I have been playing with yugen for months now. I’ve looked at the troubled youth of Zeami Motokiyo and the bleak anime of Natsume Ono. I’ve explored the surface beneficence of Arab moguls and the latest direction of religious studies. Yugen is a notion both ancient and unstable. Sometimes sublime, it can become a darkly disturbing force. Here is one of its purest manifestations.
Terms
yugen: an undercurrent of yearning, the aesthetic expression of the profundity of loss.
grand: magnificent, of the highest rank
“Walt & El Grupo” (2008): a documentary of the ten-week trip taken by Walt Disney and a group of Disney studio artists and filmmakers to five South American nations, under the auspices of the US Department of State in 1941. Written and directed by Theodore Thomas; produced by Kuniko Okubo.
MICA: founded in 1826, The Maryland Institute College of Art is the nation’s oldest continually functioning college of art, with a current enrollment of more than 1500 undergraduates and 200 graduate students. Programs of study include animation and film arts.
Event
A screening of the documentary, with commentary by the filmmakers
Thursday, 23 September 2010, 7:00 p.m.
Falvey Hall, Brown Center
MICA, Baltimore, Maryland
free and open to the public
Context
Congratulating ourselves for finding on-street parking, husband Kit and I arrived early at the architectural showpiece that is the Brown Center on the campus of Maryland Institute College of Art. A few meters from bustling West Mt. Royal Avenue, in the Cohen Plaza, members of the MICA community sat at outdoor tables, sipping beverages and talking with the intensity of artists everywhere. A toddler and a dog provided comic relief. The toddler fed the dog; the dog gobbled the food. Adults intervened fitfully and futilely or stepped around the smaller beings, busy with their own performance magic.
We wandered into the Fox Building, which adjoins the Brown Center in a feat of conceptual construction. The Decker Gallery to our left was showing a faculty exhibit. I glanced at my watch. Seven minutes. Kit would take in most of the gallery; I could view one work of art. I allowed myself to be pulled across the room and around a corner. There it was: “Wim Wenders,” a brooding electro-cinemagraph by Christopher Saah (MFA, 2006), Adjunct Professor of Photography. I could spend a lifetime inhabiting that odd landscape.
Six minutes later, Kit pulled me through the Doris Cafe, where shaggy undergraduates served vegetarian specials and chilled bottles of Snapple. On we went, through the door connecting Fox with Brown, and down the main staircase to Falvey Hall. Descending the staircase in Brown is a lot like entering the Louvre through the glass pyramid: overhead is all light and air, but below lies concrete possibility.
Text
under construction
Commentary
under constuction
Meta-commentary
under construction
