House Talk

Spotlight on Alexis Pride

2012-01-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

Alexis Pride partnered with Andrea Jia Yin Rettig in the 2011 Flying House gallery event. Originally, I thought the two would hit it off because both were interested in working with cross-cultural issues. Well, they did hit it off, though I’m not sure the outcome of their collaboration went anywhere I had expected it to go––and that’s what I’ve come to know about Alexis; she’s unexpected. On one hand, she’s bold and she’s vocal, and on the other, she is sensitive to detail, sensory, and even a little shy. It was a pleasure to meet her.

Alexis is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago and a Director of Graduate Programs in the Fiction Writing Department. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia, and her PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She’s the author of a novel, Where the River Ends, several short stories, and is also a playwright who runs a small theater company with a strong civil engagement practice.

Here is what she had to say:

At the gallery event, you introduced your reading by telling the crowd what you had been expecting out of Flying House, and about what you got. Can you tell us about that?

When I read about Flying House I immediately knew I had to apply! Based on my reading, the expectation was that I’d have an opportunity to explore beyond my usual artistic inclinations through a partnership determined by the Flying House team. The idea of being pushed out of my comfort zone, to consider another way of perceiving and conceptualizing narrative was extremely attractive. I love challenges that encourage artistic growth, learning from others who can artfully introduce and articulate another point of view. I’m thrilled to say that my expectations were exceeded by the actual collaboration experience. Andrea and I connected across the continent (literally), in that I was in Prague when we first spoke; and little did I know the physical distance would be somewhat metaphoric, with respect to how we conceptualize story. Still though, there was immediate synergy we both felt when we met in Chicago. In the spirit of Flying House alumni, I tried something completely new: writing a period piece from another cultural perspective. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating by calling the experience transformative. As a result of my Flying House emersion, I’m a little bolder, a little more willing to try myself out as a writer in other contexts, to be open to the possibilities.

I mentioned above why I originally partnered you with Andrea Rettig. In your applications, both of you mentioned your interest in cross-cultural issues. I’m curious, did that ever come up in your brainstorming sessions? How did you start down the road of Just Once?

Just Once, Photography by Andrea Rettig

When Andrea and I first met, we talked about our lives as artists, and our principal interests. Cultural issues were a common thread in both our work. The contrast, however, was in our approaches to narrative. As a writer, I trend toward more sweeping prose; Andrea’s visual art, as she described it, focuses on a moment captured and examined. Our brainstorming was a winding process of finding the balance between my prosaic “macro” approach to telling, and Andrea’s “micro” sensibilities. The breakthrough came when Andrea suggested an inspiration item: a vintage gold beaded purse, circa 1950s. It became the centerpiece for my contribution to the partnership, the short story titled, Just Once.

Both the work you submitted with your application, and the work you completed for Flying House, was focused on young adults misunderstanding one another and therefore losing out on something, or changing in significant ways. Is this an intentional theme in your work?

I can’t say comparable themes in my work sample submitted and the work completed for Flying House were deliberate. I will say, however, that I find myself attracted to the idea of characters on the precipice of something significant, something that will change them significantly as a consequence of the choices they make. This resonates with the human experience, as we know it.

Just Once, Photography & Installation
by Andrea Rettig

The main character of Just Once is a young woman with a deformed foot. Perhaps it’s because of the foot––a very physical, tangible image––being at the center of this story that I find myself noticing other incredibly touchable images in your work: the beaded purse, the tulle, the cigarette. I want to literally put these things between two fingers and feel them, that’s how sensual your descriptions are. Do you think writing this story for an artist guided you in this direction? Did knowing your work was going to be made into an object make you think in objects?

Andrea was an incredible help in many ways to influence the final story product. I have to credit my training in Columbia’s MFA program, however, for sensory awareness when writing stories. The Story Workshop® approach to the teaching of writing emphasizes the heightened imaginative seeing at every given moment of narrative telling to draw the reader in.

Any projects in the hopper we should know about?

I’m continuing the work on my second novel, Gamekeepers.

Looking forward to it!

I’d like to close by saying Flying House provides a fantastic conduit for artists looking to stretch beyond the confines of artistic patterns. Long live the genius of the Flying House team!

Thanks so much, Alexis. Best of luck in the future––and we hope to see you at next year’s show!

To read an excerpt of Just Once, check out the 2011 Flying House Anthology. On sale now!

Flying House Fall Issue

Spotlight on D.O. Letz

2011-06-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

D.O. Letz, International Man of Mystery

I met D.O. Letz in a Comedy Writing workshop down in Alabama, and I sometimes still picture that horrible, moist and rubbery, gigantic vagina which he portrayed a father stuffing his adolescent son into, in an attempt to keep him from becoming gay. They went to the zoo. The father espoused. The son struggled hard to slither from the soft skin pouch. It gave me nightmares, but the story was hilarious (in a sick sort of way). The larger-than-life vagina was my introduction to Danny Letz, as well as MFA workshops. Both of us were newbies, finding our writerly selves, and in the years since, Danny has truly honed his craft.

I’ve read quite a few of Danny’s stories, many not so humorous, but all incredibly unique. Dense. I remember meeting a German expatriate in one of his pieces, at a urinal, having red-hot issues, and I had the need to continuously open up my large desktop dictionary as I read the idiosyncratic scene––this German was a professor type, and he had the biggest vocabulary imaginable (as does the author). Danny’s written about human taxidermy, about arson, about dissection, about mutilation––as you’ve seen in his Flying House work––and he enters these dark places all the while, somehow, still speaking to the ideals of love, faith, vulnerability, and emotions that make his stories not so much shocking, as incredibly tangible. Visual. The text on his pages is as much a work of art as what the words together represent.

Here is what he has to say:

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? How did you get to where you’re going?

I grew up in Utah and spent my childhood forever afraid of being outed as non-Mormon to my solely Mormon peer-group, which seems a trivial concern in hindsight, but meant everything when I was young. I carved a niche for myself writing and illustrating my own comic books, and decided very early on that I would dedicate my life to superhero comics. Perhaps this explains my love of movies, and stories magnified (whether in character, situation, or language) beyond the scope of “ordinary” existence, which at the time I found pretty ho-hum. For all the focus in the L.D.S. faith on the afterlife, all is wasted on marvelous descriptions of a three-tiered heaven (your local missionary can clarify), and there is little talk of hell fire to stoke the imagination. So in a way I needed Dr. Doom and Magneto to keep things interesting. Story writing—the non-adenoidal and non-radioactive land of pure text—finally won out. I decided that was a pursuit I couldn’t pass up. I’ve been working, as Barry Hannah put it, to simply make “the team” ever since.

Reading your stories requires focus, not only because there is a lot going on from one sentence to the next, but also because the language you use to create your worlds seems to come from another time––an occasionally gothic prose that meticulously probes its subjects. Very maximalist, in any case. Has there been a certain influence on you as a writer that created this style? What pushes you, and is there a direction you’re moving toward? (You’ve mentioned a love for Salmon Rushdie in the past––what about him influences your writing?).

Rushdie’s Satanic Verses pretty much killed my desire to do anything but write—the language in that book is so pristine, the elevated prose occasionally punctured by these incredibly comedic moments, it was like nothing I’d ever read. That book introduced me, obliquely, to an entire form of story-telling that spoke to me and my sense of the world. All of the authors I sought out all seemed in on the joke, attuned to the tragicomedy I’ve become convinced underlies all existence. In any case, I’ve always wanted to write something worthy of all the books that spoke to me, all the writing that introduced me to who I really am.

Jay Paonessa (left) & D.O. Letz (right)
2010 Flying House collaboration partners

When you signed on as a writer for Flying House, had you ever participated in a collaboration like this before? One of the challenges I’ve come to find for writers coming to our project, is the need to open up your work early on––before, during and after your ideas have started melding into something. Writers often work independently, not wanting to share stories before they are finished, and polished. Do you have any advice for writers new to collaboration? Your partner for Flying House was Jay Paonessa, how did you work together to form a cohesive product?

I had collaborated frequently on a number of short films, but that experience was very different. I enjoy collaboration, especially its ability to fence you in, force you and your partner to devise clever and equally satisfying solutions to a work you equally share. I think every writer gets a kick, no matter how small, whenever their words instigate a response, especially a creative response, and especially from a talented visual artist like Jay. Working collaboratively, for me, helps nurture a creative dialogue, and whereas in film all the participants get to watch slices of the project come to life as the narrative glues together, the collaboration with Jay was much more like a conversation. We sort of had an idea of what the thing might be, and tossed it back and forth till it was finished. Collaborating also has the bonus, if the partners sync, of keeping you on your toes. At its best it feels like a great, ante-upping game. I like that feeling.

On House Talk, we’ve been discussing where/what is the truest place art and text overlap––in performance art, in film, in video game platforms, in life––places both language and visuals have equal weight. How does the visual fit in to your writing? If you were to participate in Flying House again, what sort of project would you like to take on?

I would love to someday honor my third grade promise to the world and collaborate on a graphic novel. That would be amazing. I do think the aesthetic experience in all of the visual/textual mediums you’ve mentioned are unique to their mediums. For me each visual/written medium has something to offer the world in terms of communicating truth and human experience (to don our pretentious caps for a second), and while I may tend toward some mediums than others, I think each has a relative value in offering a take on “truth,” whatever that is. I do adore the Legend of Zelda if that’s what you’re asking.

Any of projects in the hopper?

I’m currently devoting all my energies to writing a novel. Hopefully I’ll still be alive at the other end of it.

interview by M– Fink

A (Late) March Feature Article, Sort Of

2011-04-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

Maniac Mansion: A Walkthrough

In my grandmother’s house, there was no paint, just wooden walls and nightlights: I would run my finger across the slats in wood to feel my way to where my grandparents were watching television: loud gunshots and fire-eyed speeches, words I would never understand. A memory and nothing afterwards—a snap and then sleep.

Afterwards, a house with the snake in the front yard. Afterwards, a house I don’t remember the first moments in: the moving in, the unpacking of boxes. I don’t remember having a say—your bed goes here, upstairs. Your bed is next to the attic with the pink puffs of insulation. I wanted to touch it, but it was made of glass, it would keep us warm. I know you know this but I had trouble sleeping—I wanted it to be colder than you could imagine. I want the window open. I am safe when I hold your hand and cross the street. I am safe when I am in my house. The car, fast, could not hit us—it would pass through us like a ghost, like a blowing curtain. I am going to tell you where I would hide if you found the key under our doormat. If you found the key under our doormat, my mother would lock you in the basement. My mother did not paint things back then. My father did not build things back then. We did not care about furniture, about sconces, about recessed lighting. This lamp provides light. You can sit on the ground if you’d like. This house is not ours—it never was; the smells of cooked pork from the downstairs neighbor, the wiring on the windows. There were no places to hide—no bookshelf that would rotate, no brick to push to open the door. No one would visit.

Afterwards, the house that is always changing. My mother jokes that long after we are gone from this earth, long after the people that inhabit the scorched earth understand what a house is and what it looked like, they will find the remnants of a building underneath the dirt and ash and know that it is old. Many years after that, they will try to figure out how old—how did the people in this house live; what rooms did they sleep in, what rooms did they keep hidden when guests arrived. They will think the house is older than it is: they will not understand that style is modern—that to evolve from Queen Anne, there would’ve had to have been a Queen Anne: arm slouched, a hybrid of thistle and rose sprouting from the same stem. This house is ours, and we can change it when we want: the dark red in the foyer a custard yellow now, after primer and coats of white. The light taupe in the kitchen, the color of a mouse’s back has been replaced with yellow. All things yellow. All things no longer permanent—the lighting up of the room, spring time when it is winter, certainly—but we are in New Jersey; the house set back into the woods separated by fences that keep the horses from cutting through our yard and eating the fake apples off the summer wreath, so that their legs cannot burst through the wooden planks of our porch (my father and I laid them down, slat by slat, painted battleship grey with a touch of blue, summer, spring, lighter) and snap into two with no way to set the bone. I don’t want to think about the most humane way to kill a horse, but I will: a poisoned meal, a bullet between the eyes, a freezing. My grandmother used to bet on the horses as a child and on the larger races she still does: a card in May contains folded bills with the words your horse came in. I wonder how she picked my horse; if it were random or if the horse looked like me, broad bodied and slow. If that is the case I don’t know how I could ever win—I would be a horse that carried wood to the barn. I would be the horse with the broken leg that you would try to drown in a bucket of water. To win: leave. To win, know that this house is not a house where anyone could live. To win, know that these things serve a purpose—a stone in the basement, an attempt to make music, an attempt to make the world around love what is left.

by Brian Oliu

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently lives in Alabama. New work can be found in The Collagist, Ninth Letter, 42opus, and others.

Spotlight on Jason Watts

2011-03-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

Jason Watts partnered with our last House Talk interviewee, AB Gorham, in the 2010 Flying House gallery event. He and I met just a few months prior to the show, and I quickly learned from working with him that Watts was a committed family man, a hard-working designer, and a lover of art. You’ll find him standing tall and straight and nearly always smiling, and with a forthright, quiet way about him. His work has been displayed in successful gallery shows around Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, Delaware and New York, and his paintings are included in many private and corporate collections including Northwest Airlines. Much of Jason’s work evolves out of an intimate love for Americana.

Here is what he had to say:

Tell us a bit about your artistic self. What has your journey been? Where are you headed? In your perfect dream, what kind of artist would you be?

I paint because I love to be creating, I’m constantly thinking about my “next work.” That said, I don’t always know where I’m going with my art from a larger point of view. My new work definitely uses pattern in a strong way as a motif, I have also tended toward multi-media, and am a bit more open to new processes in the work itself. I have been using an app called “brushes” on my ipad and iphone, and I already have seen the impact on my work. I now use this finger painting app to generate many of the compositions that I take to canvas.

You’ve mentioned in the past that landscapes intrigue you, especially American ones, and from the work you finished for Flying House––I’m thinking specifically of Prairie Grass or Cornfield here––you seem interested in a certain paint pallet, a blocking in between outlines, and in using interesting perspectives. I can only imagine you’ve arrived in this space after many, many attempts, and I wonder what it is about your muse that interests you personally?

Usually, my past work would always have a strong use of lines, or roads, that signify the human or man-made side of the equation. I like to play off more natural fluid lines with the hard edges of a row of buildings, homes, etc. I’m motivated by composition first, and then work in and build a scene. I’ve also taken to these topographic views, and it’s no secret that Google Earth has made it easy for me to zoom in on interesting landscapes and topography. The muted tones of Prairie Grass and Cornfield are very much grounded in the Midwestern landscape, and I typically view these places from a car or airplane, so they are a bit mysterious in a way, or places that we feel are familiar but yet aren’t. They are places we travel through to someplace else. I have come back to themes of travel, commuting, and transitional spaces in my work because I think of them as a larger metaphor for where I am in life and in my work––in constant transition from one phase to the next, really not knowing where the road will take me.

Prairie Grass, by Jason Watts
42" x 42" oil on Canvas with wood band

To follow up on the last question, when I look at Prairie Grass, I can’t help but notice that the shapes you’ve outlined within the landscape remind me of a technique Cezanne may have used in his figure paintings, where shapes were outlined and squared, and where color was of utmost importance––and that Cezanne drew the viewers eye through the canvas by placing objects (like your treetops) in critical quadrants of space. Then again, Cezanne was little interested in landscape. Who then, did you find inspiration from?

It’s an interesting question, and I do love Cezanne’s use of color and the way he could simplify, and abstract, certain shapes, all the while utilizing color to create focal points. I am influenced by a broad range of artists, and I do think we learn from wherever we can, borrowing from the artists that came before us. In terms of color, this is very true in my work. Many times I will place complementary colors together in the focal areas to draw the eye. Red and green, for instance, when next to each other, tend to make one another pop forward. This is helpful in foreground elements. Cool tones tend to recede and are helpful for backgrounds. I am very planned out when I create compositions, and usually I have charted my approach to what colors should go where in my sketchbook. That said, once a painting starts, sometimes a painting will work, and sometimes many changes will be needed to get it back on track. Some of my favorite artists, who I tend to come back to often, and who creep into my work, are Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Ruscha, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and George Bellows.

I find that we tend to steal bits and phrases of styles that we like from different places, but when you assemble these elements in your own work, and develop a process, they hopefully build to make your own style. That said, I find it strange when artists take offense to “looking like” a certain artist. I find this to be a complement.

You are both a Creative Director at a marketing agency, as well as a painter. When you think about the work you do for a living, in comparison to your artwork, how do you see them overlapping? Does one impel the other forward, or is one an outlet for the other?

I like the work I do, but I do believe it to be commercial in nature. Creatively, the types of projects I do are very interesting and challenging––but the blank sheet of paper that fine art represents is something entirely else. There are times when something I would see or do in the workplace might creep into my artwork, but I definitely think of them as separate. Plus, I tend to like the more expensive paint brands, substrates, brushes, etc., so my job allows me the ability to produce and buy the nicer supplies.

Diamond Prismed in Arrangement, by Jason Watts
I-phone brushes art with Gouache on arches paper
float mounted in 8" x 8" and 8" x 16" shadow boxes.

Advertising deals with image in conjunction with words, and the mission of Flying House is very interested in how these two entities merge and relate to one another. Do you consider advertisements to be pieces of artwork? Or is there a specific reason your artwork does not include type? Can you think of any artwork that incorporates words/headlines/text in interesting ways? Or, on the other hand, do you think advertising has a way of muddling the original artistic message?

I’d say advertising can be art, but it’s not a point of reference for my compositions. I do have some pieces with signage in them, but they’re not necessarily ad related. I would say more billboard imagery, and media found in our everyday environments, are the types of things that find their way into my work. I have several paintings where the main character is a parking garage, with vertically stacked cars and the front neon sign. Ed Ruscha is the guy that comes to mind for this type of work. I have created a few pieces with words that are almost like headlines. It is different though, as I think of these things as everyday vernacular signage that we see on the street: highway signs, parking garages, sometimes billboards. All of this media is around us, but is grounded in a place.

Your collaboration partner for Flying House was AB Gorham, a poet from Montana. In her interview, she mentioned your partnership: “Working together was a bit serendipitous in that we came to one another already working individually with similar ideas of landscape, space, & color. So, the meshing was fairly easy.” Is there anything there you would like to elaborate on? Was there any one thing in Gorham’s poetry that cued a light bulb just above your painting brain?

I was amazed by the way Ashley described a place. I think she is right to state that we came from the same place, but really they were so different. Paintings can get off track (for me at least) if they go too narrative, but Ashley was able to weave in very descriptive story lines and textures, while still keeping them fairly abstract and open. Like a good painting, there is sometimes a mystery to it. It keeps you coming back, wanting to know more. We both were describing landscapes, or places, in our work. We were making reference to things like texture, vantage points, the way light casts shadows and reflects, and ground and sky.

I began working on a collage, a display of many boxes, that dealt with Ashley’s poem, Diamonds Prismed by Arrangement, and I also sent her images of the two pieces that I had recently begun for Cornfield and Prairie Grass, and she used those as reference for her compositions. At the show, some of the questions that we fielded about the work were very relevant and suggested that people were reading in a bit more as well. I like that the pieces are somewhat open ended, and I think our work together describes the ambient mood, while leaving the details to the viewer/reader to imagine a bit further.

interview by M–– Fink

Spotlight on AB Gorham

2011-02-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

It feels fitting that AB Gorham should be our first House Talk interviewee. She and I spent many a late evening cooking dinners together down in Tuscaloosa while we were still both in MFA school there. After a bowl of curry, and a second glass of wine, our talks would inevitably turn literary, and oftentimes YouTube videos, graffiti documentaries, and the latest internet discoveries were pulled out for display. This is how Gorham saw art playing out in the world; everything––every single thing––in Ashley’s world had poetic promise, and she filled her house with these bits and pieces: a dried-up locust, flea-market tea saucers, a hand-made screen print delicately framed. She had a way of making the over-looked, magical.

AB Gorham is the author, most recently, of “Construction of The Vow, City-Shaped” in Gulf Coast, “The Consequences of Jumping From This Bridge…,” “Failure to Machinate,” “Embedded,” and “One Last Show” in Front Porch Journal, among others. Here is what she has to say:

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Why do you wake up in the morning wanting to write poetry?

I’m not sure if I can articulate the why of writing poetry. I thought about saying, I write poetry because I have nothing else to do, but what a stinking lie! I do believe that to write does not mean that I know what to say, rather, I’m inclined to create a record of the words/phrases/sentences that feel the best rolling around on the tongue of my mind. Also, the pink knot in my mouth. Susan Howe believes that poetry must bring back the wilderness, and in agreeing with this idea, I also see the opportunity to bring back the wild/ness of living. Not every poem must/should be about trees, but poems are so often about the “nature” of things.

The process of creating a poem, a collage, or a painting is an act on which I depend for gaining knowledge. I assume the process will illuminate the post-process self (me, tilted towards a new light). With this, I also see writing as an act of kenosis, an emptying of oneself, not completely, not all of the time, but at least partially onto the page. Writing acts like a gift to the page/reader in its motion of exchange, not because it’s always well received. Poems are an opening, and I know that I need open spaces.

Much of your works seems to incorporate emotionally charged imagery. For instance, in the poem “Prairie Grass,” which you wrote during the Flying House collaboration, you say, “We’ve seen/ green stalks flail anemone towards sunset like that on a South Carolina/ license plate.” You choose imagery that both insinuates movement and feeling (I often visualize your poetry in blocks of color), but that also tears the reader out of their individual mindscapes and puts them into one that feels solely you (a license plate, perhaps, that the reader has never seen but knows, of course, that you are familiar with it). Do you think of yourself as an image-driven writer? When you pick a thing to visualize, what is it about these things that interest you?

Paul Celan writes, “No sooner does an image enter than it gets caught in the web, and a thread starts spinning, spinning itself around the image, a veil-thread: spins itself around the image and begets a child, half image, half veil.”

I love a writer who can render an image the way that I love certain painters/visual artists. To me, the act of phanopoeia is so similar to that of creating the visual image. The image, be it coded in words or coded in paint, soothes the same bone. When writing a poem, images can volunteer themselves, and in this way they know better than me what to do. I’m just the arranger.

Movement: yes. I’m constantly trying to capture the moving image. Everything is interacting with everything else; there are no still lives?

In lieu of talking about the ways in which a particular writer has inspired my work, I’d like to offer a list of writers to whom I’m greatly indebted: Barbara Guest, Dickinson, Frank Stanford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Marianne Moore, Lorine Neidecker, Wallace Stevens, Susan Howe, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Charles Baudelaire, Ann Lauterbach, Eleni Sikelianos, Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright, & Mark Levine—the list goes on.

Your collaboration partner for Flying House was Jason Watts, a painter from Chicago who has already had successful gallery shows in Chicago, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Delaware and New York—and who, to my knowledge, has never worked from poetry. How did the two of you fit your ideas together? Did you find yourself morphing poems to fit his artwork or was there a clear give-and-take? How did Watts influence your work, and were you able to put a fingerprint in his paint? Perhaps as a starting point, you could tell us how you think of collaboration, or how you see writing and art as same/separate entities.

Jason Watts and AB Gorham

Flying House 2010 collaboration partners

What a great time I had working with Jason on this collaboration! Working together was a bit serendipitous in that we came to one another already working individually with similar ideas of landscape, space, & color. So, the meshing was fairly easy. I sent him some poems from which he took a cue for a four-part piece, and I wrote two of my poems while meditating on some images of paintings that he sent me. I really enjoy writing from a visual, whether the writing ends up being ekphrasis, or just something inspired by. Collaboration (whether it be with another person, another text or image) is an excellent way to push one’s perceptions. I would do it again!

interview by M–– Fink

Frank Lloyd Wright, the Interstate, and the House: a Romance

2011-02-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

image courtesy of wikimedia commons

I’m going to do something that Frank Lloyd Wright would have liked: I’m going to run a highway through the middle of this essay. Let’s take I-20 West through Jackson, Mississippi; through Shreveport, Louisiana; into the Dallas, Texas, metropolitan area; and then turn south in the direction of Austin. Unlike the highway itself, Wright might not have liked these cities in their current forms, for he wrote at length about his views on the cultural, ethical, and aesthetic decay that he saw as manifest in the modern city. He was a proponent of decentralization, the broadening of the American landscape out of its urban centers, and of the road system that would carry citizens in their personal vehicles between smaller communities and the institutions spread out across them. As such, I think it would have pleased him to have an interstate highway in an essay about him.

But I need to neglect Wright for a moment in order to make a divergence.

I once fell in love with a Junior Architect from the state of Texas. I met her on a social photography website and then drove 725 miles west, most of it on I-20, in a rented car to meet her at a beer garden in Austin. The montage that followed contained images of the futuristic furniture sold at Design Within Reach, lunch at a downtown falafel shop, a tour of the Texas State Capital building, an outdoor concert, and then a long drive back east. It wouldn’t make a good film, but what is important is that I left Texas with two distinct impressions: one, of course, revolved around my feelings for this remarkable woman; the other was of the wide plains of Texas which I crossed between Dallas and Austin being broken by the occasional building and little else. A month after our meeting, I called Texas to tell her: “I want to collaborate with you—words and design—I’ll write the words and you’ll draw the plans for how we will interrupt the plain between us with architecture.” This proposition felt like the height of romance to me at the time.

If the American Dream is based on anything, it’s founded on romance and the act of building. It goes something like this: from the rawness of the surrounding environment, we draw strength and inspiration, then by a combination of our own willpower and the grace of God, we build our lives up on what was once savage ground. There are variations, many with white picket fences and many without, but the core remains fairly unified. Frank Lloyd Wright himself made his career on pushing an architecture of democracy built in response to and in communion with the American landscape, and using native materials drawn from new American techniques developed by new American talent and labor. So say the biographical notes about him, along with other relevant data like the fact that he was born in Wisconsin in 1867, died in Arizona in 1959, that he remains America’s most famous architect, and was responsible for overseeing the design of buildings as renowned as the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

But Wright was also a writer. He authored over twenty books, he gave talks and lectures, he produced articles. Some of his writings were prophetic and doom-tinged, like When Democracy Builds (1945), where his distaste for the modern urban landscape became opaque—

   “The properly citified Citizen has become a broker, a vendor of gadgetry, a salesman dealing for profit in
   human frailties, or a speculator in the ideas and inventions of others; this puller of levers is a presser of the
   buttons of a vicarious power, power his by way of mechanical craft.”

It’s difficult not to admire such diatribes and deny them in the same impulse—how can anyone have stepped into a modern city and not found something of value to counterbalance all the bad taste? Is it possible that there were not many many exceptions among the “citified” Citizenry, even if this pessimistic view held some truth? There is a degree to which we can walk down Canal Street in New York City and feel Wright’s criticisms as we see street dealers piled on top of one another, selling knock-off perfumes (bottled rubbing alcohol) and imitation designer purses (glorified plastic bags)—their tiny shops are barely closets opening onto the street even as storefronts seem to vomit out cheap products. But short of reversing millennia of human migration from rural societies into urban settings, it’s hard to imagine how we could begin to plan a functional society around architecture that looks or works anything like Falling Water.

image courtesy of wikimedia commons

Perhaps the thing to grapple with, though, is how Wright—the thinker and writer—conceived of his discipline of architecture, and how he saw his work situated among the other arts. This is a man who claimed that, “The land is the simplest form of architecture. Building upon the land is as natural to man as to other animals, birds or insects.” (despite his sad inability to acknowledge women in his grand statements—) It is easy to begin to see the imperative that Wright felt to build. It is an extension of the land itself, and a human extension at that. There was a kind of divinity in it too, even if you could interpret it as being manufactured. He argued—

   “Shelter and utility in themselves were never enough. The edifice was the highest product of the human
   mind. Man always sought reflection in it of his sense of himself as God-like. Man’s imagination made the
   gods, and so he made a God-like building. He dedicated it to the God he had made. His architecture was
   something out of his practical self to his ideal self.”

There something about this movement from the “practical self” to the “ideal self” that corresponds to the romance I tried to reference earlier. It’s the idea that from something practical—the movement of a pencil’s point across a sheet of paper—comes an ideal—like the writing of a manifesto or the drafting of a design. We might find this to be at the root of most idealism in art. We might also find it at the heart of the American Dream, that the young boy who begins his professional life as a worker in a bobbin factory may end up with the soaring riches of Carnegie. Or we might find it somewhere more modest but still ideal: in a three bedroom home in the "nice part of town," perhaps. Whether we are talking about building a bourgeois life in the American suburbs, or developing our magnum opus, there is a shared idealism in this urge to build, to create. And I’m sure that comparison might not sit well with some artists. (Let it be accepted that at a later time we could introduce a finer analysis between creation and bland mimesis, thus protecting “true artists” from being too closely associated with workaday clones that simply search to recreate the IKEA showroom.)

Another divergence is necessary here, because there is a point to be made about the harmonies (not to mention the dissonances) between different modes of creation, one that I think is central to what the people here at Flying House are working to achieve, even if I’m not sure I’ll be the one able to articulate it best. If there is anything to be shared at all between the provinces of art making, it can’t only include the things we esteem—it must also include the more banal sides of creation. It all needs to be tumbled together like clothes in a drier. This, of course, would not be an attempt to equivalate all works into a homogenous gruel, but to engender more of the exchange that is already inherent.

Wright knew about this kind of interconnectivity between the arts, even as he tried to define something specific and new in architecture. He called the architect “a poet,” and of the architect’s discipline, he stated, “the kind of building that we can call architecture today is the building wherein human thought and feeling enter to create a greater harmony and truer significance in the whole structure.” It’s a romantic notion because, yes, on the one hand the structure noted here is that of the building itself, but Wright also means to reference the greater structures of family, culture, society, and so on. All of these structures also lean upon the human-built edifice, and Wright himself built with the history of this in his mind. In his most famous essay, “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” he describes how once architecture encompassed the pinnacles of all arts:

       “After seeking the origin and tracing the growth of architecture in superb fashion, showing how in the
   middle ages all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point—architecture —[Victor Hugo]
   shows how, in the life of that time, whoever was born poet became an architect. All other arts simply
   obeyed and placed themselves under the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the great
   work. The architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the sculpture which carved his facades,
   the painting which illuminated his walls and windows, the music which set his bells to pealing and
   breathed into his organs—there was nothing which was not forced in order to make something of itself in
   that time, to come and frame itself in the edifice.”

This claim, that in the medieval era all arts were subsumed under the direction of the architect, must ring true to any who have stood in front of a Gothic cathedral. From the stone of the flying buttresses, to the woodcarving in the interior screens, even to the narrative writing enameled in the hagiographies of the stained glass windows—there is no question that at one time all artisans were bent to the purpose of raising and embellishing these buildings. You must imagine that even the artisans of local cuisine were feeding the works, or at least the workers. And as a result, the great architecture of our past, especially of the Gothic period, bears the imprint of the visual, the textual, the spatial, and the spiritual, all in a certain unity.

Architecture’s predominance changed, of course, as can be seen today at both modern and historical sites. We can accept that there are still great architectural projects between the huge swathes of subdivision housing, and that like those we saw proposed for the World Trade Center site in New York City, these endeavors also still rest on the work of a multitude of artists from numerous positions. But a visit to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres reveals the work of restoration artists and cleaners—a bright facade, almost ivory, appears where the cleaners have finished, and centuries of neglect have left the rest a sooty grey. Though buoyed by the work and spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, the role of architecture is not as lofty as it once was. Whereas architecture was once built literally to house God (during what Jacques Rancière has termed the “Ethical Regime of the Arts”), it has long been an art form that must contend with the prefab, the modular, and the cheaply realized. It faces the windfall of our age of easy reproduction.

Wright described the change as coming with the advent of moveable type:

   “…down to the time of Gutenberg architecture is the principal writing—the universal writing of humanity.
   In the fifteenth century everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not
   only more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. The book
   is about to kill the edifice.”

This observation, this conclusion, seems particularly apt in a moment when the book publishing industry is trying to avoid collapse in the face of the internet and quickly changing habits of media consumption. For some writers and their allies, this might seem the anti-romance—the old “decay of culture” fear coming true. Yet it is possible to note the timeliness of Wright’s observations on architecture without falling into pessimism and negativity about our current situation. We might speculate on whether Wright himself would have written a word if architecture had remained the aggregate and collaborative force that it was before the Gutenberg Bible. And the division of the arts into their own domains does not mean an end to collaboration or cooperation or mixture. It means a new series of relations between the arts, and a quick survey of literary websites today, for example, will show that there is an increasing interplay between text, design, interactivity, visual art, and even sound and video. We ought not to even begin thinking about video games as ever-heightening realms of highest collaboration (or should we?). Is this not the most modern realm of collaboration? It might not always be called Poetry, but the best of it is working on our aesthetic frontiers like the novel did in the early modern era. Not to mention that these virtual offerings are often re-manifest in real world events, with tactile presentations, held in a variety of available edifices—because we don’t all rest on “vicarious power” to pull our levers. The information super highway eventually leads back to I-20 and, eventually, an amazing smile in a beer garden.

The point is that for the romance of America—or anywhere else for that matter (and I'm trying to say this as politically neutral as possible)—to be realized, we do need to step out of the car, meet across the divisions of art, and start to build. This is why I took the indulgence to include a personal anecdote about my love for a Junior Architect in Texas (we never did get together, though she remains wonderful). In fact, I should add something—when I arrived, the first thing I talked about was my disappointment that Austin bore no resemblance to the desert state I had imagined thanks to countless films set in West Texas rather than there, at the base of the Great Plains. Yet the plains became a fascination, one I wanted to disrupt the lines of in collaboration with this woman. I wanted to break through the frontiers of form. I’m not sure Wright would have understood that, since he died in the desert of Arizona, and his constructions there were ones meant to compliment and enrich the landscape rather than disrupt it. But then, as I think of the many forms his writing took—in text, in poured concrete, wood, glass, in steel and brick—I have to imagine there was a moment in accord with my instinct. Despite his professed love of the personal vehicle, I can’t imagine Wright would have enjoyed a life spent all in horizontals, forever driving along the interstates, shut into the interior of a Ford. But he is the master here, so who am I to say what he might please him?

What I do know, is that Frank Lloyd Wright the architect, held to an esteem beyond a scope that most contemporary artists could wish for, did so not simply by the ingenuity of his architecture. His art was driven by both text and form, his reputation as well, and such innovations as the “open floor-plan” became assimilated into our culture due to the work of his pen in all its modes. In fact, it seems a fitting conclusion to consider this simple offering he gave us: homes where the rooms opened onto one another, rather than subdividing space into closed off chambers. How great an impact has this seemingly small innovation had on the functioning of the American family? In this open-planned home, one can cook in the kitchen while freely conversing with someone sitting in the living room. It’s a joining. It’s an edifice that houses discourse, not the breaking down of life into discrete parts. It’s a domestic piece of the sublime. It’s sex out in the open—the most pleasurable and dangerous of collaborations. It is, even for those of us bent on paving our own roads, that part of the dream that’s driving us across America, around the world, and back together again. That’s it—idealistic, romantic, yes, but it’s a coming together, under the canopy of architecture. It’s not simply a shelter—it’s a house.

image courtesy of wikimedia commons

by Jeremy Allan Hawkins

Jeremy Allan Hawkins is a critic & poet born in Staten Island, New York. His reviews appear in Pleiades, Zoland Poetry & The Black Warrior Review. He has poetry & creative non-fiction appearing or forthcoming in Tin House, Super Arrow, & PANK. He in the founding editor of 300 Reviews.

Quickly

2011-01-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

There always is The HUMUMENT to discuss as well.

I didn't bring it up earlier since I feel it's been so widely discussed already––but perhaps those discussions have only occurred in my small writing sphere.

So... any thoughts?

7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone

2011-01-20T10:44:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen this project yet, check it out now: 7 Rings: An Artist's Game of Telephone.

The site was inspired by Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker, and it, coincidentally, contains work from four brilliant professors I met in MFA school - Michael Martone, Kellie Wells, Dinty Moore and Terrance Hayes.

I think this collaboration project contains notes from the Flying House mission. However, again, I want to ask the question: does writing and art have to stand alone, or is there some way of merging the two together in one piece? In 7 Rings, what is there said between pieces? What are the bits and pieces that travel from one inspiration to the next, and do they have anything in common? Is there more to collaboration than inspiration?

January Feature Article: Foundations

2011-01-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

William Blake was a strange fellow. He was theological writer who swore he could see and speak to angels––which, no doubt, lost him a bunch of friends––and he was also a free-love promoting feminist who thought law and love were intrinsically opposed to one another. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, he writes: “Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound/ In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain/ Of life in weary lust?” (5.21-3, E49). Elsewhere he speaks of the “Marriage Hearse” and the “pale religious letchery” that traditional norms force people to follow. All this is most likely why Blake made up his own religion, a mix of Christianity and Greek mythology. You can see why I called him a strange guy.

He was also the first artist I encountered who merged his words with image.

Remembering back, I was a big fan of The Tyger and The Lamb in Blake’s Songs of Experience. The Lamb symbolized innocence, gentleness, and Jesus, and the Tyger, in juxtaposition to the first, represented experience, humanity, and death. I liked how the two poems spoke to one another, but I’d like not to critique the work here. Instead, look at the images themselves. Go ahead and read them, but make sure you take a look at them.

Blake, William. Songs of Experience. 1794. Google Images. Accessed 3 Jan. 2011. http://www.google.com/images

I think it’s safe to say today’s literary critics would write these two poems off in an instant. Illustrated verse wouldn’t be worthy of a single literary journal I know of save, well, one maybe (Camera Obscura, would you take a look?). When I worked at Chicago Review Press, for example––it was an internship––any illustrated work that turned up in the slush pile was instantly discarded. Trash bin central. And while, yes, that particular publishing house was not geared toward the poetic, I’d still be hard pressed to find any literary journal that would take even a handwritten poem (what would Emily Dickinson think? Well, okay, since she didn’t publish her poems, she probably wouldn’t think much, but what happened to craft?). Even in college and graduate level academia, I never found a single professor interested in the unification of image and word. I was met with blank stares. “You mean like graphic novels?
No. That is not what I mean––although I do appreciate a good graphic novel.

I also do not mean illustrations à la children’s storybooks.

Or the illustrated first letters of an art deco novel.

And I don’t mean the buttons here or there on a Marianne Moore poem.

I don’t even mean an artwork inspired by a piece of writing sitting next to it.

I mean one piece. One piece of artwork that includes an entire story. Writing that is writing and art at once. Not a single line of poetry written along the arm of a woman sitting in a portrait, not an excerpt or a tagline or a single word placed somewhere interesting (like Paris! or Wine! or some such other word you’d find in a Toulouse-Lautrec knockoff hanging over a kitchen stove). I mean a whole work. A stand-alone, beautifully rendered, beginning-middle-end piece of writing-art. It’s as hard to make as it is to explain. Harder actually.

I spent a semester in graduate school tasking myself with working out how to go about making a literary piece of artwork. I failed miserably the whole way through. I painted a canvas with a long foreground to house a story within, but the action of the work happen all at the top of the canvas and the rest of the painting slunk away unread. I overlaid text as texture in the dress of a woman, and I wove words into her hair, but while the texture looked… pretty?––the words’ aesthetic qualities overtook their readability. I tried fashioning words onto skin like a tattoo. I tried painting on my own skin like one does with henna, and then photographing it. I think my most successful piece was a noir story I wrote over a faded drawing of a small child’s face close up. I printed the piece onto cards and sewed the cards together, folding them back and up and over each other so that it felt like a book. With each turn of the page a little more of child’s face unfolded with the story, building along the lines of the plot, the visual following the written, until the last page was opened and the reader read that the little girl was dead at just the moment he saw the knife-cut slit into her throat. It wasn’t a great story, and in a way, I was simply illustrating the closing sequence, but it felt like more than that. An art piece that could have been appreciated by both artist and writer alike. Again, it wasn’t great, but it was the best I had come up with so far. The more I tried to merge story-writing with art, the harder it seemed to be to find the appropriate convergence. Was it as simple (simple?) as a Blake poem?

I think there is something, somewhere deep inside art and writing that ties the two together. Perhaps it is the same force that drives artistic-minded people to do the work they do. The feeling that says there is an ultimate goal, the perfect story/painting/idea out there, waiting to be found. That transcendental moment of perfection. That thing Emerson writes about in the true Poet, in the search for Beauty and Truth. That thing that a part of our population believes is a concept not worth worrying over, an unexplainable or nonexistent fancy for those writers/artists to dilly-dally over. It’s that thing we writers/artists sometimes wake up to, questioning, wondering if everything we are working for is illusionary and foolish.

Do you think it is?

Let us know your thoughts. All you writers and artists out there, we want to know how you see art and literature as merging entities, if they can be at all. Flying House is all about collaboration, born out of this idea. If art and writing aren’t related at their very foundations, then at the very least they influence each other and we want to explore that relationship. If you are up for taking a stab at it, we’d love to see your results. We might even love to use your insights to further the discussion I’ve started here on this website. Please send your ideas along to TheFlyingHouseEmail@gmail.com, and I’ll continue to keep posting.

M– Fink