Every day, in this strange new world of unprovoked wars and a hyper-corporatization of everything, my husband and I are trying to find ways to live a life that feels meaningful, authentic, and sustainable. This week I found solace and solidarity in the essays and art criticism of Art on My Mind by bell hooks and the strange assortment of blog posts that make up Lady No by Kim Hyesoon.
Art on My Mind by bell hooks
“Learning to see and appreciate the presence of beauty is an act of resistance in a culture of domination that recognizes the production of a pervasive feeling of lack, both material and spiritual, as a useful colonizing strategy. Individuals who feel constant lack will consume more, will submit more readily.” – bell hooks, Art on My Mind
Given that I first learned of bell hooks at my hippie grad school where we all read Teaching to Transgress, it’s odd that this is the book I most quoted on LinkedIn this week. Odd, except that there’s something about Art on My Mind that spoke so deeply to the creative maker in me that I wanted to share the balm of her words in that awful den of capitalism we feel compelled to show up at every day but that brings few of us any joy (or jobs, TBH).
“It occurred to me then that if one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonization is complete.” – bell hooks Art on My Mind
There are a lot of things to love about this book, and I learned a lot about Black artists I hadn’t encountered before (including Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, and Alison Saar) and about the racism, sexism, and classism of the art world (the book was originally published in 1995, but I’m willing to wager not enough has changed).
“Anyone involved in the grant-receiving, grant-giving process… can see it is often individuals, irrespective of race or gender, from privileged backgrounds… who are best able to utilize existing funding agencies.” – bell hooks, Art on My Mind
What I appreciate most, though, is how layered hooks’ thought process is. For example, when she discusses the “place of the visual in Black life” in the titular essay, she talks about the lack of representation of Black artists in the art world, but she also digs into how the way Black people have been portrayed in art over time presents an inherent conflict between art being “necessarily a terrain of defamiliarization” and early Black audiences who “were wanting art to be solely a vehicle for displaying the race at its best.” When she writes about “the visual as an experience that can convert and serve as a catalyst for transformation,” I found myself longing for an updated version of this essay that touches on where we are now and where we might dream of going next, although quotes like this are still far too current:
“Transforming ways of seeing means that we learn to see race—thereby no longer acting in complicity with a white-supremacist aesthetic that would have us believe issues of color and race have no place in artistic practices—without privileging it as the only relevant category of analysis.” – bell hooks, Art on My Mind
She applies the same nuance to discussions of cultural appropriation and artists for whom “no critical framework existed to theoretically validate and illuminate the significance” of. Other topics of interest are the choices an artist makes (important in an age of AI), hedonistic consumerism, intuition vs. intellect, the dynamics of competitiveness in art, and “art as the practice of freedom.” Basically this book is a (still too valid) primer for how to think more deeply about the forces that are trying to separate us from our art, and with that our humanity.
“I’m doing exactly what I always wanted to do, and that’s what keeps me going. As an eight-year-old, that’s what I wanted. Now I’ve got what I wanted.” – Emma Amos in Art on My Mind by bell hooks
There’s a celebration in that statement and also a bite, so it seems fitting that I literally bled on this book (I’m okay). For now I’m fighting the good fight by trying to learn from hooks’ commitment to living simply to sustain her own art.
“The task of setting free one’s gift was a recognized labor in the ancient world.” – Lewis Hyde
Lady No by Kim Hyesoon
“To write poetry is to place something that is nothing in the middle of spokes, spinning the machine of oblivion at full speed. Against the judgment of usefulness, it is utterly useless, spinning the absences that can’t even be used as ingredients of a story.” – from “Oh, Honest Poem!” by Kim Hyesoon, Lady No
In a very different vein, I also found inspiration in the forthcoming Lady No, a collection of blog posts by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon that originally appeared anonymously on a Korean publisher’s website in 2014. The posts themselves are eclectic, often taking place in a country called Aerok (Korea spelled backwards if you are also sleep-deprived). Some are stories and some poems. Most are uncategorizable, and it took awhile for my brain to open to what Kim was creating by writing them. Translator Jack Saebyok Jung writes of working at “preserving Kim’s fierce strangeness,” which I gradually learned to appreciate. I’m still unpacking the layers of the work, but she touches on topics including loneliness, motherhood, and authoritarianism— you know, my usual trifecta.
“Is there any metaphor in this country now.
Perhaps if we are forgiven
Perhaps if every poem in this world is forgiven.”
– from “Metaphor Ban” by Kim Hyesoon, Lady No
One of the things this book made me think about is audience. There were whole sections of pieces that I could not initially relate to because I didn’t have the right life experience to unlock them. Others, like “By the River Ouse” spoke to me because I did have the necessary keys to understand this was about the suicide of Virginia Woolf. When writing (or creating any art), there’s always a moment where you must choose to consider an audience (or not) and at what level you want to communicate with them. While I did feel outside some of the work, when I finally worked myself inside, I felt like I had passed some test and achieved complicity with the writer.
One recurring theme in the pieces in Lady No is the literary world itself. From translations to literary festivals, I enjoyed learning from Kim’s perspective on these as she is both more accomplished than I and coming from a completely different culture. Yet I learned from the way she questioned the rigidity of the canon, the narrow slices we view artists through, the capitalist insistence on branding even our creative selves, and how she posits that each poem demands the creation of a new worldview.
“Once you name a poet a woman poet, then manly poetry becomes the standard, and womanly poetry becomes its provincial other.” – from “Witch-Type Poet” by Kim Hyesoon, Lady No
This book is still unfolding for me, but one thing it has me thinking is about how being open to the world and to new ideas is itself a wonderful transgression right now. I hope that you will reach for something that challenges you today—as an act of resistance if nothing else.
“When the ground is shaking under one’s feet, fundamentalist identity politics can offer a sense of stability.” – bell hooks Art on My Mind
If you are interested in broadening your world with either of these books, order a copy of Art on My Mind or pre-order Lady No from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.
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