Category: Uncategorized

This semester, RC Professor Ana Fernandez is teaching a course in East Quad about alternative exhibition spaces for art shows of all kinds. The assignments are planned and executed as collaborative projects, with each student carrying out their own role in the course of its completion: there are places to reserve, deadlines to schedule, theme and scope decide on, not to mention the art to find and install!

But what if the art came to the show?

This group of exhibitionists decided that they didn’t wanna put on the same kind of juried competition in which the art that’s being shown is decided on by a group of people all with different opinions and ideas of what a painting should be or how sculpture is done – they decided to have a show that’s UNjuried by its nature, driven by the energy of the movers and makers themselves, participatory, in flux, alive ! If an artist wants to hang a painting they can hang a painting! Hang stuff from the ceiling! Sculpture on the floor! No found object, designed object, sound, photograph, poem, performance or any other gem of creative thought or action turned away until the Duderstadt gallery’s full to the brim!

In addition to the open space with NO rules (except maybe no things that explode or cause other quieter forms of bodily harm), word on the street is that there’s also gonna be a place to make stuff over the course of the show itself – an invitation to come and help create a big sprawling field of anything at all on the paper-covered walls and blank space of glinty lights! Like the imagination itself!

And I think this is an important to be happening, how sometimes the gem of the art is the making itself, makin with a friend or with strangers, expressing thyself to a neighbor, to a tree, the snow, the sky ! Open up the world of dreams! This Friday at 6pm and beyond!

(themostopenopenshow@umich.edu for info n stuff)

Tumbling through my own thoughts – slowing to a crawl at certain times and speeding into a frenzy as slews of unending sentences spill forth through the tips of my fingers rhythmically tapping the key – it becomes very easy to forget where I was going with anything. There is never a strict agenda when I bring my thoughts to the page, or maybe not even in my head either. More often than not, a character as absurd as a man who drinks poison for a living is all I need to get me going. That would be some cool shit to write about for my next short story I say and my sprawling unconscious responds with, “fine, I’ll fill in the rest.”But being guided through the corridors of my mind by color coded fluorescent lights may be all in all a better strategy if I wish to extend my stories to anything longer than twenty pages. Wouldn’t? Shouldn’t? Naw…it couldn’t, I would never finish it cause I’d get bored halfway through. There is more excitement if I don’t know the ending either as I write the story.

Each scene needs to be important by itself. Come come no filler filler. But when I plan, I always find myself adding such elements. Such bombastic or often dull lulls of needless plot.
Sometimes you don’t want to buy that OJ with no pulp, sometimes you NEED that pulp. Ironically, I guess OJ with no pulp goes down smoother than the other variant. Revel! Revel! Cheap amusement has come!
Couch lounging relaxation to soothe the mind into a gentle haze of acceptance of whatever stream of information is being filtered into the tête. Cups of corn syrup and handfuls of salt, munching with ever-dry lips and watching with half-closed-lids, and an engine that is barely running, grumbles on to keep the top happy.
Outside, in the bay, the cargo ships sit in the polluted waters that spit out purple seashells for kids to collect and dogs to step on, awaiting the delivery of their presents from ashore, until then, their red noses sticking out of the water, their empty stomachs allow such buoyancy. Reveal to me your little red nose greedy vessel. Wait in the cold night till fate delivers you what you yearn. Then before the collared man wakes the next day, leave without a note, taking with you your earned riches, only to give it all away. Give and take, never keep anything, and see the new and old.

It is easier to move on when you do not linger. Deal with success and failure in the same way – quickly learn and move on. Otherwise, how can you improve? By sitting around on your successes or failures…all you do is spit out purple shit.

We need to stop acting like we are better than others. This is a rampant issue on campus and off it. We are not better than another person who chose another major or someone who decided to join an organization that we don’t like. We all made it to this university and we all deserve to be here. We should not judge others based on these shallow labels, it takes a lot more than that to deem what someone else worth is. A pre-med major is no smarter than an English major and I really don’t see how we can make these comparisons so easily.

Let’s get back to the fact that all of us went through the application process and all of us were accepted. This wasn’t a mistake, we’re here because we deserve to be here, not because we chose a major that is easy to be accepted into. Sure, there are different applications for the different schools, but none of them are easy to pass through. We made it here and we deserve to be proud, but we should not be proud because we are better than other students on campus.

In addition, your hard classes do not make other classes easier. We all take hard classes and we all struggle with our majors. Even if you do happen to struggle harder than other students, that won’t make you a better or worse student. We all can succeed or fail here and our quality as people is not the reason for that. We are all worthy and we deserve to be treated with worth.

When I was in New York City this past Summer, I made sure to make it to my favorite spot in the city – The Strand. The Strand is the most amazing book store you can possibly imagine and I spent over an hour reaping the bounty of their shelves. One book that particularly stood out to me had an all mustard-yellow cover. Whoever said you can’t judge a book by its cover was far from right in this case. The off-yellow of the cover wound up perfectly matching the sort of off-beat humor and quirk of this book. The book actually turned out to be a collection of short stories called No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July. I’ve always loved short stories and the description on the back of the book really made me feel that this was the book for me. “July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency,” it says. She does indeed. The power of these stories is the way in which they give voice to all the thoughts in one’s mind that are so often silenced for their out-of-placeness in common culture. Her stories reveal the depth of human complexity through seemingly insignificant experiences. I was able to see myself in so many of these characters and hear my own unspoken thoughts through all of their voices, no matter how extreme or unlikely the circumstance. I felt truly touched and inspired by this work. Miranda July has a presence in film, writing, and art and has just released her second book entitled The First Bad Man, a novel. I highly recommend No one belongs here more than you. It takes you on a journey of profound empathy that never fails to reveal something to the reader about his or herself.