Filmmaker and friend of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog, Rick Minnich, cordially invites you to the closing night screening of the documentary film ‘The Strait Guys’ taking place at the Global Peace Film Festival on Saturday, September 23, 2023, 7:30-9:15 PM, at Crummer Auditorium, Rollins College, Fairbanks Ave. & Interlachen Ave., Winter Park, FL 32789.
The Strait Guys tells the story of the 76-year-old retired mining engineer George Kounal, who is on a mission to connect the United States and Russia via the world’s longest train tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. Filmed across Alaska and Russia over a twelve-year period, The Strait Guys follows the efforts of George and his fellow “Strait Guys” to convince governments, corporations and indigenous tribes to green light their $100 billion project, which promises to become the Panama Canal of the 21st century.
The film poses the timely question: What is preventing the US and Russia from being connected?
Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the tunnel plan certainly seems absurd. Yet the Strait Guys are more convinced than ever that their mega-project is exactly what the world needs to finally leave wars behind and create “peace, progress and prosperity” for all.
‘We all need to know one another and see each other as friends and coinhabitants of this beautiful planet, not as enemies. What a massive, ambitious and visionary project. We need a transformation in discovering we are all brothers and sisters! The train could help facilitate this change.’ -David Hartsough, co-founder World BEYOND War and author of WAGING PEACE: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist.
To request a press screener or interview appointment, please email head of distribution Charlie Corubolo at: distribution@ourmaninberlin.com.
ABOUT The Strait Guys, a film by Rick Minnich 99 min. color English + Russian English + German subtitles
Global Peace Film Festival Since 2003, the Global Peace Film Festival has used the power of the moving image to further the cause of peace on earth. From the outset, the Festival envisioned “peace” not as the absence of conflict but as a framework for chanelling, processing and resolving conflict through respectful and non-violent means.
Rick Minnich Rick Minnich is an American independent filmmaker based in Berlin, Germany. He holds a B.A. in English from Columbia University and an MFA equivalent in film directing from the Film University Babelsberg “Konrad Wolf” in Germany. Rick Minnich has been writing, directing and producing shorts and feature documentaries since 1993 through his companies Rickfilms and Our Man in Berlin and in association with various German broadcasters, film funds, and production companies. He has dedicated his life to building bridges, rather than walls. In his filmmaking and teaching, he is always on the lookout for stories about what motivates and connects us human beings no matter where we live on this beautiful planet of ours.
Summer is finished and with most folks back in Berlin the Carl Kruse Arts Blog would like to invite all to an “open studios” afternoon of several visual artists, first and foremost that of our friend Helena Kauppila, who was featured in our last blog post here.
The event takes place Sunday, October 1, 2023, from 1 – 8 pm at Ackerstrasse 81, 13355 Berlin, with several resident artists opening their studios to the public.
However, we will meet at noon that day at Helena’s studio – about one hour before the formal opening — for some coffee, light finger foods, light networking, and a few brief words from Helena about the art at hand.
To access the event ring the buzzer of Studio “Kauppila” 4 O.G. at the building.
Closest S-bahn: Nordbahnhof and Homboldthain. Tram 10 Gedenkstat Berliner Mauer. Wheelchair accessible.
Drinks (including coffee) and finger foods for a light brunch will be served.
Participating artists for the building Open Studios: Fritz Balthaus (im Treppenhaus), Alexis Baskind, Herman Baeten, Romuald Etter, Rolf Giegold, Eva Groettum, Ulrike Hansen, Reinhard Haverkamp, Gabriele Herzog, Ruth Hommelsheim, Esther Horn, Roswitha Jacobi (Gast bei Eeva Hauss), Helena Kauppila, Katrin Kersten, Jürgen Reichert, Vincent Tavenne, Ina Weber, Herbert Wiegand
In addition, a variety of music and sound performances by guest artists will take throughout the building.
About Helena Kauppila: A mathematician turned painter, Helena is fascinated by complexity and emerging systems. While her colorful paintings may appear random and disjointed, there is a systems thinking behind them, often anchored in mathematics. Her work touches on the structure of DNA, mathematical theories, and the human connection to nature and the world around us..
Kauppila resides in Berlin, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University and is the recipient of the Reginald Marsh and Felicia Meyer Marsh scholarship at the Art Students League of New York.
For further information please contact Carl Kruse of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog at carl@alumni.princeton.edu
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all to the vernissage of artist (and blog friend) Helena Kauppila’s solo exhibition titled SYSTEMS SYMPHONY with an opening reception Wednesday, August 30th, 2023 starting at 7 pm in Berlin.
For the reception, Kauppila has prepared some remarks reflecting on the blending roles of color, movement, science, and humor in art. This introduction takes place at 7:30 pm and lasts 10 minutes.
DETAILS: SYSTEMS SYMPHONY EXHIBITION Opening Reception August 30, 2023, starting at 7 pm CET Introductory remarks by the artist 19:30 -19:40
LOCATION: Galerie Gondwana Merseburger Str. 14 Berlin
Public Transport: U7-Eisenacher Str. S1-Julius-Leber-Brücke
About Helena Kauppila: A mathematician turned visual artist, Kauppila is fascinated by complex systems and the phenomena of emergence. Although her work is representational, she derives her understanding from mathematics, which can get quite abstract. While her colorful canvases may appear haphazard and unplanned, there is a systems thinking behind them. Her work often touches on the order of the genome, the structure of mathematical theories, and the visceral human connection to nature and intuitive experience.
Kauppila currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University and is the recipient of the Reginald Marsh and Felicia Meyer Marsh scholarship at the Art Students League of New York.
The Estorick Gallery in London is now dedicating four of its rooms to Giorgio Morandi. These are not the grand spaces you find in places like the National Gallery or the Louvre; the gallery is a converted Georgian town house and it is impossible to become overwhelmed by these rooms that you can walk across in less than ten steps. So it is with the building: floor one, two rooms; floor two, two rooms; floor three, two rooms. Morandi has two floors and they are mostly Still-Life, that odd and obvious genre that extends back to the Greeks.
The Estorick Gallery in London
It shouldn’t be glossed over that the Still-Life is held to art as the etude is held to musical composition and style; it is a way of training the eye for compositional features, of conditioning the sensibilities to the pictorial complexities that arise from the placement of objects. You get the Still-Life showing up in every significant artistic movement of history, and it is still a healthy form today. It is the most ready and versatile form for any kind of drawing class and a reliable form for an artist to showcase their skill. We all know and live around the objects depicted that we intuit their forms subconsciously; we know how to inhabit the picture, and being reminded of the beauty that is inherent in a vase is something strikingly pleasurable.
Giorgio Morandi
This pleasure of viewing and seeing what we know may partly explain the enduring fascination with depicting inanimate objects, fruits, flowers, dead animals etc. for these past two millennia. In 5th century B.C., so the story goes, Zeuxis and Parrhasius competed to determine who was truly the greater artist. When Zeuxis revealed his depiction of a bunch of grapes, birds were even fooled and flew down to attempt a peck; Parrhasius then asked Zeuxis to do the honours of drawing the curtain to reveal his own painting, however, Zeuxis was unable, despite trying, as Parrhasius painting was of the curtain itself. Zeuxis bested the birds and Parrhasius bested the man, giving that imitation to the extent of “tricking” the other was prize-worthy.
This desire to imitate nature can be an end in itself – it appears so for the Greeks – even though the composition, by definition, is far from natural, and so too are all those other peculiar features inherent in the art that are so dislike nature: the mechanical side which presents the image, i.e., the medium, the frame. All these elements are, naturally, withheld from perception’s attention in order to deliver the art; it is actually their function, and the Still-Life seems able to adapt, for whatever reason, century by century to this need to close in perception on the inanimate.
The Dutch Vanitas painting of the 17th century was a Still-Life genre aiming at something different from imitating nature to imitate nature. It was reminding the viewer that life is short, that you ought to fill it with good works; all your vain attempts to secure earthly fame and prestige will come to an end: remember this transient life is nothing in comparison to the life beyond. Here we see the low-lit interiors, the somber hues, the skulls, the tomes piled up with a lute to boot, and the fruit is beginning to rot; it is all depicted perfectly, actually beautifully, and the detail is exquisite: you cannot take your eyes away from this earthly share which is all you know; Vanitas presents a beautiful piece of mockery.
Vanitas was the Still-Life imbued with the troubled Christian spirit of the 17th century, and one who is willing may want to compare it with the Greek manner of viewing such imitations. It does seem, moving on through to Morandi’s celebrated career as a predominantly Still-Life painter, that these two forces (the pleasure of imitating nature and nature’s imitation’s ability to signify beyond itself) help pave the way to a new recognition of the Still-Life. Where it ended had much to do with perception for perception’s sake – that is no light thing – and a silent praise of objects.
Still-Life can often remind us that we have not been paying much attention to the objects around us. We grip and hold, pour and sate ourselves on things that are, when presented to us, capable of a complexity and beauty above their function (See Cézanne’s Apples). A Modernist like Picasso or Leger would confound with their chaotic Still-Life images; the planes and angles have all been deconstructed, nothing will come into focus. The experience of a Cubist Still-Life is an experience that is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in lived experience – and the use of the purely intellectual faculty here seems to lack something. Go to your vase, look at it from every angle and you can understand how many possibilities there could be, and how does this change with the introduction of one other object? In the Cubist Still-Life, there begins to form a fragmented abstraction of all the possibilities, as though the atoms are lining up to be formed and what we get is a snapshot of the process.
This ‘processional’ technique was not limited to the Still-Life, but Still-Life proved welcoming to the new experiments of Modernism; Still-Life even fared well with Surrealism and De Chirico’s “Metaphysical Art”, though it is perhaps not the exemplary form of these artistic statements. It is something to wonder at that, in a century of such experimentation, such “liberation from traditional forms and idea”, Morandi made his name through decidedly simple Still-Life images. Seeing a collection of his work, you do see why they are often described as “silent perfection”, or as “exquisite poetry”. Morandi’s interest is not in strict imitation of nature, instead, the objects seem suspended in no place – Morandi had learned from De Chirico, but instead of the obscurity of image and that strikingly clear technique which would characterise a Surrealist like Dali or Magritte, Morandi reduces things to an awkwardness of technique and a simplicity of colour.
Still life by Giorgio Morandi
Morandi’s choice of objects rarely alters either. It is always the vases, bottles, and bowls again and again, each time working towards a balance of tone and composition. There is a little else to it; the paintings are hyper-focused for the express purpose of these few and simple objects; there is no background, no lavish display, only this twilight feeling of things coming to rest. There doesn’t appear to be any “outside” message, no fooling the birds; it is only (only, not as in merely) a quiet simplicity in an everyday object, and after the cubist foray, things appear manageable and well; you don’t need to look any further than this one concentrated image. The Still-Life, under Morandi, cannot be recognized as just another table in a home but as a balance of mood that objects lend to a home, a recognition of the things that inform the most simple of our daily rituals, and the perception to appreciate it.
This is a photograph of two women in front of a photograph of couples dancing.
You do not know these women.
What can we deduce from this image? Many a thing. The old woman is looking at the camera. She knows she is being watched. But it seems as though there is a roughness to her shape, potentially indicating that she has recently turned her head and only just observed her onlooker, thus her expression could be one of shock, or surprise. She is smiling – does she know her voyeur? Is she posing for them? Do we see a melancholy in her eye, something tired and weary of life? The woman turned away from us – does she know the old woman? Does she know she has been seen? Is she observing another photograph beside the one before her, or might she be gazing off in a reverie about the dancing people, or, perhaps, has she spotted someone else that she knows? And on the form of the photograph – is this a triptych of sorts, a three-part story in a zigzag pattern from right to left of young (the faceless woman), old (the old woman), and older, but likely passed from this world (the people in the photograph)? Are we being shown the course of life through this photograph? Is this a play on Magritte’s Le Chef-d’Oeuvre ou les Mystères de l’Horizon (1955), where all parties exist within the same frame and yet simultaneously exist within their own realities? Or maybe this is a feminist piece, one centred on revealing the beauty of old age as being in the wizened, knowing eyes and smile-creases on an elderly woman as opposed to the younger woman, whose beauty is in her flesh, her form, and so her face is not shown, as opposed to the women in the photograph whose beauty is used solely for the entertainment of the men they are dancing with?
All of these are tepid assumptions, just like most of those propounded in popular artistic and literary theory. But I’m sure you warmed to one or another, thinking it to bear some truth.
The woman looking to the camera is my mother’s mother, and the other woman is my mother. I took the photograph when we were visiting a gallery on a hot summer’s day in France, where my grandmother lives, and where my mother is from. You see how I was able to use this image to promulgate any theory I wished, any social cause that came to mind, any artistic vision that I could think of off of the top of my head. I could swindle you, tug you in to believe any narrative I wished just through using believable-sounding words.
Peter Brook, in his novel The Empty Space, asks this pertinent question: ‘Is it that we are living in an age of images?’. I think we do. As illustrated by my annoying and somewhat pretentious vernacular about the photograph above, it is clear that meaning can be gleaned without the need for language, for, as John Berger asserts in his text Ways of Seeing; ‘Seeing comes before words’, and further that ‘this seeing which comes before words [] can never quite be covered by them’. We are born with an innate propensity towards the visual, and it is from the visual that we oftentimes learn language.
We have known the significance of images as importers of meaning since the beginning of time; for what is a painting if not a meaning, an explanation of a feeling, a narrative without words? For what is a photograph, if not a condensing of words and emotions within a frame? But, perhaps, words can also exist as images. Perhaps we should not limit the term ‘image’ to denote something purely visual in this instance. Take the Noh play, for instance. Not much ‘happens’ in a Noh play. That is to say there are not many events within traditional Noh plays. A Noh play could be said to be a visualisation of a metaphor, peppered with historically prominent symbols and actions. Because of this, the dialogue in a Noh play tends to be limited, allowing space for meaning to be derived from the specificity of its choreography and instrumental accompaniment. The Noh play creates a series of images, images passed down generation after generation, whose perfect translation is facilitated by the use of masks on its performers. The specificity of the movement, music, and setting of a Noh play is strictly protected by the Nohgaku Performers’ Association (Nōgaku Kyōkai), and so it is indeed possible that a Noh play performed some 200 years ago may be a mirror image to the same play performed today.
What I know of Noh Theatre has mostly come from Toyoitiro and Toyoichirō Nogami’s comprehensive text Japanese Noh Plays: How to See Them (2005), which details the essential structural and artistic components of Noh Theatre. To avoid simply regurgitating the Nogami’s scripture, I shall describe the environment of Noh as best I can in my own words: there is the stage, where the actors perform; the back stage, where the musicians and prompters seat themselves; the veranda to the right, where the chorus performs; and the corridor to the left, where the musicians and actors journey to and from the stage. This corridor is also known as the Bridge. There is a pine tree painted onto the wall at the back of the stage. This tree is ever present in all Noh performances. The set does not change, regardless of which play is performed. It is up to the performers themselves to make something happen.
Why do I bring up Noh in my discussion of images? Consider my comment on assumptions and vernaculars propounded by popular literary and artistic theorists. While I was studying literature in Brighton, I came across many tedious commentaries made about such prolific writers as Shakespeare, Twain, and Hemingway. In the West, we are constantly preoccupied with finding the political issues, the social issues, the identity issues associated with art. We find this in both the literary and plastic arts. An image cannot simply be one, or simply be beheld for its beauty, or its enlightening insights on this fickle, strange thing we call life. In the West, we act as if it is of the utmost importance for us to reduce an image down to the gender, political leanings, and social status of its creator and of the characters they depict. We act as if this will give us a greater knowledge of art, but, in fact, it reduces art by looking behind the canvas, or the page, rather than at it. In the West, we decide that we can no longer look at certain books, certain artworks, certain buildings, because we believe that this act of erasure will make us better people. In the West, we decide to adapt pieces of work to make them more palatable to our audiences. Noh refuses this. Noh remains as Noh has always been; an image solidified through the centuries.
It is true that we are living in an age of image, as Brook believes, but it is also true that these images lack constancy – we are so hungry to find the images that we believe we want that we find ourselves inundated with such a vast amount of them that we no longer know where to look. Instagram, TikTok, adverts, YouTube, immersive gallery showings, memes, GIFs, emojis; these are the facilitators of our hunger for the perfect image, an image that supports our political and social leanings, an image whose creator is unproblematic, an image that satisfies us aesthetically. We are greedy, these days. It seems that we are beginning to lack the humility to acknowledge the potential of l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake; that is, that the fundamental value of art is separate from its political, moralistic, or ethically instructive function. Of course, that is not to say that art is meaningless, because it is surely not. Art, as Nietzsche asserts, is ‘the great stimulus of life’ (Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize With a Hammer, 1889), and the meaning we glean from it is so subjective and personally driven that I simply argue that it is an insanity to try and pin down a work with its backstory, and further to reject or embrace it purely as a result of that backstory.
In Noh, we can look onto the stage, and realise that no matter how many images we destroy or create, nothing can change the fundamental things of life that Noh portrays, amongst them being love, death, and the magical mysteries of life itself. Noh unknowingly rejects our penchant towards the politicisation of art by presenting us with an unchangeable form, one which does not cater to our erratic political and didactic whims, and invites us simply to watch and see all the bountiful emotions and experiences that frame the oddity of our human existence.
Perhaps I am wrong. Of course, Noh addresses socio-political issues of its time, and other issues therein, because it is almost impossible to create an art that does not reflect one’s lived experience of the time one is living within. But, as Earle Ernst propounds, Noh is ‘an exquisitely precise theatre based on the artistic principle of reduction to essential forms’ (The Influence of Japanese Theatrical Style on Western Theatre, 1969); it is the form of Noh that is its artistic power, its inimitable fusion of voice, movement, dance, music, acting, poetry, and prose to create enduring images. It is Noh theatre that presents the ultimate challenge to our currents views about art. =========== The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other articles by Hazel Anna Rogers include When The Show Is Over, Finding My Clown, Acting and Art, and What Does it Mean to be Wealthy. Carl Kruse is also on Buzzfeed.
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all to the gallery walk scheduled for June 2-3, 2023 in the Charlottenburg neighborhood in Berlin, Germany.
Known as the “Charlotten Walk,” the two days will see more than 40 galleries – from the established to the up-and-coming – open their doors to all. Hours for Friday, June 2, are 6pm to 9pm, and on Saturday, June 3, from 12 noon to 6pm.
|The Charlottenburg neighborhood in Berlin is home to one of the most active and fastest-growing gallery scenes in Germany, making for an exciting locale for contemporary art. Participating galleries include Kornfeld Galerie, Studio 4 Berlin, Galerie Michael Haas, Galerie Akonzept, TVD Art, Mommsen 35, and Zilberman.
In the last few years, an ever increasing number of galleries have moved to the neighborhood from other parts of the city, such as from the Potsdamer Strasse, and from other cities such as Hamburg and Köln.
The Charlotten Walk gallery tour was created in 2018 by Artbutler. Sussanne Burmehl took the helm in 2022.
While the Carl Kruse Arts Blog does not have a specific tour planned for the Charlotten Walk it encourages all to explore on their own the exciting offerings in contemporary art open to the public and free of charge.
Sometime in the 1940s, the artist Jean Dubuffet coined the term “Art Brut” which roughly translates as “Raw art”; un-cooked and close to the initial mood of creation; or, the closest representation of the individual’s creative urge before the influence of learning. Much of Modernist art had been playing with this theme and had been courageously trying to get over the hump of earlier academic training, or taking steps to create a new one. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, questions of style and representation were caught between all those -isms that populate that fertile period. Picasso speaks about how he learned to see like a child; ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, in their only publication, showed an enthusiasm for “naïve” forms of folk art; Dadaism made its point of no-point while Surrealism automatism was nearing the surface.
The nineteenth-century academic artistic standards that had provoked rebellions lived on through those initial rebellions. Authority presumes opposition, and it is because of its relative stability that it provides an energetic ground for creation. The nineteenth-century judges of “fit aesthetics” provided a proven ground of what later artists could rebuff, and gave them an idea of what subject and style would not only shock public taste, but were still rude, still waiting to be expressed – so, in a sense, they lived on through opposition. When Picasso reviewed his plan for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, he decided to nullify any sense of perspective and model the faces on African masks, giving the audience those sharp, cutting glares of an art form that had found the traditional Western forms of representation wanting; perception had been altered from the previous century, so they say, but in that painting, what was also being expressed? Rebellion, alteration, vigor of the artist, an intellectual/cultural conversation about expression? A want of recognition?
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
The keyword for the purpose of this essay is “found”. Most Modernist artists and the -isms all knew the traditional forms and were searching far afield to find new expressions. What these breaks and rebellions symbolize is a complex of ideas about aesthetics within a tradition. Modernism was working on two fronts in order to change perception, one through freeing the visible expression and the other through forcing reflection in how we perceive – and they knew what the critic, the art enthusiast, already knew or expected. Mainstream modernism was a cultural duel, and Art historians are quite confident in their abilities to see the rise and fall.
“Art Brut”, or what has been called “Outsider Art”, was (still is?), an art form that has not “found” anything in any artistic canon wanting because it has not supposedly been influenced by culture. Dubuffet was particularly interested in a psychiatric study by Hanz Prinzhorn: Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922). In the study, Prinzhorn studied ten, of what he called, “schizophrenic Masters”. Most of the subjects displayed a spontaneous irruption of artistic delight and seemed to present an image of “raw” feeling in the treatment of their craft. Many of the Masters had led usual working lives before being hospitalized for the sudden onset of schizophrenic tendencies – this study of Prinzhorn was also the birth of “psychiatric art”, which would later result in Art therapy.
It was not only the art that came out of the psychiatric ward that interested Dubuffet. He also took an interest in the drawings of children, and of spiritualists and hermits. What binds these artists in Dubuffet’s eyes is their unassuming desire to create, their lack of concern for reward or appreciation, and their supposed lack of cultural knowledge and artistic tradition – this last reason is harder to qualify. All these variables cause hesitation, planning, and a degree of self-consciousness that inhibits the initial impulse and follow-through – two things that, by the 1940s, Dubuffet desired more than carrying on the Modernist experiments.
Paris-Montparnasse, Jean Dubuffet, 1961
These “works from solitude” were for Dubuffet an analgesic. To stand a piece of “Art Brut” beside any work of “cultural” art was to see the paling of society; the intuitive power and unabashed presence of Art Brut next to a cultural composition shallowly vying for our attention. Excited and enthused by his discoveries, an art form that had not been swallowed by culture and thus choking off its genuine expression, Dubuffet set up the ‘Compagnie de l’Art Brut’ with leading Surrealist André Breton. The aim was to exhibit, discover, and document, the plains of outsider art. The movement lasted three years before being turned into a more commercially viable ‘Collection de l’Art Brut’.
Dubuffet himself, as you would expect, turned to a style of painting that was more simplistic, supposedly less concerned with intellectual matters, though how he spoke about his art remained intellectually refined. Did Dubuffet kill the authenticity he felt was in Art Brut by championing it, studying it, and trying to embody it? Is the one-sidedness of his argument convincing: culture, academic artistic culture (even with Modernist influence) = stifling, pretentious vs. art created outside these boundaries, at the expense of experience, in the case of the child, or at the expense of sanity = authentic. The authentic would never appear so without its other half.
Art Brut leaves the question of authenticity unanswered, and it is fine that it does: antipathies and sympathies drive the artist along. When the question of authenticity arises, the artist often will go “out of the common way” to bring something new into a culture. How does it sit when it is established? Must authenticity mercilessly create and destroy itself to be renewed? It’s true, the Art Brut of August Netter, or Adolf Wölfli, is fascinating and brilliant, and perhaps there is something to be gleaned: the abandonment of pretension, the utter giving up of one’s body to expression, the delight of play. What Dubuffet found so vital in Art Brut was the spirit and the necessity of art, something akin to what we feel finding in our heritage the caves of Altamira and Lascaux.
========== The Carl Ktuse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com The blog’s last post was on Comic Kids. Other articles by Fraser Hibbitt include Thoughts on Science Fiction, the Street Art of Insane 51, and the Art of Atari. A Carl Kruse Blog on technology and internet culture is here.
It was back in 2018 that Reed and Kat Horth had an idea born from their desire to give back to kids in Miami’s under-served communities in the best way they knew how…with art. They started teaching a weekly comic and cartoon illustration class for children at Big Brothers Big Sisters Miami. Soon, they affectionately began referring to the kids as our “babies.” Teaching them on Thursdays quickly became their favorite day of the week. They chose comic illustration because Reed had fallen in love with art and reading as a child through Marvel and DC Comics. Powerful messages of “misfits” overcoming odds helped him through his parents’ divorce and led him ultimately to a career in art. If he could do it, he thought, so could other kids in similar circumstances.
The impact and messaging from the class made Reed and Kat realize that teaching kids to draw comics and cartoons resonated with them. This needed to be bigger they thought. And from there, Comic Kids was born.
Comic Kids became a formal non-profit just before the Miami schools went online in March of 2020. Quickly, the pandemic showed that the best way to reach vulnerable communities was through virtual learning. Since then, Comic Kids has taught thousands of children how to draw over 250 different comic and cartoon characters, interweaving books and graphic novels into their classes.
In the fall of 2022, Comic Kids was contacted by NBC’s Kelly Clarkson Show regarding a segment they produce called “Rad Humans.” This production features “Mom and Pops” who are weaving goodness into their communities. Comic Kids resonated with them.
On January 30th 2023, Comic Kids appeared on the show, which can be viewed here.
Kat and Reed – Rad Humans.
We have previously written about Comic Kids and Reed and Kat’s beautiful work and are happy to see their wonderful efforts honored by a major media outlet.
The mist has lifted, and life is back. It is an abyss, a swamp of unknowing and learning how to live without the glistening sheen of adrenaline that glosses over your eyes for the weeks and days preceding and encompassing a show. You lie flat, and all appears flat. Everything reminds you of it, and you are reminded of the loss of it. Life is back, and it is clear as day.
My company and I were reminded on the last day of the show that theatre is ‘live’, and that that is both the beauty and the curse of it. Its liveness is what can make it so much greater than any other acting form, and yet it is also its downfall – while simultaneously, if it is indeed great, it will be remembered, it must yet always live within the mind of its beholder, never to be looked upon again, and so its greatness dies a death after the final bow.
The stage is effortlessly alive. It is a space to breathe and swim in, and its heart is palpable, touchable, unlike the screen. I love film, and television, but theatre is a beast apart from these things. How wonderful to be able to reach out and brush the leg of the actor as they scurry in the round, to smell their skin and feel their breath on you as they pant and sweat and scream and whisper. How is it than an art so old can be breathed into and brought back to light out of the fetid dust it has oftentimes become. Theatre is a difficult place, a breeding ground for ham and cringe and fault. It demands much, and, if committed to, its reward is jubilance and a drug-like high. Laziness is all too obvious, all too noticeable on a stage. One cannot hide, one cannot be tired, one cannot be human, when one acts in the theatre. A missed beat hangs like a rotting beam of wood. A forgotten prop is befitted with mime, and it breaks the mind of the observer in half, letting reality seep through like worms pushing through a rain-covered mud. A bored actor stood in the corner of a stage stands out like a pustule, bringing all eyes to their ugly treason. There is no room for mediocrity in theatre, and yet mediocre theatre is made, making the art harder and harder to work within. One bad song can be skipped. But a bad play repulses like a disease. An hour trudges by as boots through a waterlogged field. An uncomfortable chair takes the attention’s precedence over the action afore the onlooker. This is why the inevitable end of the run of an astonishing play is so very sad. It is a tragedy that the world must keep turning, and that we can dwell but for a second on a moment so great.
I don’t know what to do with myself. My whole body has come crashing down. My bones feel heavy, and I can barely lift myself. The wild rush of the show run has left me crumpled while, at the time, it made me feel as though I could go on and on and on without stopping. Veins of fire turned ash, now. Still. What a dream it was. You know, I still pinch myself thinking on it. Me? Here? Doing this? I could but wish for others to feel what I have felt during this past week. My mind strays back to the day I was accepted, and then further on to the first night I spent in my home in London, then to the first day of the course, when I walked home teary-eyed. Many a moon that was ago. Today I skip and leap even with my fragile temperament. I am low, but am ready to be lifted high again. How endless the process of a show is. How panicked one becomes when one really realises the show is come upon them after weeks of tough drudgery through lines of text not altogether imaginable until they’re spat on stage. How suddenly it all ends.
Mother Courage and Her Children is an important play. An integral play. It speaks to an audience in a way quite unlike the war films and history books do. Though the adaptation we performed was set in 2080, it harkens to our lives today, to the wars that prevail around and through us, and to the depravity and beauty of our sorry world. My character, Kattrin, was at once the beacon of hope and compassion at the centre of the play, and yet ended the play as the very horror at the root of it, Mother Courage herself. We have all of these things within us. The kindness and softness of a child, and the brutality and violence of a mother who has lived through trauma so profound she knows not what else to be other than tough and sharp and cold. I will be forever thankful to have lived through Brecht’s world, and to have revealed it to others.
I could continue at lengths about theatre and the stage and Brecht’s play itself, but perhaps I should end this piece by speaking on something else. For those who don’t know the dressing room, and for whom its name speaks of secrets and celebrity and mystery, I shall tell you of it now. It is a warm place, filled with the oddity of bodies fueled by nervousness and tiredness and excitability. Bodies naked and clothed, passing around sticks of charcoal to dirty the edges of their faces, bodies coated in thick layers of sweat and grime and cloth. Bodies dancing to music off of a small black speaker, laughing together, hugging, weeping together. Women howling and singing and stretching before they go into the wings around the stage. Women cheering one another, eating together, sharing thoughts and jokes and love and pain. The dressing room is the place in which it all begins. A stage manager comes in and calls the ‘half’. The squirming commences, the jumping about, the endless anxious toilet visits, the swigs of tepid water from old plastic bottles, the hand squeezes, the giggling. A stage manager comes in and calls ‘beginners’. The performers become cool, collected, zoned in. They breathe as one. I leave them, and wish them well. One clasps me by the head and says to me: ‘You are the heartbeat’. I go down, alone, and enter the stage. The audience have not yet arrived. I sit inside the metal frames of the ice cream van in the centre of the room, and become her. The audience file in. Blackness. Silence. The play begins.
The fundamental reality of creation is solitude. This is what Lecoq tells us, and, when I turned around and faced the audience, clothed with my red nose for the first time, I did indeed feel very alone.
We had started doing clown the week before, but we only have one session a week with our Lecoq tutor, Ally Cologna, who had trained with Lecoq before his death in 1999. Clowning, as interpreted by French theater practitioner Jacques Lecoq, involves the smallest mask available to the actor: the little red nose, and normally comes last in a series of other more obscuring masks, including larval and expressive masks. Due to its smallness and thus its tendency to expose the actor beneath it, the red nose is often seen as the most challenging mask of all.
Jacques Lecoq
The week prior to my own attempt at clown, Ally had told us that we were to go up one at a time and complete a few basic tasks. The first was to walk around the space, without the red nose on, during which time a member of the audience would come up to the space and mimic our walk as best they could. Once a rhythm had been negotiated between actor and mimicker, the actor would turn round and watch their comrade’s impression of the walk. Then, when the time was right, the actor would go behind the mimicker and mimic their impression of their own walk. After this, the mimicker would leave the space and the actor was to continue walking in the particular fashion that had been observed by the mimicker in order to receive and experience the sensation of interpreting another’s perspective of their personal movement patterns.
Eventually, the actor would be instructed by Ally to walk as ‘themselves’ once more. For the actor in the space, discovering the unexpected picture which had been painted of them by the mimicker was often a cause for hilarity and a great method to release tension; for myself, the mere presence of a fellow actor in the space prior to entering into this new phase of our acting journey – clown – reassured me quite. Lecoq calls this practice ‘ways of walking’ and states that it can help the student to find their own characteristic walk which is a natural development from their own personal way of walking, not a forced comic walk which is artificially built from nothing. Lecoq also works with ‘forbidden gestures’, those which are not normally permitted for adults and which we quell and crush deep within our childhood so as to be more societally respected and, perhaps, ‘normal’, if there were such a thing. Lecoq suggests that the psychologically freeing nature of this work, whereby the actor will hopefully find himself much more open, less defensive, and more receptive, will allow the actor to find his ‘primary clown’, which, as Nathalie Ellis-Einhorn describes it, might be an access to ‘childish joy, curiosity and vulnerability to the world, [with the knowledge that] children are also spiteful’ (from her thesis: I.M. L.O.S.T! a show about clowns). The clown might be innocent and unguarded in his presence, but this does not mean that he is always kind or sympathetic to both his Monsieur Loyal or the other clowns which might join him in the space. This statement should not be interpreted insidiously, as, according to Lecoq, ‘the clown needs no conflict because he is in a permanent state of conflict, notably with himself’. Rather than making the clown inauthentically selfish or impudent, this inner conflict results from a desperate need for attention and love which might materialize in the clown blaming others for his ‘flops’ in order to gain praise for his own behavior, but this is not inherently egocentric or insolent conduct that comes from a protective societal mask.
After the walking exercise, Ally would instruct the actor in the space to turn around and put their red nose on. Ally was clear that neither the red nose nor the act of clowning must be referred to in the duration of the actor’s clowning practice, or else the illusion of the clown be broken. I suppose this makes sense; we do not usually refer to the characters we embody on stage, lest the Fourth Wall be irreparably shattered. It might make even MORE sense with a clown; as a clown is itself ‘the person underneath, stripped bare for us all to see’ (Lecoq, The Moving Body, p. 143), it makes sense that the person should not refer to their clown in case they become even insensitive to this vulnerable, exposed part of themselves, which might have been previously unseen by their colleagues. I don’t know. I’m merely hypothesizing.
My colleagues and I saw a few different clowns on the first day of our clown training. It is wonderful to watch someone grapple with the candidness and the verity that the red nose offers them, but this is a task that is sometimes too much for the actor to handle, at least on the first try. In fact, rather a large proportion of those first clowns ‘telephoned’, either a little or, God forbid, a hell of a lot. ‘Telephoning’ in clown occurs when the clown deliberately leads himself down a path of reactions and actions rather than being ‘entirely without defense…[and] always [] in a state of reaction and surprise’ as Lecoq encourages. If the clowns begins preceding his own intentions, one might say that the actor clowning had begun to play a role, or put on a coat, as opposed to being innocent and open to the possibilities of the moment. I ‘telephoned’ a few times during my own turn at clown, I think. But I’ll get on to that.
Students at the L’ecole Internationale de Theatre de Jacque Lecoq find their clown.
I want to comment for a moment on the character that our teacher Ally evolved into when she was provoking our clowns. She called it ‘Madame Provocateur’ after ‘Monsieur Loyal’ of circus and clowning tradition, otherwise known as the ringmaster or ringleader. During many difficult moments for my colleagues’ first clownings, ‘Madame Provocateur’ was capable of eliciting brilliantly authentic and, often, hilarious responses and actions out of the unseasoned young clowns before her. She was oftentimes brash, offensive, and extreme in her berating of the clowns, but one never felt unsafe or at all nervous in her presence due to the fact that Ally herself was unable to keep a completely straight face as she scolded the pitiful clowns on stage. Ally is a phenomenal teacher, and I shall surely miss her when the time comes for me to finish my training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
I went up to clown during our second lesson of clowning with Ally. My walk, as displayed lovingly by my colleague, was rather more ‘sexy’ than I had previously believed. I was rather sure that I had more of a swagger, but I took on the exaggerated version of my walk produced by my colleague and strolled around with it for a while before shaking it off and going to put on my nose. I had thought fleetingly about what my clown might be and had concluded that it was likely going to be quite a grotesque or obnoxious clown, perhaps speaking back to Madame Provocateur or being generally unpleasant and profane (from a most unguarded state, of course). But what I discovered that day was sadness, and loneliness, and an inability to understand why my audience was laughing at me. I say this not to overemphasise the freedom that I found in my clown, for my clown was not entirely candid; as I said, I’m certain that I did ‘telephone’ a few times, for it is oddly difficult not to react defensively to some of the comments thrown towards one by Madame Provocateur. However, the sympathy with which my clown was received by the audience made me feel so very safe, safe enough that I was not afraid to feel sad and misunderstood and equally unafraid to display my desperation to be loved. How much I wanted to be loved and seen by my colleagues. How I wanted them to watch me and smile with me and love me. I suppose this clown is much like some personas which I indulge in in my personal life. My twin sister and I still continue the role-playing which we started when we were much younger, which involves myself as the younger, dumber, and more endearing character and my sister as the character of authority and tyranny. All the bravado and crudeness of my habitual social mask were stripped away by my clown, and all that was left was a timid, pitiful little clown who thought little of themselves. I wonder how I did not see this coming. My colleagues commented that they had not expected such a clown from me either and that they believed that they had now seen a side of me which they had only spotted in glimpses prior to then.
I am excited to see where I can go with my clown, but I sometimes fear that I will begin to orchestrate my clown’s reactions and tendencies should I get too comfortable with how my first clown was received by my audience. The novelty of my first clown lent itself well to honesty and openness, but even in my second attempt at clowning I found myself ‘telephoning’ a little more than I had the first time. In my third attempt, I found it difficult to put words into my clown’s feelings, and ended up being rather too silent and ‘meek’ compared to the other clowns, who readily answered Madame Provocateur’s provocations.
Despite my uncertainty about how this side of myself came to be that which lent itself to my clown, I believe that I know this ‘clown’ very well. It is that part of my being which believes that I am quite useless, however hard I try, and it indeed does try hard! Perhaps clowning is the safest place wherein I can explore this darkness and melancholy, for the clown mask enables one to experience a conflict of self in a way that does not linger on into the rest of one’s day, or week, or month. Lecoq speaks of the difficulty that might arise when exploring these intimate depths of emotion:
‘The student must be prevented from becoming too caught up in playing their clown, since it is the dramatic territory which brings them into closest contact with their own selves.’
And, importantly, that:
‘[T]he clown should never be hurtful for the actor.’
I wish that I could comfort my clown and tell it that it is worthy of the love it desires so intensely from its audience. But equally, I wish to exploit and indulge in the emotions that the clown allows me to experience while eliciting laughter and pitiful sighs and groans from the audience, because these small indications of validation might help me to understand that I, and this particular aspect of my being, are fundamentally ridiculous, and that this part of me is merely an essential part of what it is to be human.
(All quotations described as coming from Jacques Lecoq are from the book ‘The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre’, trans. David Bradby, Methuen, 2000, of which the original text, ‘Le Corps Poétique’, was published in 1997 by Actes Sud-Papiers.)
