Week 8: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

This week, I am struggling to find the words to adequately convey my feelings, thoughts, and issues with this weeks readings and presentation. Perhaps it's because I have a lot on my plate, academically speaking of course, or perhaps its the live streaming of Christmas music I've been listening to for 15 hours straight, but the words are escaping me. All I can think is "fa la la la la la" "gramma got ran over by a reindeer"... But I digress.  Hmm, on second thought, maybe I don't digress. Maybe I'm on to something here with this whole Christmas thing. I think I am. I think my traditions are art in it's most noble form. I've never thought of Christmas traditions as art. But that's all changing right now.

 This time of year, for me, is the most beautiful, warm, creative, uplifting time. Things in my world shine and sparkle exceptionally bright during the winter months. I love the traditions, the family gatherings, the huge meals complete with grandpa's caramel squares and my mom's homemade stuffing. Quite simply, the months of November and December cannot be beat. There is something so inherently magical and soulful about them, something so comforting and renewing. All these traditions, however aesthetically pleasing or functional they are, are essential to a merry Christmas, crucial to our lives. Because they nurture us, they cultivate a sense of connection to our family and to our lives and to our souls. We create our life, our experiences, our values, through these traditions. We listen to the same Christmas cd every year- A Charlie Brown Christmas. We eat the same foods every year, even, much to my chagrin, grandma's infamous jello salad. (One year I had a boyfriend over to grams for Thanksgiving-she served him up a good ole helping of jello salad, and needless to say, said boy and I are no longer dating). We hang our stockings in the same order every year. And we almost always wear our same "holiday" outfit every christmas eve. And for all this, I am forever grateful. I have deep gratitude for my family, for the traditions they've passed down to me, and the traditions they've created for me. It makes my life so rich and wonderful, so comforting and , to know that every year, even if everything else has changed, we'll be watching Griswald Family Vacation around 6pm on Christmas Day, in our pjs, because it's a tradition- and our most favorite movie as a family.

 You see, there's such a deep and rich connection that we feel with these traditions; the aesthetics of it, the stringing of the popcorn and the trimming of the tree, the form of it, basting the turkey and whipping the mashed potatoes to a creamy decadence. It's this living of life for both the pleasure and the functionality of it that we experience around the holidays, that for me, makes me glow. The deep rooted traditions, the history of it all, the anticipation of it all. And it makes for an incredibly satisfying life experience. Isn't that what it's all about?

For Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, we shouldn't define art as having to be something strictly aesthetically pleasing; instead we should assign "form to value."  The institution tries to speak for everyone, make claims and classify what art is and how it should function, for not only itself but for everyone else/everything else, while simultaneously asserting itself as distinct and above all the "Others." This marginalization of space and time, of aesthetics and functionality, that they cannot exist equally and beautifully, limits art in all ways. This limits how the aesthetics in our every day function, because we don't see our social interactions or our family traditions as functional and beautiful art; in fact, we don't view it as art at all. The institution has instilled in our minds, that our day to day lives, and our actions and interactions within them, are average, and pale in comparison to the grand show pieces in museums. But that's not true. I'm learning that, for me, art is most beautiful when it's uninhibited and pure, when it has an aesthetic component and a functional component. For Tannaz, it is an interesting evolution of the art and the life, and how the two function together. With her journey from Iran to the US, her identity was transformed. I found the use of her cultural identity as it relates to spatial time in her art very powerful. For me, Tannaz is cultivating this awareness of identity and time and the possibilities that it provides. With the nature of art in daily life and social interaction, we should realize these possibilities in the everyday life. Like the possibility of improvision when it comes to making gravy (you know it never turns out quite like you want it to- too much flour, not enough turkey drippings). This art of living as improvision, doing what works, getting innovative and deliberate in how we are living and what we are doing, in both the aesthetic and functional aspects of living, I think, is the essence of what tradition is made of. We utilize these traditions, or simple rituals, in our every day lives, creating something wonderfully dynamic and nourishing for our creative spirits. And in doing so, I think, we are assigning form to value in our every day lives.