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You are here: Home / Archives for art about the news

On Reading the News: Living with Images

March 27, 2011 by Iskra 1 Comment

Today I am holding a New York Times in my hands. My fingers have a faint imprint of ink on them; I can smell the pulp, slightly dampened by rain even through the blue plastic sleeve that encased it this morning. I read the text, but mostly I look at the pictures. I relish the signs of reproduction: the irregular halo around a dancer’s silhouette, the soft blur on a soldier’s boot, granulated dots across the Japanese grandmother who cradles a child, her expression unreadable behind a white dust mask.

Every few weeks I sort the collected papers and cut out images.  Some I put in folders which I label and promptly miss-file: “hands,” “people with hats,” “bank criminals and football coaches,” “people shouting.”   Where do you file “tribal man holding a translucent scarf against his body”? Or “boy sweeping the sky?” Some clippings I put on my bulletin board until they become so yellow I have to hide them.  One particular photograph teeters on the edge of archival viability now;  I never get tired of (or less disturbed by)  the man in a turban praying in a bombed out mosque. The walls are the palest aureolin and blue, and the blue of the sky now blends with the walls. He keeps praying; he was praying seven years ago and the bombs keep falling, shifted a few miles to the north.

In contrast to this, this living with fragments of newsprint tucked in drawers and pinned to the wall, there is TV. I walk on the treadmill at the gym and a newscaster pans excitedly to a video from Sendai. The video has been shot by a man in his car as his car is engulfed by the tsunami. Water spatters on the window. The announcer exclaims again and again, “These are stunning images!!” The man in the car is having an experience. We, as we exercise,  are having stunning images. The newscaster bounces on his toes, practically panting in anticipation of the next new video. The man in the car is a true “content provider” offering up his suffering, turned into a marvelous adventure. I can see the same thing on my phone if I like, while preparing to drift off to sleep. I can play the tsunami, and then set my alarm.

This is what the human condition, ie. “news” has become. It is everywhere all the time, in our eyes and ears instantly, real time or instant replay, on demand, however we prefer, no matter how close or far from us it is happening. The way I receive the news affects how I absorb it. Although I was riveted for thirty seconds watching CNN how long will I remember the man who’s car is going down under the tsunami? When will it begin to blur with that fantastic viral U-tube of the guy in the carwash?

A few days ago I opened the Times to a black and white image of a bowl of ink on a table. Beneath the bowl inkspatters and scribbles mingled, and in my mind I added thumbprints, although the thumbprint is far too precious to toss away on a table, as it was the vote of the Egyptian people. I lost the clipping, and rediscovered it online in color. Now I see that the ink is a brilliant fuschia, and the photograph, by the astonishing Ed Ou gathers a whole new poetry in color. But part of the impact of this picture is that I first saw it in black and white and held it with my own hands, and touched it. It acquired a talismanic quality in memory and as I tried to recover it, and interestingly, no amount of keyword searches unearthed it in my quest; I had to go through the archives of the New York Times online.

I went to a talk by a meditation teacher last week. Serene, unassuming, and smiling like someone who might be selling you yarn at the knitting store, she delivered a powerful talk on holding the suffering of the world. At the end of a lengthy discourse filled with Buddhist terms like sila, punya and mudita she said almost offhandedly, “I hold my laptop, and there they are, the tiny people on the screen, running from the ocean, lying on the battlefield, cowering in front of a tank. Don’t you just want to pick them all up in your arms and keep them safe?” Beautifully posing one of the most troubling questions of our day: how do we live with the news, keep some margin of psychic immunity and yet retain enough porosity in our boundaries to feel compassion?

Crosshairs_collage
© Iskra Johnson

I created this collage at the onset of the second Gulf War. I am afraid it can be repurposed indefinitely and will never go out of date. I showed it to some friends and one said, “Oh, the vase is our denial, our domestic delusion that everything is all right if it’s all right here.” And then someone said, “No, it is the table and the vase that are real. They are our sanity. They hold up the world.”

The blue vase, I am sorry to say, broke several years ago.

Filed Under: Prints Tagged With: art about politics, art about the news, Ed Ou photograph of Egyptians voting, news collage art, on reading the news, on Reading the newspaper, political collage

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Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?
I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.

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