Peter Yumi

This weekend I watched a couple of interviews with puppeteer, video artist, painter, Illustrator, and set designer Wayne White. For the past few years I have been rather obsessed with Wayne Whites work, mainly because he drew inspiration for a large installation he did at Rice of a giant George Jones puppet head, which he claimed was “the largest George Jones Puppet head ever created” That’s quite a an accomplishment, I don’t think anyone has ever built a giant puppet head of George Jones and I don’t think anyone will anytime soon.

Wayne White’s use of country music for his inspiration for this puppet head was of interest to me, as I had steeped myself in a healthy diet of country music and honky-tonks and really set to work to create work based upon this amazing musical genre. What I really like about White’s tribute to one of country music’s legends is that he made something that was not drenched in country music visual cues and clichés, instead he worked with the lyrics of George’s song “I’m ragged, but I’m right!” using the lyric “Well I got big electric fan to keep me cool while I sleep” Wayne thought about the time in Texas before air conditioning and all of the luxuries we have now, the past of Texas has a history to it and the lack of amenities is intertwined in Texas history, it’s also something that is intertwined into the hard living life of a country musician. So White decided to build a giant puppet head of George Jones and put a giant fan inside the head so when the mouth was opened up a COOL BREEZE came out and cooled the room.

Loads of contemporary artists are taking inspiration from contemporary rock music or electronic and making work that reflects the culture of those genres of music currently. What country music speaks to and is vital to being American and an American artist is about traveling a road less traveled. While country music is a populist music, there is a certain snobby attitude about the music from many, that somehow they are above the music or that the music lacks intelligence or that it’s for uneducated beer swilling rednecks. All of those assertions in some sense are based on fact, but it should be remembered in the early days of country music recording, with artists like Carter Family, this was the music of the masses, they sold over 300,000 albums by 1930, while Jazz and big band music did outsell country albums, it was mainly because of economics, the have and the have nots, many of those living in rural areas could not afford to buy albums during the great depression, radio and live performances was the typical way that many consumed the music. Most Americans were living in rural areas, and played many of the instruments that were featured on the recordings, so in a way the recordings and the music were a reflection of their way of life. What is missing from most of the criticism I hear from people about country music is a genuine understanding of the genre, lack of understanding of the harmonies, the chords, the instruments, the arrangements. While it’s not really my objective to make converts to country music in writing this, I would suggest that one spend some time exploring the rich history and life of country music.

That being said, I sincerely love and have a deep appreciation for country music, country music was my theme music when I lived in my VW van and trucked across the country, learning what I could about video art and the way the old universe tumbled and twirled. I made a lot of video and collage work based on country tunes that resonated with me while living on the road. Hank Williams; Lost Highway, became a video I made called Doghead 606, George Jones; She Thinks I Still Care, became, Hourex, Buck Owens; Cryin Time, became, I like my eggs with DDT. For me, country music is about transcendence, the lyrics speak of knowing ones self and shortcomings and even knowing that you are not moving past them or are stuck within them. In making these videos I wanted to make work that not directly about the songs, but more about how I saw America and the world as a result of these songs. I drove around the country reading a ton of contemporary America poetry, and listening to old country music, stopping off and sleeping in Wal-mart parking lots, talking to people at truck stops and rest stops and really doing my best to try and stave off depression while at the same time keep an open mind to possibilities. I started my journey at the beginning of the great recession in 2008 and finished it up in late 2009, finally settling down and getting an apartment. It was there once I had a job and place to cook, that I started taking a look back my journey and taking a look at how country music really impacted American culture.

Maybe it’s just living in Colorado, but to me living in little old Denver seeing rock music and electronic music seems almost out of place with the space, it feels contrived, almost pretend, that the music doesn’t really resonate with physical place. To give an example I cannot tell you how funny it is to go to a Gothic nightclub in Denver and see all the kids in the middle of summer dressed in leather trench coats and mascara dancing around to industrial music from the late 80’s and early 90’s. It seems so out of place, Denver is so happy and so a place of possibility and a place were one almost has to be in a place of authenticity of the environment. True it’s always sunny, but the weather also changes from one moment to the next, you have to be on your toes with your wardrobe here, layers people, layers. But part of the culture of living in the west is the lack of “Culture” with a capital C, we have to make our own culture here, which is also a western attitude, we have to show those big city slickers that we have just as much of a life and just as much culture as they do in Chicago and New York City. It’s this DIY attitude that is really western, really country, really cowboy, really the authenticity of the west. Not dressing up like people in NYC and London in the 1980’s in horrible night clubs. Go out and make something, make it your own, look at what others are doing outside of our bubble and look at how it works within our bubble and make it better and make it our own. That is what country music is about, so yes, kids with laptops are country musicians, when they are mixing beats and creating new music, they are taking something and re-working the texture of the electronic landscape to make it new and fresh. Video and digital media artists are doing the same thing working with what is out there in the world, re-working it and making it new and fresh, throwing away the stodgy all academic notions of culture and creating a new culture.

Living in the American west I should be aware of my history of the music and culture that I came from and use those attitudes to help enhance my work. It’s so amazing driving across the plains of Colorado and seeing all the barbed wire fences and cattle, the truck stops, the tiny towns where a job putting together irrigation equipment at 9 bucks an hour is a DAMN GOOD JOB. This kind of thing is what has become important to me in my work, I read it in the poems I read, in the people I talk to, and in the music I hear, in the artwork I see. I really do want to be a cowboy in so many ways.

I read something today that went like this: “Humans are participants among other participants, not godlike entities upon which everything else depends and which bring everything else into existence.” I think this about sums up the general thesis of the film Tree of Life, upon which I am still obsessing. The film starts with a woman learning of the death of her son, what then follows is her praying to God that she dies so that she can be with her dead son. The film then takes you on a magnificent visionary journey through the creating of the universe starting at the big bang and then back again to the lives of the family in West Texas. What we are immersed in before we learn about the lives of the humans in Texas, is just how small we really are. I could not help but walk away from the film feeling that all of my worries and fears and hopes and dreams are really nothing that I am just part of a giant universe, and it’s really my place as a human to just live and live humbly and simply.

I recall a summer in 1987, when I was in South Dakota and I saw a pool of turtles, the pool had so many turtles in it that they were all crawling over each other trying their best to get scarps of veggies that tourist bought to feed them. The colors, green and yellow shells and bits of carrots floating in between the bodies of the turtles, the water dark with algae growing on the sides and the bottom, the light glistening off the water and the turtle backs.

Yugen: subtly profound grace, not obvious;

These types of experiences like Tree of Life are about subtly profound grace, experiences that cannot be describes with words. To experience a profound mysterious sense of the universe, we have felt it, had the experience where we understand, but yet we lack the ability to fully articulate that experience. The beauty of Yugen at this high level in Tree of Life is how it works from the obvious to the subtle, giving us the banal, while at the same time overloading us with what we cannot begin to comprehend. The size and age of the universe is something our minds cannot comprehend, yet we can comprehend the slamming of a door, the anger at a family member, or can we? Yugen penetrates through the limitations of self, sparks off bits of transcendence, but not quite enough to fully comprehend the mystery the grace the subtle. What we find when we experience this grace we begin to grasp Yugen is what Malick does in Tree of Life so effortlessly, he gives us the profound tranquil loneliness, the realization that death can appear at any moment and grace. Yugen is at the essence of Malick’s throughout the film, pushing the characters to moments of death and pain, and constantly reinforcing the loneliness that is in Malick’s work the heart of his ontology.

Yugen is a Chinese word broken up Yu and Gen both relate to dyeing something black, but the word evolved to mean something profound, so deeply profound that we cannot comprehend. The word was transmitted to the Japanese and was a key element in Japanese No plays. Western culture lacks a true translation of this word, which is why I believe that Malick’s Tree of Life has been referred to as “sucking balls”. Western culture does not have a vocabulary to really understand what the film does ( not attempt, DOES). Rarely do you see a film that impacts an audience in such a deep in moving way as Tree of Life does, throughout the film you can hear people crying and reacting to the film.

“Humans are participants among other participants, not godlike entities upon which everything else depends and which bring everything else into existence.”

To seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to truth. So, if I now wanted, according to idealistic principles, to base this de facto self evident truth, this irresistible belief, on some absolute self-evident truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which my thoughts have for me; if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied forth the framework of the world or illumined it through and through, I should once more prove unfaithful to my experience of the world, and should be looking for what it is. The self evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodictic self evidence. The world is not what I think but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.

Phenomenology of perception
By Maurice Merleau-Ponty

This weekend I saw the Terrance Mallick film Tree of Life. I can honestly say in seeing this film it is truly one of these rare films that works in such a way that is pure poetry and near perfection as one can hope from the art of film.

I only want to write about a couple of points in the film that really resonated for me after watching the film. Before I do that I wanted to share with you just how deeply the film opened my mind up from its usual clutter of my constantly chattering mind.

The film begins with a woman receiving a telegraph and learning that her son has died. There is no indicator of how the son dies; only a barrage of poetic signifiers that clue you into that someone has died. The images and the sparse dialog do not give much to the audience at all, rather it works like a well crafted poem in which the reader must fill in the blanks, and it leaves room for the self, room for the complexities of each and every persons experience sitting in the theatre. The narrative works in a way that memory and consciousness work, folding parts and pieces of remembered experience together to try and make piece of a much larger and bigger whole then one can ever possible imagine. This worked perfectly, all too often in films we see the retelling of a death in family as this attempt of someone to make sense of the lose, but it is always in this way that creates a withdraw from the world as it is, but reflection (or those moments when our life flashes in front of our eyes) never works quite like it does in novels and film. It never withdraws or recalls in this simplistic manner that we see and read in film and books. Instead it flares up and sparks off bits of transcendence like sparks from a campfire. We cannot know, yet we still have a sense of the complexities of the universe and all of creation but as soon as we begin to use language to describe the ‘real’ it our arguments and sense of that shifts and falls apart. This is where Mallick’s genius is, he understands this idea far better then I could even hope to explain, instead of trying to tell you what the nature of life and death is, he sits up a frame work for the audience, the film creates those flames and sparks of life and death and transcendence.

The film read like a poem, and made me recall the work of Lyn Hejinian in her book My Life this collection of poems works in the same manner, never giving the reader the narrative but creating a frame work to create the sparks. It is a rare artist or writer that has the confidence or the insight in allowing their audience the room to allow their minds to work and fill in the empty space.

I sat on the windowsill singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice in order to turn his bristling breath into steam. He broke the radio silence. Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy. What one passes in the Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is nearly incommunicable to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude.

One of the most remarkable things about the film, was what happened after seeing it. This is a rare thing in art, literature or music, but it changed how I saw the world, I know this feeling might drift away one day. The past few days the impact of the movie still resonates with me, the smallest of details of life and its richness seem so remarkable to me. I went to the grocery store and saw one of my favorite vegetables the romanesco and was almost moved to tears, the exquisite beauty of the vegetable sparked a moment in me of profound awe for the very fact that we has humans exist.

Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay, floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language. To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning, so full of surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take a vacation. Still, you had to wonder where they had gone, since you could speak of reappearance.

I plan on seeing this film a few more times and really trying to experience it more fully, I was so blown away watching it the first time, I was at a lose for words. I am still at a lose for words to truly try and comprehend this masterpiece of film.

A burn in sparrow
Lift an aphides’ strawberry
Corn substitutes volume, radioactive meander
Elbow burns, knee burns, bruises
Discipline, – – -
As if uneven
Apply the tools, lust belt
Discipline
without

“For whoever opens his mouth for an extra-dramatic utterance, he invariably manages to diminish his stature as a dialectical artist by reducing his complex perceptions to uniformation dogma.”

I am guilty as charged; guilty of leading a half truth life of living as a artist-philosopher, spending my days and my time inventing false ideals, the artist-poet as a self destructive bohemian. I have lived myth, never intentionally, but somehow it always persists in my practice as an artist.

It’s no wonder the Platonic notion of the poet-artist as a liar is so pre-dominate in our culture today. This idea that those who are not engaged in useful occupations that will provide some type of salvation for the community at large, still weigh heavy in our cultures thoughts. Artists are often asked “do you make money from your art?” What the person really means to say is “ If you are not making money, you are a mere hobbyist”. So the artist-poet will often engage in a “job” that will give them the appearance of being useful, they will take to teaching, they will take to creating work that stirs the community at large to a higher realm. Is that just as much as a lie?

One might think that the lofty ambitions of creating work that works as a medium of prophecy or as a means of a wider and much deeper way of seeing and thinking, would be a goal for the artist-poet, they would therefore be serving a valuable economic function with their work.

Perhaps now we have created a world in which art and poetry cannot exist unless it makes its bed within the realm of the betterment of human civilization. This type of work is at best a still born child, and at its worst a malformed child. The very fact that this type of work is demanded by society at large is not at issue, what is at issue is the appalling fear and lack of critical thought that occurs when the artist-poets buys into this lie and succumbs to making work that meets this economic model.

Artwork today that dominates the galleries and museum is a work that is dominated by overemphasizing the philosophical side of art. That is not to say that the artist-poet should avoid having philosophy, poetics, theory inform their work. What we see now is a meat sandwich made primarily from the lexicon of historians of a genre. It would be apt to think of the poet-artist as the giraffe and the art historian or English literature professor as the zoologists. They study what we as artists-poets do, but now artwork and poetry has become a bastard child of those myths or ‘truths”.

How can the artist-poet just make? To free themselves dictates of economics of value of what is produced be a factor in the production of their work.

I know that I exist in both worlds, I want to communicate, and often times with my own work I hold back, for fear of misunderstanding, fear of someone misreading one of my videos or collage. It’s pure foolishness on my part. I am the rebel artist, who over dramatizes the irreconcilable conflict between subjective revolt and the mitigating restraints of objective reality, guilty as charged.

Last night I was online discussing a Perloff’s collection of essays Post-Modern Genres. I haven’t read this book since the last time I read it, and I think I need to order it again and give it a once over once more. The book has some great essays about Cage and his Mesostic of Joyce, and an extremely interesting essay about Laurie Anderson’s work.

My current collaborative project with Veronica Violet Rainbow Reeves, has a lot to do with a passage from this book that I found in my notes which I recorded as such :

“If the palimtext is a description of the modern era, it is also a memorial to its passing”

I can’t say much more then that, but I can say that it has everything to do with the moment of technology’s birth and at the same moment that birth signaling the death of the same technology. Kind of like the battle between HD video formats, what was it BLU-Ray vs WHATEVER, I can’t even remember now. But the idea is that new technologies often are markers of their death. The 8 track was gone in a blip and the technology that we are dealing with is new fresh and everyone is buzzed about it, but I can see it going the way of the beta-max in just a couple of years.

Will art literature and music disappear because of the digital age ? I wonder, what if all is lost, all of our music, books and art are only available online, and the electrical grid world wide ceases, civilization as we know it today is simply gone, instead we are back to bear skins and bones and the hard drives containing all of our dreams are better used to make spear heads and ritualistic jewelry. What would happen if what is invisible, that exists only in the information dimension was somehow cut off from our minds that have melded so seamlessly with this technology. Our nervous system would no longer be extended globally, but back to our bodies that we inhabit, the fanciful reality that we have created would become a memory of a memory, perhaps becoming a myth a cerebral heaven. We would tell our children of this magical place that we used to inhabit, but they could not conceive its possibilities, and they would tell their children, and their children would tell their children and so on and so forth. It’s how myths are born, down the grape vine.

caught the perfect pickle, bound as they are origami-sluts
folded up akin to trombones for flame retardants-
dissolving delicate drains
half a knee and razor wire and compliments to toiletry
side born-disco-hide-seek-pranks-thrill rides more
folding belts-grapes or chiyogami-spanking-triplesec

There is something in the air today. I typically am not annoyed by people that often, but today my patience has been tested. I wondered why? Sometimes I feel like the character Chance from the Jerzy Kosinski novel, Being There. I spend so much time alone that often times I am completely unable to relate to others. Today there must be a massive solar flare or something that is upsetting all of the humans living on this planet that I have encountered today. Tempers seem to be flaring more quickly then usual, I have seen three people blow up today over seemingly absurd events.

This is reminding me of a movie I watched the other night called Visioneers, an absurd movie about people literally blowing up from stress. I can relate to feeling like I might blow up, I can also relate to doing everything in my power to avoid blowing up. One of the things that I have done is to completely disarm myself from situations that have made me ill at ease. I have avoided persons that I feel are not conducive to me making my artwork; I have avoided being in loud noisy places that make me feel anxious and a general dislike of my fellow humans.

Who would not want to be a hermit, live in solitude and do as they will without the conflicts of personality abound? I was recently asked if I had the opportunity to be on a desert island who would I want to be with, I could only say myself and a collection of good books and a means to make art. But what is art if it is not shared with the world? What is a world that is not shared?

I cannot help but think that we as artists have become creatures that make work that is meant for consumption. We have begun to make solely for the purpose to achieve the supposed higher goal of “showing” our work in galleries or museum. The notion of art for the purpose of communication, or art for arts sake, seems tired and dull to most. That somehow for an artists work to be valid that it must be part of a conversation. I am not entirely against that notion, but I am not entirely for it either.

I have not be much interested in sharing my work with the world until very recently, and now I feel as if I actually have something to say, that I am communicating something that is not just about art history, or about theory, that I am really communicating what it means for me to experience my life as a human. That being said there is a poetics of absence, a poetics of fear, a poetics of irritation, poetics of being, poetics of beauty, poetics of water moving from high places to low places, poetics of brevity, poetics of thought, poetics of hermits, poetics of solace, poetics of war, poetics of lying, how can the complexities of being human be expressed visually, how can we make a poetry to communicate that experience to others? I simply stopped trying and started making, making art from my experience; I am attempting to be as honest about being me as I can possibly be. That seems to be the best approach for me, to remove my masks and really just share with the world how I am. It’s more difficult then one can imagine, as I would much rather not deal with others and the world, but I find that the more that I engage in the world and with the world the more my work begins to open up and the more willing I am able to share.

Wire, wire, wire.
I doze
Some trees grow outwards and inwards
You and I should have visited Acoma, New Mexico that one year
We were diverted from seeing the sand hill cranes
Wire, wire, wire
Frozen arch head space.
It was in those days we counted dead birds in the park
frozen lamp posts in the winter
hazy footsteps excuses to drink wine.
Wire, wire, wire
Looking for hot sauce in the shower
Complaining of aphasia when reading Derrida

I can undo the undone.