The Other

The other love of my life isn’t a dark secret I’ve kept from my husband. This love is, in fact, a brightly-lit street free for all. For every word censored by the husband, I take a step down the street. Sometimes there are a hundred steps, sometimes more. In the street, I walk on hysterically—I feel like a woman. But when I get home, I cook and agree and shut up—just the way my husband likes it. I am a wife, The Great Pretender. I am The Woman, a f*cked protester.

Artyfarty

Been an exciting week of art, art and more art! Just some thoughts to keep meself grounded for now and not get lost..

- Must art be confined to museums or galleries or on walls? How is it evolving?

- Politics is a huge part in the art world and awareness of that is great, but focus always on ideas, narratives, meaning and social capital instead

- Homework is great too, but don’t take things too seriously in this world of hyperbole. Mayo Martin’s blog always reminds me to keep it all light and fat-free!

- A roundtable sounds like a great idea :-). Everyone should be friends!

- Art is to move, communicate and/or educate

- Artists are important, and should be honoured with tangibles like cold hard cash, space and time

Choice part 2

JOHN 6: 70 Then Jesus replied, “Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!” 71 (He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve, was later to betray him.)

How amazing is it that Jesus still chose Judas as a disciple, knowing that Judas would betray him in the end?

A Portrait of the Wolf as a Man

This is taken from PBS.org. The photograph features Lobo the legendary leader of a band of cattle-killing wolves that had been terrorizing cattle ranchers and their livestock. Click to see the story.

My time was recently spent with wolves. I wish I could say that the experience was real and wild, but it was largely a literary one. Still wild, though.

There are many ways of looking at the animal. Biblically, wolves are sly and destructive creatures. In nature, they share an ancestry with dogs and are seen as the more majestic cousin. In other mythologies and folklore, they are highly revered.

But the past few days were spent looking at wolves through the eyes of Jiang Rong, a Chinese novelist (whose real name is Lu Jiamin and was once a political scientist). Jiang Rong wrote Wolf Totem, an ambitious tale of Mongolians in the 1960s, as a critic to his own culture — that of the Han Chinese.

Because the Mongolians’ lifestyle is so much interweaved with that of the grassland wolf, Jiang Rong uses the animal as a metaphor to symbolise them. As opposed to the wolf-like nature of the Mongolians, the Han Chinese are seen as sheep with a muted, emotionless herd-like mentality borne from the Cultural Revolution.

I used to think that wolves are sly creatures — and they are. But Jiang Rong redeems them by emphasizing their loyal character and ability to display human-like emotions. They feel sad when one of them dies. They avenge. They protect. These are the traits of the Mongolians. Though the wolves destroy the horse herds of the people, the Mongolians never form a naive deduction to render them as mere attackers. This is because wolves are also guardians of the environment and Mongolian livelihood — they hunt for gazelles who eat away or destroy the grasslands.

For the Mongolians, the wolf becomes both friend and foe. The Mongolians’ ability to understand nature’s intelligence, power and cyclical renewals means that wolves are meant to be respected as part of nature’s plan. In this light, the Mongolians never wear a dead wolf’s hide or hunt them meaninglessly (the Han Chinese do, according to Jiang Rong) — if they do, they think only for themselves and disrespect the bigger picture, that is, the ecology of the grassland.

All these ideas are told through the tale of Chen Zhen, a Han Chinese student from Beijing who obeys Chairman Mao’s urging to go to the countryside. Chen chooses to live in the Mongolian grasslands with nomadic herders. As he becomes a part of them, he grows fascinated with their lifestyle and especially with the cleverness of wolves. And hence the whole novel’s fascination with the creature (it sometimes reads like a never-ending National Geographic article, though).

Halfway through the novel, I am reminded of Cai Guo-Qiang’s glorious piece, Head On. This larger-than-life installation sculpture carves 99 wolves where, in a ferocious force of herd mentality, they crash into a glass wall. Cai, a prominent artist also from China, certainly has a very different conclusion about wolves.

He describes his work: “I tried to find an animal that represents a collective heroism, an animal that likes company, that lives in a pack. I wanted to portray the universal human tragedy resulting from this blind urge to press forward, the way we try to attain our goals without compromise. This is something that keeps repeating itself all throughout human history. In Zen philosophy, there is this idea of tragic beauty based on the notion that most of what happens has no meaning whatsoever.”

I wonder what Jiang Rong would think about that. Certainly, for the author, wolves are not blind followers but are in fact, clever planners that move in perfect unity.

It is simplistic to relate both Jiang Rong and Cai Guo-Qiang’s work to each other just because both feature the wolf as centrepiece. Yet, in spite of this and the different views of both artists, there are obvious similarities in lessons from their ideas.

For one, people, like animals, exist as a collective whether we like it or not. Therein lies a fine line in balancing this collectivism — how much of each other can we protect or avenge before it becomes blind support or group-think that is eventually dangerous? And as part of a collective, each of our actions ultimately impacts one another no matter how modern society alienates us or endorses individualism.

Here’s how I look at wolves these days — they’re just like us humans, complex in nature, both prey and predator, no lesser a warm-blooded creature than what we are, capable of both crime and compassion. To understand wolves is to understand men, and vice-versa. Man and nature are irrevocably interdependent, a reflection of each other. Jiang Rong writes: “That must mean that if there’d been no wolves, those great war counselors and leaders, there’d have been no Genghis Khan, no golden tribe, and of course no wise and brave Mongol fighting horsemen.”

Sail to you, sail to you

Song to the Siren encapsulates my memory of Nepal, a charming land that constantly lures my return. Sometimes, the beauty of this country scares me, as if too much of a good thing can be wrecking…


Tim Buckley (who wrote the original) and Robert Plant have fantastic versions, but Susheela Raman’s Hindustani voice hits the sweet spot of remembrance for me. This is the last number off her album Salt Rain — it leaves a lingering whisper and longing in the heart, and is simply divine even as a poem.

Susheela Raman – Song to the Siren

Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
Till your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your eyes

And you sang “Sail to me, sail to me
Let me enfold you”

Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?

Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks
For you sang, “Touch me not
Touch me not, come back tomorrow”
Oh my heart, oh my heart shys from the sorrow

I’m as puzzled as a newborn child
I’m as riddled as the tide
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or should I lie with death my bride?

Hear me sing: “Swim to me
Swim to me, let me enfold you
Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you”

Writers question the impact of nationality

Art vs life

The scariest thing about the pursuit of art is that it may overtake life. That it becomes more important than living. Have you been in a situation where the “art”/image of remembering or documenting a  moment is more crucial than living it? That creating “art” out of the moment is more important than being involved in it?

Perhaps it’s the condition of our world today. With so many mediums that help us create and remember in no time, we are engaged and enthralled with the medium and what it produces, rather than the moment. McLuhan was spot-on. We find an easy  way out to use the medium to engage, rather than engage with our senses, and more importantly, engage through time. We rather know bite-size information about people, about things and situations, and create works out of that, than go deep with them. Going deep is inconvenience.

How much of these fly-by-night creations can truly make an impact? How much of such documentation or creation is art?

The one thing that struck me at the Art Stage recently was the sheer number of hours/years spent being involved in and creating a breathtaking piece of work. The beauty of such pieces is partially the artist’s discipline and devotion in spending years understanding and engaging in that one idea or subject, and in the process, creating his one piece. Time — is so much a part of the authenticity of an artist. Barbara Kingsolver took 10 years to write the Poisonwood Bible because she wanted to know Congo, where the novel was set, through and through. Michelangelo took more than 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel, and could only do so with tremendous detail knowing the Book of Genesis so well.

I’m all for speeding things up, don’t get me wrong. But perhaps in our greed to create and make our names in our own right, think about the moment, the idea and the people that are reflected in our creation. Have we given them a gift in return — perhaps the greatest gift that’s time?

My faves from Art Stage


Ai Weiwei, Through, 2007

Christine Nguyen, The Colorbands, 2010

Norberto Roldan, Quelques Fleur 2, 2010