Category: Arts

Last night I attended an UMMA + Chill Group Chat, a guided virtual art tour and group talk put on by the UMMA during the winter season, paired with recipe for an alcoholic or non-alcoholic cocktail to add a fun element to the night. I was invited by a friend to join this themed event, Caustic & Bitters–we would be talking about humor as an artist’s tool and looking at examples from the UMMA collection. I popped onto the Zoom call of about 7 participants (some attending with housemates or friends) and settled in while music played and people filtered into the call.

The tour began quite abruptly with the cocktail-making. I was a little disappointed with this section of the event–a brand new recipe was created by the Bellflower Restaurant in Downtown Ypsilanti specifically for this group event, and I had prepared by purchasing the materials. However, the making of the drink was restricted to a quick 3-minute video at the beginning of the event, blowing through the process before I could even get to my kitchen. I must have missed a step from my memory, because what I ended up concocting tasted pretty awful. It ended up going down the drain, an unfortunate waste.

What I did enjoy about the event, after I was able to mourn my mixology failure, was the art, which is what I was mainly there for. 

We started by looking at humor in art as a purposeful tool, in art that is meant to mock or emphasize differences, something that is extremely useful in political or social commentary. We spent a bit of time talking about how capturing the humorous in photography takes a different form than in other mediums, because the artist can really only use what they see (for example, facial expressions) and exaggeration is more complicated to produce.

Something I did take away from the event is that sometimes, it’s okay to laugh at art that is not necessarily intended to be funny. It’s okay to look at unintendedly ridiculous aspects in pieces of otherwise serious art and find it humorous. For example, this 1400s Italian painting of Madonna and Child. Why do the baby Jesus and the saint in the back have the exact same face? How in the world is the baby being supported in Mary’s arms? I genuinely laughed out loud when we examined the details of the painting and pointed out these elements. 

In all honesty, I did expect a little more from the event. Overall, the event felt rushed and unengaging. It was the guide’s second theme tour of the day, which could have factored into the hurried nature of the ‘group chat’ part of the night, which didn’t seem to inspire much audience participation. While there were some comments and conversation starters from participants in the chat, the tour felt more like a lecture, which went against my expectations but still turned out to be an interesting event.

The freedom to find humor in anything is part of the beauty of the subjective experience of viewing art. This exercise helped me to fully grasp that concept. I can’t wait until I can wander the halls of the UMMA again, but until that time, I’m glad the UMMA is at least trying to expand access to their collection with virtual events like this one.

Caustic: sarcastic in a scathing and bitter way.

Bitters: liquor that is flavored with plant extracts, used as an additive in cocktails or as a medicinal substance.

I received an unexplained Google Calendar invite a week or so ago from a good friend. “UMMA + Chill – Group Chat: Caustic & Bitters. 7pm 2/27.” I wasn’t quite sure what I was being invited to, but my weekend evenings have been painfully bare due to COVID, and every UMMA event I’ve ever attended has been well worthwhile, so I texted my friend and let her know I was coming. 

I’ll be catching the last of the UMMA + Chill winter events tomorrow evening, a virtual guided museum tour and mini cocktail-making lesson. The tour will be guided by Isabelle Marie Anne Gillet, a UMMA Stenn Fellow in Public and Digital Humanities and Museum Pedagogy, with the theme of humor as an artist’s tool to “undermine the superficial meaning of what is depicted and subvert or even confuse expectations.” I haven’t been on a museum tour, in-person or virtual, in a good while, so I’m very excited to spend the evening with the UMMA collection and some friends from the comfort of my own living room.

Today along with my regular grocery shopping, I picked up ingredients for a cocktail designed by the Bellflower Restaurant, which we will be learning how to mix during the guided tour. The prep email also included the option to purchase pre-made kits directly from the restaurant, and also a non-alcoholic mocktail recipe. 

Tomorrow evening, I plan to put on a nice outfit and kick back on my couch to enjoy a virtual guided tour with my friends through Zoom–a sophisticated Saturday night in.

Existential dread: it’s something many of us try to avoid thinking about, and yet it’s not really avoidable at all. We’re bombarded with this concept in memes, Tweets, movies, and everyday conversations. And then there’s the awareness that we live on a planet that’s floating around in space, surrounded by even bigger planets and stars, surrounded by galaxies that are far too vast for us to conceptually comprehend. Whoa. 

In the first episode of her podcast, The Weight of God, host Fareah tackles concepts of existentialism and nihilism through philosophical theory, religious history, and her own soulful insight. Fareah is a student, writer, and an aspiring scholar at U-M. Her work always pushes me to give more generous thought to life’s big questions, and The Weight of God is no exception. This episode, “The Curious Case of the Soul (pt 1),” is a meditation on the meaning of life, and perhaps why we’ve become so disconnected from it. 

When you really think about it, everything we do in life can feel kind of absurd. This is the reasoning of philosopher Albert Camus, who also authored “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In this myth, Sisyphus receives a punishment by the Greek gods that sentences him to rolling a boulder up a hill (which rolls back down once it gets to the top) for the rest eternity. Sometimes it feels as though our lives are like Sisyphus: and endless cycle of repetitive tasks—and for what purpose?

Yet, perhaps there is a different way of contemplating our existence—one that feels liberating instead of suffocating. In the second half of the podcast episode, Fareah addresses the origins of civilization’s dissociation from its spiritual core. As she explains, the rise of Western science, philosophy, and industry has brought with it a “radical separation from God.” We often forget that humans used to rely on spirituality in order to make sense of the world and derive value from life. In contemporary Western society, our capitalist economy emphasizes a more materialistic understanding of the world, dictating that an individual’s value comes from the things we own and produce. However, these things are often out of our control, and that lack of control often breeds dread about our ability to survive. 

As Fareah explains, this may be a source of our existential fear. The world becomes a burden that must be carried by every individual. Fareah concludes that we’ve lost our spiritual history which used to be a source of meaning, and in its place, we are left with an capitalistic individualism that feels isolating and unstable. 

I don’t consider myself to be someone who’s religiously observant, but this podcast definitely made me think about the role of religion in history and in human thought. One of the reasons I found this podcast so engaging was because it didn’t feel like a lecture or a persuasive essay; rather, it felt like an invitation to think alongside Fareah. Furthermore, her expressive voice, emotive storytelling, and inclusion of music brings her “audio immersion journalism,” as she describes it, to life. 

Visit The Weight of God website to listen to the podcast and learn more: https://theweightofgod.wixsite.com/twog