Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 4B
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
I’m terrible at keeping journals. I admire
their purpose, but I can never keep up with
the commitment. I always stop to doodle and
quickly get sick of hearing myself talk about
the same things over and over.
Despite the distracting nature, I’m still
fascinated by the concept of tracking growth
over time. Some of my favorite artworks are
those that do exactly that – without a clear
end goal. Instead of developing an art piece
based on an argument the artist wants to
make, these works develop a framework for
creating and let time take the reigns. Maybe
the piece does make an argument, but it
appears organically as the work incrementally
changes. It’s not the driving force. It’s time-
based, but instead of the “time as a medium”
mindset of other “time-based” art forms like
film or performance, this type of work invites
the force of time to be a co-artist.
Bre Boersma’s 2018 Sunrise Trek project is
a great example of this. Every morning for a
summer, Boersma woke up at 5:45 a.m., took
a picture of the sunrise and created a color
palette of it. The framework is simple, but
the results are intriguing. You can take a lot
of conclusions from this work if you want –
maybe we should wake up earlier, maybe we
should appreciate sunrises more, but it’s not
about the conclusions. It’s about the process of
letting forces beyond our control drive what
we make.
There’s a concept that information designer
Giorgia Lupi calls “data humanism,” which
champions the collection and visualization
of subjective, complex and personal data. She
makes highly rendered, sprawling depictions
of gathered information that take time to
interpret. Every one of Lupi’s graphs needs a
key. Her infographics are beautiful, yes, but
their delight goes beyond aesthetics. They’re a
way of telling a story by inviting the listener to
look closely and put together the pieces.
But not just any story. It’s always a
personal story, as benign as showing every
instance Lupi looked at a clock in a day and
as emotionally heavy as representing the
daily experiences of a child with a serious
illness. Lupi knows and embraces the fact that
these works cannot help but be subjective.
That’s what communication is: a flawed
interpretation and subsequent representation
of a subject. We unavoidably filter everything
we say, show, write and express through our
own viewpoints. That’s what art is, too.
At a young age, I switched from keeping
journals to sketchbooks. I’ve got piles of them
at home, going back to when I was seven
or eight years old. A lot of the sketches are
embarrassing to look at now, and I probably
won’t ever show them to anyone else. But
I’m glad I kept them. It’s a record of change
that I never could have predicted, both in
the development of artistic skills and the
development of my own personality.
I can track my growth over time, from
drawing princesses as a child up through my
emo comic book phase as a teenager. I can
look through these drawings and pinpoint the
moment I decided to go to art school. I have
nearly 50 sketches of the same friend over the
course of four years, showcasing not only my
friend’s rapidly-changing haircuts, but the
way our friendship changed over time.
The University of Michigan Museum of Art
has a piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called
“Untitled (March 5th) #2” which consists of
two lightbulbs, cords intertwined, affixed to a
wall. Either of the lightbulbs can go out at any
time. One of them will always go out before the
other, but the artist and the museum have no
control over when that happens. It’s a simple
but profound framework where the outcome
is determined by time.
Gonzalez-Torres
made
this
piece
in
response to the AIDS crisis after the 1991
diagnosis of his lover, Ross Laycock. It’s one
of many lightbulb pieces he made in the years
after, a way to deal with ideas of connection
and mortality in a time of hurt and uncertainty.
Right now, we’re also living through a
time of uncertainty. No one knows exactly
how our days are going to progress or how
life will change. It’s set a lot of people’s lives
and art goals into limbo – canceled shows
and lack of access to materials and equipment
can be a major setback for professional and
amateur artists alike. But rather than be
consumed with frustration at the roadblocks
to other projects, there’s another option: Start
something new.
You don’t have to set up a time-consuming,
complex framework. You don’t have to know
how or when you’re going to end it. There’s
something comforting about starting an art
project without planning the finish. It means
accepting that you don’t have total control
over what happens next.
As someone who revels in careful routine
and planning, it can be worrisome to give up
any control. But you can still set parameters
for yourself. Maybe you photograph all of
your daily meals. Maybe you record yourself
playing a song every day. Maybe you make
color swatches based on your outfits. Maybe
you stick with a tried-and-true journal.
Maybe, if you’re like me, you just set aside
daily time to sketch.
So if you’re stuck in limbo, worrying about
the future, try starting a routine art practice.
Let time work with you, and see what happens
next.
The timeliness of starting
a new, routine art practice
EMILY CONSIDINE
Editorial Page Editor
99U
As weird as it may sound, time travel
is a common topic of conversation in my
family. This is mostly because my sister
just doesn’t understand it. Any time we
watch a time travel movie, we end up
spending hours discussing the logistics
behind the warped chronology that the
characters inevitably go through, and
we usually end up more confused than
we began. In our terms, to accomplish
time travel correctly, there have to be
repercussions for all of the character’s
actions without unresolved or confusing
gaps in the timeline. While I am by no
means an expert in this topic, I’d like to
think that I do know a little bit about time
travel in movies, at least enough to explain
which movies make sense and which ones
don’t.
I’ll
start
with
one
that
doesn’t:
“Avengers: Endgame.” In the simplest
of terms, the movie revolves around the
Avengers venturing into the past to get the
Infinity Stones that control the universe.
But it isn’t exactly a simple concept. The
directors of the film, Joe and Anthony
Russo (“Captain America: The Winter
Soldier”), pioneered an entirely new way of
time travel. Their new method insinuated
that any change a character made to the
past didn’t affect their original future;
rather, it affected a new future. What does
that mean? To be honest, I’m not sure
anyone really knows. The best way that I
could understand it was that any time you
go back in time and change something,
you create a new alternate reality.
This is a fine concept, I suppose, but
only if it’s consistent … and it isn’t. For
one thing, if Steve Rogers (Chris Evans,
“Knives Out”) goes back in time and
lives a life with Peggy (Hayley Atwell,
“Christopher Robin”) — which he does
— wouldn’t that then create an alternate
reality, or an alternate ‘future’? So how
does Old Man Steve show up in the
Avengers’ reality, having lived a life with
Peggy? According to the Russo brothers’s
rules, he shouldn’t be able to. Also, when
Steve and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr,
“Iron Man”) go back to the ’70s to retrieve
the Tesseract and Pym Particles, how
is Tony’s father Howard (John Slattery,
“Churchill”) an old man when Peggy, who
is presumably around the same age as him,
appears virtually the same thirty years
after we last saw her? Again, it doesn’t
make sense. I’ll never really forgive the
Russo Brothers for messing with my mind
the way they did with “Endgame.”
“Back to the Future” remains one of the
most iconic examples of time travel and
does it more correctly than “Endgame”
does, but plenty of concepts in that film
remain difficult to swallow, continuity-
wise. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox, “The
Frighteners”) accidentally goes back in
time, interrupts his parents’ meeting and
has to hurry to reintroduce them to ensure
that he exists in the future. But how do
Marty’s parents and Biff (Thomas Wilson,
“The Heat”) not recognize ‘Calvin Klein’
when Marty himself grows up to look just
like him? Shouldn’t they all remember
the kid that had such a huge impact on
their lives? After all, ‘Calvin’ helped
George McFly (Crispin Glover, “Hot Tub
Time Machine”) and Lorraine Banes
(Lea Thompson, “Howard the Duck”) get
together while ruining Biff’s car with
manure in the process. However, I will
admit that this film did a pretty good job
with time travel, especially considering
the fact that it was such a new idea in the
’80s. Most of the time travel continuity
problems in the “Back to the Future”
franchise stem from the fact that almost
all the time travelling that Marty and
Doc do involves either past renditions of
themselves or the past versions of people
that they know, thus teaching me that if
anyone ever does decide to time travel,
they should not meddle with events their
ancestors were a part of. In fact, if time
travel ever does exist, it should only be
used to passively observe history.
This brings me to my final example
of time travel, the movie that does it the
best … “Mr. Peabody and Sherman.” A lot
of people might overlook this film due to
the fact that it’s categorized as a children’s
movie, but not only is this probably the only
movie I’ve ever seen that has done time
travel correctly, it’s also just an awesome,
entertaining film. Mr. Peabody, voiced by
Ty Burrell (“Modern Family”), and his son
Sherman, voiced by Max Charles (“The
Angry Birds Movie”), use Mr. Peabody’s
invention, the WABAC Machine, to time
travel to important historical events to
teach Sherman about history. This movie
shows that there are repercussions to time
travel that go beyond just getting stuck in
the past, like what happens to Marty. You
could destroy the entire universe with
time travel. This is why, in all honesty,
time travel should just never, ever exist.
There are too many variables and too
many ways to mess up everything. And
there is, unfortunately, no Mr. Peabody
in the real world to save us all when we
inevitably screw everything up when we
try to time travel.
A ranking on time travel:
From the best to the worst
SABRIYA IMAMI
Daily Arts Writer
WIKIMEDIA
B-SIDE