Tik-tak-toe

This is a clip of a CCA drawing workshop where First Year students made their best drawings of the semester without knowing it -- an example of unconscious competence. Two months later they are performing with new eyes, new hands and new tools for seeing and drawing. I think the experience will resurface in their dreams and memories, nurturing their self-confidence in whatever visual practice they pursue.

bUtom ~ Jingletown, Oakland CA '09

TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles

 

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Simpler & Friendlier ButohDrawing

Okay, I want to say it a little bit differently --
‘The space around you’ in butohdrawing can be focused-in from its Peripheral experience to its Central Experience, a much smaller frame, kind of like a telescope zooming in on something. When somebody’s reading or working on the computer their attention zooms into what they’re working on and the peripheral experience of the real surrounding space vanishes. They’re in a completely different space.

Sometimes it’s called pictorial space or ‘virtual,’ where the image on a literally flat computer monitor turns into a wonderful virtual or fantasy space in which the imagination’s creativity explores and invents.

In ButohDrawing the goal is to grasp the peripheral space and deploy the imaginary space that’s inside us – no script – not somebody else’s program, not a video game. It’s a Paradoxical space that’s far away from ordinary everyday Doxa or “reality.” This experience then, is active:::> movement of one kind or another happens.


TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles 

 

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ButohDrawing ~ looking through the frame

looking through the frame


‘The space around you’ in ButohDrawing (I was talking about it in my previous blog) can be narrowed down from its peripheral experience to its opposite, Central Experience, like reading, a logical, left-brain mode. This much narrower frame of reference could be a photograph, a book page, the lens of a camera or an image when someone is working on it in Photoshop.
When the artist is working in ButohDrawing the only space s/he is aware of is visually limited by the format of h/er focused awareness. This awareness may be situated in virtual reality or even in the left-brain domain that is created when one is reading, like an escape from reality into another, quite different reality, what’s sometimes called ‘pictorial space,’ where perceived depth is an actual space that doesn’t seem anything but real.
So the drawing aspect in ButohDrawing can be thought of as an extraction, like rendering bacon fat, all the fat is extracted leaving the meat to stand alone. In ButohDrawing everything ‘s being pulled out of what’s around you, and your experience of your center is profound, something like a substance that makes you feel ALL your power – Chi. ButohDrawing can be like walking meditation when you’re doing it right, but it’s NOt that, it’s art, it’s cultural, it’s work and discipline.

TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles 

 

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ButohDrawing

7/10/09
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In ButohDrawing you try to change the space around you for as long as possible, even after everybody’s gone home.

When the work is done right it has so impressed other people that they walk away remembering it and pass it along to others; it’s their own version, not the version of the so-called author or actor or mind reader.*

The work isn’t exactly transparent because its intent in the first place is to do something unusual, different, weird, perfect, whatever – however far you can get. 

interpretation, recombinant reading, image-thought that’s actually spoken or acted, communication in butoh state
– pay it forward.
--= play it forward.
*My favorite writing model is from Roland Barthes:
‘a really good “read” is when it seems to have been written in a foreign language, translated.
It’s well written__ it’s not doxa, it’s paradox.’ (bUtom’s version).


TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles 

 

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popopomo

25 June 2009
The key word for this my virgin blog is popopomo, evolving critical culture from the Dark Ages to modernism through postmodern deconstruction and spiraling ad infinitum, temporarily hovering at popopomo as a cute gay, new marketing strategy for hi capitalism and the WWW.

My notion of Blog ideology is: how many crap islands do we need floating in the seas / orbiting the galaxies?

Present day humans compulsively read. It doesn’t matter if it’s quality, they’ll read n twitter anything as long as it’s in a familiar tongue; the root of High Capitalist virus that spawns and begets mediocrity, crapshoots, so maybe even recombinant reading could be on the way – look in the back door.

TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles 

 

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