This afternoon we were honored to be joined by Christine Corday, an artist who works with elemental metals to create monumental sculptures. Afterward, our panel engaged her in a lively discussion that touched on many of the points we have covered in our dialogue. Readers are encouraged to post questions and comments for Christine here; she will be checking and I'm sure will be delighted to respond.
Christine Corday artist talk: Thingly Affinities: Christine Corday.
3 comments:
Christine, this was an unforgettable presentation. There were so many points of resonance for me in these 90 minutes. Thank you for sharing, openly and articulately.
Charlene used a wonderful word to describe your language and point of view: fresh. That’s another way of saying your authenticity is unquestioned and in tact.
Intimacy is indifferent to scale.
Material phases of suns.
How to observe what you cannot see.
Objects that defy objecthood.
Art without being an artist.
We are all looking at the same clay.
Happy to be alive in the down cycle (or up cycle) of shared material, shared disciplines.
This all speaks to a deeply devotional practice.
Scale was a term used many times in your presentation. Your projects and explorations operate at a level that is rarefied and larger than life. Meanwhile many of us are working at a very different place on the scale spectrum. I am now considering what outcomes I can achieve that are, like intimacy, indifferent to scale. It is a useful and clarifying question to ask, one inspired by your words.
Yes to all that, Deborah -- Christine is such an inspiration. As I said last night, one of the things I so admire about her is her determination to bring art back out into the real world - out beyond the petty concerns of the soulless and obsolescing gallery system and into the larger cultural sphere, where it can actually make a difference. (I say "back out" because "out" is indeed where art originated: out there in the larger community, a shared cultural force belonging to everyone and of which everyone partook.) One of her favorite phrases is "art as cultural infrastructure." This is exactly what I envision for a posthumanist art -- an approach to art that is other-oriented, out-oriented, oriented away from the self and toward our shared beinghood as Earthlings, where "Earthling" extends beyond the human to include all that is of the earth that is nonhuman too. Christine's ITER project speaks so beautifully to this idea. Humble, anonymous, and deeply interdependent with all the other parts, her little bolt sits tucked into that enormous structure, unseen and unheard, yet spreading its symbolic resonance through the enterprise as a whole. Art with a capital A as the 36th participating country: can you imagine how much this has inspired all the other countries involved? And I can guarantee that it's revised more than a few assumptions about art long held by people who have no familiarity with what we do and why.
Taney, That's a wonderful summation of one of the many highlights from Christine's presentation.Thank you for pulling it together so succinctly.
I have been thinking about the presentation steadily over the last 24 hours, and now new questions are coming to the surface. I would so appreciate hearing Christine talk about the tension/relationship/confluence that exists between logical cognition and intuition in how to chart the next project, how to determine the direction of one's work.
I know those are loaded terms, so perhaps I can phrase it another way that most artists will recognize: How do you decide when to follow those inchoate urges rather than the logical/strategic mind, and vice versa? With so many project possibilities to consider, how do you go about choosing your next step?
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