A rrest

My sustainability show opened last Friday at the downtown Collegetown Bagels cafe in Ithaca. Hung in an organized way, and with an audience to perform to, it was very satisfying to see how all the parts of the exhibition flow together to support a complete idea, and how the idea stands quietly by itself, independent and not in opposition to the alternatives.

Last week, I began to write about something I had been told Lady GaGa said to Vogue magazine about choosing to remain celibate now for fear that others would steal her creativity through her vagina. Somehow that assertion is comforting to me, not for its paranoid sound, nor for its interpretation that distractions would take from the art, but for the idea that one must step back from the inspiration of one's work in the process of representing it in a slightly altered form in an infinitely more interesting way.

I saw an interview of Lady GaGa over the weekend, which reinforced the impression I have of her from her music; that there is a complete, rich, and beautiful underworld that she reveals through her work. The world is there, independent of the commonly presented reality; she lives in it, and shares it in a generous, positive way. To me, this is the positive power of art, in which I would hope to participate.

Tied to the interview was a showing of the videos which are associated with the music. Seeing the videos together, and realizing that none of the videos are an obvious (and I think not initial) representation of the music for Lady GaGa, it makes me happy to to see how flexible statements already made can be(come). The music expresses sets of ideas itself. The music video opens up new possibilities for the nature of the ideas expressed, and the speech about the work expresses something else. The combination opens up a view of an other reconstructed world, where things are just different enough to help us see a place we might take in this one.