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Imagination as Sanctuary, Confluence of all three aspects of Creation,…

- - - - The Pictures Generation
        Unlike the other two artistic examples that I have on this thread, the relevance of the Pictures Generation to my project is entirely fostered on the audience's reception. For these artists, coming of age in the mid-twentieth century, as the essay linked below describes, stymied their belief of any shred of authenticity. In order to convey this to the public, these artists played on leitmotifs of highly circulated pieces of popular culture germane to their everyday life, but always with a slight twist. Something was always off... but that never interrupted the legibility of their work, so it has been argued. In turn, this causes the onlooker to take pause and entertain the cerebral nature of their work: why am I able to fully understand this artwork without many particularities? Why am I able to comfortably fill in the gaps? In turn, particularly with the work of Cindy Sherman in her series entitled Untitled Film Stills, these artists want us to walk away with a more critical question: why do I accept these axioms? Or better yet, why and how do I willingly participate in the prevailing cultural imagination if it is constantly working to belittle and ostracize certain demographics who oftentimes do not have a platform to advocate for themselves within this very same cultural zeitgeist? In short, the work of the Pictures Generation is meant to prompt the audiences to think about what they let inform their imagination, and why/how they allow these things to be unchallenged by provoking discomfort within the viewer.
        (MoMA essay link: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pcgn/hd_pcgn.htm)
  - - - Brittany's Discussion Response:
        "Annie,
        I adore the spirit behind this project, and I echo a lot of what my classmates have said in answer to your prompts. Like Maya (and perhaps also like you!), I sense that the distinction between imagination and creation is not so clearly defined. I also struggle a bit with the concept of “embodied” vs. “disembodied” practices. What exactly do you mean by that? Are those words you’ve chosen to articulate “real” vs. “imagined”? If so, I can’t help but think of a quote from Harry Potter: “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth does that mean that it’s not real?”
        I’m also stuck on this point because I’ve noticed the ways in which people (within academia particularly) sometimes use the word “embodied” to denote a certain kind of movement in the world, which is sometimes juxtaposed with something that is implicitly less desirable. I don’t think that’s what you’re doing here in your distinction between terms, but I want to flag that anyway. As you know, embodiment is complicated. And as a young, disabled child (and even now in some capacity), I often turned to books and imagination to grapple with questions I couldn’t physically do much about. I think what you’re suggesting here is that imagination is its own form of perfectly valid “doing.” But I wonder (genuinely—I’m unsure) whether the “embodiment” you’re suggesting carries with it a distinctly physical character that many people—my young, disabled self included—may find less than truthful to our experience.
        Not to throw a wrench in your project, but I also wonder what it would look like to approach imagination as embodiment. What are the benefits and limitations of doing so? How, if at all, could something like creation come in to fill gaps in imagination? Maybe this is totally beyond the scope of the questions you’re trying to answer. But maybe approaching your own in a similar way can highlight the reciprocity that binds imagination and creation, rather than setting them on a binary that implies opposition where it may not exist."
  - - - "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" by Torrey Peters
        (https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020-05-05_5eb19256d9754_IFYFALO-Website-PDF.pdf)
        This fictional novella by Torrey Peters ties into similar themes of what it would look like to reimagine what sanctuary everywhere and for everyone could look like, this time for Peters using the vehicle of writing to explore this concept as it pertains to gender creation and assertion compared to the Biennale's approach through different forms of global visual and performance art practices.
      - Maya's Discussion Response:
        "Annie - thank you so much for your beautiful prompt for this week's Q+Q. This, and your project in general, are giving me a lot to think about. A few initial thoughts.
        At first read, I'm stunned (in a good way) by your articulation: "if imagination is sanctuary, creation is survival." I want to simmer with this. And I agree with this articulation. It is powerful, beautiful, a call to exist more fully in both, to see the value in both.
        To think aloud with you: As I consider my personal experience, I find it complicating slightly your delineation of disembodiment/embodiment between imagination and sanctuary. In my experience, certainly imagination can be a disembodied (or entirely internal/mental/spiritual) act. However, as I reflected on your question about the most powerful experiences of imagination in my life, they actually have an incredibly embodied feel to them. For example, I have at times used imagination as a way to counter my own anxiety and felt tears wash over me. To me, the imaginary process and the embodied experience were so closer together that it was hard to separate them. But perhaps you would classify this as an act of creation? Similarly, I am curious if you think of imagination --> creation as a chronology. In my own creative process, I will often feel most "in it" when I actually don't think beforehand but just let my body/spirit move.
        Okay one other thought here - are there times when imagination is an act of creation? I'm thinking about futurisms specifically that imagine a future world beyond climate change, racism, settler colonialsim etc.
        Anyways - I am in love with this prompt and have no answers but clearly this prompted a lot for me to consider."
      - Susan's Discussion Response: "Annie,
        Your musings on the imagination are wonderful.
        I was wondering, thinking of a situation in my own past, what happens if you can imagine but feel no sense of agency to create?
        I once had about seven weeks of disembodied imagining because I was in a hospital on bed rest with a precarious pregnancy, early in its 7th month.
        I really wasn’t allowed to leave the bed.
        I recall being hooked up to monitors measuring my heart rate and the baby’s and my job was to JUST STAY CALM. I tried to calm my anxiety by imagining the best possible outcome, but, really, imagining is challenging when you can’t act to create the world you are imagining.
        A well-meaning nurse gave me a book to read, “The Premature Baby Book.” After looking at it for about 2 minutes, and finding it quite scary (and being in a state of denial), I put it aside. I remember a hospital chaplain coming in and asking to pray with me, and I remember thinking, “That’s fine, but this is not a tragedy…”
        I spent a lot of time imagining what I would do once going home with a healthy baby. (I was clueless about parenthood.) Frankly, by the seventh week, I was mostly imagining me being able to do things I had taken for granted, like going to the grocery store or turning on a light in a room. But mostly, I just refused to imagine terrible outcomes. That was the most creative act I could do. I could at least choose what to imagine.
        Perhaps it worked; I went home with slightly premature but healthy baby."
- - - - Paul McCartney GQ Interview "Let It Be" is described around the timestamp of 18:20
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u97_inloBmY
      - my personal video of Paul playing "Let It Be" in concert not too long ago (the link below is for a public Google Drive folder, so the link will take you away from this page)
  - - - “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” 3
        “Life changes in the instant./ The ordinary instant.” 3
        “Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” 26
        “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” 27
        “Until now I had been able to only grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention… [so] I began.” 143
        “People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as “dwelling on it.”... Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.” 192
        “Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given… In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves.” 193
- - - - Even though I mention several of these quotes within my podcast, I wanted them to be especially accessible because of how moving I find them to be, and how artfully they coalesce so many of the themes and strands of thought that undergird my project.
        
        “That while people passed away, the soul of a great artist would stay; that what they made would never die, so they were the one we could hold close forever. Art would never leave us like a father dying. In a way, it would always remain. Artists manifested themselves in art, not the world, so humans could encounter them there, forever.” 64
        
        “She didn’t want to get over the pain. She didn’t have the energy to make the best of it. She didn’t see what purpose it would serve to make the best of something in a world that felt stripped of any arrows, any direction, any sense.” 87
        
        “Humans hadn’t lost what was most beautiful; our very small and tentative sense of the hidden, magnificent, divine.” 88
        
        “To find the right distance from everything in life is the most important thing. To stand at the right distance, like God standing back from the canvas – for you can’t see anything if you’re too up close, and you can’t see anything if you’re too far away.” 14
        
        “There is a ruthlessness to life. It seems to lack balance- and in its particulars, it does. None of us is able to stand far back enough from life to see the balance that somehow exists.” 175
        
        “An artist is driven to make art by the spirit made inside them, making an artwork like a signal or flare calling out, beckoning its kin to come near.” 185
        
        “The heart of the artist is a little bit hollow. The bones of the artist are a little bit hollow. The brain of the artist is a little bit hollow. But this allows them to fly.” 6
        
        “For art is not made for living bodies – it is made for the cold, eternal soul.” 23
      - “Are words actually any use to describe what pain (or passion, for that matter) really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful.” 22
        “Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him. Everyone will get used to it except me.” 24