Carol Emmons: Artist lecture reflection

Today was Carol Emmons' guest lecture. I went into it with an open mind, and left with some answers, but mostly a sense of wonder and even more questions. 

Yesterday, I had prepared by reading Emmons' bio and browsing her works on her website. My understanding of installment art before today was fairly limited, although I still had/have an appreciation for it. She spoke briefly about this cultural preference towards 2-D art which made me stop and re-evaluate my own values. Anyways, her work intrigued me, and I was excited to see her speak about it. As a third-year this was my first time going to a lecture at the Wriston auditorium, so I felt a little out of place around all the art kids who basically live in the building. Something that I contemplated before, during, and after the lecture was how any of this might apply to me, an artist whose primary focus is on music. 

But some of the questions in which she opened the lecture hit me hard:

How do I know what I'm supposed to be doing?

Yeesh... That's the same existential question I find asking myself on a daily basis. It drives me insane, yet she almost answers it with another question; it depends, where does the art come from?

To answer this question, she structures the rest of the lecture around 8 possible answers through this very cool graphic:

quick photo of the presentation I took on my iPhone, cropped

You can't read the text very well in this photo, but the 8 categories listed are as follows:

A. Genetics

B. Environment

C. Intervention (of the divine variety)

D. Education

E. Research

F. Site

G. Theme

H. Magic

Something I found really interesting is Emmons' use of the zodiac here, because it also seems to be a major theme in her work. I was drawn to this chart, and curious about its origin and meaning, so using google image search, I believe I found an image of the original:

via raremapsandprints.co.uk ⇐(hyperlink)

I don't think I can speak on any significance this might have, but I find it interesting nonetheless.

The idea of space and place is something that McLuhan has been making me ponder a lot about recently, so I appreciated the time that Emmons took to speak about B. Environment and F. Site. Which is interesting because I am once again wondering how I can translate the values of these physical mediums to the auditory?

Carol gave me a few ideas, but it's definitely something I'm going to need to contemplate deeper, along with determining from which possible origins my art comes from.

"Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly" (McLuhan 68)