Blog
Posted on 1/31/2022 7:07:36 PM
By Donald Fox
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New Window
On this last day of the first month of the calendar year, I happen to think about the past moving into the present much like a weather system moves into an area and transforms it for some period of time. Here in Texas, for example, it is cool and rainy whereas the day before it was colder and clear. In Boston where my sister lives, it is very cold and snowing. In fact, they are experiencing a severe winter storm. I can easily experience the present weather while also imagining what my sister may be experiencing and simultaneously remember a warm summer day at the beach when I was a kid. My awareness is flexible to a degree because it is composed of perceptions that can include present sensations as well as thoughts and memories, and one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other.
Awareness is one of those aspects of experience that we may take for granted and not give much conscious thought unless our attention is drawn to it. Being conscious or being aware is really quite a remarkable experience in itself. It is through consciousness that we take in our daily experiences, process them, question them, and ultimately understand them. It’s interesting that we can also be aware and unaware at the same time, for this is the limited nature of our personal consciousness. Obviously, there are many internal automatic processes of which we have no immediate awareness, but it’s also true that when we tune something in (becoming aware of it) we are often tuning other things out. In cultures that approach awareness from a spiritual perspective, awareness takes on a different meaning as it refers less to the isolated individual self and more to a comprehensive, cosmic self. The individual merges with the one and awareness becomes all encompassing. Whether any one truly reaches that state of awareness is another question. Still, the idea relates to a level of awareness that artists often strive for in their particular disciplines.
Through self-motivation, perhaps some genetic predisposition, and continual training, artists develop their sensitivity and awareness of sensory experience to a fairly high degree. They pay attention to things and often sense that things are more than they seem on the surface. It is a state of heightened awareness not so much for survival as a soldier might develop in combat, but one in which day to day experiences are perceived for their value as sources of information and meaning. I don’t think it matters whether the meaning is discovered in the experience or manufactured by the observer in the midst of the experience. Is it really important to know where a particular idea or understanding comes from? Isn’t the outcome – whatever is done with the idea – the most important part of any experience? For the artist this is probably so. Anyone can say that we might give ourselves over to an experience and really be in the moment with it. Afterwards it may linger in memory to be recalled at a later time. The value was in the experience, in having the experience, and because it was memorable, we hold on to it. This may be what most people do (I’m guessing), but artists generally take experiences to another level.
Artists make use of those experiences, and through their art create something that will enable an audience to create a similar experience for themselves. It won’t necessarily be the same as what the artist experienced, but it will have a larger context because the artist has contemplated, extracted from, interpreted, and re-formed the experience into the artistic language with which he or she works. A message of sorts is embedded in the artwork either consciously or intuitively by the artist, and this ultimately will enhance the audience’s experience of the work even if they don’t directly get the message. We might say that the artist has enlarged the possibility for something to happen in the presence of the work. The audience then determines what that something will be. This could be where awareness on the part of the artist meets awareness on the part of the audience. A cultural pattern emerges from this interaction between artist, art, and audience, and sometimes the energy generated from such interactions carries into the far distant future as part of the ongoing history of art.
Posted on 1/13/2022 4:00:23 PM
By Donald Fox
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Blue Streak
When I was a kid, we often visited my dad’s relatives in South Carolina near Charleston where I was born. One of my uncles worked as a caretaker on several plantations for different absentee owners. He and my aunt lived several years on each no-longer producing farm (I remember three that were visited more than once and even celebrated more than one Christmas at several of them). I loved the remoteness of these locations, all of them abutting rivers. On one of the plantations, my aunt and uncle lived in the original manor house, a large two-story brick home furnished with late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century furnishings, heated by fireplaces in all major rooms including bedrooms with canopied beds and chifforobes, and adorned with period paintings and portraits of former owners. I always felt as though I had stepped into some historical past, mysterious and haunting.
What I didn’t understand or appreciate at the time was the darker underside of that history. There was no longer evidence of slave quarters on any of these plantations, and the once abundant rice fields had become pastures or thickets of young trees. I paid little attention to the occasional small graveyard or the remaining foundation of one manor house that had some time ago burned to the ground. I never heard any stories from any relative about the history of any of the plantations or how they came to be. These places remained isolated in time far off the main highways and down lightly or unpaved roads lined with oak trees whose long branches created moss-laden archways into the past.
Only one of these plantations had a notable recent history as it was owned at the time I was three or four years old by Clare Boothe Luce and her husband Henry. The Luces had lost their twenty-year-old daughter in a car accident in 1944. The inconsolable Mrs. Luce, a Republican member of the House of Representatives and acknowledged writer, was inconsolable and converted to Catholicism while seeking solace. She allowed a group of Trappist Monks to live on part of the plantation while my uncle still worked there. Later she ceded the entire plantation to the Monks, they eventually forced my uncle out, and they established Mepkin Abbey, which has become a self-sustaining farm and retreat center. Perhaps the land with darkened past has been re-consecrated by its devotees to contemplation and prayer and peaceful existence.
Ironically, these and other plantations in South Carolina have been declared historical sites while many of them have been acquired by wealthy retirees and updated with guest houses, new greenhouses, and other accoutrements that landed them in the pages of Architectural Digest or Southern Living after designers ‘conserved’ their traditional looks and blended them with modern updates. At least they have avoided threats of becoming subdivisions and golf courses. The voices, chants, and haunting tales of former slaves who once made these plantations prosperous have long faded into distant memory replaced by a picturesque landscape that has pushed the value of these properties into many millions of dollars. It is a typical story of American enterprise and appropriation.
