From: shannon stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 04/12/02-07:27:40 AM Z
Judy wrote:
> But my comment about media was because the two of you
>seemed to take art about media as ipso facto pernicious and meretricious,
>proof of original sin.
Not really. I am just tired of the insistence that it's the only
topic worth exploring these days, and Jed Perl seems worried that
it's the only kind of art that gets the imprimatur of the tastemakers
and art establishment. My philosophy is, Let a Hundred Flowers
Bloom! (Please disregard the fact that this was one of Chairman
Mao's sayings.) Like Judy, I also photograph "ugly" things almost
daily here in Houston; as well as photographing the magnificent live
oaks and huge pines in our neighborhood, I put garbage bags, trash,
rusting machinery and old warehouses in my digital collages. I have
come to love looking at these things. (Houston is a very ugly city.
If you like ugly, you would love Houston.) These collages have the
beautiful trees in the background and the foreground is filled with
weird junk from people's yards and from the streets. Also there are
lots of freeway ramps, cars and downtwon buildings. I am making a
website now where these collages will soon be available for your
delectation.
Actually, at my school I think I have made a little headway
recently in convincing our teachers that it's also ok to take
pictures of things like flowers and children and trees. Heretofore,
this was considered hopelessly naive, a sign perhaps of a deficient
intellect. But yesterday one of our teachers actually encouraged a
young woman to continue to photograph her adorable little girl. So I
feel like I have made some progress, made things a little less
oppressive for people at our school.
> In fact I suggest perhaps you might let a few "media"
>enter your life, to give yourself the wherewithal should you ever wish to
>see around or beyond Perl.
Thanks for your suggestion. Actually it's impossible not to let a
few media into your life. We live in a media-saturated environment.
I live in Houston half the year, and on the way to school I drive by
media (billboards). I listen to NPR sometimes when I'm alone in the
car. But I don't constantly and daily monitor tv and radio news
because it's easy to get so overwhelmed by all the sorrows of the
world that you become inured to it and don't really hear it any more,
or else you become so preoccupied with suffering on the other side of
the world that it's difficult to hear the needs of people right close
to you. It's important to think globally and act locally, and part
of acting locally is to keep the big global picture in mind, but
really listen and attend to the local problems at hand. Yesterday
there was a lot of emotional turmoil at my school because an Asian
girl is being tormented by her classmates, and I had to listen to
her, advise her, and placate the other side too. It was hard work and
if I had been preoccupied by the middle east, I doubt I could have
pulled it off. (As the oldest person in our class, I have this sort
of Mom role, a conflict resolution role that I learned as the mother
of teenagers.)
I used to go to sunday school when I was a child and I remember a
saying from the Bible, Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I
think it's also true that Sufficient Unto the Place is the Evil
Thereof. That is, I can deal with the problems in my own household,
neighborhood and school, but I can't deal with every bad thing that
happened that day in every neighborhood in the whole world. And as
one of my friends pointed out, a lot of good things happened in those
neighborhoods too, but we don't hear about that on NPR very often, so
we get the impression that humans are violent, horrible creatures.
Maybe this is why art has taken such a negative turn in the last
twenty years? Media saturation may lead to cynicism and fear and
hopelessness. In fact I think I read somewhere that older people who
read a lot of newspapers and watch tv news regularly are more afraid
of crime than those who don't. And that while crime has actually
decreased over the last few years, the perception is that there is
more crime than there used to be.
I do read political analysis in The New REpublic (where I read the
Jed Perl article), The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.
I like to wait until news has cooled a little bit and people have had
time to think about it, to read about it. Also, the daily random
acts of violence--wrecks, murders, fires, child abuse, etc--mostly
gets edited out of these journals, leaving only genocides, wars, and
economic collapses for us to mull over. And I devour "cultural" news
like book reviews and art criticism, as well as regular books
(remember them?). To me, though, that doesn't count really count as
mass media. When I think of mass media, I think of daily newspapers,
tv, and radio. These things just seem to clutter up my mind and
distract me, rather than really help me think and work.
--shannon
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