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Mona Lisa - Ritual longings
Your weekly art takeaway
Mona L
August 18, 2024
Aug 18 | Issue 04
ML - Welcome to Mona Lisa. A weekly newsletter for artists with timeless quotes, ideas and light bites for curious & wandering minds.
In art, at a certain level, there is no 'better than.' It's just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.✨
Little thoughts
😔 The Rothko Chapel closes its doors indefinitely.
🚿💭 If sculpture takes up space, then painting creates space.
🤫 “…there’s a sense that the art world views secrecy as key to its survival…” - a reporter goes undercover…
👹 The price you pay for doing what everyone else does is getting what everyone else gets.
Mona’s notes
Do you have any rituals? I like to clean my desk at the start of the day and always wash my hands before I start or return to any piece of work 🧼🙄 Am struggling to think of more but, I’ve recently felt quite compelled to have more.
Being self-employed, as I’m sure some of you reading this are, I lack the routine and rituals associated with and enforced by the 9 to 5. Generally speaking artists have the freedom and flexibility to structure their days how they wish - dreamy, but it can admittedly be overwhelming when things aren’t going to plan.
“I would think of Golconda while shuffling into a church service at my school auditorium or being herded around in uniform with my swim team—my selfhood dissolved into mass spiritual or athletic ritual.” — Kelsey Ables
I recently read an article that suggested that in situations where we lack certainty, rituals can be an effective coping mechanism in driving down anxiety levels as they mimic the act of control. The article began with the mesmerising suite of rituals reeled off by the tennis player Rafael Nadal during a match which I thought were curious enough to share:
When he arrives at the stadium, he enters the court holding a racket in his hand, taking great care never to step on the lines and always crossing each line right-foot first. He places his bag on the bench and turns his tournament ID face up. His chair must be perfectly perpendicular to the sideline. He checks his socks to make sure they are perfectly even on his calves. During the coin toss he faces the net and starts jumping until the coin falls, then runs to the baseline, where he drags his foot across the entire line in a single sweeping motion before hitting each shoe with his racket.
When the game begins, Nadal starts performing repetitive hand gestures that resemble those of Catholics crossing themselves. With his right hand he touches the back and front of his shorts, then his left shoulder, then the right, then his nose, left ear, nose again, right ear and finally his right thigh. At each changeover he picks up two towels. He waits for the other player to cross the line, and then he crosses right-foot first to take his seat. He carefully folds one towel and puts it behind him without using it. Then he folds the second towel and places it on his lap. He takes one sip from a bottle of water, then another sip from a second bottle. Very carefully, he returns the two bottles to the exact same position, the labels facing the same way.
And no, he’s not superstitious….
In his autobiography, he (Nadal) writes, “Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.”
At a very last-minute visit to Matthew Barney’s exhibition yesterday I saw a version of performative ritual and ceremony enacted by the actors playing sportsmen in his film SECONDARY. It triggered memories of craftspeople and artists I’ve met with similar ritualistic behaviours, that have little practical outcome but to create a sense of predictability to match the “order” they seek in their work.
Interestingly, the research also suggests that in situations where we experience uncertainty or lack control, we are likely to seek patterns and regularities where there are none - from visual illusions (seeing shapes and faces in clouds) to causality in seemingly random events. The brain as a predictive device which likes to colour in its blind spots - what a wonderful and frightening prospect. ☁️
With love -
Mona x
“shit in, shit out” — Chris Bianco
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