Author Archives: jennybach

Uncompressed/uncompressable time

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February of 2021 saw an epic winter storm in the Pacific Northwest. There was a lot of snow, but more than that, there was a lot of ice. I was one of the many who lost power for several days, in an apartment where everything runs on electricity. I was fortunate to have a tiny fireplace and to be able to borrow a camp stove to make coffee and possibly food on my tiny balcony, but I was unprepared for the situation and had to forage wet wood from fallen trees to fuel my fire (thank goodness I had a lot of candles I could use to get that wood burning). I did appreciate the beauty of the ice even while cursing my lack of heat, hot water, and refrigeration. I know that I was better off than many.

Complicating matters, though, was the fact that my truck had broken down a couple of weeks earlier and I had no money to fix it at the time. I had to take the bus to work, which in itself was not really a problem, just an inconvenience. When I was growing up we never had a car and we took the bus or walked everywhere. I’m comfortable taking public transit, I believe in it as a system; I only wish we invested more money in making it better. Still, it meant I couldn’t just go out and get more wood or non-perishable food, because I was the one with a 4-wheel drive vehicle and my friends couldn’t necessarily drive in the ice. 

I grumbled about taking the bus when I first started needing to. I spend (too) much of my life rushing from one obligation to another, and being forced to use a system that cannot be hurried meant I had to squeeze more time into the spaces between obligations in order to make it all fit in my schedule. Well, that’s impossible, of course; no one can actually do that.

Instead, I had to allow for things to take longer. It took me an hour to go the three miles to my job rather than the 15 minutes it would take to drive myself. That meant I had to be ready earlier in the morning, it meant I had to leave the house at a specific time without fail, and it meant I couldn’t be rushed once I was underway. My public transit route involves a 15-20 minute walk through a park to the “downtown” Milwaukie hub, and another 8-10 minute walk on the other end. I walked through glittering ice and snow that bejeweled the trees; I walked through moody rain that raised the level of the lake and fed the moss on the stones; I walked through the bright, cold sunshine and riotous eruptions of flowers as the spring wore on. I discovered the exquisite nature of uncompressable time.

Eventually I received a stimulus payment and was able to fix my truck (it was the alternator). I swore I would continue taking the bus, at least once a week, to maintain this precious liminal space of un-compression, but I didn’t. It’s a challenge to move slowly when everyone else is rushing; it’s difficult to maintain that feeling of freedom without guilt or embarrassment creeping in, as though taking one’s time is an offense that requires excuse, or at least apology. Certainly it’s not a thing you do without cause.

Then in late January of 2022 I had the opportunity to drive with a dear friend and colleague to Tucson, Arizona, for work. Though I love road trips (putting aside for a moment my concern about the environmental impact of such), I admit I felt some dread over the sheer length of time the trip would take. Driving added three days at each end of our purchasing odyssey (an exhausting experience at the best of times), compared to only a few hours on an airplane each way, and I didn’t really want to be gone for two whole weeks. On the plus side, the drive included spending time with my friend whom I’d barely seen in two years, and the task at hand required it.

We drove for three days through three different deserts, and saw the colors of the rocks change from brown, to gray, to pink and orange. We stopped for gas on “the loneliest road in America,” and stayed at the Stagecoach Hotel and Casino overnight where Denny’s was the only food option. We imagined ancient oceans and prehistoric creatures above us as we drove down into deep valleys that had once been inland seas. Most of all, we couldn’t be hurried. On the way back we took a different route, and saw different parts of the desert. We stayed in one slightly fancy hotel for one night, and we collected a small, errant tumbleweed that we found in the parking lot; it sits on my balcony now. I was able to share uncompressable time with my dear friend.

And it has changed my priorities. I still drive to work, but I’m trying in earnest to carve out more space to be uncompressed in my life. It’s an uneven journey, but I am committed to it; I just need to figure out how to make it happen without it being thrust upon me. 

The importance of low culture

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How do we make art in a violent time? (Is there any time that isn’t?) How do we make art that says something meaningful about the human experience while eschewing didacticism and heavy-handedness? What is the role of spirituality in art? What is the role of feminism?

Modernism had an enormous push away from meaning in the exploration of an ideology of “pure” form, and while I agree it was necessary to divorce art from the stranglehold of classicism, the resulting new stranglehold of “pure art” has left just as many artists by the wayside of the contemporary art world. The elevation of the heroic gesture has become just another expression of toxic masculinity in our misogynist culture and yet another way of excluding women and people of color from having a seat at the table, as it were. By removing meaning from art, we ignore context and culture. By pushing away from figuration and ritual context, we have pushed away from art by people and cultures outside of the white European male paradigm. It is considered a sign of ignorance or even a lack of culture to exclaim that you don’t understand a work of art (though meaning can be read into anything), especially abstract works with no clear narrative; it requires someone who is educated in the jingoistic, coded language of the “Art World” to explain to the ignorant masses what an artwork symbolizes and why it’s legitimate, and often the explanation itself is incomprehensible to the average person. Pierre Bourdieu says, “Any legitimate work tends in fact to impose the norms of its own perception and tacitly defines as the only legitimate mode of perception the one which brings into play a certain disposition and a certain competence. Recognizing the fact does not mean that we are constituting a particular mode of perception as an essence, thereby falling into the illusion which is the basis of recognition of artistic legitimacy. It does mean that we take note of the fact that all agents, whether they like it or not, whether or not they have the means of conforming to them, find themselves objectively measured by those norms.” Modernism, despite shrugging off the shackles of classicism and the necessity of ritual meaning in art, has also created new shackles of a rarified and exclusionary aesthetic theory.

Our reductive approach toward culture borne of the Age of Enlightenment leaves little room for those whose art explores mystical or metaphysical topics; as we rejected religion as the meaning in art, we have effectively thrown the baby out with the bath water and rejected spiritual exploration in art as well, decrying it as irrational or superstitious. Walter Benjamin said “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value…But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice — politics.” He’s making this argument in favor of the equalizing force of reproductive methods in art rather than an elite mystical aura applied to objects made by hand. Certainly art as a whole has benefitted from wider access to reproductive methods by the general populace, but humans tend to struggle with moderation and so this has also lurched us toward a glorification of empty, mass reproduction and a scorn of craft methodologies. This becomes a racist issue too since handmade ritual objects are traditional forms of art in many non-Western cultures, and someone employing a non-Western visual language may find it difficult, if not impossible, to gain any traction in the contemporary art world. In this pendulum swing, the handcrafted item becomes especially political if it has a ritual meaning in addition to a (subjective and culturally specific) aesthetic value. The history of western art is a history of colonialism, and contemporary art is still employing these tactics by invalidating works that fall outside its nebulous, yet somehow narrow, parameters. In Black and Blur, Fred Moten says, “There’s another kind of prayer, another modality of devotion, another devotional mood, given in the black indigeneity of ceremonial indigo. We are (in) the general prayer just like we are (in) the margins, the wilderness, the social. We are (in) the insistent previousness of the we.” He is asserting the relevance, the sacredness, of tradition and craft outside of the erasure of colonization. Art is bigger than the world we are shown and when we try to reduce it, it becomes empty; a hollow capitalist enterprise.

When we look at the contemporary art world through a feminist lens, we see that it also has a narrowness hemmed in by misogyny. As a female artist I have felt this particular sting keenly over the years. Many women work in ways that reflect our cultural confinement within domestic space, both literally and metaphorically. The humble and personal, frequently the subject of art made by women, is often seen as merely decorative or overly sentimental; on the other hand, works that are overly critical of the structures that constrain us may be dismissed as “angry” feminist art, because anger is an emotional expression coded for men. I have heard many men in my life refer to angry women as “feminazis” and therefore anything said or done by them is invalidated. Black women have an exponentially harder time being recognized, especially when they are legitimately angry. Betye Saar is an artist who originally gained some recognition for her 1972 assemblage piece, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.” It’s a small piece, roughly 8 x 11, but it created a significant impact in its revolutionary political moment. Unfortunately the United States didn’t keep its attention on political change for very long and Saar’s work, especially as she addressed questions of meaning, mysticism, and Black identity, fell out of the peripatetic sightline of culture; her style and subject matter don’t fall within the parameters of “high art.” Now in her 90s, she is receiving recognition again for her body of work as a whole and for her contribution to intersectional feminist dialogue. It’s wonderful that she’s receiving this recognition, but it has been an absurdly long time in coming, and it’s a poor bandaid on the cultural wound of misogynoir.

How art is determined to be “high” or “low” is generally the purview of theorists, mostly men, mostly white. Low art is accessible, therefore less valuable in a capitalist society that seeks to maintain the status quo, because low art is dangerous in the way it can reach people who don’t already know the stratified language of art. Low art speaks the language of the common person, which doesn’t mean it must be simplistic, just that it has the capacity to pose questions in an appealing, comprehensible manner. If art is to be a tool of revolution, then the lumpen proletariat has to be able to grasp it in some way. The world has more than enough elites, I think it’s time to aspire to breadth rather than height.

References

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Accessed August 10, 2020. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Aristocracy of Culture.” Media, Culture & Society 2, no. 3 (July 1, 1980): 225–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344378000200303.

Lippard, Lucy R. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. Dutton, 1976.

Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Duke University Press, 2017.

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Comfort is wherever you are

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A few years back when I worked in tech support, a coworker came to my desk to discuss a project. When she came over and looked at my desk, she paused. She really looked at it, and commented on how I had adorned it (plants, a jar of colored pencils, maps, an illustration of birds’ eggs, a mercury glass skull on a cake plate, etc.), remarked how nice it was. I was flattered, not least because of her sincerity: she meant it, nice. It evoked some pleasant feeling in her to sit at my desk and look at the environment I had created, and I realized in that moment what it means to create comfort. I realized that comfort is something we create for ourselves.

I moved a lot when I was a kid. I mean, a lot. When I was 29, I tallied all the places I’d lived up to that point, and, counting spots we crashed when we were homeless for a few months, it was 29. I’d lived in as many different places as I’d spent years on this earth. My rate has slowed as I’ve gotten older, so that now, at 49, I’ve only lived in 36 places. I think it’s probably a good thing that my rate of movement has decreased, overall, and it’s mainly been for the sake of my kids because I thought it might be better for them to experience more stability than I’d had. While my mom couldn’t teach me about stability, she did teach me that home, and therefore comfort, was a condition you create around yourself, independent of location. She had funny stories about moving to the commune on Orcas Island (where she would ultimately meet my father) and how people helped her carry her many, many boxes of things and pieces of furniture over uneven ground through the woods to the place where she would build a house. And though people complained mightily about carrying all that stuff (especially when they discovered one box was full of rocks), after all was said and done, her house was the place everyone gathered. She had created home, she brought it with her.

When I was a child, I knew we were home when the Napoleon Cigar tin sign and the wooden hanging monkey went up in the kitchen. They were the visual cues that told me I could find comfort in that place, because my mom was intentionally creating it. Those humble and peculiar objects hung in every kitchen of my childhood, and since my mom died, they’ve hung in every kitchen of mine, as well; I expect that they represent home in some way for my own children now. I do understand the human attachment to place; there are places I’m attached to despite being only tenuously connected, but I most often see how entrenched people become in one place, how stuck. Home becomes a default location, one created by inertia rather than intention, and comfort will never be found there because no one has put it there.

This urge I have to create intentional space carries over into my artwork by way of installations, into my home in the form of de facto altars and vignettes of objects arranged “just so,” and especially into my cubicle at work where it felt like a survival mechanism to manifest my little bubble of comfort. Since I spent most of my waking hours in that cubicle, it was arguably the most important place to create home, if at all possible. If I were truly skillful, I wouldn’t need any material cues to remind me that, like the turtle, I carry home with me. But I do enjoy my adornments, and when the world feels ugly I appreciate the respite I’ve made with my pretty little tableaux. I always know, however, that home and comfort can only really be generated from within, and any pretty bauble can easily turn into a stone around your neck if things get tricky (which they inevitably do). “Home is where the heart is” is certainly a cliche turn of phrase, but it doesn’t just mean that home is where the people and things you love are. Rather, it means that home lives within you, you are its source, and that place of comfort issues forth from you to wrap you in its/your own embrace.

“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur.
L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”

(Here is my secret. It is very simple: one cannot see clearly but with the heart.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.)

Antoine de Saint Exupery