Alison Watkins | Ringling College of Art and Design (original) (raw)
Papers by Alison Watkins
The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American se... more The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American self-taught, contemporary artist whose life spans from the 1930's in the South to the present day. The apocalyptic worldview presented in Mr. Scott's visionary paintings are as vivid as Blake's. His vernacular yet highly evolved Giottoesque style makes his paintings a unique blend of contemporary art with the atmosphere and style of the Old Masters, melding the images of Italian Renaissance Catholic iconography with rural Southern Baptist visionary-laden metaphors and stories.
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3879643161/
Though the modern revolution in ethics may have begun with challenging the divine authority of th... more Though the modern revolution in ethics may have begun with challenging the divine authority of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, a task for both the Reformation and Renaissance to struggle through, it nonetheless failed to cure evil. Neither was the problem of evil adequately addressed by the rationalists of the Enlightenment who placed their naive hope in human reason as a natural panacea for the ills of the world. Instead, Darwin’s proof of humankind’s kinship with the apes, the rising advent of Biblical criticism in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious all contributed to the destruction of old values. With the loss of any authoritative collective standard of value which accompanied the demise of the old ethic, there occurred a coincidental loss of soul, or if not of the soul itself, certainly any human sense of the soul. W.B. Yeats reacted strongly to the scientific materialism prevalent at the beginning of the century, and ...
DESCRIPTION W.B. Yeats and his wife George Hyde-Lees , in an attempt to make contact with the spi... more DESCRIPTION W.B. Yeats and his wife George Hyde-Lees , in an attempt to make contact with the spirit world, conducted a series of experiments they devised during their honeymoon and almost daily for the next seven years, which included automatic writing and sleep and dream trances. The Yeatses' contact with other world spirits ultimately led to the metaphysical world view constructed in A Vision. This work examines the automatic writings in search of the relation between the soul and the imagination in the Yeatses' construct.
William Butler Yeats had a lifelong expectancy of writing poetry that brought him to revelation, ... more William Butler Yeats had a lifelong expectancy of writing poetry that brought him to revelation, to a kind of apocalyptic vision that he hungered for. In his Autobiographies he tells how, “deprived of orthodox religious belief by the skepticism of his father, he had turned to imaginative literature to find or create there the ‘sacred book of the arts.’ Such a book would provide the modern reader with powerful symbols, with “liberating images, which working through the collective mind would restore humanity to something of that unity of culture that it had, so Yeats supposed, enjoyed before the rise of science and analytic, rather than imaginative modes of thought” (YO 131). Yeats once remarked that he “had an unshakable conviction that invisible gates would open, as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme” (A 254).
Knowing more of the Paleolithic imagination is to know the ‘Paleo Ecology’ of our own minds. . . ... more Knowing more of the Paleolithic imagination is to know the ‘Paleo Ecology’ of our own minds. . . For it is in the deep mind that wilderness and the unconsciousness become one, and in some half-understood but very profound way, our relation to the outer ecologies seems conditioned by our inner ecologies. This is a metaphor, but it is also literal. ~ Gary Snyder In a broad sense the history of image-making among humans is a history of the changing fortunes of the word underworld. When, as the result of the discovery of the unconscious, the people of the twentieth century set sail in the uncharted waters of ‘psychology,’ a sudden broadening and expanding of the meaning of underworld set in. In the imagination of the nineteenth century, foraging into the underworld carried with it the spectacle of progress: the clean neat sewers of Paris, the tunnel under the Thames are bold images of scientific and technological improvements. to say the beginning of the Age of the Imaginal coincides wi...
Not a day goes by that we don't find some way to fictionalize our lives; in fact, we invent a... more Not a day goes by that we don't find some way to fictionalize our lives; in fact, we invent and live our lives through our stories. Some may argue that the very act of perception is itself the creation of a fiction. And certainly many of us recognize that we live in universes of our own making. In fact, if the truth be told, we have but to observe the chronic spin that we are bombarded with daily from the media to come to the realization that the world itself is a field of ever changing possibilities, in which, as Annie Dillard says in Living By Fiction, "Anything may happen." To the artist, to the writer, this "anything" is real subject of fiction. (58) While some stories may be true, others are not. In either case, our storytelling, just as much as our perception,is a way of achieving personal affirmation of our identities and our experiences.
Straddling the Blurred Lines -The Paintings and Frames of Lorenzo Scott, 2019
The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American se... more The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American self-taught, contemporary artist whose life spans from the 1930's in the South to the present day. The apocalyptic worldview presented in Mr. Scott's visionary paintings are as vivid as Blake's. His vernacular yet highly evolved Giottoesque style makes his paintings a unique blend of contemporary art with the atmosphere and style of the Old Masters, melding the images of Italian Renaissance Catholic iconography with rural Southern Baptist visionary-laden metaphors and stories.
This paper explores the work of American artist Lesley Dill whose art give visual form to poetic ... more This paper explores the work of American artist Lesley Dill whose art give visual form to poetic texts, and to the significance of language itself. Her working premise focuses on the idea that words have spiritual significance, and that even our basic utterances collectively conceal and expose us at the same time. At a talk at the Hunter Museum last year, Dill said, “I know I am an artist that is in the category of using text, but I don’t care for that word, because it seems too impersonal to me. To me words are so important . . . I take a deep breath, I have a thought, I wrap that thought with air, I bring it up past my heart and lungs and my throat and my teeth and my tongue and my lips, and bring it up and out into the air, and into your bodies, and onto your skin, therefore the deepest part of my body is going from me to you. Speaking and listening is a very intimate thing.” This presentation explores how in Dill’s artwork the words revealed through image become a vehicle for ex...
Between October 1917, when W.B. Yeats married George, and April 1925, when the first version of A... more Between October 1917, when W.B. Yeats married George, and April 1925, when the first version of A Vision was complete, Yeats and his wife conducted almost daily a series of psychic experiments that included automatic writing and sleep and dream trances. In one of the first pieces of automatic handwriting she produced after her marriage to Yeats, George took down the information about the origin of Yeats’s “system.” . . . At the time the Yeatses conducted their experiments, the world could not have supposed that in the confusing, unreadable scribbles of psychic fragments were the skeletons of a major metaphysical world vision. In those illegible scrawls of George’s hand can be found all the antinomies, all the phantasmorgia of gyres, circles, hourglasses, and cones which has fascinated the minds of many a reader of Yeats, and confused as much as illuminated them. But a problem presented itself to the Yeatses: What were they to do with the messages from the other world?
When contemplating how to read visual poetry, I’m reminded of the old “This is your Brain” anti-d... more When contemplating how to read visual poetry, I’m reminded of the old “This is your Brain” anti-drug commercial. Only the visual for “This is your Brain on Vispo” not only dices or fries words and letters often right off the page, it effectively demands an alternate approach to reading. As Michael Ridley in the Beyond Literacy thought experiment says: “Reading and writing are doomed. Literacy as we know it is over. Welcome to the post-literate future.”¹ It seems that no longer can readers and lovers of poetry depend on alphabetic literacy to unravel the secrets of a well-crafted poem. But beyond that even, reading and reading proficiency both have declined significantly in the U.S. in the past 25 years.² So what tools are there that we can call upon, or develop, to perform the essential reading function more fully and effectively? Does Vispo offer a glimmer of how to retool our reading skills to address what appears to be a visual-centric future?
¹http://www.beyondliteracy.com/
²The Los Angeles Times, Thursday, April 17, 2014
University Teaching Conference, Jaen, Spain, Jul 2007
""The latest tools of interest in new media that our students often use, the iPods, video cameras... more ""The latest tools of interest in new media that our students often use, the iPods, video cameras, cell phones, laptops, Internet, and all the associated gadgetry, are also superb tools for rethinking our approaches to classroom learning. As classroom educators, we
need to move beyond the notions of simple literacy in reading and writing to help students mature into a condition of empowerment and engagement of the new media for creative learning. These latest technologies can help students and faculty alike analyze and construct elements of narrative, create metaphoric perspectives, build layered and non-linear stories, and help both students and faculty begin to understand new reading behaviors. In addition, these new technologies encourage collaborative learning spaces that cross boundaries between the traditional and the new media. This presentation will explore the use of digital technology in the classroom to enhance creativity in reading and writing.
""
Southeastern College Art Association Presentation, Oct 2012
As a sculptor, photographer, printmaker, installation and performance artist, Lesley Dill exploit... more As a sculptor, photographer, printmaker, installation and performance artist, Lesley Dill exploits her response to language to unearth the human form, entwining the two together as a single cloth. Though made from discrete strands, in her work the two are in every respect inseparable from one another. By visually combining the human form with language, Dill shows evidence of a longing to see beyond what her visual sight tells her—a longing for a revelation of her soul’s existence itself, brought about by the very act of her reading.
NYSVA Conference Proceedings, 2012, Oct 2012
Florida Studies Proceedings, 2006, Aug 2006
NYSVA Conference Proceedings, 1999, Dec 1999
NYSVA Annual Conference Proceedings, 2005, Jan 2005
Association for the Study of Ethical Behavior in Literature Journal , 2009
Yeats’s psychic experiments performed with this wife George between 1917 and 1923, perhaps the mo... more Yeats’s psychic experiments performed with this wife George between 1917 and 1923, perhaps the most remarkable sustained psychic experiments of our time, enabled Yeats to open unconscious channels between them, and to transform what had previously been for him intellectual observations into tangible experience. The Yeatses’ experiments in automatic writing and sleep and dream trances resulted in a group of apocalyptic and visionary writings known as the “Script” that were eventually codified into the complex metaphysical world system recorded in A Vision. In this work Yeats created a mythology of the soul, and then applied that mythology to the ethical concerns of his contemporaries, and in particular to the problem of evil and the idea of valuation by images as a means for constructing the soul.
Marquette University, Milwaukee WI Conference, 2002, Mar 2002
The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American se... more The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American self-taught, contemporary artist whose life spans from the 1930's in the South to the present day. The apocalyptic worldview presented in Mr. Scott's visionary paintings are as vivid as Blake's. His vernacular yet highly evolved Giottoesque style makes his paintings a unique blend of contemporary art with the atmosphere and style of the Old Masters, melding the images of Italian Renaissance Catholic iconography with rural Southern Baptist visionary-laden metaphors and stories.
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3879643161/
Though the modern revolution in ethics may have begun with challenging the divine authority of th... more Though the modern revolution in ethics may have begun with challenging the divine authority of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, a task for both the Reformation and Renaissance to struggle through, it nonetheless failed to cure evil. Neither was the problem of evil adequately addressed by the rationalists of the Enlightenment who placed their naive hope in human reason as a natural panacea for the ills of the world. Instead, Darwin’s proof of humankind’s kinship with the apes, the rising advent of Biblical criticism in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious all contributed to the destruction of old values. With the loss of any authoritative collective standard of value which accompanied the demise of the old ethic, there occurred a coincidental loss of soul, or if not of the soul itself, certainly any human sense of the soul. W.B. Yeats reacted strongly to the scientific materialism prevalent at the beginning of the century, and ...
DESCRIPTION W.B. Yeats and his wife George Hyde-Lees , in an attempt to make contact with the spi... more DESCRIPTION W.B. Yeats and his wife George Hyde-Lees , in an attempt to make contact with the spirit world, conducted a series of experiments they devised during their honeymoon and almost daily for the next seven years, which included automatic writing and sleep and dream trances. The Yeatses' contact with other world spirits ultimately led to the metaphysical world view constructed in A Vision. This work examines the automatic writings in search of the relation between the soul and the imagination in the Yeatses' construct.
William Butler Yeats had a lifelong expectancy of writing poetry that brought him to revelation, ... more William Butler Yeats had a lifelong expectancy of writing poetry that brought him to revelation, to a kind of apocalyptic vision that he hungered for. In his Autobiographies he tells how, “deprived of orthodox religious belief by the skepticism of his father, he had turned to imaginative literature to find or create there the ‘sacred book of the arts.’ Such a book would provide the modern reader with powerful symbols, with “liberating images, which working through the collective mind would restore humanity to something of that unity of culture that it had, so Yeats supposed, enjoyed before the rise of science and analytic, rather than imaginative modes of thought” (YO 131). Yeats once remarked that he “had an unshakable conviction that invisible gates would open, as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme” (A 254).
Knowing more of the Paleolithic imagination is to know the ‘Paleo Ecology’ of our own minds. . . ... more Knowing more of the Paleolithic imagination is to know the ‘Paleo Ecology’ of our own minds. . . For it is in the deep mind that wilderness and the unconsciousness become one, and in some half-understood but very profound way, our relation to the outer ecologies seems conditioned by our inner ecologies. This is a metaphor, but it is also literal. ~ Gary Snyder In a broad sense the history of image-making among humans is a history of the changing fortunes of the word underworld. When, as the result of the discovery of the unconscious, the people of the twentieth century set sail in the uncharted waters of ‘psychology,’ a sudden broadening and expanding of the meaning of underworld set in. In the imagination of the nineteenth century, foraging into the underworld carried with it the spectacle of progress: the clean neat sewers of Paris, the tunnel under the Thames are bold images of scientific and technological improvements. to say the beginning of the Age of the Imaginal coincides wi...
Not a day goes by that we don't find some way to fictionalize our lives; in fact, we invent a... more Not a day goes by that we don't find some way to fictionalize our lives; in fact, we invent and live our lives through our stories. Some may argue that the very act of perception is itself the creation of a fiction. And certainly many of us recognize that we live in universes of our own making. In fact, if the truth be told, we have but to observe the chronic spin that we are bombarded with daily from the media to come to the realization that the world itself is a field of ever changing possibilities, in which, as Annie Dillard says in Living By Fiction, "Anything may happen." To the artist, to the writer, this "anything" is real subject of fiction. (58) While some stories may be true, others are not. In either case, our storytelling, just as much as our perception,is a way of achieving personal affirmation of our identities and our experiences.
Straddling the Blurred Lines -The Paintings and Frames of Lorenzo Scott, 2019
The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American se... more The introductory chapter for a book on the outsider artist Lorenzo Scott, an African-American self-taught, contemporary artist whose life spans from the 1930's in the South to the present day. The apocalyptic worldview presented in Mr. Scott's visionary paintings are as vivid as Blake's. His vernacular yet highly evolved Giottoesque style makes his paintings a unique blend of contemporary art with the atmosphere and style of the Old Masters, melding the images of Italian Renaissance Catholic iconography with rural Southern Baptist visionary-laden metaphors and stories.
This paper explores the work of American artist Lesley Dill whose art give visual form to poetic ... more This paper explores the work of American artist Lesley Dill whose art give visual form to poetic texts, and to the significance of language itself. Her working premise focuses on the idea that words have spiritual significance, and that even our basic utterances collectively conceal and expose us at the same time. At a talk at the Hunter Museum last year, Dill said, “I know I am an artist that is in the category of using text, but I don’t care for that word, because it seems too impersonal to me. To me words are so important . . . I take a deep breath, I have a thought, I wrap that thought with air, I bring it up past my heart and lungs and my throat and my teeth and my tongue and my lips, and bring it up and out into the air, and into your bodies, and onto your skin, therefore the deepest part of my body is going from me to you. Speaking and listening is a very intimate thing.” This presentation explores how in Dill’s artwork the words revealed through image become a vehicle for ex...
Between October 1917, when W.B. Yeats married George, and April 1925, when the first version of A... more Between October 1917, when W.B. Yeats married George, and April 1925, when the first version of A Vision was complete, Yeats and his wife conducted almost daily a series of psychic experiments that included automatic writing and sleep and dream trances. In one of the first pieces of automatic handwriting she produced after her marriage to Yeats, George took down the information about the origin of Yeats’s “system.” . . . At the time the Yeatses conducted their experiments, the world could not have supposed that in the confusing, unreadable scribbles of psychic fragments were the skeletons of a major metaphysical world vision. In those illegible scrawls of George’s hand can be found all the antinomies, all the phantasmorgia of gyres, circles, hourglasses, and cones which has fascinated the minds of many a reader of Yeats, and confused as much as illuminated them. But a problem presented itself to the Yeatses: What were they to do with the messages from the other world?
When contemplating how to read visual poetry, I’m reminded of the old “This is your Brain” anti-d... more When contemplating how to read visual poetry, I’m reminded of the old “This is your Brain” anti-drug commercial. Only the visual for “This is your Brain on Vispo” not only dices or fries words and letters often right off the page, it effectively demands an alternate approach to reading. As Michael Ridley in the Beyond Literacy thought experiment says: “Reading and writing are doomed. Literacy as we know it is over. Welcome to the post-literate future.”¹ It seems that no longer can readers and lovers of poetry depend on alphabetic literacy to unravel the secrets of a well-crafted poem. But beyond that even, reading and reading proficiency both have declined significantly in the U.S. in the past 25 years.² So what tools are there that we can call upon, or develop, to perform the essential reading function more fully and effectively? Does Vispo offer a glimmer of how to retool our reading skills to address what appears to be a visual-centric future?
¹http://www.beyondliteracy.com/
²The Los Angeles Times, Thursday, April 17, 2014
University Teaching Conference, Jaen, Spain, Jul 2007
""The latest tools of interest in new media that our students often use, the iPods, video cameras... more ""The latest tools of interest in new media that our students often use, the iPods, video cameras, cell phones, laptops, Internet, and all the associated gadgetry, are also superb tools for rethinking our approaches to classroom learning. As classroom educators, we
need to move beyond the notions of simple literacy in reading and writing to help students mature into a condition of empowerment and engagement of the new media for creative learning. These latest technologies can help students and faculty alike analyze and construct elements of narrative, create metaphoric perspectives, build layered and non-linear stories, and help both students and faculty begin to understand new reading behaviors. In addition, these new technologies encourage collaborative learning spaces that cross boundaries between the traditional and the new media. This presentation will explore the use of digital technology in the classroom to enhance creativity in reading and writing.
""
Southeastern College Art Association Presentation, Oct 2012
As a sculptor, photographer, printmaker, installation and performance artist, Lesley Dill exploit... more As a sculptor, photographer, printmaker, installation and performance artist, Lesley Dill exploits her response to language to unearth the human form, entwining the two together as a single cloth. Though made from discrete strands, in her work the two are in every respect inseparable from one another. By visually combining the human form with language, Dill shows evidence of a longing to see beyond what her visual sight tells her—a longing for a revelation of her soul’s existence itself, brought about by the very act of her reading.
NYSVA Conference Proceedings, 2012, Oct 2012
Florida Studies Proceedings, 2006, Aug 2006
NYSVA Conference Proceedings, 1999, Dec 1999
NYSVA Annual Conference Proceedings, 2005, Jan 2005
Association for the Study of Ethical Behavior in Literature Journal , 2009
Yeats’s psychic experiments performed with this wife George between 1917 and 1923, perhaps the mo... more Yeats’s psychic experiments performed with this wife George between 1917 and 1923, perhaps the most remarkable sustained psychic experiments of our time, enabled Yeats to open unconscious channels between them, and to transform what had previously been for him intellectual observations into tangible experience. The Yeatses’ experiments in automatic writing and sleep and dream trances resulted in a group of apocalyptic and visionary writings known as the “Script” that were eventually codified into the complex metaphysical world system recorded in A Vision. In this work Yeats created a mythology of the soul, and then applied that mythology to the ethical concerns of his contemporaries, and in particular to the problem of evil and the idea of valuation by images as a means for constructing the soul.
Marquette University, Milwaukee WI Conference, 2002, Mar 2002