Minds over Matter, Wits over Bums

We are products of our desires, or what Joseph Campbell calls the

" the zeal of the organs for each other"

I was lucky enough to spend 10 years in the San Francisco Bay Area and consider it one of the most progressive areas in the world today.  It is absolutely no coincidence that apple, google were formed there.

Our identity, and sexual identity in particular, is central to our being and how we operate in the world. We embark on many quests and gender is one such a quest.

But it should remain a personal pursuit and should not be a corporation's or our government's business who we go to bed with.

If a corporation  or the government requires you to specify your gender identity this is the vulgar equivalent of it pulling your pants down to check on the shape and form of your genitalia.

This contact binary potato named #UltimaThule

I imagine they will laugh in a hundred or so years at our pitiful excitement about a contact binary potato that we saw on our way out of the solar system but hey we are on a good vector and trajectory is more important than place.    

Happy New Year from my fire escape - a beautiful day in New York, open and sunny skies - much sun to you tooo!!!!!

Happy New Year, drinking my first coffee of the year on my fire escape, barefoot ! #happynewyear #happynewyear2019 #firstdayoftheyear #sun

#coffee #mirenarhee #breakfast #InstagramNYC #newyorkcity #newyork #artnyc #art

#drinkingcoffee #morning

#performanceartist

#artlife

#discovernyc #newyork_instagram

#newyorkcitylife #artlife

#myart #newyorknewyork #newyorkcitylife

#beautiful #nyc mirenarhee#fireescape #goodmorning

mirenarhee#2019

A pick me up - flying penguins, normal penguins, and George Carlin

Blue Planet 2, the out of this world documentary voiced by our favorite David Attenborough... which is surprisingly a show about our own world, can be had for ten bucks on youtube and honestly this is the best thing since they discovered that penguins can fly: .

Blue Planet can be watched here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmsaqQmH6Sw&list=ELDiEnf4inTk2z-c3sGkD6vw

Penguins can’t fly. But they can get airborne. The secret technique that penguins use involves wrapping their bodies in a cloak of air bubbles – and it turns out to be the same technique that engineers use to speed the movement of ships and torpedoes through water from r/Awwducational

and george - I am usually wary when anyone is negative of America but you know what - sometimes a laugh is worth it.

I believe one day violence will be obsolete, and will be forgotten

I know in my heart that one day we will be among the stars, just the way we witness all the incredible miracles at the palms of our hands today and think, boy, how did Plato manage without a phone. Just kidding - he did just fine, it is not about the technology, it is about the people. I believe that violence takes so much of our focus and energy as species, it is almost like we carry a heavy sack of tumors on our backs. We spend so much time and resources on things like security, prisons, guns, fences, locks, .. and so little on building ourselves a better future.

It will take a set of very determined people to change everyone's mind, just like it took a lot to change our minds on all kinds of things like slavery, women's rights, gay rights, basic freedoms, democracy. It will not take a state but a person or several that will not stop until it is changed, I do not know if these people were born yet but it is coming. It will take for a strong person to say "enough" and turn humanity around.

I believe one day we will use the freed resources to spread among the stars, to travel further into unknown galaxies, to venture into black holes, to cross unfathomable distances and push unthinkable boundaries. It will be so much fun I think, and I have a good time contemplating that future - it will be so much fun to be among the stars with incredible machines and inventions that will keep us safe and traveling into far horizons,  zipping among gas clouds and super novas, and swirling down wormholes into unexplored neighborhoods.

We will deserve this future once we outgrow our basic natures, once the enlightened politicians are born, once humanity realizes it is simply too costly to be violent.

Giant Hands in Beacon - the frivolity of weighting little

Often when we try to achieve visual quality - like in the case of the giant hands - color and strong presence - we lose the frivolity of having the art object simply be. Sometimes art objects need to be left alone to simply be otherwise just like people - they gain weight, become less frivolous and less dynamic. The life goes out a little. I loved being in this place, in the company of bushes, crickets, birds, wind, greenery, ruins, graffiti, and random humans.

Giant Hands in Beacon

Making of and hanging of :

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Found the hands a beautiful Japanese Garden to hang in, except it was not Japanese, and not a garden

while hiking in the area I found the most beautiful space - abandoned brick factory which has been taken over by nature. While passing by I only saw a brick wall, partially collapsed and had no idea the area just around the corner held this amazing environment.

I walked by, the place called me and I answered. It's my magical forest sans the mushrooms. I was in love and spent much time here.

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. They call the place Dennings Point ruins, I found them much improved though, and much more beautiful. imagine the sheer mundanity of a brick factory building with all the brick making stuff in it. Now it has been beautifully rearranged by nature and you have the most lively soundscape too.

It was made so much more beautiful.

… .

Art is about a punch to the stomach. I figured what the difference is between art and art, art gives you a punch so when the art is absent and the artist is absent you still hold the image in your head. You say ah!

If there’s no ah it is just making stuff, or being creative which is of course absolutely valid too it just isn’t all that interesting.

More on what the Silicon Valley gave me - vol2

Couple of additions to my first post - The museum of modern art in San Francisco had a great permanent collection, they also had incredible exhibitions like the Magritte show which opened an entire new world for me - that of surrealism. My first lesson in art was also at the SFMOMA but oddly enough it was about photography. So there was this major retrospective of Richard Avedon, whom i admired at the time and then there was this show of Robert Frank photographs downstairs. And here for the first time I saw the problem with commercial art standards. So there were these giant gorgeous portraits made by Avedon but because of the commercial strategy and commercial standards he adhered to - they lost their human emotion power battle to the much smaller but made from the heart photos made by Robert Frank. It is all about the punch to the stomach, and that can't be faked with special effects and expensive lighting.

So the lesson was that if it wasn't a battle that the artist fought, if it is not coming form the center and the heart, if it is not true to an inner standard - it won't win the long game. And this is the story with William Bouguereau - incredible technique and special effects, and no punch to the stomach, at least for me.

More on what the Silicon Valley gave me

Work in the valley gave me an an unlimited travel budget, in addition to a hunger to find the best players in what I considered my field. My field was art and through interactions with other artists and research on my own I decided to focus on the top players in my field, and study their work in person.  

So I went to London and went through the National Gallery as well as the Portrait Gallery and other museums, not sure what my top artist was there but a lot of Renaissance. I went to Paris to study the impressionists, my visit to Musée d'Orsay changed my entire attitude and changed the way I look at art. Until that point I had not much respect for impressionism. After that point I gained much respect for both impressionism and art, and got a glimpse of what a profound change in seeing involves.

With this newly gained perspective i started looking at Van Gogh. I went to Amsterdam and the Hague and in addition to Van Gogh looked at Rembrandt, Bruegel and the Northern Renaissance. I discovered Vermeer in person - I was running through a gallery at closing time and arrived, almost out of breath, at one of his smaller paintings. I was stunned and this small painting took my last breath away.

Anyway - back to Paris I resumed studying with sculpture and painting, and started studying Picasso and Dali. I continued my education on Picasso and Dali in Madrid, where there are three major museums stuffed with the best the world can offer in terms of painting, including Goya, and Hieronymus Bosch. My interest in Bosch came after I got acquainted with surrealism, and his work as a sort of a predecessor, the first surrealist.

Now big impact on my consciousness was of course Rome and Florence. The Vatican museums and the Uffizi produced in me growth equal in its intensity to that of going to the moon. I stared at the Botticelli and other pre-Renaissance for hours on end. Most impact on me in Rome was produced by the sculptures in the Vatican museum, and by the work of Michelangelo. Later i saw Bernini in person as well - I spent a whole day with his sculptures at Galleria Borghese.

With all this newly acquired knowledge and new standards I started spending more time in New York and the galleries there. I was flying on weekends to see the major museums, including MOMA and the Whitney. Modern art entered my consciousness, with the solid backing of old art.

And here I will pose for a minute, because art has and will always be at the forefront of what I consider worthy of thought. But there is another thing I discovered, which is a school of thought which dealt with how we see the world, and it had little, if anything to do with art.

I went to Japan, and in a summer I spent time in several temples of the Rinzai school of Zen in Kyoto. Sitting on the mats somewhere in Arashyama, surrounded by ponds and zen gardens, I was struck by lightning. Her I found, I saw and felt, the ultimate efficiency and beauty of simplicity. I saw and felt the effects of Zen and later on adopted that outlook for my life.

What did the discovery of Zen mean? It meant that on my return to America I started seeing how much time and resources we expend on things that fill our rooms and our environment. I remember a conversation with someone about their experience with a seventy thousand dollar kitchen in Westchester. Imagine the amount of pressure and resources that would take to cut up a simple salad. it's like having dinner and dragging a locomotive behind.

When I think of dinner - i imagine going to the fruit stand guy on the corner, having an avocado, a few tomatoes, fruit, eating it in a park or in a nice public space somewhere in Manhattan and using the rest of the time and resources to have fun and enjoy the company of family and friends, of galleries, museums and theaters, libraries if you want, of which our city abounds.

To sum it up and to circle back to the title I gave to this post - I had the piece of mind and resources to study what mattered to me without the pressure to produce immediate results and act on the so gained knowledge, and to expand my outlook on the world and find a set of beliefs and standards for life that struck a chord with me.

The best lessons I learned in the Silicon Valley, and a few more things

Number one is the ultimate skill of cooperation with strangers - I now notice that i can relate to many people from all walks of life completely and with ease and within the first few minutes, and I did not have a very social job per say. The job of the Silicon Valley artist is pretty much long hours of grind, on the surface.  However there is the unique aspect of technology which permeates any Silicon Valley job. When you have complicated tech you have to leave the confines of your computer desk and start talking to people. Since 50 percent of your job may end up being trouble shooting and problem solving. It is not uncommon as part of you job, for you to need to communicate with people from the top to bottom, to engage the CEO, your manager, your colleagues. complete strangers with huge responsibilities who you have never met before  and where they are not your friend, relative or acquaintance. I didn't realize until much later what a huge role social interactions had in the valley. And it didn't really dawn on me, until much later, the fact that everyone in San Francisco is overly nice somehow is part of the secret sauce of the valley success. I remember my parents being almost taken aback by the niceness of people, I remember them telling me they thought all the niceness seemed very fake. However they got used to it so much that they talk about it until this day.  

This is the reason I recommend, even for artists who eventually may choose a life outside of an organization - take a job for a few years in a high pressure environment, a boiler room, a pressure cooker, a place with high pressure and high standards. If you can get in the best company, in the top place to compete with the A-players. A few years in the top company in the world equals 5 years of education in a top university. And ultimately this is not about compensation at all, it is about growing to the point where you outgrow most of your peers and start seeing a new horizon. It is important to step on a pretty high place to see the farthest.

Never seen anything more beautiful

Drawing the tree of life

[video width="1152" height="720" mp4="http://www.mirenarhee.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Drawing.mp4"][/video]

Steve Jobs at his best

Art Truck

http://mirenarhee.com/performance/art-truck/mirena-rhee-art-truck.html

I will rent a 24 foot moving truck, package it in primed canvas and park it at rest areas and parking lots along the i-95 highway. I will have acrylic and sign paints (all water-based paint ) available as well as brushes on sticks and ask the audience to paint on the truck. Canvas will be hung alongside cargo area of the truck (see diagrams) using fishing line. Truck will be protected with plastic drop cloth underneath canvas. The intent of the piece is to ultimately collaboratively produce a 56 feet long painting.

The Art Truck is special in that it was originally inspired by the American trucking culture I have long been fascinated with. I meant it as a country version of an art installation, where a large truck makes frequent stops along highways – at truck stops and rest areas, and out of the cargo hold come art materials. Primed canvas is stretched over the truck and then a quick and impromptu painting happens with people that happen to be there.

This is also the mini version as I'd like to go with a 24 ft truck. Looks like a 24 ft one could easily be rented one way between Florida and New York.

What is it to have

Currently working on the third edition of my Japanese Gardens - a Journey into zen book and it all ties into the questions of possessions, having, not having, and what is it to have.  

Think for yourself first - my "i am always writing" book, and this is number one rule in it

We are back to relying to the opinions of all kinds of royalty, media royalty, political royalty, opinion royalty, kitchen royalty, banking royalty. We forgot that it took storming the Bastille to establish the equality of the common man and this is what this country is based upon. The sweat and the thought of the common man. in fact the most important thing and rule number one is - think for yourself first. The gift of the enlightenment combined with our 21st century ability to access all information instantaneously… always depend on yourself to think, learn to develop your judgement with historical or any other perspective you choose.

You are the utmost authority, chances are the learned have as many chances to get it right as any of us.

Self-reliance updated for the 21st century.

Having recently become overly reliant on images and words from long times past, on this glorious July morning occasion I wanted to mention that the most important words and thoughts you will ever read and have are your own. No one else is more important or wiser than what you got inside. That’s why we were given this faculty – and this is why the thoughts of “sages and bards” are only second to the bard inside.