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Mathm 1431546286.Pdf Abstract Tellings is an art exhibition that interprets the impermanent state of storytelling through visual art, narrative, space, and objects. Exhibited in the Stamps School of At & Design’s Slusser Gallery, this MFA thesis project places the viewer in the delicate position between the world of things and the imagined spaces of folklore and fables. Sculptures, installations, and narratives draw on folklore, mythologies and personal memories, to obscure the role of storyteller and leave the audience to build their own narratives. The work deconstructs the narratives/fables into key moments, translating them into viewer experiences in visual storytelling. This MFA thesis explores the relationships of these elements and will illuminate their role in conjuring the exhibition, Tellings. Keywords Folklore, memory, mythology, narrative, nostalgia, objects, storytelling ! 2! ! 3! Contents The Story Is: The Structure of Story and Space The Rock Is a Rock, The Book is Being a Book: Material Power Building an Island: Access Through Space Painting Around the Holes: Narrative Transformation Conclusion Exhibition Index Bibliography ! 4! The Story Is: The Structure of Story and Space Story is more than a narrative. Within this document and within my work I use the term story often. To begin with clarity I attempt to use them as the following. Narrative is the tale: a collection of characters, setting and details sewn together within a plot. They are the written fables that pair each installation. Story is greater. Story includes the narrative, but also the visceral reactions to those narratives, the collective conjuring of imagined realities, and the emotional ties to personal experience and memory. Several terms throughout this paper are used in specific ways for specific purposes. Though I seek to make my purposes clear, I do not make claim to their general meaning. Everyone lives within his or her own story. That story is a construction of how we perceive our lives; I’ve lived here since… my grandmother gave me these when… I don’t get along with my neighbors because… These are a part of your story; it is built from memories and incoming information (i.e. circumstantial or environmental) from every direction. Our stories overlap with one another. Sometimes we adopt parts of someone else’s story or imagined parts of an unknown story and they become a part of our own. This does not make it false or fictional. To live in a story creates a duty to maintain it, to refine it, to develop it, and to add to it. ! 5! "Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” John Keats ! 6! ”... It was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge ! 7! “Willing suspension of disbelief" is the line between story and lie. The term, coined in 1817 by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is the action of a reader (or viewer) deferring the rejection of a narrative due to its inherent implausibility. The suspension, according to Coleridge, can only operate if there is some “semblance of truth” or appearance of reality. The purpose of Coleridge’s proposition was to reveal how a rationally minded person might understand and even enjoy an irrational story. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote about a rationally minded reader in Tree and Leaf in a way that contradicts the idea of suspension of disbelief. Tolkien writes that in lieu of enabling this suspension, the writer must create a consistent reality within a second system of belief, or “Secondary World”. In this way, the author and reader must separate the written world from what is considered the real world (Tolkien refers to this as the Primary World), thus creating a system of logic in which anything written must only function within the secondary world. To Tolkien, this alleviates the rational mind from entering into the place of “irritable reaching” described by Keats. Tolkien chose to locate these worlds in a hierarchy, “Primary World" and “Secondary World", indicating “Primary World” is shared by all, also regarded as “reality.” I, however, believe Keats and Tolkien’s ideas are closer than they appear. I suggest that Tolkien’s “Primary World” is actually the story each of us live in, as mentioned before. The story, being independent, is not shared by all, however, can overlap with others (his “Secondary World” being the others). In this way each of us has the perspective of my story and all other stories. What suspension of disbelief does here is to allow for the merging of stories without rational or direct connections. For instance, without the suspension of disbelief a person living within a story of logic and law (i.e. lawyer) may not have opportunity or need to merge stories with one of fantasy. I do not seek to make the viewer believe my narratives to be true in the way they believe their story to be true, or Tolkien’s “Primary World” to be shared. I am attempting, by putting all stories on the same plane, to use the suspension of disbelief to obscure their boundaries and become permeable; each remaining separate truths, whilst influencing the whole. Thus, connections must be created, anchors in “reality” must be cast, and a semblance of truth must be assembled. In this work, I interpret a semblance of truth as a component to the greater structure of seduction, which is carried out through installations using three components: objects, space, and narrative. To seduce is to persuade someone to abandon his or her duty. We all have a duty or obligation to function within our own story. This is made evident in the ubiquitous act of carrying out our lives. To abandon this, even momentarily, allows another story to enter and even become a part of it. My intention is to seduce viewers into the suspension of disbelief. One day an archer was walking along the road. He was the best archer anyone has ever seen and was often recognized for it. As he walked along the road he came to a wooden fence running ! 8! between a house and a barn. Across the fence several targets were painted. Some very high, some very low and in many angles since the fence had warped with age. As the archer moved closer he could see holes in the center of every target. He was amazed! He was known as the best archer in the land and even he thought a truly remarkable archer must practice here! He quickly walked up to the house and knocked on the door. A woman answered and before she could even speak the archer asked, “Who practices on this fence, I must know. I am a very accomplished archer and I must meet the person that practices here!” The woman went back into the house and moments later she returned with a young boy. “This is my son,” she spoke, “he is the one that practices on the fence. The archer was momentarily stunned at the boy’s age but it quickly wore off. “Can you show me how you practice?” he asked the boy. “I must know how you do it. Every hole is in the middle of the target!” The boy took the man to the fence. “Well, I stand here,” the boy said with his back to the fence. “Then I take about thirty steps this way.” The boy took thirty steps away from the fence and turned to face it. “Then I pull my bow way back, like this.” He was mimicking a bow and arrow. The archer was focusing intently on his technique. “And SHOOT!” The imaginary arrow was released and the boy walks back to the fence. “After the arrow hits the fence,” he pauses as if trying to remember, “I go to the barn to get the paint. Then I paint around the holes.” I first heard this story told by Angela Lloyd in episode #114 of The Art of Storytelling, a podcast that interviews storytellers from around the world. I use this story to illustrate my own practice. The story functions the same way as the structure for seduction. The fence is the space in which the action takes place. The objects are the arrows or the holes left by arrows. The paint is the narrative transforming the holes into targets. These three elements are combined in a way that leads the archer to believe a certain chain-of-events has occurred. More than that, he believed in the story: the perceived chain-of-events, the imagined character of an archer better than himself, and the feelings of possibly advancing his own technique. I use the phrase painting around the holes as a term for this combination of elements and my creative practice. ! 9! The Rock Is a Rock, The Book is Being a Book: Material Power “Sculpture means direct dealing with the material world.” Thomas McEvilley (Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, p. 42) Objects create the power of shared space between multiple viewers, and therefore can become the focus for a shared story. Thomas McEvilley writes about this in Sculpture in the Age of Doubt. While describing the reversal of values between painting and sculpture in a post-modern culture, McEvilley touches upon a particular power or perceived authority contained within sculpture: "Its representational function is obscured or complicated by the facticity of its presence.” (41) What he is remarking on is the very realness of sculpture and its power to overshadow the illusion of representation.
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