It's raining heavily and Alice in Wonderland is not playing any more in 3D, so it's difficult to figure out what to do with myself. Reading seems to be the order of the day. Or maybe just processing the previous two days. I do that a lot - allow myself time to reflect on something interesting that happened, but then I had to cook dinner and the phone rang and the afterward part slipped away.
On Friday evening a friend and I went to a goodbye lecture for an art history professor at the university who was moving on to a position at the Tate Modern in London. So she was in a reflective mood, and was expressing her appreciation for her years here. Her subjects for the talk were the artists Agnes Martin and Ann Truitt, both of whom died fairly recently, and who represented the art of minimalism. But the professor was also recognizing her goodbyes might be final, as, as an older woman, she was going far away and time feels fleeting at our age, and after all, our time with Martin and Truitt as live working artists feels fleeting as well. They're gone. You and I could be gone today or tomorrow. It's in the air for us.
I loved the way she placed herself, humbly, in the position of a woman whose body of work may grow in stature, or decline, but what matters is the process of it. Seeing while there is still seeing possible.
So I'd like to see my life as it happens, and understand that minimalism, in all it's forms, does not mean with little meaning. It is life scraped pure and clean, looked at lucidly, and recorded in the endless personal ways that we women mark our time on earth. My friend and I stopped a while in that knowledge, and honored the scholars, the artists and ourselves by doing so.
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