3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.: Is Your Blog a Gallery or a Canvas?: An artist (Elizabeth Perry), photographer (Ms. Jen) and writer (Eden Kennedy) explore art on blogs and blogs as art. Some bloggers are putting their best stuff online...for free. Others are exposing their works in progress. Are blogs a means to an end, or the end itself? And how do you decide what the right approach is for you?
Elizabeth Perry is a sketch blogger: All of my background is in literature and writing and now I’m an accidental tech geek. About a year ago, decided to learn to draw and everyone said you just did it. So I got a sketch book and I wouldn’t care how bad and after 28 days I was so excited that I’d done it for 28 days in a row that I posted a slide show to my blog. And the next day, I did a good drawing and did it again.
577 drawings later, I’m still drawing and posting to my blog. So that’s how I came to be on this panel because I’m interested to see if you see your blog as a space to collect images, artistic works or if you see the whole blog or enterprise as itself a work. So I’m doing an extended performance piece.
Eden Kennedy – fussy.org and yogabeans.com: Part of the reason I’m on this panel is that I’ve put a lot of work into writing a decent blog and if I’d put as much work into a novel or something, I’d have a book. I had a conversation and they said you know, if you pitch a blog book to a publishing company, they won’t get it. So I started questioning the need to be validated in print and thinking maybe this is good enough, so if I keep accumulating the work as a whole, maybe it’s art. And maybe we can define art later if we must. And yogabeans is like a comic book – I take photos of my son’s action figures doing yoga. And I look at the pictures and it looks like they’re saying things to each other. I don’t even know what it is right now.
Jennifer: – I blog at BlackPhoebe/Miss Jen – got my first camera when I was 7 but my mother thought it wasn’t appropriate. Been taking photos for a long time, undergrad in design and art and there was a point in time where I really was engaged in attempting to be a serious artist in terms of paint, gallery – and then the internet came and I fell seriously in love in 1994 and my weblog is an extension of that love. When you get image, text and code together in these little graphic circles, there used to be all these separate worlds and now what we do with these objects in the internet space you’re having the ability – ok convergence, a space in time when we can be wildly creative. Started posting photos immediately and started a photo moblog type of thing and that’s mostly what’s on my site now.
Mrs. K: I’m going to start with a question for both of you, because you both use words and images. What do your images and sketches say that you can’t in words?
Elizabeth: It starts with the image, which is very different when it’s me as a writer. When I’m drawing, it begins with me looking and trying to see better and my day is so full of words and interruptions and excitement and distractions and what I tend to draw are small still life objects from around the house because I do this after everyone has gone to bed and it’s quiet and the writing is a reflection of what the drawing process was and what it meant to me and it’s important to me but it’s an expression that arises out of the drawing.
Jen: Because I really do see it as an intersection, I find that it’s whatever is most interesting me at the time and this year I started thinking – I should out myself to start with – if the definition of this panel is your blog a gallery or a piece of art – I don’t see my blog as a gallery series, I see each post and piece as adding up to a larger whole, a gestalt, so in itself it becomes a piece of work and as a result, if I’m doing something like this if I end up with mostly photos because I’m busy – but at times I don’t take many photos and I end up with a lot of text. I’m trying to figure out how to integrate it better and wondering how do I take this idea of posts so people can see it when they first come and be intrigued by the images but also read the posts.
How many people are artists?
How many people are writers?
Jen: Eden asked us how we feel about images and text. Asked her what the dividing line is
Mrs K: – badnewshughes.blogspot.com – inspired 1000s of bloggers with post about his family’s Christmas. They go and they get drunk and they do funny things and he took bad snapshots of all of it and he wrote captions of everything. And I’ve read it a dozen times. And part of the let’s define art thing – with most blogs, you just want to read the post and go on, but it’s not the kind of writing that you want to return to because it moves you so much. But this rose above the normal blog thing. So you take the camera around and you go to the fair or aquarium and I do a lot of that with the kids – and you can upload it to flickr – but sometimes they just beg to be captioned. And it’s not like I’m a good photographer – if some pictures are worth 1000 words, well, mine are worth about 50 and I need to write the other 950.
Jen: As I said earlier, from 1999 to 2003, I was running a music website. Trying to get up a photo essay in static web pages is so frustrating. I was covering so many events as a music journalist but they were literally a black hole. What really freed me up was getting a content management system in terms of a blog. But I still found that my computer was a black hole for photos. I’m still thinking of photos from 3 or 4 years ago – but having a mobile device, now I can take a photo or set of photos and review them from the gallery of the phone and because I have a data plan, I can send them immediately to flickr or the blog and so now I have the spontaneity of th emoment, it gets up it gets out there. And it frees me from being obsessive about what each image looks like, so I don’t feel the need to polish every photo. This also raises up a question – a lot of times what I try to do is that I will show my friends a picture and ask if they mind and if they don’t want it on the internet, then I won’t.
Audience: Do you every have [ublisher’s remorse?
Jen: I get commenting remorse, because if I’ve had a glass of wine or two (because I do that late at night and that’s when I read blogs). I read Rebecca Blood’s book on blogging in 2003 – once you put something up, you don’t delete it. You may strike through or correct, but you don’t delete it, you take responsibility for it.
Mrs K: that’s like a sketch book rule, you never tear a page out?
Elizabeth: That is my rule. I have a rule that I don’t diss any of my drawings. Because once you start that, there’s no real place to stop. It’s a very easy road to go down. The other amazing thing I discovered is that some of the drawings I really thought were awful, other people respond to and really love. Or I’ll come back to something two months later and I’ll recognize the beginnings of something I’m doing now. Or I can be completely infatuated with a drawing and nothing. No comments.. or I’ll come to it later and say I don’t really know what I was thinking about. I look back to instruct myself but really it’s a way about it being about the process, it’s always the next drawing.
Audience: Do you know who your audience is, and how does that affects the way you make your work? Does that interfere with your process as an artist or is it something that you anticipate, or do you ignore it or is it integral to the work?
Jen: A writer’s process may be different from a sketchbook artist or mobile photography and at what point is revision part of the writer’s trade?
Mrs. K: "To be premature is to be perfect "(Oscar Wilde) – I thought maybe it applied to blogging because in a way it’s better than if you made it perfect because you’re really capturing what’s happening right there in the moment. And even if your drawing was sentimental, that’s where you were. Do you spend much time looking at your archives?
Elizabeth: not really. (Mrs. K holds up her Moleskine notebook – it’s really small) I started with these because they were special and slightly expensive and really cool to work with. But after a while, the paper resisted water, but as I wanted to use color, that was a problem. So now I’m binding my own notebooks (yes I’m that obsessive). It turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.
You were talking about oscar wilde –
(OH MY – there’s a red caterpillar that came up to Jen’s phone and she has to take a picture. This caterpillar is being blogged. (laughter as everyone takes a picture of this caterpillar).
Elizabeth: – it’s undulating. It’s kind of a belly dancer of a caterpillar.
Audience: I don’t know how to compete with a caterpillar, but… Way back when I had an email newsletter, I tried to work with websites, I had a personal website where I was doing a lot of writing and some photography and then I moved over to Blogger. It’s primarily video now but sometimes text and photography, I’m not one thing, when I feel like taking a photo and describing what it means I do that. I interview a lot of artists. If someone would give me instructions on how to videotape art, that would be great. am I a blog? I’ve come to the point of saying I’m me, this is what I do, and so there.
Elizabeth: – I think this is all so new. How these amazing tools are coming together to let us do these things there’s no reason why we can’t reinvent the media. There are amazing communities out there doing all kinds of amazing and new things.
Mrs. K: – that goes back to the audience expectation question, which I don’t think we really answered. Your audience doesn’t know what to expect from you, which sounds really liberating. When you do know your audience, it can be kind of restricting. I got to that point a little while ago, and I decided I’m just going to post lists for a while…sometimes you just don’t want to tell a story. And I know Heather Armstrong approaches her blog like a column. And that’s where the images let you go in a totally different direction and use a different part of your brain and I really love that.
Jen: – pre-Internet, in the art world there was a certain path you would take – move to New York, get involved in the gallery scene, involved in the art market. For writers there is a step process and you start to submit and there’s a set of steps you take. And now that we use this blogging medium – for every one person who gets a book published or a solo show at a gallery, there are thousands of other people who are working quietly at home and are just as good. So the question I have for us – now that we have blogging and the Internet – and for the last 10 years – am I running my own gallery of which I’m self publishing, and is that something now I should be pursuing in order to monetize (buzz word of the day) – how do we engage in this thing especially if this is your love and your passion and you want this to be your career? Where is that tension for you? Do you put certain things on your blog but not others because you’re reserving those for your publisher?
Elizabeth: I think I have photos like that, but my drawing project is such a different thing for me. There aren’t a lot of drawings besides the ones in the sketch books. I don’t always post all of them but I don’t hold back things that are special. But if I write a piece of fiction, I don’t post on my blog but send to an editor with a query letter.
Mrs K: – I put everything I’ve got into my blog because it makes me feel that I can write about anything. Even if it’s just three paragraphs. If I was reserving things for my novel, then the blog wouldn’t be quite as good and who knows what the novel would end up like.
Elizabeth: – you were able to start a second blog. Not like the yogabeans had to go on fussy or that fussy wasn’t honest. There might be another kind of writing that would be different so maybe if you were stretching out into a longer fiction or nonfiction it might be a different kind of writing for you.
Mrs K: – I used to think there was a novel in me, but lately I think – I don’t. I might have a little gift book or some weird yoga thing. It’s kind of sad. Well, not sad. Because I think blogging is really wonderful…
Elizabeth: – you might have a fully choreographed ballet you don’t know about. If you had asked me when I was 20 and applying for MFA fiction writing school that I would be an artist, I would have said I don’t think so.
"A small daily task if it be truly daily will outpace the labors of the most spasmodic Hercules" (Trollope quote)
That tiny thing adding up is interesting.
Audience: We all might have a symphony inside of us – been building websites and working for myself for almost 10 years and the greatest thing I’ve learned is that not every idea I have is one I want to spend time on.
Audience: What we’re all saying is that we do find out who we are through our blogs because when I started my blog I thought I was starting a writer’s website because I’m a writer but what I found out is that I care about visual art, movies, music – but I’m not part of the lit blog community because while I’m a writer I don’t want to write about who got a book deal. The blog itself is a gallery – or a salon, really. I think I’m channeling Gertrude Stein – I would like to see more dialogue with the artists. Not quite there with the dialogue.
Jen: I flew from Dublin, Ireland on Wednesday and not on right time zone so forgive me. I want to ask the audience: how do you find yourselves working with themes in your work? If you go to any writing workshop they tell you to work through your themes, also true of photography. I read my blog once a year on its blog birthday and by doing that, I see that my photos are falling into some categories and it really allows me to see what my themes are.
Audience: I definitely – I write about going to college and being on my own and I definitely discovered a theme is family and the huge schism between my life and my hometown and moving to college and that drivintg that 250 miles is like driving to another world and my family doesn’t understand what that huge dichotomy is, but my college friends do get it.
Audience: do you guys make a distinction between art and craft as far as delineating and defining things?
Jen: How many people here read A Wrinkle in Time? (most of the hands go up) Madeline L'Engle has another book called Walking on Water that addresses creativity, that creativity makes us human and when we are creative we are participating in a process that makes us more human than we were before. When I went to art school there was a barrier between fine art and design – yet now these barriers are crashing. And then you look at some of the crafting sites and people are making these incredibly beautiful things. At what point – maybe it’s not between craft and art but public and personal.
Introduced Megan McMullen – an artist and writer from Texas who is part of a team that does video installations. Did a residency in Spain this year. One of the women was from the Midwest and takes photos of graffiti and she went around Barcelona and then she would stitch embroidery of the graffiti – it’s whimsical and adds layers of meaning and yes, it’s craft but it’s art and I’m not going to make the delineation.
Elizabeth: – My mother went to art school in the late 50’s, working with traditional women’s work. Her mother knit, I learned how to knit – she went with the idea that text and textile have the same origin and English is full of words that connect. She took her mother’s journal, cut it up and knit it into a garment after my grandmother had died. It’s profound when you begin to blur these boundaries because some of these boundaries are rooted in political and class and other kinds of divisions between what is art, high art, or just a project? I know it’s a contentious or painful issues for some people that art sites on blogger unless you’re in entertainment, come under hobbies and some people fine that difficult because it’s more serious to them and hobby sounds dismissive but it’s not your day job either. So where’s the category for that kind of personal expression.
I like the maker to decide how to present that to the audience.
Audience: I expected to come here and see pictures as well. As an artist, there is something about the tactile quality of your work that I cannot see on the web. The other thing – what is more important, the visual or the word? If I had a blog site I would just have pictures and there is a purity in that. I’d like your comment on that.
Mrs. K: – I wouldn’t dare tell people what’s more important because some people have a knack for one and not the other. But I do know the tactile quality of words as they relate to blogs – the one blog that has been published as a book – I got a copy and I’m reading it and I thought it’s great to have on my lap, but I’ve already read it. For me, a book that’s very tactile needs to have more weight and threads and themes and stuff and development and character. She’s a wonderful writer – but the book itself was a very odd experience.
Elizabeth: – would you have felt differently if it had been syndicated in a newspaper instead and you were still getting it a little bit at a time?
Mrs. K: – yes.
Jen: – I think also, for me, there’s not that big of a differentiation. It’s a different act. Painting, photos, typing – different acts. Different movements, like dancing or reciting poetry is different from reading poetry,. Somebody like Nam June Paik – in his video pieces, he always made sure there were objects so people could go into the spaces and have an object anchor them. It’s still art. I personally don’t need it to be in person or to be an actual object.
Elizabeth: – for me, it’s both. I don’t see the blog as a gallery so it’s not a place where I’m showing work that exists elsewhere. I’m interested in the relationship between this private object which I then put out in this public space of the Internet and it’s reflected on a screen where light is shooting into your eyes but it’s largely experienced in private. People tend to look at their computer screens by themselves. It’s mostly a private experience, so I’m kind of interested in that, and the accumulation over time of these small moments. If the primary existence of the work for you is in the physical space and that’s where the delight is, then the web is a pale imitation.
We were told no projectors on day 2 so we wouldn’t rely on Powerpoint, they wanted it to be more conversational.
Audience: there’s a tendency to want to own a piece of your work by fans – you want to have a more direct interaction. Have you thought of providing something like that for your audience - not necessarily a book, but some kind of takeaway?
Jen: I put my photos and create a rubric of photos and that’s what we’d pass out to people and bands loved it especially if they were on that postcard and then they would put it out on their tour merch tables for free and that was how the work would get out. I’ve watched some of the chap books Heather Champ has made and thought maybe I should.
Mrs. K: – I actually sell t-shirts off my site. I have found out how difficult it is to create t-shirts.
Elizabeth: – I have a business card – homemade – haven’t figured out what I’m doing with that. I can’t see cutting up the sketch books and part of the nature of the project is the bookness of them. I’ve thought of doing a chapbook – I’ve thought of doing a separate series of drawings that wouldn’t be the daily drawings but would be for sale, but haven’t figured out what to do with that. Have another project in mind – am interested in museums and collections. I think I’m going to do the daily drawings of my own life but also to draw my way through the museum collections. Might be the water fountains or somebody’s shoes. That’s a project that I see balancing in dialogue with my own daily drawings next year. But after that, I’ve thought about doing something that could sell. The word monetize doesn’t sound right to me – guess I’m prejudiced about ugly sounding words.
Jen: More of my shuddering is about all these buzzwords wandering around the web and at what point do we play into them, if you care about a word and how it’s used? I’m not afraid to say yes and it would be good to make money off my creations, but there are so many ways – sometimes things are appropriated in the wrong way.
Audience: With all the different kinds of social capabilities through blogs and other technologies – what are your thoughts on collective creativity – has anyone in the room participated in these?
Elizabeth: – There are collective sites. I live in Pittsburgh – an old city, a great city for artists because it is affordable. There are all these wonderful old buildings and old businesses that have some of these wonderful old signs and I’m one of the editors of the Pittsburgh signs project, and there are about 60 photographers involved and there are about 300 photos on the site. People also participate by commenting. There’s also a flickr group around. The flickr photographers in town do things together and tag them – as these things are evolving, people are figuring out new ways to use them.
Audience: There’s a lot more of that really happening and I’m sure in the other forms of art as well.
Audience (Jenny of ThreeKidCircus): with collaborative projects – my brain tends to work towards, how can I make money off of this. As an artist, does that cheapen what you’re trying to do? Because I do think there’s tremendous potential to make money off these fantastic art projects. Does it cheapen the art or make it less valuable?
Mrs K: – there’s nothing wrong with that.
Jen: – That brings me back to the question too – you’ve stated on your website that you’re a writer and you’re a mom. So is this a way for you that you are approaching maybe a new way to publish, rather than submit to a publisher?
Jenny: Absolutely – my whole goal in life is to find a way to be paid for being me.
Jen: that’s a fabulous goal!
Jenny: With the blog – I’m really the stereotypical mom who talks about the pee and the poop but I really feel like the best is yet to come for me, so I’m training for that. The feedback is so valuable that it makes you a better writer.
Mrs K: – I had a great commenter – the WGA says that only 3.7% of writers are making a living at it in the US. And as a musician, she had far more satisfaction just performing out in the street and putting out a hat. And that’s why we blog.
Audience: more on collaborative projects, by blog.
MISSED THE REST OF THIS – INTERNET ISSUES
Jen :– I know we stated our opinion here and jenny stated hers. Does anyone else have any other ideas on blog a gallery or a canvas?
Audience: – I think I’ve got both. Sometimes you’re using the blogging software just to put something up there.
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