tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7424914094601435567.post6153170880517591748..comments2023-03-21T03:24:56.533-07:00Comments on Thingly Affinities: Changing the Subject (Stephanie Grilli)Taney Ronigerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13624397685047300841noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7424914094601435567.post-22667172217910381632020-12-12T08:23:57.046-08:002020-12-12T08:23:57.046-08:00Stephanie, This post has so much I would like to r...Stephanie, This post has so much I would like to respond to, way more than I can put in a comment. But I thank you for closing in on essential thinking/feeling that is so intimate to my art making life. <br /><br />I resonated so redolently to this:<br /><br />"I suggest that it is subjectivity that can be the vehicle (how’s that word choice?) that can extend our sense of being in the world to ever-widening awareness."<br /><br />And then you move to Christine Corday, how "no matter how much she deferred to a system how much of her self was still present." <br /><br />That was followed by this powerful line:<br /><br />"The way out of a solipsistic, narcissistic subjecthood is encountering and entertaining the integrity (in its double meaning) of others in their multiplicity (rocks, trees, birds, bacteria…)."<br /><br />Speaking personally--and I use that term intentionally with its many meanings--my art practice takes place in that spectrum between the intensely personal/subjective and the exquisitely incomprehensible cosmic/unitive. But the starting point is highly subjective and personal to me. I emphasize "starting point" since embracing the rest of that spectrum is, as you have suggested, so necessary.<br /><br />Many of us--like your Taos artists--have found centers of gravity that operate from a place that has almost nothing to do with market trends and international art developments (after drugs, art is the largest unregulated market in the world after all.) And we are, in our own way, tapping into our own versions of the "cosmically resonant setting" you experienced with the Taos Pueblo. Like Salmon Rushdie's metaphor of a sea full of currents that, like stories, can be found just by reaching your hand in, the multiplicity and exquisite expansiveness of our world is everywhere. Dive in.<br /><br />And how grateful I am that you included images from Margaret Pettee Olsen. Her work is full bodied, complex and compelling.<br /><br />Deborah Barlowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13152621151325407328noreply@blogger.com