Mentor Meeting with David Ulrich

I just finished my first mentor meeting with David Ulrich (www.creativeguide.com.) Although David and I have known each other for a few years now, today marks our first official meeting with AIB’s mentor program. I am very fortunate to be working with David again and to also have an experienced mentor, educator, and artist living and working locally in Honolulu, HI.

I’m walking away from our first meeting with a number of ideas. David suggested a list of pertinent literature about Hawaiian contemporary art and philosophy that I will post soon. He mentioned the importance of recognizing my unique location here on Oahu – I am an artist/student living within a melting pot of both Western and Eastern philosophies. While I am engaged in an MFA program based on the east coast of the United States, I am living and working within a community in the Pacific influenced by a rich Polynesian and Hawaiian culture.  As I study the notion of sublime, it is important to acknowledge the very idea of sublime as a Western cultural construct. In relation to Hawaiian and Polynesian culture, the sublime is in fact embedded into every dimension of life. Thus, in an effort to better understand the sublime and how it relates to both the people and landscape of Hawaii AND my own approach to making artwork here, I need to read up on number of local literature and artists. I will be researching how other local artists look at, understand, work with, and portray the notion of sublime.

David had a chance to browse a book I am currently reading, Simon Morley’s “The Sublime.” An important quote by Morley in his introduction on the discourse of sublime reads, “Methodologically, the sublime may be invoked performatively in some texts, while at the other extreme it will be analyzed through the abstract and detached lens of philosophy. Several texts can clearly be located with a residually religious, mystical, or spiritual discourse, while others take a more sociological and even Marxist perspective in exploring the centrality of the concept of the sublime to postmodern culture as a whole. Some texts approach recent history as itself a sublime experience, while others address problems posed by science and technology. All these perspectives are deepened by the application of psychoanalytic theories, and by revisions of received knowledge and belief arising from feminist, ethnic, and non-Western critique. Ultimately, the sublime is an experience looking for context.” (21)

Morley acknowledges evolving understandings of the sublime, and most pertinent to my work (and location), he suggests “ethnic and non-Western critique” as important contributions to the discourse. This is where gaining a deeper understanding of Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures may come into play as approach the broad and massive topic of the sublime.

Morley concludes, “In the pre-modern period, this context [of the sublime] was mostly provided by religion. From around the Romantic era onwards, some forms of art took on this role. And more recently, spectacle and mass media have given the sublime a new if not unproblematic home. The sublime is an experience that can serve many interests; it is now for us to decided what it holds for the future.” (21)

Work-wise, David and I discussed the importance of staying open to multiple strains of thought and exploring many projects this fall… although it is already apparent that threads exist between ideas. Currently, I am looking at:

•                Constructed/commercialized sublime in Hawaiian tourism industry

•                Escapism

•                The sublime (…broad and massive topic here but keeping this theme open for possibilities)

•                Water & air experiments (& perhaps how these relate to sublime experiences)