For my "earthing"

"Earthing" Exercise

My "earthing" exercise was designed to minimize elements of my existing practice. Given verbs were separated into two groups. One was an 'action' category and one was a 'thing' category. These were placed into numbered lists. Three darts were shot from a blow gun into a piece of wood. After the first shot, distance was increased to increase indeterminacy. XY coordinates of each shot were measured with an engineer's scale using the lower right hand corner of the wood as 0,0. Scales for each axis were chosen specifically so that the range of units existent on the piece of wood was roughly analogous to the number of entries in each list ('action' and 'thing' respectively). Each set of coordinates was corroborated with word from the lists generating these pairings. 

20,7 

20- individuate

7- break

31, 7

31- fall

7- break

33, 13 (no 13, value for 11 used instead)

33- vary, kciking, , self-centering*

13- cadence"

*note that during copy and paste operation these ended up as one entry. In keeping with the theme of indeterminacy all three were kept as one coordinate point.

As I looked at these combinations I came up with several ideas but these were all related to current notions of my practice. The closest I came to any sort of idea was in the fall and break category; I thought about break dancing. The others were baffling or led me back to things I already did. For instance, the third combination would easily get me back to playing the drums. I decided that since I could not, as the assignment asked, forget who I was or what I did, I would follow Iain's advice and ask a stranger. I found a scrap of paper in the recycling and ripped it into a few pieces. I ended up with four; again I was trying to remove my bias here, so I tried not to have intentions in the number of slips I ended up with. On these four slips of paper I wrote pairings of words. 'Break' and 'fall' went on one. Note I reversed the order that they came up. This was because the combination, 'fall break' seemed to me too loaded for those that I would be asking. Although this was decidedly a conscious and contrived decision, it was done with the intent of getting further from known territory. 'Individuate,' and 'break' went on the next slip. Finally for my last pairing, that featured multiple words for its X value, I scribed on the remaining two slips the words, 'kicking, cadence' and 'self-centering, cadence.' I did not give much thought to the words.

I walked around and asked for help from people on campus. For each I generally explained my goal then had the person pick a slip from my hand without being able to see what was written. Participants then read the words and I asked them what kind of art they thought should be made about the words on the slip. I intentionally picked people in locations where I would not expect to find art students. I did this specifically to distance myself from notions of art present in my life. I asked roughly nine people. Most suggestions tended towards visual art; people described imagery representing associations with these words. For the pair, "self-centering, cadence," one person suggested a mobile with a number of fragments arranged like 'exploded views' of the human body she had seen at the 'body worlds' exhibit. For, 'Kicking, Cadence' another mentioned the idea of a veteran with one leg. Another person said something that I interpreted as pieces falling away from some material to reveal a form within. Finally in the last group of people I queried a girl chose a slip bearing the words, 'break, fall.' She said that she wanted to say 'tree' but that was something she always defaulted to. I thanked her and explained that her response was good because it was hers and it helped me get past my own defaults. She similarly suggested the notion of waves  breaking for the word 'break.' I was delighted, as this was an association to which I had been totally blinded (before asking other people I was thinking about break dancing or breaking physical objects). As these suggestions were visual in nature, and because I couldn't  sculpt them in an hour, I decided that I would sketch them out. This also keeps with the theme of forgetting one's practice as drawing is not a medium I would have otherwise used for this assignment.  

My favorite part of the assignment however occurred with the first person I asked. She was a girl at the information desk in the Union. The slip she drew bore the words, 'individuate, break." She told me she did not know what 'individuate' meant but that she thought of an ice-breaker. This was perfect! The excercise was in fact an ice breaker. I have long been bothered by my inability to talk with strangers. When I was younger I used to use a nicotine addiction as a means to converse with strangers but cigarettes are problematic in their own ways. I have noticed that often without some kind of premise, interaction with strangers is often awkward. By introducing the notion of 'art' and 'homework' I was able to have comfortable and friendly conversations. This technique appears useful for social artistic practices. 

"Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler"

For my graph project, I crossed narrative on my x-axis (thing) and remember on my y-axis (verb).  I tried to forget my usual medium, which would have been either recreating something with textures, moods and a narrative, using a layering process, or I would have painted something in oils or acryclics.  The subjects of the digital piece would likely have been a house, church (where there are a lot of records) or perhaps some sort of state building in ruin or set into a beaucolic background.  Whether painted or printed, the object would be given either on canvas or on photographic paper with all that that entails.

For this project, I used none of those processes, and instead I tried to narrate a memory to someone without using any of my old methods or processes.  I tried to think about what exactly a memory is, what types of things, tangental and otherwise preserve and / or convey  a memory.  I tried to think of narratives and how they're usually created or past along: oral tradition, song, poem, verse, writings, diaries, books, plays, movies and all other manner of handicraft work inlcuding quilting and needlepoint. 

 So my final piece is a paper mache book assemblage piece that I created to look worn, old, and handled.  I chose the book for the metaphorical inference for a storage system, relating and communicating a recorded memory.  I lined the book with old newspaper articles, because items and happenings of importance to our lives often came to us, before the internet, through the newspaper.  I felt the newspaper clippings gave the book a very old feel as well because I painted them with yellow, to show that they've aged, like memories and people do. 

I decided that one thing that holds alot of memories for people is the family home they grew up in and I also paired that with one of the strongest sensories center located closest to the part of the brain that processes memories (smell.)  On one cover of the book, I mounted a picture of a family homestead that I had created last year (it is a product of photoshop, but I didn't create it for this project, so by using it  in this project, the old process is not important to this piece.  I thought that the picture of a country homestead, that a home in and of itself is an import holder of memories.  Mothers bring home new babies, you grow up there, you eat there, are with your family there, celebrate life there, cry, laugh and sometimes die there.

Finally, I filled the book with old handwritten recipees, thinking that the handwriting, the memories associated with favorite meals shared with family would help to recall memories.  I also associated the recipees with recreating smells, in an effort to relate smells again to memory and narration.   So with this project, my new process was to communicate using things that are in the fields of my two words: memories and narration.  For example,  books often hold narratives, and in this case, they're serving to frame imagery as narration, and recipes are types of record or memories, and in this case they're serving to narrate memories of familiar smells, cooking, and the memory of shared meals.   Also, we don't think of recipes cards in terms of a pysically holding the  memory or the essense of the person, but if you touch something that someone else has touched, held or written on, then in that sense, through memory and along the time continuum, you are holding a part of that person by touching and holding what they have held.

Socialize/Breakdown

My Thing was 'breakdown'. My Process was 'socialize'. This was a simple experiment where I tried to socialize with a cat through a pane of glass.

Circle circle circle counter (code/translate)

My words were "code/translation".  I gave myself five minutes while doing the dishes to imagine erasing my memory of my former practice making.  Brain erasure complete, I decided to wander around my apt, looking for the first thing I could interact with as a code.  The first thing I found was a deck of cards that I made to help create sense-based choreography.  Unfortunately, this is an object that really triggered old habits.  Bummer.  I tried my best to resist. 

So, this deck of cards: basically, each card signifies a different sense or to examine through movement and sound.  This is explained on the back of each card in words, and represented on the front by a symbol. That was the information I had to go on.  I shuffled the cards and then drew four, one right after another, to make a phrase, and then used the chair to try them out.  The cards I got were: circle/circle/circle/counter".  The circle cards ask you to explore this shape internally and externally, using bodies and objects and sounds.  The counter card (represented by the squiggle) means to do the opposite of your first impulse.  The video shows me exploring this pattern/code on the chair and my own body.

Since this is something I use a lot in rehearsals, the forgetting aspect became more crucial/even more difficult.  Interestingly, it was a process of me trying to decipher code and translate in multiple ways: my ideas to the chair to the viewer as well as my own handwriting to myself in my state of voluntary and semi-successful amnesia.  There are moments where you can see me struggle with my initial impulse and then reconfigure into a state of "forgetting."  If nothing else, that moment is really interesting to me. 

The unfamiliar object of the chair was incredible helpful in trying to forget in order to discover.  

So.  Yes.  Ok. 

The Experiment; Trying not to be Aware, and Un-know

I saw this experiment as an opportunity to get away from myself, from my over-controlling, analytical and logical habits which are comforting, and yet stifling.
I thought it would be easy to escape from myself.

To start with, I made a graph of the verbs on a rectangular piece of paper and being a bad shot, kept missing it all together. I placed it flat on the floor instead, and jumped on it. I wanted to get a completely random result, so I tried shutting my eyes and rotating and flipping the paper and putting my finger on a point between the axes, but I found that I was counting the rotations and flips, my finger tip was too big, and I had a pretty good idea of the region I wanted to land in, so I felt I was influencing the outcome too much. 
I re-drew the graph on a circular piece of paper and spun it with my eyes shut so that I could not tell which way the graph finally oriented. I decided that I would use the 2nd of three results, but making three stabs at the paper was too tempting. I had to look and decide whether I liked the outcome or not and made about six.

Drawing straight lines from the point I pinned to the axes seemed to give the same results in several pinnings. I used a compass to draw an arc passing through the point and intersecting with each axis. This led to thinking about where the center of the arc should be placed, or whether to use a randomly wiggly line to link to the axes, or distort the axes, so that no possible influence by me could occur. “I” was surprisingly hard to get rid of in this process.

The process words were organized by the degree of freedom they could give, from archaic-izing to freeing on the x axis. The “Thing” words were also organized by how finite and restricting they are, from “limit” at the origin to “progress” at the far end.
I obtained the same instructions stated slightly differently in several instancies: alter method, allow progress, and spreading desire. “Alter method” seemed especially important in a omniscient sort of way. I became very curious about finding more interesting instructions but stuck to my plan of using the second set of words I obtained.

I made a series of short movies that explore the effect of detergent pushing food coloring around on the surface of milk. I used full-fat milk, almost sour, which changed the blue coloring to indigo, hot and cold water diluting the milk, floating gold pigment on the surface of the milk, different types of dish soap, adding red vinegar to the mix, and large and small containers for the milk. A small container trapped the spreading film and the color could not move, whereas a larger one allowed movement to occur for several minutes. Temperature also affected the mixing: warm milk caused movement up and down in the solution and cold caused the warmer droplets to stay on the top. Less fat allowed a more free-flowing movement, and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Soap was more effective as a color pusher than blue Dawn.

World of Milk     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeuMOMt94Nw&feature=plcp

Much of my practice is in printmaking, though I use digital media, drawing and painting to help me understand and interact with what I see. Drawing moves me beyond recording superficial detail of an object to an awareness of qualities integral to its presence. For example, I have had to spend many hours in hospital waiting rooms, and began making drawings of chrome fixtures, corridors and mechanical objects so that I could explore the effect of shiny metal, seeming cleanliness, sparse surfaces and perspective. I could have taken photographs, but this would not have made me notice or understand as much as drawing scenes in hospitals. Diary-like drawing is not part of my practice that carries an emotional charge, or something I want to use in a piece of work immediately, but these projects are a resource and some day they will emerge. Drawing is an inquiry process, and functions like a diary. Other inquiries have been drawing lunar moths, sunflower spirals, patterns in the skin of puffballs, water droplets, amoebas, dancers in motion, islamic patterns, creating digital images on textured polymer surfaces, and pigs. These are not intended to communicate anything to anyone. They are helping me to understand the three-D form of things. By seeing something and interacting with it, I understand it better.

Intaglio printmaking can be a slow, messy process, and it has often occurred to me that I could use a computer to produce similar images much more easily. I prefer to create printed images from hand drawings or direct engraving because digital programs cannot provide the same richness or tone. Filters in Photoshop can mimic the look of a drawing medium, but they have repeat patterns in their pixel arrangements that, even if they are almost imperceptible, may make an image look contrived. My images are therefore bound by the possibilities of software that I did not design, rather than the limits of my practice. Working to establish a printed image by hand is a struggle, a series of decisions that reflect sustained involvement and alteration. A computer image shows no artifacts left from its creative process. It is flawless, and conveys no sense of labor or emotional involvement in its production in the way a non-digital print does. Signs of a production process, of human rather than algorhythmic design are a better means of communication, I feel. Though a press could be thought of as proscribing the means of production, the marks produced are far more random than digital ones. An image can be highly detailed and delicate, only producible a few times before it becomes less readable. 

In the print shown here, the figures in it represent us. Presences each on our own path, reaching into others’ lives, but not actually able to physically join or fuse with others. The figures dwell together in the image, and illustrate the solitariness of lives, as well as our efforts to reach one another. They are separate, trying to communicate with and support each other. The poses the figures have are a little theatrical, more alive than with just ordinary gestures, they are also un-clothed. Less obvious motions of hands and bodies may not be clear enough to convey the sense of reaching out for others. Have they awareness of their own deaths, are they enervated because of this? Yes. I assume that all people reach for one another, even terrorists so full of desperation that they act without compunction to kill people in my world, or their own.

The theme of interconnectedness of people and history, whether a good connection, or a terrifying one is something I return to repeatedly.

How does this work pull at the fabric of eventualities? Looking at it invites viewers to examine the separateness of each of our lives, yet realize that though we are distanced, we are close, united in perceiving our own death in the Heidegger sense. We are more than a resource (for blowing up, or for employment) more than people who have learned how to work and keep our human component hidden. We share the experience of knowing we are apart, of otherness, yet we are together in the situation of dwelling and being in life. In the four-fold sense, the figures are mortal, the life paths are the gods, manipulated and evolved. The earth (dwelling) contains the figures in the print. It has given rise to the questing that we do in a temporal, spatial, spiritual and physical matrix. The sky links them to the passage of time, and the urgency to keep alive and participating in life. 

I find the idea of string theory to be a useful basis for thinking about Heidegger. As I understand it, it is a scientific explanation of how the universe that is manifesting right now (that is, while you are reading THIS), that what we encounter, is actually all we could possibly experience at a given instant. Things have a past and a future affected by every other thing that exists, or ever did exist, or will exist. We experience our world structure because of the interactions of all the objects in it; all their pasts and futures and nows are on trajectories that tangle like strings. We can only know (experience) the energy manifested in things that are able to surface, or become apparent to us, appearing out of the tangle. Physical objects are like knots; we can unravel and manipulate them, re-tie or re-attach them. We see one thing or event, but it occupies the same space as another thing. What happened to the thing we cannot see? There may be other eventualities that we cannot know because our physical presence in this plane twists us past them. This a way of looking at things that discounts  whether we cause changes to happen, or that things get assimilated into different roles because of the priorities of evolution or habits of use. The stings in string theory are a mathematical analogy for thinking of all things’ history being interwoven. It seems to deny the spiritual interactions that I seek to represent. 

A paced life. My work in the four fold.

Most of the time when I sit down to do a painted piece, I have something of a vague mood in mind, or I will try to express the feeling or atmosphere in terms of weather, lighting, time of year, onto someone else.  My subjects and messages are concrete and easy to grasp, usually rural.  They express to the viewer that time is fleeting, take in what’s around you and the beauty of it, recognize and give thanks to a higher order, realize that this moment will be gone in the next moment, recognize the importance of this moment in your life as I am doing in seeing this moment before me.  There is always the underlying theme expressed to the viewer concerning the awareness of mortality in that they will one day pass from the natural beauty that surrounds them physically, but what is around them will remain after they‘ve looked away, left the area or died, and likewise there is the importance to me of expressing something like this perfectly, hopefully before I die. 

I rarely do interpretive or abstract pieces, although I am thinking that I might start trying to work in a more abstract sense. I’d like to be able to express quick moments, fleeting impressions, quick notions of weather, season and atmosphere, the quick glances that we sometimes have of our environment which transport us, that move us to a moment or two of reflection, contemplation, meditation, rest; images that would express an unthawing, a split second recognition of the immediacy of this very moment. 

These paintings or photos might pertain to cityscapes, urban systems, rushing through crowds, urgency, hurriedness, metro transportation systems, tunnels, darkness and then sunlight as we are moved along, the architectural details of city buildings, churches, banks, urban decay.  The value or direction is in expressing time as it relates to moving through space, going to our jobs, work and everyday life.  It comments on the cacophony of sensory information that comes to us when we multitask and live for everyone else before ourselves.  The viewer sees that their busy environment can be distracting, beautiful, loud, ignored, sensual, in the background and in the foreground all at once. 

My viewer of these works might say, “Her work makes me think about how disconnected the moments of my life become when I am overloaded, busy, rushed, burdened with long lists of chores, work, responsibilities, etc.  It also makes me understand that there is a certain  busy pace that I choose for myself, that in choosing to move at this pace, through fleeting seconds of light, shadow, confusion, distraction,  that I am energized and I’m energizing the pace and timing of my life, my work and the world around me.  There is no judgment made in the work because city living and city pace is a lifestyle choice that I don’t make comment on.  I let my audience make their own comments about their lifestyle choice, including the pace at which they live.  

Analyzing my practice with Heidegger

Benjamin Burpee / 25 September 2012

Current Project:

1.     Process: Develop an ethico-political practice based off of Deleuze’s Three Ecologies, asking three main questions and folding them into a singular project. The secondary questions (below) are more refined research topics that incorporate the ‘prompts’ into the singular project.

a.     How is the Studio (as a historical environment devoted to the task of making) a social/collaborative environment? What possibilities does it hold to exceed the private, reflective, individualistic notion of art practice?

                                               i.     Prompt: Swab the counters, grow cultures of bacteria on agar, grow molds and fungi

1.     But how can any found collaborators (microbal bacteria, yeasts, fungi) contribute to making?

b.     How might collaborating with the immediate environment for sustenance change our conception of what an environment is?

                                               i.     Prompt: Forage for edible foods within the campus boundaries

1.     How can food produce a worldview that exceeds the considerations of ‘nourishment’ and ‘calories’?

c.      What is the relation between the social and subjective? How can one’s behavior be affected by a social ecology (and vice-versa) such that a ‘new’ culture is arrived at?

                                               i.     Prompt: Convert the studio into an experimental social space—restaurant

1.     Within a space, what will allow for new cultures and subjectivities to emerge (how to develop a micro-culture with humans who are not engaged with Guattari’s philosophy, or any other for that matter)?

2.     Potential Product: A good way to answer all the above questions is to develop a highly social food processing/experimentation center in the studio. The studio will be converted into a microbiology lab/restaurant/think-tank to radicalize each of the three ecological domains: the environment, the social, and the subjective. This is an art practice oriented toward action and the production of difference, and will also be based on a deep research program utilizing scholarly literature, philosophy, and experimentation.

Analysis:

1.    Sky—What’s immediately revealed

a.     The most obvious aspect of this project will be its involvement with food and drink. It might seem that I’m coming up with ‘weird’ ways of preparing food and nothing more. I am making beverages, lunches, and dinners for people. Also, I am growing bacteria and yeast cultures simply to demonstrate the fact that microflora are ubiquitous; an odd juxtaposition and contrast to the edible stuff.

2.    Mortals—The meaning of the project

a.     The meaning of the project is political; it’s not only a reaction against traditional western paradigms but a positive thinking and inventing of new ones entirely. The meaning is also embedded in the process of questioning and curiosity itself—the meaning is entirely self-contained and autoreferential in that it isn’t assigned from the outside but is emergent in the process of teasing these things out. This has really only begun and will hopefully be much more than ‘sustenance’ or ‘nourishment’.

3.    Gods—The directionality of the project

a.     I think the directionality of this project is partly open-ended in the sense that the project itself is based on an open-ended question. What’s for certain is that there is a definite directionality toward social—the whole thing depends on groups and gatherings at every level. To be even more specific, there is a directionality toward collaboration as a social practice. Not only is there a need for a gathering, but this gathering serves to articulate or solve some problem—In other words, there’s work involved, questions at stake. As for my own private bias, I am curious about a directionality toward inhabiting an ontology that takes the human as a generative and relational entity, intimately coupled to the world that’s already full of agencies and relational entities abound.

Rachel's Sky+Mortal+Gods (-Earth)

A brief intro:
I am a theater maker and performance artist who also works in longer-form theater.  When I am working in more traditional modes, I work with several theaters in Minneapolis as a playwright and/or performer.  For the past several years, I have also run my own performance art collective, called APORIA, where I work as a much more free-form theater artist, writing/directing/performing alongside a group of other people working in a similarly multi-disciplinary fashion.  I do a lot of self-producing, which means that I often perform at tiny theaters with a specific following, such as The Mudlark Theater in New Orleans, or Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis: venues that have a specific focus to everything they produce.  These factors both inform and limit my work.  

I am interested in expanding out of these specific contexts into a larger framework of audiences/collaborators who bring different expectations and realities into my work.  With this in mind, I have begun a collaboration with Ben (as in Burpee) and Johanna Cairns that is exploring the transformative qualities of desire and the potential for sensory experience to disrupt and rewrite existing systems.  We are currently exploring how/who to bring in as audience members.  

I answered the prompts below from my experiences in the past.  The future might be different. Duh.


Mortals: In general, the type of human that exists in/around my work is younger than the average theater-goer: somewhat educated, sometimes (but not at all always) interested in radical political and/or social change, and looking for ways to manifest this through art.  There are a lot of artists of all type who work in/around/at my work.  The people who see my work are quite often reflective of the people who perform in it.  

Gods: I work primarily in systems that expose systems.  Through using (fairly) traditional performance elements, I allow for multiple readings of the body in performative moments. While the values and paradigms that this can touch on are somewhat limitless, I tend to focus in on sexuality, power structures, and notions of romanticism, and creating non-traditional narrative realities around these topics.

Sky: Ideally, my work allows for people/performers to find new ways of existing inside their own notions of self.  Most often, this is non-directive: I mean mostly that when performers play with notions of power and reality, new ways of looking can open up, for them and for the audience.  Objects/touch/emotional knowledge can be read differently.  

Exercise one: everyday object

A pack of gum
on a
counter top.  

First, there is the initial surface cut: the gum came to be here, in my studio, when I purchased it at the university bookstore three days ago.  It is a new flavor called “sweet mint.”  Let’s refer to the emotion that surrounded this choice as an impulse. Impulsive buying let to this gum laying on this counter in this studio. It's possession was a surprise to me.  That's the first thing about this thing.

In discussing the thinging of a thing, an object that is mass produced and mass consumed with often little thought involved or overt communication between the object and the consumer seems like a poor choice.  There is little to discuss in an object of mass production, maybe.   Or maybe not.  Maybe there are multitudes.

But another layer unfolds itself:  there is incredible serendipitousness in this moment.  Or maybe not.  But in the interest of writing another line, (and anotherandanother) let’s go with maybe. To grab wildly from other readings/watchings in the course: “why this instead of nothing at all?”  why this gum instead of nothing?  Why this gum instead of no gum?  The  answer folds in on itself with complexities, which begin to write and imagine histories and pasts forward and back with exhilarating speed and possibilities.  

Even if the history of this gum is exceedingly pedestrian/typical, and even if there is incredible effort put into making this gum exactly the same as all other gums, there is no possibility of this sameness being truly successful. A convoluted history emerges.  Let’s say, maybe, that the gum itself, the wrapper, and the packing came from widely disparate locations.  It's possible.  Probable, even.  This possibility alone suggests narratives of staggering proportion.  

The hands of each person who touched the machinery that made the gum came with different intentions, different histories, different Moment Right Before’s.  The vast networks of paper mills, processing plants, and printing presses insinuate people, insinuate a huge volume of machinery, all of which approach the gum package with differences.  Each of these narratives is, in the most basic sense, "true." 
 
And these narratives, these truths, begin to clash.  

Maybe the thing about things that are one of many is they thing differently for everything.  The thinging of this particular thing is different for the woman who (I imagine, with my own imperfect and biased imaginings) observes the passage of this gum on a conveyer belt, waiting for her mid-morning break, checking to make sure the ink has dried on the package.  This thing things to her in a particular way.  It things differently than the first gum package she saw that day, and it will thing differently than the next.  

To me, it things in a different way.  It things of a break from typing and a fulfillment of nervous energy and oral fixation and OCD and whatever other weird baggage I force onto and into the gum package.

The human narratives screams loud and clear from a mass produced object.  These narratives inform one another.  They exist side by side in the same bed, breathing off-beat from one another and sweating miserably, but coexisting none the less.  These narratives shriek of context: what do we bring to this gum?  How does the gum receive or fend off our advances?  Our demands?  

So then, the object.  How does a gum package thing, in its essence?  It things of spaces.  It things of the regimented holes where the gum lies, packaged neatly in paper jackets.  It things of the gradual absence that is created.  It things of time: it decomposes quickly.  It is vulnerable to liquid and shock and over-use.  At its core, it reminds us of the earth- it is of trees and is taken into our bodies, mediated through the most chemical and sterile of processes.  It reminds us of the muddying of these things.  Of the way technology and globalization melds and confuses the perceived pure differences between the natural and the artificial.

The gum things of impermanence.  It things of sharing, potentially, or hording.  It things of systems and order: twenty pieces to a pack, one paper jacket to each piece, one pack for all of this.  It things of portability: clearly designed to fit in a loosely clenched human hand.  It speaks of efficiency and ease: it will go with you.  It will stay.  We attempt closeness but not nearness with mass produced objects, but our interactions force a dialogue, and the dialogue is infinite.

Updated Diagrams w. Heidegger in mind

Assignment Two: What is a Thing?

Mary Mailler
Assignment Two - What is a Thing?

 

Flour, water, sugar, salt and yeast; these are the simplest of ingredients that when kneaded together, have formed the staff of life for generations. For the sake of bread, great societies have risen and fallen, served or revolted, destroyed or built kingdoms and monuments. For bread, great populations have survived and prospered, or starved to death and fallen waste to famine.  At its least, it has kept the slave alive to labor and the prisoner reminded of all that he is deprived. At its most, it has graced our tables, sustained our bodies, and rooted itself at the foot of major world religions.

For as long as there has been recorded history, there has always been bread. Someone has planted and harvested the grains, someone has baked it, someone has bought it or sold it, and someone has eaten it or fed it to their families. Amazingly, the essence of what a loaf of bread is has remained unchanged for thousands of years and for hundreds of generations. In comparison, we have very little in our everyday world that we can point to and say it is much the same today as it was a thousand years ago. If ever it were possible to send something back and forth across time, bread would surely be recognized and appreciated at either end of the line.

Although the essence of bread to us today remains unchanged, we can't say that the experience of bread hasn’t changed significantly over the ages. Our ancestors once worried about the cost of procuring seed, the possibility of drought, of flood, pests, locusts, and the wrath of an angry God. Today we have no concern for any of those issues other than whether or not they might raise the cost of our preferred brands.   Our ancestors might have walked in their fields and been satisfied to know that their work, prayers, and good efforts were smiled upon by the heavens, and that a bountiful harvest was assured. Perhaps they fell to their knees and gave thanks, for such a blessing would mean an end to famine in their lands. Today, most of us don't walk in fields of anything.  We walk down brightly lit immaculate aisles, pinching and pulling, checking expiration dates, thumbing through coupons and wondering how many loaves we can cram into our freezers at home.  

What did it mean for our ancestors to plan their meals around a loaf of bread? A reenactment of Jesus' boyhood depicts him as the poor son of an itinerate craftsman living in Nazarath, two thousand years ago. His mother wakes him in the morning and offers him only a piece of flat bread to sustain him through his busy morning. At noon, he and his father return from their work, and Jesus is anxiously awaiting his lunch. This time, there is the same bread, but it is served with crushed olives in oil. He wants two pieces of bread for his lunch, but his mother can't allow it. He is lucky to have one. For Jesus' dinner, there would be more bread served as the solid in broth perhaps, or as the solid for a spread. Jesus probably never knew the experience of bread as an appetizer or as an afterthought to the main dish, like it is usually served today.

But as women and mothers, the keepers of hearth and home, might the experience of serving bread to our families be similar to what it was for Mary so many years ago?  Mothers today are busy outside of their homes, and our worries about feeding our children are not the same as Mary's were.  For us, the worry is time related.  We're not worried about how we will feed our families, we are worried about when we will feed them, instead.  Today, it is enough if the loaf is still warm in the bag when we get home from the grocery store and plunk it down on the table, and so long as children are fed, whether or not we know the farmer, the baker or the candlestick maker, makes very little difference to us at the end of our busy day.

I am a mother who bakes bread for her family, and the process for me serves as a reminder of all the women in my family who came before.  All at once, it is my oldest sister, who has always been beautiful, and the way she presses her lips together when she punches down the loaves in their pans.  It is my mother and the thousands of perfect loaves she’s made versus the hundred or so that I've made, some of which I’ve miserably failed.  But in the quiet moments of an empty home, it is me standing near the Hoosier again, with my grandmother, watching her hands at work in the flour.  She is telling me about how hard is was for her to bury her little baby in the bitter cold of December, so long ago. And now it is the sweetest face of an angel pressed into both of our memories, forever, her's and mine. It is her telling me about the sorrows of motherhood and it is me leaning in close to hear her far-away words.  Finally, it is just me alone, a mother putting her best efforts forward towards her children everyday.