Friday, December 26, 2008
To Marfa From Marfa
So Kristy and I are planning a trip to Marfa over Xmas break. Jane's lending us her SUV so we can pack all the stuff we want to take. The idea is to make a kind of quasi-spiritual pilgrimage and document the whole thing. I want to focus on the spiritual part of it for a few reasons: first, several of the photo grads at SAIC confided to me at the end of the semester their religous beliefs and how they relate to the making of art; second, Kristy's been having some concerns about the way people talk about art and the whole art-making thing; third, I've been reading Lewis Hine's book, The Gift, and am trying to figure out a non-spiritual or religous way to address my own desires to include wonder and joy in the artmaking process. Finally there are so many people I've talked to who describe their own experiences in Marfa in religous or spiritual terms that I'm a little sceptical about the whole thing and like the idea of skeptically commencing a pilgrimage. And I like that neither Kristy nor I have an agenda for how the trip will go, in other words, that it is an open-ended journey and we'll take what we get. Whatever that may be.
We'll bring video cameras, a large format camera with black and white and color film, digital cameras, polaroid cameras, and a DAT recorder. We want to create an immersive installation at the end, with video, sound, photographs, found objects, the camp fire we will make, and the SUV all in a gallery. We will also recreate the first art objects we remember making (for me, clay figures and a big castle made around a hole in the ground). There will probably be text as well. We will probably spend about 5 days all told making the trip and returning. I've got 20 hours of video tape and 20 hours of audio tape on the way and we will have wide angle, standard and long lenses for the large format cameras. If this works out, we would probably propose it at Lawndale or anywhere else we can drive a dusty car into a gallery and set up a campfire and show 3 or 4 videos and have room left over for big photos, plants, rocks, clay figures, and other stuff. I think it will be hard to make this something other than a cliche or maudlin but since we both think that, there's a chance we can avoid it. We'll see. Note to self: buy extra nicotine gum.
