Some words about "Life After Covid": Interview w/ Gonkar Gyatso @ The Rubin Museum (Patreon)

Hallo my loves.

Short story: The last of my three talks at the Rubin Museum is OUT TODAY: 

First up...since I haven't had a chance to say it - WELCOME, WELCOMEto the many new patrons who've hopped abord in the last few weeks. You may have come for the Boston Event (the details of which are HERE, and it's happening TOMORROW! Thurs, Feb 22 @6pm! BRING SNACKS, BRING KIDS!: https://www.patreon.com/posts/98778790?utm_campaign=postshare_creator)

Or....you may have just seen one of my pleading conments/posts on Instagram or Facebook asking you to join. For whatever reason, if you're here, I'm glad you're here. It's nice to see so many new faces. It's been a strange, long, season for art-output this year as I grapple with moving around and getting my bearings after being in New Zealand for so long, and I'm trying hard to put this new Dresden Dolls album center stage, but there's a lotta moving parts and meanwhile, I'm trying to make art that repairs little bits of soul stitch by stitch: a talk here, and essay there, a cover song here, a filmed concert there. If you missed the last big offering, it was a whole EP of songs written in 2020-2022 while I was in New Zealand. The patrons here helped fun it, and the whole thing's downloadable for all y'all patrons HERE if you haven't listened to it yet.

On to the next....

Greetings from Boston, where I am deep in a week of February vacation with Ash. The team has helped me pull this post together, and I'm sad to say it's coming with some dismal news. 

If you haven't heard yet , The Rubin Museum, this beloved space that we just called home for three nights (and where I recorded this Interview), is closing its doors.

It's plan is to live on as a "Museum without Walls": https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/02/style/rubin-museum-closing-new-york/index.html

But god, this is saaaaaaad. 

It is not lost on me that one of the things that's comforted me in this life is these third spaces, these alternate "homes" where I often feel more at home than in a walled house. So when a place tlike this goes, it's yet another grief. The Rubin...ughhh. I was planning sleepovers in that little theater, meditation marathons, and pitch-dark piano parties, and and...all I can hope is that the Rubin might be into presenting those sorts of crazy ideas in alternate spaces and places, as they become a wall-less thing. 

It also just makes me generally mopey to see a Museum die. I know that many physical structures: theaters, music venues, indie book stores...just aren't surviving the world weather at the moment. Post-covid, post-internet, post-amazon, post-everything. I don't want it to feel like a pattern, But it is.

......................... 

Timely then, that I'm sending you the final interview from my" LIFE AFTER..." series at the Museum. 

This one is the first one we recorded, and it's with Tibetan/British artist Gonkar Gyatso.

The topic we chose was "Life After...Covid".

Its full of heart, art, what home is, what home means.....family stories, Covid stories, survival stories, and long tangents. I think you'll all like it. We really go all over the place.

You might want to just listen to the audio - as a podcast. But unlike the talks with Sophie and Noor, there's a visual element to this one, so you might wanna take a look.

If you want to catch up on the full series now, you can do so - and please do share around:

Sophie Strand: Life After Exile From The Kingdom of the Well

Noor Tagouri: Life After Telling The Truth on Yourself

............

Here's me and Gonkar in the museum, (in the Shrine Room), after the talk:

I have a a few thoughts I want to share as you dive into this one.....

First of all: I've been thinking a lot about physical art, and record, as I move through this season of change in my own life.

Artifacts, recordings, meaning, what we leave behind, what we MAKE for one another. 

What lasts. What disintegrates. 

What we try to reflect, as artits, to the people around us.

Ash has been obsessed lately with being famous, and he and I have been having a lot of talks about what it means to "do things", and what it means to make art for other people, or to make art to "get famous". Why artists make work. To be recognized? To help others? To make sense of things? To get rich? To pull the veil of distracting and entertaining meaning-making over the eyes of our fellow humans in an attempt to divert their gaze from how traumatized and uninspected we actually are? (Ash agrees: it's probably that last one).

Gonkar speaks to this.

As I dig, very fucking slowly, into the long work of new projects, new books, new songs, and post-morteming the last few weird, unspeakable, traumatic few years of my life, especially those first months in New Zealand when I watched the bottom drop out entirely, I am thinking a lot about art and how it "kept me sane". About how I've spent years of my life being approached by people who tell me that this or that song "got them through" or "kept them alive", but I really didn't start to depend on art - my own listening, my own reading, and, at last, my own creation of things - as an act of survival until recently. 

Though, thinking about it, this was where I began. And when I think of many of the "trauma artists" I know and have loved and known - and there are many - it actually begin, in the early days of teen-hood as its own act of survival. My work became less an act of survival and more an act of casual relfection and joy in my 20s and 30s. Then Covid hit, my family fell apart, and I turned back to the source. I found that "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, the album "Punisher" by Phoebe Bridgers, and watching "Moana" and "True and the Rainbow Kingdom" with Ash soothed my traumatized nerves in a way that nothing else could reach. I was able - in this strange, traumatized Covid place - to create those "New Zealand Survival Songs".

One of the most meaningful moments of this talk was when Gonkar talked about being sparated from his own son and ex-wife, and  how he turned to the smallest, simplest drawings to keep himself from going crazy.

I understood this. And I appreciated how non-dramatic and plain his delivery was. His Tibetan demeanor is so different from my American one (and maybe...it's just us.)

This conversation, in itself, really soothed me.

So did the long consideration of what it feels like to be from a place, and to move places.

I've been feeling very placeless lately. Stateless.

Gonkar's actual situation certainly puts mine in fucking harsh relief. I'm not Tibetan. I'm not from Gaza. I count my blessings that I have the freedom of movement that I do. Some perspective, then. Always grateful for that.

It also felt very important to me to keep this conversation about WHAT HAPPENED TO US DURING COVID rolling along.

One of the things that my friends and I have been discussing around the table lately is the lack of post-mortem in this department; the lack of digestion, the lack of clarity around WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO US ALL. 

I, for one, am only starting to begin the process of making sense of it all.

I want it to be part of my work - my ARTwork, my patreon work, my writing work - to keep that conversation alive. 

So many people are still reeling from Covid. Many friends tell me they are having trouble "making meaning" from it all. How? Why? WHAT? WHAT JUST HAPPENED? I mean: That Really Just Happened, Didn't It?

It did.

It's gonna be a long slog, but I'm here for it.

I hope you love this talk. Chuck any feedback in the comments, I'm reading.

xxx

AFP

Uke joy at the show.

......

Here's a little more about Gonkar.

https://www.artrepresent.com/gonkar-gyatso

Gonkar Gyatso is a Tibetan born British artist who moved to London in the late 90‘s on scholarship to Central St. Martin‘s College of Art and Design. His unique style combines traditional Buddhist iconography with Pop Art and influences from Pop Culture.

Much of Gyatso’s work centres around the reproduction and reinvention of Buddhist iconography and the geometry and aesthetic approach of traditional Tibetan thangka painting. Skilfully weaving western and Tibetan cultural constructs and influences, Gyatso translates Buddha images posed in traditional thangka-influenced compositions into pop imagery that satirises world politics and the mundaneness of life, while creating a space for the coexistence of different cultures.

Gonkar Gyatso’s work comes out of a fascination with material and pop culture and a desire to bring equal attention to the mundane as well as the extraordinary, the imminent and the superfluous. These contradictions are often found in the same piece. His work can be very silly, uncanny, and even ironic and at the same time comes out of concerns that are shaping our times. As his own experience has been one that reflects a kind of hybridity and transformation, his work also holds this quality.

And a selection of his works:

"Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky" (2011)

"Dissected Buddha" (2011)

"Shangri La" (2014)

......

And one last thing to amuse you....

Two of my bestie friends came to this talk: Meow Meow and Storm Large. 

Here's me and Storm, licking one another, in front of one of the art installations at The Rubin.

Let's hear it loud and clear!!!!!!!

ONCE MORE FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK!!!!

DEATH IS NOT THE END.

Love,

Amanda

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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