An "Artist's Date" with my weekend activities

A commitment I have made to myself for the new year is to embrace my creativity. This weekend I had a variety of experiences, and my "artist date" for today is to blog about them so that I can explores some of the ways my head is still full of images and ideas. The events in Arizona have been an emotional blow, so I'm holding on to these manifestations of human creativity right now.

Errol Morris has a web page chock-a-block full of links to fascinating stories. I must explore it when I get the chance. We watched his film Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control on Netflix on Friday night. I'm going to watch it again soon because there was so much that was fascinating (naked mole-rats! robots with funny walks!), funny and also sad (the lions and tigers). The film makes you think animal life and instinct, mechanical self-perpetuating systems, and the human drives that connect, re-order and create in and around them. There are four stories: a man who devotes his life to creating and maintaining topiary animals in Green Animals Gardens for a wealthy woman in Newport, RI; another who documents and organizes exhibitions of naked mole-rats, an MIT scientist who takes extraordinary pleasure in building artificial creatures that can move like organic creatures, and a man whose ambition is was to be a "lion-tamer." Watching his interactions with the big cats was distressing. What is it that drives us to make a spectacle of the violent confrontation of humans and powerful animals? Can we leave it behind?

On Saturday, we made a visit to the Minnesota Institute of Arts, one of my very favorite Minneapolis places, not least because it is free. We attended a lecture by my U of MN colleague Michael Gaudio on European representations of the Americas and the idea of "natural history," from the Utopian writings of Francis Bacon and the watercolors of John White in the 1580s (including the butterfly above) to "Mister Peale's Mastodon" and art as part of American nationalism. One of the most beautiful images he showed was by an artist named Catesby, a "forerunner of Audobon" who is less well known, but no less accomplished.
I want to learn more about his life and work, having visited botanical gardens in Amsterdam and London. I have discovered that a film has been made about him:

The Curious Mister Catesby from David Elliott on Vimeo.

Underlying this tradition of representation was both the joy of "illuminating" the world, and the process of conquest, appropriation and colonization. So it was fitting that we should also be able to see the gorgeous, beautifully curated collection of Native American art for a second time. It was crowded because the show was closing this weekend, and we ran into people we knew: one of R.'s English teachers, a former grad student who is now a professor and a sculptor, a colleague from the U of MN. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to see a show that brought together so many beautiful examples of the art, yet painfully aware of how this legacy also speaks to the ongoing reality of colonial rule here where I live.

Finally, we watched the first chapter of a British series "Downton Abbey" on PBS, which is fitting because it dramatizes the slow implosion of the British ruling class. Best line of the first episode: Maggie Smith, "What on earth is a week-end?"