10 Oct The Art of The Meme
Whoever said memes can’t be art doesn’t have a sense of humor, or of art for that matter--and they definitely haven’t met Travis Sharp. That idea was one of the jumping-off points at the Drawing Words & Writing Visual Texts workshop he ran at the Just Buffalo Writing Center in early October. Sharp, a PhD student in the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo, centered the first day of workshop around the visual and physical structure of letters and words. At first, the prompts were straightforward: ● Draw a vertical line. ● Draw a lowercase “l”. ● Draw the uppercase “I” upside down. The language used here is crucial. Sharp asked the students, Ryan and Theo, to “draw” instead of “write” letters. Without saying it, Sharp rejects the confinements of what can or cannot be drawn or a drawing. The task is visual in its instructions, and eventually becomes more abstract: ● Draw a face. ● Draw the word “face”. ● Draw the word “word”. ● Draw the word “poem”. ● Draw a poem. The ambiguous reasoning behind the instructions creates space for a myriad of interpretations--both for what it means to draw and what it means to write poetry. What does it mean, for example, to “draw” a poem? Do you draw lines in the form of stanzas? Do you draw words escaping from a brain? A heart? It’s hard to convey what exactly the directions mean, but it allows the results to be endless. “It’s not really explaining something but it’s creating some sort of experience that you can talk about.” Sharp said, on the topic of writing from the vantage point of the visual. On the second day of workshop, he inverted that prompt. First, by projecting images from Matthea Harvey’s If the tabloids are true… a book of photos and artwork accompanied by poetry. The collection is beautiful but eerie, especially in the way it unsettles our expectations of how things should be. from Matthea Harvey’s "If the tabloids are true…" There’s an uneasiness in seeing something warped from its usual context, like a mermaid with scissors for a tail, or a set of tiny chairs and human figurines paralyzed in blocks of ice. from Matthea Harvey’s "If the tabloids are true…" The two students attending the workshop, Ryan and Theo, took different paths: Have you ever heard someone say If you choke on ice, All you have to do is wait? What if you get frozen with ice? Just wait Wait until it melts so I can move Wait until the cold stops Stop Please stop Get this ice out from between my thighs and handbag. But I just have to wait. Tick tock I’m getting bored I think this ice is starting to reach my heart I can feel my blood freezing My veins closing My heart stopping Stop Please stop How long must I stay waiting? -Ryan Theo on the other hand saw the ice as an opportunity to speak on the obvious, and not so obvious, as he explained to the group that day. The obvious being the objects trapped in ice, and the not so obvious being the elements not present in the photo. I tried