Author: Sue

An underwater sculpture park by Jason de Caires Taylor has gained international recognition for his unique work. His sculptures highlight ecological processes whilst exploring the intricate relationships between modern art and the environment. The cement finish and chemical composition actively promotes the colonisation of coral and marine life.

Imagine creating something with every intention of ensuring its decay. To shed itself of its synthetic, immaculate character in exchange for erosion and gentle oxidations; to meld itself with nature. Growth in decomposition. Therein lies the art.

This notion of disintegration, of systematically, plucking off atom by atom an initially seamlessly structured entity to its naked constituent bones… well, it’s just strangely alluring. Not only does this motif permeate visual art, but it emerges in the realm of literature; I recall a passage from Don Delillo’s White Noise:

Albert Speer wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins. No rusty hulks or gnarled steel slums. He knew that Hitler would be favor anything that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically — a drawing of fallen walls, half-columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation.

Where does this rather counter-intuitive trend spawn from? After all – why not glorify aesthetic perfection and produce architectural marvels that rise and stand, frozen in that moment of time encapsulating their birth? Why not conceive of a world (since art can move beyond reality) where time is construed as some tangible density, acting as a preservative rather than an agent of fermentation and chemical decay? As audiences to art, we seek to find beauty in what is presented before us. We want to be stirred. As humans, it inherent for us to yearn poignancy.

In the commercialistic modern world we inhabit, the visually sleek, the sublimely crafted is marketed towards us – or rather fired towards us with an alarming mathematically accuracy to pierce maximum desire into our hearts. Boxes of technological phenomena, tubes and glass bottles of resplendent hues, and exquisite scents to mask our natural human features and processes, are marketed widely and are appreciated by the masses. There is some portion of us that delights in the idealized – that perfect, unspoiled form, that sheen of the new.

And yet, we are self-loathing because in those moments when the rapidity of life slightly loses its vigor and pace, the fruitlessness of our pursuit becomes painfully apparent.

Taylor and Speer embrace the timely decay of the natural and artificial; theirs are a much more realistic portrayal of the universe we inhabit. But why is deterioration so beautiful? A crooked frame of a bird sprawled on the pavement elicits an initial feeling of discomfort and an instinct to shrink away, yet for me (and perhaps for you, too), I’m unable to will my gaze away from this spectacle.

Perhaps it represents us. It is catching Time in the act of doing its business. In its terrifying inexplicability, we find something beautiful and feel a quiet, involuntary tremble between our ribs reminding us that we are alive. The ephemeral nature of existence gives weight and meaning to life; the very mortality of things and their sheer vulnerability brings forth the worth of every object, for objects innately, without the presence of a human to perceive it, do not possess ‘worth’. Artists then, are rightfully so to be engrossed with the subject of decay. As Ray Carney puts it:

Art is not about making gorgeous images, but about revealing things that matter. Don’t confuse beauty and prettiness. Real beauty is not pretty. It is scary or disorienting, because it threatens everything we think we know.

And thus, I end on an excellent and utterly enthralling articulation by Mr. Carney (from The Path of the Artist) and leave you to better surmise, or simply mull over the reasoning behind what makes this rather dreadful steady deterioration so ineffably enchanting.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

It’s a rare occasion for all of the three roommates that live in our home to gather themselves into some semblance of synchrony and sit down for a proper dinner in the dining hall. Because phenomena like this are few and far between, we decide it is all too appropriate to indulge in dessert and coffee following the generous helpings of exquisite dormitory cuisine. But alas, the perspiring lemon tarts, shrugging in a fatigued melancholy under the unflattering fluorescent lights looked as appealing as a hot poker to the eye. And alas, the community coffee holder was depleted of its contents. I had lost all my dignity while stubbornly and furiously depressing the button in hopes that by sheer force — by my superior cognitive and muscular might— some secret compartment within the device might open and coffee would, in a sudden happy deluge, spill forth into the awaiting cup. This did not occur.

To compromise for this setback, we decided upon a Plan. But before I divulge the details of the Plan, a little background information may be appropriate.

While one of my roommates is typically home, diligently learning two foreign languages and intermittently bending completely out of shape in the name of economics, the other one is mysteriously absent from her one-third of the room. Only between the odd hours of 1 and 5 am do we ever chance upon to hear the lock click and subsequently see a dark, disheveled, abstraction emerge silently from hallway. We have already crawled under our covers and we are now rubbing our eyes in sheer exhaustion and half-conscious confusion from reading an excess of cryptic Middle English. Because my brain emphatically demands sleep and possibly also because I am myopic, the construct of this nebulous silhouette diffracts and then liquefies into complete and utter incoherence.

The next morning, we find evidence of her presence by the chaotic array of blankets and enigmatic imprint of a body within the fabric. But for all we knew, she had vanished to the distant outposts of infinity.

This is the life of an Art and Design student living on central campus.

Now, you see, the Plan involved ascertaining that this roommate of ours was in fact still enrolled at the UM Art and Design School and not frolicking about on North Campus, engaging in an array of boisterous tomfoolery of which we had not been invited to. She happily conceded to our request to view her projects and so, on a Friday night tinged with the slight bite of the November air, we made our way to The Land of the Engineers and Artists and entered the Art and Design headquarters.

We immediately found that she had obviously not been engaging in boisterous tomfoolery and were quite taken aback at the talent of our peers whose works, poised tactfully behind glass, invited, and on occasion even, stole our attention. The reasoning behind her extended absences was explained in the series of cases, the manifolds of studios and workshops holding student art. The sheer weight of the ideas, the manifestations of complex and meticulous concepts combined with earnest workmanship, strained the architecture of the building.

After some preliminary perusal, she brought us to one of her pieces that she had worked on with a group in her multi-medium class: a school of fish cut from copper and held together by the continuity of their collective three dimensionality and the aquatic, streamlined body shapes they shared. Concurrently, each creature glimmered in its individual undulations to and fro creating patterns of shadows and playing with the physics of light to create a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing piece. Although anchored to the wall, it nevertheless suggested the concept of motion.

To continue the tour, she brought us to an art classroom where her most recent group project – the culprit responsible for her currently sleep-deprived state – stood in all its glory and casting sharp, impressive streaks of shadow on the concrete floor. We decided it was well worth the cost of one night’s slumber. The paper architectural framework appeared to burst in outrage; a tangible interpretation of an exclamatory, willing its viewer to come forth and inspect its integrity. (Interestingly, the work appeared to have toppled in exhaustion of its persistent visual strength, and needed the temporary bolstering of a chair.)

We eventually scoured most of the building. Every corner that we turned in the Art and Design building, we encountered more creations by students at our school – artists that would continue the revolution of visual art, define aesthetic appeal and cultivate notions of beauty in our era. They would do this, in exchange for coming home to their roommates, and in exchange for turning in for the night. There is no such thing as suspension of consciousness in their endeavors.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

They told me that the truth of the universe was inscribed into our very bones. That the human skeleton was itself a hieroglyph.
— ‘Something to Remember Me By’ from Collected Stories, Saul Bellow

Generally, when my roommate and I find a breath of a space between the obligations of academia, we declare that we must experience a wider, bolder swath of life — a swath of life beyond the innocuous margins of the text, the pedantic erudition and the giant, intellectual abstractions digestible only in quiet rooms steeped with the aroma of books. In these moments of vast aspiration, we have been known to turn to art — to experiencing this genre of life on our own terms under no overarching formalities or fine, symmetrical theories.

On most days we are terribly conventional pair, opting for UMMA or the DIA to set up our inevitable encounter with a masterpiece of leviathan proportions. Under the shadow of this work of art we would stand, humbled and bemused by its catastrophic beauty, yet unable to intelligently articulate why we felt the way we did. It might’ve been the subtle variations of color, the bluntness of the visual narrative or something more intuitive, like our individual capacity to identify with it that made it so poignant and remarkable. Regardless, our aesthetic senses were piqued. Our goal achieved, we would meander back home to tend to our books.

Traditionally speaking, art grasped our attention in the context of a museum, under soft bright lighting, backdropped with wide expanses of benevolently-hued walls. An air of legitimacy bound the place together.  Yet, perhaps the most ruthless art, the art that had stricken me and had made me feel that terrifying unshakeable vulnerability in the depths of the marrow, occurred most peculiarly in my physics class.

The subject in question was the human body.

Time and time again, I am enthralled by Nature’s wit, manifesting in tasteful, charming creations in every taxonomic branch of life; I am rendered utterly incapable of verbalizing its sheer grandeur. Oftentimes, I don’t think we truly appreciate how miraculous our bodies really are and how come a century or two, the frontier of science will hardly come close to imitating every complexity of our human anatomy. On the most basic, structural level, we are composed of a series of levers and wedges and joints which collectively, so to speak, cheat the inexorable downward pull of gravity. I lift my arm and my mind can only hope to understand the mechanisms that have just transpired beneath this opaque coating, the sliding and pulling and pushing of tendons, exerting a perpendicular force with the radial length of our forearms. And something so plain like hands – these sculpted specimens of extension have created and destroyed and pantomimed across tables and surfaces for centuries. Musicians, with their combination of crisply abrupt tips and taps of fingers on taut strings, of fingers alighting on piano keys to produce a swell of seamlessly strung chords, can give thanks to every delicate and carefully placed sinew, tendon entwined on bone. Further, our ears are capable of capturing these ghostly waves of sounds traveling at amplitudes and frequencies, ethereal and impalpable, yet absolute. (If only I understood what sound looked like inside myself.) One cell proliferates so our growth accelerates, pieces all compiling together to create exquisitely contoured masses constituting as life. What a daunting endeavor Nature has taken, refining era after era, for all these laws come together and combine to culminate in a fully functioning human being. (And here we are, suspended in this strange position as observers and corporeal manifestations of these laws. It is an innately human conundrum exclusive to our species.)

Nature’s ingenuity is perhaps the best coalescence of science and art that I have encountered. It is an art that reaches a degree of personal relevance beyond what can be found in traditional museums. Needless to say, my roommate and I are thrilled about the Arts & Bodies focus by the Arts on Earth program happening this semester and will be traipsing around campus to attend the various events.

The art of nature – and the art of bodies makes me certain that science is the artist that I revere and am enthralled by the most.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Inspiration
noun
A violent, rippling surge that pulsates through the cavity of life in blossoming melodic synchrony; Oftentimes leaves in its wake, art, ideally breaking all the boundaries of  traditional good taste, constructing in earnest an unforeseen, heraldic marvel.

But from where does this entirely human phenomenon spawn? From love? From the sight of a particular hue emanating from a spear of grass? Or from that exquisite dorm-room oatmeal that you consumed this morning?

Literary giants, upon embarking on their magnum opus, have invoked the Muses. Homer did it. So did Edmund Spenser. Accrediting these Muses with the resulting bold, creative wit, they themselves humbly claim to be the vessel through which this rich stream of luminous genius rollicks, tumults, and pours out of. Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, he says. And the epic poetry that in a deluge, spills forth, is not his own doing, but some universal force conspiring to bring the words to his ready, poised hand. There have been many instances in which I found myself voluntarily locked in the fourth floor stacks of the Hatcher Graduate library, essay-prompt in hand, and desperately calling for my Muse to promptly present itself. Give me wondrous, beautiful syntaxy droppings to fill this empty screen, I say. Within half a second, I am met with a wave of shushes and someone from a neighboring study-carrel knocks at my door and politely reminds me, as he delicately readjusts his glasses on the bridge of his nose, the carrels are not sound-proof. The cursor on the screen continues to blink mockingly, and to my utter dismay, neither the muscles in my hand nor my intellect flex by their own accord to produce nine-line stanzas of literary art. At that moment, I need nothing more than, as Jonathan Nolan cleverly puts, “moments of clarity, insight — when the clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious.” In its stead, all I have are clumsy electrical impulses, rising, in a tumultuous, enraged manner, to mere rebellion against idleness. Yet they are thoroughly substanceless, lacking a textured palpability, a unified vision that encourages their movement towards birthing a true, affecting idea. Instead, old drawers are hastily opened and shut, moth-eaten curtains are flapped yet again, and vessels carrying stale and frayed stems of once matured ideas are tipped over in their furious lunges of motion. The neurons know that perhaps, nothing remarkable is to be found in the billions, trillions of folds of white and gray matter — a horrifying prospect that further incites their violent, untamable desire to keep firing wild arcs of shrapnel into the darkness.

I am alone, through and through, with my endeavor to create.

During these moments, I wonder on the nature this psychological curiosity of Inspiration. Where do those canonical, ground-shattering poets, painters, architects gain the incessant fervor to shape the volatile intangibilities of their minds? From what factory is brilliance manufactured in? And let’s not restrict inspiration only to the realm of art. Otto Loewi, a German pharmacologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936 claims that the idea of chemical signaling (his experiment included the placing of dissected frog hearts in beakers of saline solution) came to him in a dream and after controlled experimentation to quantifiably demonstrate chemical synaptical transmission, he is now referred to as the “Father of Neuroscience”. Is there simply a genetic formula that I had not been graced with that causes a proclivity to inspired states? At times, it seems to me that one either has the talent of finding Inspiration and channeling it into something quite (alarmingly) beautiful, or doesn’t. Other times, I look at pieces of art by O’Keefe, or read an essay by Emerson and wonder if they are simply just stricken with the disorientation of life – of nature, in all of its chaotic vicissitudes of chance – that they simply must articulate it because to keep these inflamed wisps of thought within the confines of their mind is utterly intolerable. But where to encounter it? What does it take for that cavern beneath your sternum to be filled with a lurid anxiety to produce and for a mind to be set ablaze?

While it engulfs us in rapture when it occurs, I find Inspiration, on a whole, quite unreliable. She’s never there when I needed her, and if I waited on her for every class assignment on the syllabus, my professors would have long ago denied me an acceptable grade. Habit, and sheer diligence with the absence of Inspiration, is more dependable. It’s pragmatic and sufficient in this world.

However, whenever the clamor of daily duties dwindle naturally or are forced into inaudibility, I find her lurking in the pattern of upholstery, an overheard conversation, or the leathery texture and the veins of a leaf. It is then when I find myself producing something beyond what habit could dream of giving shape to. I am certain that my best work comes from when I’m inspired. The apparition of that sublime state of being will perhaps forever be inexplicable, even as we learn the depths of human cognition and the intricacies of the molecular machineries that give rise to it. And further, no two human brains are identical; perhaps no set of rules can ever be drawn to entrap the whimsy of Inspiration.

So from what parts of life do you find inspiration? And I’m curious to know: Do you think inspiration is independent of habit?

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.