I have been working on my talk for the Sur Polar event in Buenos Aires next month, and have, after numerous spoken rehearsals, made some small but important changes. The words flow more easily, and sound more like how I speak:
.
IntroA
I am going to give you a brief overview of my project, Antarctic Animation, including some of the rationale and methodology behind it.
IntroB
My purpose here is to explain the work, and to encourage those of you who have worked in Antarctica to share with me some of your experiences in the ice.
IntroC
So, what am I doing, why is it important, and how am I going about it?
1A
Antarctic landscape is beyond the experience of most of us, and to some it can seem terrifyingly remote.
This remoteness and strangeness can get in the way of us getting to know it.
1B
But if we want to learn what the future holds for future generations
it is important to find ways we can connect with this place.
1C
I am researching how the profound connections that some have made with Antarctic landscape can be revealed through making objects and animations..
1D
in dialogue with expeditioners , scientists, and other artists.
2A
Antarctica holds evidence of our planet’s changing nature.
3A
Experiencing Antarctica can change the nature of a person.
3B
Living and working in close quarters, in isolation from the rest of the world, we can become mindful of the impact of our actions, upon ourselves, each other and the environment.
You often hear it said that being in Antarctica is a life-changing experience.
4A
Here, we can find space to reflect.
4B
Ice and water are metaphors for self-reflection.
5A
Animation is the visual language of change.
5B
How can animation be used to take us into the landscape…
5C
to feel something of the changes that are happening, and experienced there?
6A
Scientists use animations to visualise important data about landscape change.
6B
These can sometimes be difficult for other people to read.
As straight graphs, scientific visualisations can seem remote from human experience.
6C
Constructing landscapes with the data, and with other Antarctic texts, we can visualise ourselves within this place.
8A
When the changes are represented as more like how we move…
8B
…we can identify more easily with the data.
(The animated images of sea ice extent through 1991 seem to breathe.)
9A
With this as the premise, I am working with dancers, artists and musicians, to respond to the voices of expeditioners…
…exploring ways to animate what we understand of their observations, actions and feelings.
(Freud recognised pleasure in feeling, and knowing, and doing, which he characterized as Eros, Nacissus, and the Man of action, in Civilization and its discontents (1930).)
Connecting to a moment of pleasure, experienced in Antarctica, can cut through the fear that can get in the way of us learning about it. It can help remove the blind spot.
I would like to end this presentation with one of the wearable sculptures made by Antarctic artist and scientist, Karin Beaumont – Masked Illusion. Here, it turns, like the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, and like a whirling Dervish…to draw you into the power of that sea.
I draw your attention to this piece to demonstrate that the voices of expeditioners can take visual, as well as spoken form.
(Fred Williams, Hans the Carpenter, Stephen Eastaugh and others)
Karin has even described another of her works (Threatened Treasure), in terms of a voice calling:
“This wearable sculpture is a call to protect the magnificent diversity of life in our oceans that is vital to the function of our world.” (2006)
If you have worked in Antarctica, and are willing to share with me a moment in the ice, I would like to record your voice describing what pleasure you found, in what you felt, and learned and did there.
Animating your voices can help us animate the landscape.
And if you have made, or know of objects or animations, that may be of interest to this project, please speak to me.
Thank you.
As you may have gathered, I am nervous about public speaking, if I am not well prepared.
I feel very bad about how unprepared I was for my last (and first!) Academic Review, and do not want that to happen again!
I had an afternoon with a dance therapist friend, who recognised my (Laban)’movement signature’ as being, like hers, “passion-drive”. We find pleasure in everything we do!
My partner has given me an article to read, “Quality in qualitative research – Criteria for authors and assessors in the submission and assessment of qualitative research articles for the Medical Journal of Australia (Kitto, Chesters, Grbich, Medical Journal of Australia, Vol. 188, No.4, 2008).
There’s a useful section on reflexivity, which has me thinking that my friend’s observation of me is important in terms of acknowledging this bias in my own response to the Antarctic. She recommends that I take this into account when I am planning interviews, and workshops with my upcoming movement study group (responding to Antarctic texts).
It is vital to recognise that we all have different ‘signatures’, or ways of engaging with the world.
My friend is an excellent advisor and mentor. She has achieved that balance between creativity and
analysis, which I aspire to.
She also took me shopping for a frock.
I will wear the frock, and have ordered new dancing shoes – black with small heals – like ones worn to Tang dance – to wear as I talk in Buenos Aires.
I am no longer in love with the leopard seal. Today it’s the frock.
Like Freud, I must always have an object to love.
I have been reading the catalogue for the current exhibition at Sydney Uni: Sigmund Freud’s collection: an archeology
of the mind.
There’s an article in there by Dr Janine Burke, whose father lectures me in Fine Arts at Melbourne University in the 1970s.
She writes:
The popular image of Freud as austere, remote and forbidding is ontradicted by the collection, which reveals a very different
personality……Though Freud prescribed the intense, inner journey of psychoanalysis for Vienna’s bourgeoisie, his own therapy was shopping. Arranging choice items on his desk, Freud confessed to Jung, ‘I must always have an object to love.’ His collection attracts multiple readings: as the
embodiment of his theories, as an investigation and a celebration of past cultures, as an exercise in aesthetic pleasure, as a quest for excellence, as a momento of real and imaginary journeys, as a catalogue of desires, and as a self-portrait.
Having watched the home movies of Freud, which are part of this exhibition, and reading more of his work, I suspect that Freud’s movement signature was ‘passion-drive’. His gestures seem impulsive, but fluid, as he talks (unaware of the camera), in the garden with a friend.
Perhaps I am helping to build, with its itinerant occupants, and other artists, a portrait of Antarctica.
I’m surprised that you have taken so much from Freud. I always think of the Arctic as Freud and Antarctic as Jung. Both of them plunging into the subconscious as the did. Freud somehow is so completely Northern, totally committed to reversing the order. Jung is always the other, not only looking into the unconscious but also the order in the reversal.
I am also drawn to Jung, his idea archetypal forms, and his idea of a universal unconscious. When listening to expeditioners speak about Antarctica, symbols come to mind, and I they are good beginnings for animations that might connect people beyond words.
I know that Freud upheld the conventional social order of a male-driven culture, and that he offered no spiritual consolation to the world.
From Jung’s ideas I get more of a sense of spiritual consolation, through the possibility of connecting with people – through a shared unconscious language of symbols.
But I have some questions:
What do you mean by ‘order’ and Jung’s ‘order in the reversal’?
What order was Freud reversing?
SIMON WRITES:
Subject: 3 answers
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:43:33 -0800
Dear Lisa
Shape of thesis:
I think Mt Erebus is definitely worth exploring as a list of 3rd level headings. I think you could combine some of them into 2nd level headings or chapters.
I won’t suggest what these might be as they should come from you.
The way you have laid them out suggests to me that they are beginning to form themselves into coherent argument. This sense of coherence is very important to the reader. The sense that you are being taken on a journey with a destination.
I would encourage you to write a paper on what you are learning through dance and movement. Many years ago when I was a drama student at UNSW we were forced to write a 3,000 word essay every two weeks. We hated it – but it was great training. It’s a very useful skill to be able to write fluently about your ideas without agonizing over every word. The more you do it the easier it gets. Although sometimes they come easy and sometimes they come hard. These days I am often asked to examine students. Most of them can’t write and their work is of poor quality. This means I have to write a constructive report on the work (I’ve done one today). These reports are usually about 2000 words. You get about $200.00 for a PhD so its simply not an option to spend too much time writing. You’ll be doing this one day.
Best wishes
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:38:35 -0800
Dear Lisa
My apologies for not replying sooner but I am not always connected. I’ve been away from connection and got back last night. I also think you may be lending my messages negative tone where none exists.
Sometimes, as per my previous comments, I come right to the point.
I stand by the comments that I made with the clarification that I was not being prescriptive about what you talked about only that you need to limit your scope to what is most important to you. If you introduce too many big ideas you will lose your audience. I can see a Mount Erebus of big (very big) ideas. Each one of these could be at least a 30 minute presentation by the time you gave several examples so that your audience had a grasp of what you were saying. If you’ll forgive me trying to reflect them back to you, here’s a list of them:
1. Remoteness and strangeness can interfere with knowing
2. There are pedagogical issues associated with different learning modes
3. The Antarctic landscape can be revealed through making objects and animations
4. Antarctica as a repository of evidence
5. Antarctic experiences change people
6. There is a link between close quarter living and becoming mindful
of the impact of our actions, upon ourselves, each other and the
environment
7. Ice and water can be read as metaphors for self-reflection
8. The proposition that animation is the visual language of change and
that this can be transforming
9. Scientists use animations to visualise important data about
landscape change but that scientific visualisations can seem remote
from human experience
10. Constructing landscapes with the data, and with other Antarctic
texts can help us visualise ourselves within this place
11. Dancers, artists and musicians, responding to the voices of
expeditioners can help us understand that there is a connection
between the way we move and the changes we see happening and that this
can facilitate our understanding of data
12. Connecting to a moment of pleasure (in the Freudian sense),
experienced in Antarctica, can cut through the fear that some people
feel (about expressing their feelings?)
What’s good?
The way you confidently launch into each one of the ideas. This is a big and profound project but you need to accept that you can’t do it justice in 15 minutes. No one will think the worse of you if you say that you can only talk about a couple of the dimensions.
To develop…?
In my opinion you have not made a coherent connection between 10 and
11. The Freudian stuff is a red herring. If you introduce Freud you introduce baggage that will distract from what you really want.
My understanding of what you really want is for people to share their stories with you.
As I said before, my advice to you is to tell your own story as honestly, simply and clearly as you can. What I’ve discovered is that if you tell people an honest story (and people love real stories) then they will feel compelled to tell you their own story.
Speak from the heart – as an artist. Annotating sentences with quasi footnotes (There is pleasure in feeling, and knowing, and doing –
Freud’s 3 pleasure principles, characterised by Eros, Nacissus, and
the Man of action. Civilization and its discontents (1930) is
inappropriate for a 15 minute talk.
By now I will have offended you terribly. Intellectual honesty is a constant challenge for us all. Because we try to meet other people’s expectations and frameworks that are not necessarily our own. You have such an individual perspective and such wide experience that your audience will respond to you. Try to use this to find your own voice.
15mins is a blink of the eye. There is nothing quite as off-putting as someone who takes more than their alloted time because they are convinced that what they have to say is more important that what everyone else might have said if they had time.
Best wishes and good luck
Simon
Thank you for reassuring me that my efforts won’t be wasted in using that framework to build upon. It feels right, and to write (for the Christchursh conference) about the work with movement is just what is needed for the overall narrative of that structure (and hence the Sur Polar talk) to flow.
There, that was a convoluted sentence!
JOHN WRITES:
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2008 11:00:01 +1100
Lisa
Sorry I have been rather distracted. I just caught up somewhat in reading your posts and made a couple of responses. It would be good to meet before you leave. When is that by the way?
I couldn’t understand your post where you listed the various versions of your start. It made me feel dizzy and uncertain. You need to bite the bullet and commit. Having said that as a series of disconnected statements they were quite fine. You could read them as a sort of poetry. The only thing is that to pull that off you have to have complete confidence.
Back to your earlier question on Jung and Freud. I think we are very much on the same page. Freud battles the establishment order Jung just completely started at the other end. Best expressed in the Seven Sermons For The Dead I feel.
Thanks John.
I’ve found this link to Sermons ro the Dead:
http://www.canonbury.ac.uk/lectures/7sermons.htm
I can read this while I’m in London.
Strangely, my father, who just died, lived just near the Canonbury tower – one of the oldest buildings in the Islington area.
Reading this page:
http://www.canonbury.ac.uk/lectures/7sermons.htm
I find that between 1913-14, Jung reflected on the symbols of his dreams.
Significantly, he often did this by that great symbol of self-reflection: a lake.
“…he took care to allow plenty of time for solitude, reflection, writing down and painting his dreams and fantasies, often brooding by the lake close to his home and building villages out of the stones on the beach. Only his wife and children would have known the tremendous strain he and his family were under as he struggled to assimilate the meaning of the images and words that flooded into his consciousness.”
Heard John Onians talking and was motivated to write to him.
My message reads thus.
I have for some time been interested in the shift from psychoanalysis
to cognitive behavioral therapy and the implications for cultural
practice.
CBT being the new kid on the block so to speak has had a lot of
attention of late and been attributed with an quantum change in how
treatment can be approached. This shift is a profound one as it moves
the attention from our history affecting our behavior to our present
having the most profound affect. That we change the dysfunctional
elements of our lives by the way we live rather than on the basis of
what we have become. It implies a new belief in a flux of mind
rather than a steady state that we have to change the basis of. I do
believe that this is a huge shift and has or will have huge
implications for art practice.
I thought you might have some thoughts on this subject which I’ve
been discussing with some of my post grads. If you have a moment I
would be most interested in any thought you had on the subject.
I got a reply today and I thought it would be good to include it.
Dear John,
Thanks for your message. Of course I think that you are
absolutely right-and put it very well! What is so fascinating is that all
this was realised years ago, as I argue in my latest book
Newuroarthistory. From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki. it was
only forgotten-and denied in the twentieth century. alrgely because of
Freud. I dont have anything more precise to add, but it would be good to
meet if I get gack to Australia. Best wishes, John O
This is really interesting John.
It is vital that we individually and collectively change the dysfunctional
elements of our lives by the way we live…to get the planet back into its natual climactic pattern.
I have been listening to scientists in Buenos Aires talk about the natural cycles of change in our environment – in and out of ice ages – and seen graphs that show this. Again and again I hear that our physical behaviour is accelerating this, into another carboniferous period. Diatoms again will even more proliferate the seas, and re-start the whole crude oil cycle. Humans may or may not re-emerge from the slime.
What we have collectively become has been driven by a a psychology of consumption.
I agree with you that has arisen a “new belief in a flux of mind rather than a steady state that we have to change the basis of.”
The perception of a steady state humanity is image-based – individually and collectively – and is driven by economic rationalism. Humans have perceieved themselves as objects in a system.
Flux of mind is awareness of one’s self here and now, and in connection with other beings and our environment. Collectively it is the univeral consciousness.
To become accountable for our individual actions we need to become conscious of how we behave in the moment.
To change our individual actions we need to be conscious in the moment of our impact on ourselves, each other, and the environment.
What can artists do to help collective change?
For the Sur Polar catalogue, New York curator Nina Collossi wrote:
“When the environmental artist touches others through their work that springs from imagination, scientific fact and ecological wisdom of indigenous cultures, and involves senses and intellect, the global community, reached through the powerful tools of technology, will understand.”
I get a strong sense of this shift in arts practise of artists in the Sur Solar exhibition.
Philippe de Boisson’s works are large photmontages, depicting Antarctica within the minds of the men and women who have worked there. I will upload images of his work here soon. He inverts the notion of Mother Earth, depicting Antarctica as the child we must nurture. What would Freud make of this?