I’ve been quiet for a couple of weeks focusing on studio work and summer work. We just had our mid-review yesterday and I’ve received a lot of compliments on how my presentation went.
Meta Thoughts
Our studio was given a series of prompts and one of them included a narrative. I take a long time to narrow down my thoughts, so I’ve been just sitting on it and distilling it and making drawings and thinking and making diagrams and thinking and ... I didn’t have a narrative for the mid review.
Other people read out their 2-to-3 pg and then referred to the drawings. I’ve been burned by reviews enough times (read as: I’ve made this mistake many times) to recognize unengaging that kind of presentation is. So I just skipped all of that. (Also note: this has been encouraged to us many times....and it’s rarely successful! There must be some art to it.)
I share this anecdote because I’m kinda proud of choosing to “improvise” and I do think I’ve had my best presentation so far. I used my board layout as an outline for my narrative and walked the audience through them. I may have done it too quickly because I’ve had to explain each drawing after that. Either way still really happy.
Going Further (and taking a step back at the same time?)
I intentionally focused on one aspect of my bigger story. My bigger theme, I think, is tragedy and trauma and how that can used as an avenue for greater empathy. For the mid-review I focused on individual experiences of trauma a little more than spaces of (and relating to) trauma.
I also made the mistake of watching some documentaries about post-war art. DADA IS SO COOL! I am now wondering if I should do a project like that.
Anyways, below are the big three drawings (all 10″ x 10″ with a 1.5″ frame) I created for this chapter. Following that is my current narrative, written out, but obviously after the response.
POST-TRAUMATIC LANDSCAPE
formerly known as: Something Scary, Something Pretty
(Quick note: I owe a lot of the framework to Kathy Knapp’s paper, “The Business of Forgetting: Postwar Living Memorials and the Post-Traumatic Suburb inChang-rae Lee's "Aloft"” (2013). It’s a fantastic *book review* full of energy. More explicit appropriation have been informally marked.)
I am interested post-traumatic landscapes. There are two types of traumatic landscapes: (1) where the trauma occurred, and (2) where the traumatized ‘moves on.’ The bigger narrative I connect today’s presentation to focuses on tragedy, not to compare different tragedies, but to propose it as an avenue for greater empathy. I believe that trauma can connect people across time and geography.
Trauma is an powerful negative event. Because of its acute nature, it remains a fragment in experience. If that fragment is left uncategorized, trauma can manifest into a recurring condition. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) labels a condition where an individual has recurring events of stress responses. Symptoms typically include a regressed reaction to stress - e.g. tantrums, rather than thought out responses - that remove the individual from the reality they are situated in.
Because of that, and from the coincidental viewing of Full Metal Jacket in the early stages of the project, the protagonist for this chapter of my story is that of the Vietnam soldier, the young American Boy who answered the call of duty. Born from an American Father -- a war hero -- and an American Mother -- a Maternal figure -- a maternal figure* -- whose job is to defend the values of his country for his American siblings, who thrive in the playgrounds and swimming pools that his Father and Fathers have created in their American suburb.
(The American Family Tree)
To war he goes along with American Brothers, who are subjected to the same fear and violence unknown; and he as much as his American Brothers could end up a ‘Dead Boy’ -- young men who have died for the freedom for the American Family to own a house -- or he could return home to become a Don Draper figure, a successful American Man who continues the heroic (and masculine) legacy of the American persona.
But he could come back home broken, as a carrier of “psychoneuroses,” and be revoked his American Dream. Perhaps like his Father’s generation, he could be medicated, shamed, humiliated, or bribed to move on. [Knapp]
Although trauma and PTSD are typically associated with war, it can be caused by a wide range of events: personal injuries, surgeries, domestic violence, ... National tragedies, impact through the continent, can act as guides guides for personal experiences. From each big event stems numerous individual memories and pain.
(excerpt from graphic timeline of national tragedies)
The designed environment, in either the site of occurrence or the site of moving on, typically responds in three ways:
(1) Burial -- like the suburbs after World War II, spaces are erected without any regard to the trauma that occurred.
(2) Prevention -- like airports after 9/11 and schools after school shootings, fences, metal detectors, security ... various deterrents are deployed while maintaining the anxiety of prevention, wanting the event to never occur again.
(3) Memorial -- like National Cemeteries, these spaces recognize the tragedy but offer a very static location to memorialize the lost. (It is important to note that there are superb examples for these sites that promote ‘reconciliation,’ like the Vietnam War Memorial designed by Maya Lin.)
Representation: These collages borrow the language of Modern artists Max Ernst and Francis Bacon. They have lived through both World War I and World War II and expressed their experiences of pain through artwork. Ingredients to each condition are abstracted into icons, lacking context beyond what can be projected onto them by the viewer’s experience. The representation of children signal one of the primary themes of Full Metal Jacket: ‘loss of innocence.’ They also represent some Modern artists revering up childish expressions of art (such as Picasso).
....(returning to normal voice)
This is about as far as I’ve really worked out. The shaky bits for me are:
1) wanting to linger in the Vietnam Era -- I think it’s worth recognizing the Vietnam soldier, no matter how dated he may be, because a lot of the conditions and symptoms of that era really laid the foundation for the American psyche today. ---- Funny enough, I have a classmate working on the feminine side of this equation, of the ‘domestic? woman’ (I see my project as the masculine version of her project) and someone asked, “Is that (50s archetype) still relevant?” ... I screamed “YES!” in my head, both for her project and mine.
1.5) oh, all of this to say -- TOXIC MASCULINITY! I think we (the collective we) are all victims of such constructs...
2) not knowing where to go next -- I guess the logical direction is to create or catalog more successful memories? And really deconstruct the not so great memorials? I’ve been given some ideas on how to do this ... I’ve also thought about therapy gardens and pretty greenways :P
3) Continuing or disregarding where this project started -- I really tried hard to not mention the dogwood trail, which was how this entire project started, but it is kinda a funny anecdote -- “I was looking up the history of the Knoxville Dogwood Trail, and then watched Full Metal Jacket, and realized -- hey, that’s happening at the same time!”
4) analog to gardening -- the video I created is really fun, and I want to hold onto this concept just for the video!
5) making the mistake of watching post-war-art documentaries: I WANT TO DO A PROJECT ON DADA!
