Michel de Montaigne - Research Presentation

 

Illustration by Floc'H / The New Yorker

"Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself—“bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais,” taking that ordinary word and turning it into a literary occupation." (Article: Me, Myself, and I - What made Michel de Montaigne the first modern man? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i)

It was very intriguing reading about Michel de Montaigne. He had a very unique upbringing; I find it fascinating that he was only spoken to in Latin for the first 5 years of his life, and that he was awakened by a musician every morning (his family was very wealthy). I had read the essay Of Cannibals in my French class last year, and it was that memory that spurred me to research more about him. I was not disappointed. He had this inscribed on the bookshelves in the tower in which he did his writing:

"In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure."

I know people of his time thought he was self-indulgent, but I think that inscription is really funny.

Michel de Montaigne - Presentation

Flickr Links

Traces

Sneaky Mushrooms

Microwaved chicken

I think this is one of my more nonsensical works. 

I had many ideas for this project, ranging from a swordfight using silverware to recording my sewing machine on all the different stitch settings.

I chose to record the hum of a microwave because it is ongoing, and the process of the microwave door opening and shutting, and the timer beeping, are familiar sounds that also provide us with a mental image that is easy to visualize.

I overlayed chicken sounds that progressed from the soft peeps of baby chicks to the sort of medium-deep clucks of pullets and then ended up with the agitated, loud whining of my oldest hen. Sort of going off the idea that something put in a microwave goes through a process of heating or cooking, a chemical change. What really happens when one microwaves a chicken? 

https://soundcloud.com/jean-lynn-kc/microwaved-chicken

Artist Talk: Carol Emmons

 Carol Emmons describes art “as places to physically explore and in which to compose personal reveries. In this way, the works also engage art itself, conceiving art as experience rather than object, and positing it as an ongoing collaboration between artist and viewer”. 

This is a line from Carol Emmons’ artist statement. I will say at the beginning of the talk, seeing Emmons’ work on the screen, it took me a little to realize that her art installations are life-sized for a viewer to experience by immersing themself in the exhibition physically; at first I thought she built smaller-scale environments and installed them. I was a big fan of the Egg Universe - Orphic Egg piece, “Cosmogony 2.0”, and particularly “Mneme XXIX: Tourism”. I found it interesting that many of her works involved the notion of time and the formation of the world, such as “Cosmogony 2.2” (2016), where she portrays the universe as if it was spun from a grandmother’s handiwork. Another thing I liked was how she chooses such cool light to create an interesting ambience in the installation. My favorite lighting was the one shown in “Miasma” (2022); that final picture on her website is really moody and a little surreal feeling because of the deep brown/orange cast on the walls and from the candles. She describes in “Mneme I: Kenilworth, Milwaukee” (1984) that Mneme comes from the Greek term for “memory” and how she creates artwork based on past environments she has experienced and subsequently evokes artistically, such as that piece inspired by the coffee table at her parents’ first house. I found many of her works to be nostalgic. In the last page of “The Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McLuhan, he states that “the environment man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it” (82). One of the things Emmons spoke about was that research, site, and theme were most influential in facilitating strokes of artistic inspiration.  Particularly, since Emmons enters into a space and must decide how to transform that physical environment, the environment is both a medium for her to manipulate, and her artistic process is reciprocally influenced by that space.