Today’s Plan:
- Listening to Kalman (15 minutes)
- Elements of her Process (15 minutes)
- Reading (8 minutes)
- Free Writing (8 minutes)
- Homework
In today’s class I want to work out a bit more what we might mean by “affective object.” We’ll be listening to Kalman discuss her aesthetic and then talk about My Favorite Things.
A question that can resonate throughout today’s discussion: why is she interested in broken furniture, shoes, buttons, and books? That is–I don’t think her work is simply an exposition of collections. There are currents that run underneath.
The following video approaches some of those currents, although I do not think that she explicitly details them. As we watch the following video, I’d like you to take notes–pay attention and record things that can help us explicate her process. What are the ingredients of a Kalman? What are the steps in the recipe? How do we “cook” those ingredients (arrange them, process them, etc)?
2012/10 Maira Kalman from CreativeMornings on Vimeo
Notes toward a process:
- A focus on specific places
- How happy are you / how sad are you? Interrogating one’s feelings
- “Which brings me to the chicken” / sudden transitions. Lack of explicit connection. Leaving the reader to make connections and fill in gaps.
- The unexpected, odd little moment.
- First instinct: Time. Precious. Fleeting. Be aware of the moment. Greatest moments when you are on your own. (Why? Because you are open to an encounter).
- Living the Journey: walk around the block, or a trip to India. You can see as much in a walk around the block as you can on a trip around the world.
- How do you navigate the world with a sense of humor?
- An interest in history. Tracing the history of specific objects.
- Juxtaposition: Lincoln. Personal history [Subjective]. National history [Objective]. Breakfast at the museum. A hat. Serendipity.
- An empty brain. Not a stupid brain.
- The dog and bemused indifference.
- Idiosyncratic details.
- “I didn’t have to think, I just fell in love with it.”
- The countess / Cindy Sherman / presence as performance art as interruption
Let’s think about that final slide she shares. What does this tell us about how Kalman approaches life and art?
Potential Themes
I noticed two dominant themes in Kalman’s work, the first was the prevalence of sadness, it’s inevitability. The second, and obviously related, was the passing of time, the inevitability of change and, ultimately, the reality of death.
This theme first surfaces on page 15, when she writes “Somewhere not too far away, the czar and the czarina with their beautiful children, all in white, were taking tea in their palace.
Soon that would end. As all things do.
This sadness really hit me on page 61: “Watching a person eat soup can break your heart.” And again on page 37: “You can rely on sadness. Happiness, well…that is a different story.” Page 87/88, from a door: “People were always coming and going and dying. She was killed in the Holocaust. Which brings us inevitably to sorrow”
And this acknowledgement of sadness leads a realization of death. Page 34:
There is a piano, and music will be played in the room.
And it has something (or everything) to do with Life and Death.
And Time. Always Time.
And page 65’s nostalgic discussion of old candy stores and candy boxes carefully hand wrapped (a time long past). And these two themes wrap up in the book’s conclusion, on pages 141-145.
But I want to suggest that these themes, the objective message of the text, are offset, juxtaposed, against the earnest joy of the everyday and the idiosyncratic. See especially page 78.
In short, I want to suggest that Kalman provides us a method for tracing the affective resonances of objects. How they compose us. How they resonate with us. Reflecting on objects and our investment in them, their histories, our histories, becomes a electrate method of introspection and invention.
Homework
Read the Amhed and Jenkins readings (available in the files section of Canvas).
