Last night Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle celebrated the 2010 recipients of the Governor’s Awards in Support of the Arts. It was another great batch of recipients (full disclosure, I’m on the Advisory Committee for the sponsoring organization, the Wisconsin Foundation for the Arts). Links to videos about each recipient are included below.
A particular favorite, for a while now, is The Wormfarm Institute, a combination of organic farm, artist residency, and cultural connector in rural Reedsburg, Wisconsin, working to ”build a sustainable future for agriculture and the arts by fostering vital links between people and the land.” Artists in residency work 15 hours a week tending to the farm, and helping things grow. Artists also enhance the life and work of local farmers through the very cool Roadside Culture Stands project. The Woolen Mill Gallery provides a public space to connect the dots, as well (as in the current Smithsonian exhibit there).
Well worth a watching. Makes you want to get your hands into the soil — both literally and metaphorically.
Other videos of worthy and wonderful recipients are also available for Racine Art Museum Executive Director Bruce Pepich, arts funders/supporters Betty Harris and J. Corkey Custer, and Wisconsin-based theatrical and architectural lighting company Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC). Also worth watching is the overview of the 2010 commissioned artist for the awards, master metalsmith Jon Michael Route.
Good to see this, Andrew, and I agree it inspires us urbanites to get out there and dig. I’ve often noticed that in rural areas and small towns, a single store needs to serve many kinds of purposes and stock many kinds of goods (the “general store”). It’s only in the cities that stores can specialize, and in big, wealthy cities they sometimes specialize to an almost comical extent. What’s refreshing and even moving about these Wisconsin projects is that they treat art just like other fundamental human needs: farm produce and visual art together at the roadside stand, everyday food for all. It takes art out of that rarefied, sacralized realm that we put it for most of the 20th century. Good news from the heartland.
“It takes art out of that rarefied, sacralized realm that we put it for most of the 20th century.”
In the past half century there has been a movement to return, once again, the basest of natural elements back into the sacred. The first mistake was to take the physical out of the sacred -ask women and the natural environment of our planet about that particular “Patriarchal” gift. The second mistake was to make what was physical evil. Again, ask women about that too. The third was to make sacred only what was left once the worms, earth,wombs, blood, and guts were removed. The more the individual thing -idea, sound, art, money transaction, people and the arts included-was removed from its connections to the earth, the more it was good, spiritual and sacred. One of Stravinsky’s shocking acts was to force the earth and the guts of life back into the “sacred” and “precious” realm of romantic classical music. But the very important thing to consider is that nothing can be sacred unless it includes the physical, or the ‘way of the earth’. So asking the worm and the soil and the body to make its way back into music, dance, all culture, is actually helping us see the sacred as it really is, maybe for the first time in a very, very, long time. Here’s Beethoven. “Nature knows no quiescence; and true art walks with her hand in hand; her sister, from whom heaven defend us! is called artificiality.”