Shonna Wells' AAD250 Page

This week’s assignment could not possibly be more up my alley. Before moving to Eugene Five years ago, I spent three years working in a fine dining restaurant in The Coeur d’Alene Resort in north Idaho. Beverly’s restaurant was one of the best and most creative experiences of my life – and that is saying a lot.
In this environment we fully embraced the art form of slow food in all we did. We sourced our food whenever possible from local farmers and harvesters. We utilized meat that was harvest by ways of the chef’s hunting adventures into the wild forests and then practiced charcuterie – which is the branch of cooking that processes meats, making them into bacon, rustic sausages, pâtés, terrines and beyond. Nearly everything was made in house – even our dressings, mustard, mayonnaise and sauces.

We weren’t only encouraged but sometimes required to spend an entire shift carving melons or creating sauces that would just be delicately painted across a paint to create the perfect bite. Ingenuity was expected at every turn. A new daring flavor profile. A pairing that hadn’t been thought of.
Once a year hosted an enormous dinner celebration just to honor the revered Copper River Salmon. Not only did we rejoice its depth of flavor, firm mouth feel and overall boldness, but we acknowledged and showed respect to the animal itself and what it stood for – especially to those of us in the northwest.
Dissanayake said, “What artists do, in their specialized and often driven way, is an exaggeration of what ordinary people also do, naturally and with enjoyment – transform the ordinary into extra-ordinary.” Every last one of us, even from the dishwashers all the way up to our Sous Chef, would say that we created art. We thought outside of the box. We took on tasks with passion and dedication and respect for what we started with. We called on all the senses to truly make a memorable experience – every smell mattered, every nuance of the garnishes, the subtle tingling of the citrus based sauces… None of it was without thought.

Food was our paintbrush and we considered ourselves to be the Picassos that could search out the most precious ‘paints’ from around the world and every day we forged ahead to create amazing, one bite at a time.

Although I know it sound like a mouthful at first, I don’t feel like paleoanthropsychobiological is really that much to take on. Ellen Dissanayake created the term and spoke about it in her paper on the value of art. To me this is what she feels art is for and what the value of it is – it is paleological because it includes all of our history, and anthrological because it is cross cultural, and psycological because it embraces emotion too. Art calls on all of these things in us and in a culture in order to express thoughts and feelings and emotion and tradition and is a way that we can carry this on. This term helps us to understand art and how we can explain it.

Dissanayake also talks about, “to make special particular things that one cares deeply about or activities whose outcome has strong personal significance”. To me this means that art can be something that is out of the ordinary when it is looked at it that way. When someone decides to ‘make special’ that means that more awareness and a sort of intentional consciousness has been brought to the context of the art. It is allowed to be seen through new eyes and a more intentional perspective. It has therefore been, made special.

The article references many different periods of art and the significance of them. The first period she went into was the god-centric Medieval times. Here art was meant more for its ability to appreciate their religious values. This can be seen clearly here, “the arts were in service of religion, as they always have been, but were not regarded ‘aesthetically’, if this means separately from their revelation of the Divine.” (Page 14) The renaissance period did shy away from such a strong God focus and did work more on the man centered concerns and ideas.

The eighteenth century brought modernity and the modernist period. It embraced the society, the rise of science by way of industrialization and technology, political revolution, interpersonal changes and emphasis on reason (Page 15-16). These change in values drew the artists from the divine pieces and into aesthetics.

Postmodernism where pieces became more outrageous through elaborate standards and the way they questioned society. Dissanayake summarized the period’s advancement best, when she said, “any ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ is only a point of view- a ‘representation’ that comes to us mediated and conditioned by our language, our social institutions, the assumptions that characterize individuals as members of a nation, a race, a gender, a class, a profession, a religious body, a particular historical period.” Art really did become about interpretation throughout this period and artists became very free to express themselves and the fully capitalized on it.

I went to Bumbershoot in 2002. It was the fall of my junior year of college (the first time). In wandering around and perusing the vendor booths, I found a shirt I fell in love with. It was black and emblazoned with a red, first aid cross, and in bold white letters it said, “Art saves me”.
To this day it is still one of my favorite shirts and still hits as deep of an emotional cord for me as it did then.

I feel that Dissanayak would appreciate this shirt too. Right at the beginning of the reading she talks about the fact that art is a behavior that developed as humans evolved and it helped us survive.

To say that I resonate with this and could not agree more is an understatement. For me and my life my ability to write and draw and express myself creatively has been a focal point in my mental and emotional well being. Art is separate for the individual. We all see things differently and we arrive to what is ‘valued’ based off of the different modes that we learned about last week. We bring our experiences and awareness and we aren’t all at the same level. I believe that there are many that would say that Jackson Pollock’s work is amateur and merely just paint splattered on a canvas. I cannot count the times I have heard someone exclaim with a deep tone latent with disgust, something to the tune of, ‘anyone who considers this to be art is dumber than he is’.

This could not be farther from the truth. Pollock is a conduit and a form of a catalyst that channels the unconscious. He has the bravery to put those exact splatters on the canvas and stand up and share it. It says something about him and his feelings and his thought process and it captures his essence in a very real, raw form, right in the heat of the second.

But, this is just my interpretation of how his body and spirit tried to translate the feeling into paint on to the canvas. I adore Dissanayak’s point that there is no appreciation of art without the interpretation. It’s so true. It’s all subjective. What some consider to be trash, another person holds as their most dear treasure. Someone could adore a classic artist like Picasso while other disregard him as trivial. I maintain that it is because what his pieces evoked in YOU is trivial, but not that his talent or perspective are.

I think it does us all good to stop and think about that before we criticize. Art and otherwise.

Shoot…somehow in the midst of trying to adjust my priorities, I totally missed this part of the assignment. It’s important to me though, so I’ll still do it even though I doubt it will count.

Enjoyment
Personal development
Integrity
Loyalty
Wisdom
Creativity
Friendship
Health
Independence
Personal accomplishment
Service
Community
Security
Expertness
Location
Wealth
Prestige
Power

Sunday was spent with a best friend. We walked and talked and I shared how hard my husband’s affair has been and how alone I feel. We talked about honesty and what our core values were. We talked about nontraditional relationships. We shopped for ingredients at the Mexican market. We prepared food. We watched football. We helped my husband with his school project. We collected eggs from the chickens and fed them mealworms. We played games. We reassured another friend who came over and was feeling alone and lost as she’s nearly going through a divorce. We researched goals. We talked about our hopes and dreams and fears and challenges and frustrations and as stupid and idyllic as it sounds, we dreamed of better tomorrows.

The actions hugely focused on:
Integrity – honesty is all I ask for in a friend/lover and I demand it in return
Family – I view this as people who love and support you with all of their being, not just by blood relation
Independence – making plans for the future that don’t really rely on anything but making me happy and my version of successful
Personal development – with every experience there is a lesson to be learned and I am an expert at picking up the pieces and putting them back in a manner that leaves me better and stronger than I was before
Enjoyment – no matter what happens I will laugh and I will last

I was really surprised with the second part of the assessment.  I think it deserves mention that I am not your traditional student. I am 31 and I failed out of college the first time when three people near and dear to me died my junior year of college, all within the same six month period. I imploded and gave up on myself and everything I valued. I am now stable — whatever that means. I have been with my husband for 6 years and then married another two. I have a great career. I have an amazing family and friends. However, it has all sort of fallen apart a bit when my husband began falling in love with one of his classmates back in April. It’s made me reevaluate what is important, needless to say.

That being said, I took the quiz and I sailed through most of the bigger issues. The things you’re not supposed to come to peace with until you’re at a later stage in life. However, what I found so interesting was how few of the early developmental stages I didn’t feel I had mastered. Things like trying to figure out my dependence and my autonomy and trying to learn my own value — I do not feel like I’ve mastered those in the slightest. It really is amazing what perspective will do for you!

Experiences feel painful  in the moment and they can feel so catastrophic and make you lose faith and hope. The key is to realize that moment is not the end all be all and you can be weak and vulnerable and tomorrow you can start to structure yourself so that by next week (or maybe three) you’re ready to tackle the world and win the day.

I was actually most inspired and stimulated by the end of Lewis’ reading on ‘A Question of Values’. I appreciated that he came at the whole article with a lot of humility. He wasn’t stating that his approach was right or wrong. He had a very thorough, unbiased process of how people arrive at their values and where we get them from. I felt like it was all transparent and stated right up front that the reading was only an attempt to redefine and shed light on the study of personal human values.

I found it to be hugely interesting that that the reading went on to say that a mere 70 years ago, subjects such as politics, economics and personal values were all studied together. Back then it was pretty much common sense that all of those would be looked at together since they were so inextricably linked and the practicality of meshing them together was hugely beneficial. The interpretation back then was that there was a lot of value in learning the topics together.  I think it would be safe to assume that many thought that by studying these as a combined topic, it would make for a more well rounded CEO or Commander in Chief, leader, accountant, etc.

Now the subjects are studied separately and the importance of values isn’t immersed in finance or economics or politics. I find it to be perplexing that anyone ever thought it was a sound idea to take value and moral responsibility out of those topics – they so greatly benefit from coming at them from a perspective that has a strong moral backbone. It’s interesting to sit here and ponder that if the topics had continued to be taught together, if there would be such debacles as Enron and Martha Stewart and her insider trading, etc. Would there be as much lobbying and selling out by politicians to get votes?

I agree with Lewis and believe that the subject of values should make a strong come back and we need to realize the important role it plays.

Works Cited:
Lewis, H. (1990). A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives. Axios Press. October 8, 2013.