, and that creativity likewise exerts a force on work and brings it new vigor. Thus, work and creative thought are in a positive, symbiotic relationship with one another. 

Start Copying (Steal Like an Artist 2/3)

Steal Like an Artist has a very profound message throughout the whole book that unintentionally points to our humanity in light of a Creator, essentially saying that all art is stealing and copying because we as humans are unable to create anything new. The Bible affirms this in Ecclesiastes, saying, "There is nothing new under the sun." Steal investigates the beauty and the peace of such a phenomenon. 

To elaborate further on this, Kleon writes, "A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve"(41).

I love this paradox! I love how we are unable to achieve perfect originality because only the Creator is perfectly original, but since He has created each human uniquely, our creations will never be perfect replicas or copies, but rather they will be echoes and reflections. They will always shout of a Creator, but they will never speak of Him as boring.

Make Things, Know Thyself (Steal Like an Artist 1/3)

Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist speaks on beginning a work of art, or the continuous, capital-w Work of creating art:

"You might be scared to start. That's natural. There's this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It's called 'imposter syndrome.'

The clinical definition is a 'psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments.' It means that you feel like a phony, like you're just winging it, that you really don't have any idea what you're doing.

Guess what: None of us do. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they'll tell you the truth: They don't know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up and do their thing. Every day"(28).

This is a comforting realization to the artist, and I appreciate the encouragement to continue with creating every day despite feeling lost at times, but I would argue that there is always a purpose behind what we as artists do to create. I personally am able to internalize what I do as good; however, I do not justify it as my own. So I do not feel like a phony, but that is because I am creating unto the glory of the Creator. I know what purposeful motion my creation is contributing to; thus, it always has purpose, but I cannot claim it as my own accomplishment.