What we're going to do now is a brief interlude of,
looking at a collaboration that Lucinda and I have
been working on since last May.
I, too, am interested in collaboration.
And I'll read some poems after this chapter
of our presentation in which I talk about some collaborations
between artists and scientists.
But, Lucinda and I, many of you know,
we did a collaboration some years ago
called The Anatomy of Desire.
Kore Press published this beautiful artist's book
from that collaboration.
And Luce had an exhibit here at the University in the Student
Union, of related pictures.
And that was, that collaboration was really mostly writing.
And the object that was produced was a little chapbook
that opened like French doors-- her words, my words, her words,
my words.
And the idea was to challenge ourselves
on a topic that was difficult, allegedly, for mothers
and daughters to talk about--
desire.
Which we can talk about, and have always talked
about quite freely for a mother and daughter.
And we discovered our limitations with that, though.
We wanted to push ourselves--
[LAUGHTER]
--we wanted to push ourselves to the point
where we got uncomfortable with each other.
Because everyone would say, "Oh guys,
you can talk about anything."
And we always say, "All right, where is it?
Where you hit the edge, where you
can't talk about it anymore?"
So we pushed it to that point.
So that, we have.
That's the only formal collaboration
we've done, other than just as artists.
I think, a wonderful deepening dimension of our relationship
is that I am often a first viewer for Lucinda's art work,
and she is often a first reader for my writing projects.
But do you want to talk about the Shotpouch
briefly, about the Shotpouch residency?
Because that's what kicked up this next collaboration.
Yes, Oregon State University has this amazing spot--
Shotpouch Creek Residency Center.
And it's essentially a cabin in the woods, which
is a little terrifying because you really
are in a cabin in the woods.
And we could imagine all sorts of creatures watching us
from the jungle around.
But we were fortunate to be there for a week in,
it was a week, right?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Outside of Corvallis is the location.
We were there for a week and really the only charge
for us was to engage in a dialogue.
There didn't need to be any product, which was so rare
and an incredible relief and--
yeah.
I mean, should I say how we, it was
like after this week of being in dialogue--
Yes.
--which was very rich, and we were each doing
our independent work.
Right.
We ended up wanting to, at least extend the process,
I wouldn't say formalize it.
But--
And Luce has been doing a collaboration with an artist
friend for years, where they send drawings back and forth,
and they keep working on the same piece of paper.
And I was jealous of that vocabulary of art, where
you could just do anything, and the playfulness
that was possible in a visual vocabulary that
didn't seem possible in a verbal vocabulary.
So we've been exchanging an artist's journal since May.
We started it at the Shotpouch Creek residency, one of us
will keep the notebook for maybe a few days or a few weeks.
And what you're going to see is an abstraction
of some of the pages, where you see
the combination of the visual vocabulary and the written
vocabulary.
And we're just messing with each other, and the point of this,
at this point, is to--
I think the point of it is for us
to work in a way that is partial, that is playful,
that works with the aesthetics of a single page.
There are themes and motifs that have bubbled up repeatedly.
But basically, we're going to show you some of those pages
and maybe say a little bit about the process and some
of the dominant themes that have come up in that work so far.
I think that works.
I mean, you know, we actually thought about sharing,
chronologically, the pages of this book and showing them
to you fully.
But in a way that would have been
so much like presenting a finished object.
And it's really not about that.
It's not a finished object.
One of the interesting things is how, well, there's
so many interesting things, but the relationship of image
to text, and how we go back and forth with that.
But also as a visual artist, I feel, not corrective
but like I want each page to work in a formal, visual way.
So, I mean, we just go through it every,
it's not like we add to pages, but we'll go back
and the pages get altered in a way that's not chronological.
And these close up shots, in a way,
echo the way we see it, I think, more accurately
than a chronological march would.
So those yellow eyes, I think, were
the eyes of either a gorilla or a cheetah.
Now, I can't even remember.
I had put a photograph in there, Lucinda pulled the eyes out
and put them on the next page.
And those eyes sat on that page, I think for two months
all by themselves.
We moved the journal on, maybe 20 pages.
One day, the notebook came back to me
and those little bones were there with the eyes.
And so, it's very intuitive, it's very,
let's see what works.
And then, accidentally, this new dimension of the project
happened.
Do you want to talk about the accident of the--
I mean, we'd started to incorporate some collage
and I usually, I live in Bath, Maine.
My studio's in Portland, so I'm traveling back and forth a lot,
so I usually have the art bag with everything thrown in it.
So I'd taken a bunch of collage elements
and tucked them in the back of the journal,
and basically forgot they were there.
And sent them to my mother who thought
that I had like hidden a present for her in the back
and found them--
For me?
--but she incorporated them beautifully,
and then sent it back with some hidden collage elements for me.
So like from that point on, if there's nothing in there
I'm incredibly disappointed.
I'm shaking it and--
Right, and we've gotten freer and freer to mess
with each other stuff and cut it up.
Like she sent me the notebook back once in a Manila envelope
that had this funky tape with pictures of Jesus
all over the tape.
And you'll see an image in the series, where I just
cut the images of Jesus in half, to make
them the color and pattern.
And to again, to knock down the authority
of the original iconography.
One thing that's significant is that, I
think it was really at Shotpouch that we realized
the degree to which our independent bodies of work
had so many congruencies.
We both were dealing with the natural world,
we both were thinking about animal narratives.
And this is giving us a vehicle to have that conversation
with one another, even though those bodies of work
were created separately.
I think that's happened several times in our artistic lives.
Is that she'll show me, where can
I-- and I'll say, "Oh, that's really interesting",
and I'll show her work.
And then suddenly, months later, we realize,
"hey, we're both working with animals,
and we have been for a year.
What's that about?"
And so part of the agenda is to be
irreverent about the inherent hierarchy that exists
between a mother and her kids.
And hopefully by talking artist to artist,
aesthetic to aesthetic, I hope that we're
able to mess with each other's material
in a way that calls up new possibilities for relationship
in what could be an inherent dynamic.
And that's what all collaboration is about,
I think, is trying to find a new dynamic of relationship
between people who might have a fixed
way of relating to one another.
Do you want to say something about fairy tales or anything
with this is sort of a fairy tale even?
No, you can describe this one because it
was based on that question about the dragon.
How we both remembered our relationship
to fairy tale and mythological--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
We set fairy tale themes that will come up,
you'll see a few images that have fairy tales in them.
A Czech fairy tale and an old Grimm's fairy tale.
But I get to use Lucinda as a research subject
because her childhood is something
I experienced as her mother.
And so I can remember certain things about her childhood,
but I can also interrogate her about her childhood.
And one of the things I asked is,
I've been trying to think about what do animals
mean in the human imagination.
At this point in our history, where there's so much elegy
and anguish and wounding and bandaging
of animals and of the natural world.
And so, I asked her about dragons
because I wanted to know, did she ever really believe
that dragons existed.
I was trying to get to, what did we
feel when we were kids about all these monsters
that were part of our lives?
Did we really believe it?
And so, that last page about the dragons came out of that,
and we both agreed that we believed they existed.
Dragons and all the other monsters.
But they seem to exist in a parallel world,
and that we were afraid of them, but it
was like they would never come in our bedroom.
They were somewhere else and we knew that.
And we somehow believed them without feeling that they lived
in the same place that we did.
This brings up something that I'll just say really briefly,
because I didn't have a chance to when
I was speaking about my work.
Which there, there are probably some people
who are fans of Lewis Hyde and his book, Trickster Makes This
World, was a wonderful one for me
in terms of thinking about the sort of artist, artist writer,
as trickster.
And again, some great unpacking of that idea of the person
who's playing and acting, and that trickster/jester role can
speak to the more difficult truths,
can speak witness to issues in a way that something, maybe,
perhaps more serious couldn't.
I like that one.
This was from the root, the root, this story.
Is Jessie Wilson here tonight?
Uh-huh, yes.
Oh, right there.
Were you in Prague, did you see Little Otik?
The nightmare horror film, anybody
know the Czech film, Little Otik?
A masterpiece of surrealism.
One of the most terrifying films you'll ever see.
It's about this couple that are infertile,
they can't have a baby.
And so, they go out from the city of Prague,
out to the country to their country place in the mountain.
And the husband takes a root and cuts something
that looks like a baby, and gives it
to his wife as a sort of consolation.
Well, it turns out the root comes to life.
And it's kind of a parable, a surrealist parable
about the perversity of this insatiable child
who begins to eat everything and turns
into this enormous monster and eats the mailman.
And it becomes, if you ever wanted
to see parenthood turned into a perverse enterprise,
go watch the Little Otik.
It's a masterpiece.
So here's the little root, the beautiful image and nature
of the dancing plant.
But indeed, it is not benign at all in this particular context.
I was, I drew this banner.
It's like a perfect place, it's the one place she didn't write.
It's like, I kept sending this one back to her thinking
she would write something really important on the banner.
But no, along the side, all around it.
I was very timid in the early pages.
I didn't want to mess with your stuff
and make you feel, "Oh, there goes Mom telling me what
to do with my banner again."
[LAUGHTER]
"Could I put it over here, would that be OK?"
This was funny because she wanted me,
and I drew that cabbage afterwards.
She wanted, you got really brave with actually drawing something
if you wanted it.
But this was her direction to me,
like, draw a leafy cabbage here.
So I did it.
For the cabbage is figured in the Little Otik field.
There's the Jesus.
I sent her those flowers from a seed catalog,
she turned them into this bubbly beanstalk.
One of the fairy tales that comes up in the narrative
was Jack and the Beanstalk.
And we're thinking, I don't know,
we want to go there more with Jack and the Beanstalk.
And the cow, I want to do something with the cow.
Well, desire, of course, has come back in because two women,
mother, daughter, cannot spend months talking to one another
about all the issues in their life without following up
on desire.
And so, this is perhaps a reiteration of that theme.
A gorilla from the Jacksonville zoo,
where I'm Poet-in-Residence.
This gorilla's name is Lash.
It's a piece of the text to the retelling of the Little Otik
myth.
Whatever this has to do--
I don't know.
You did that, I think.
[LAUGHS]
No, I sent it to you.
You glued it on top of your own text.
I did, I glued it on top of my own text.
OK.
So you see--
It's so funny, we're documenting, like,
who's messed with, you know--
Right, I know.
You messed with that, I didn't mess with that.
One of the guiding spirits of the project
is Myron Stout, who is a painter, an artist that I
had the privilege to read for in Provincetown
for a couple of winters.
He became blind in his later years,
and he used to hire some of the writers who
are hanging out in Provincetown to come and read for him.
And he had this wonderful statement in his artist
journals, the full statement is, "The intuition
is more in harmony with nature--"
I can't remember either.
It's something like, "--than any system the human mind can
invent."
Which is the idea of this project,
is to remain in a place where we trust
the intuition, letting it unfold by intuition.
We're not developing a system, we're
not saying, "this is what we're going to accomplish,
this is our goal."
We're trying to remain as open as possible
to letting intuition be the determining guide.
And we'll keep this up for maybe a year or two
and see where we go with it.
I think we need to just finish up and show
you the rest of these.
I mean, I think that one thing that's happening formally
is this attempt at repetition.
We're starting, now that we've been doing it for six months
or so, to really work to, we're pulling out narratives.
We're looking for narrative threads, but also
visual threads and visual repetition.
So--
An animal and vegetable, obviously
objects, become consistent, repeats.
I have no idea what this is.
It hasn't become yet.
OK.
And this is the last image.
Again, these are just excerpts from,
there's several other pages that were not including here.
But again, it's the beginning of a project.
So we hope that just a window into showing you,
I mean, one of the challenges to doing
a collaboration for artists is that artists
work so individually.
It's all about individual inventiveness
and consciousness.
So this is an attempt to give you
a slice into a project that's very much in motion,
and will be for some time.
So we hope it gives you a feel for what that is like.
We're having a blast.
[APPLAUSE]