“Il Mondo Magico” at Italian Pavilion

The above picture is a cropped still from Adelita Husni-Bey's video, The Reading (2017), which is one of three artworks showing at the Italian Pavilion at this year's (57th) Venice Biennale. [The card shown appears to be a picture of the head of a woman wearing virtual reality goggles.] This article has a summary, "[the video] features a group of young people discussing their relationships to their homelands.The conversations are fuelled by Husni-Bey’s introduction of self-made tarot cards." A second article has additional details.

A third article provides even more information.

... young students are given a stack of Tarot cards designed by the artist during her time protesting the construction of a pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation. They are then asked to ask how the word and diagram on the card relates to the world’s problems as they see them, and how they related to our age of information and late capitalism.

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Click here to get a three-card spread using just the Major Arcana.

Learning as Motivation

One thing I experienced several times during IFJM2017 is that solving a drawing puzzle or problem provided some motivation. (I like solving puzzles which is probably why I enjoy computer programming so much. I also like writing blog posts or emails when I have an idea I want to clarify for myself or get across to others.) Once during this IFJM I got frustrated trying to draw a tea cup and Googled "freehand ellipse" and found a wonderful video and I really enjoyed trying out the suggestions. (The teacher was so good and clear that it made me realize how much more I could have learned in many subjects if I'd had teachers like that.) Unfortunately, after I "got" it, I didn't have any desire to keep doing it. Then there were two problems related to colored pencils. (I'd not used them before but ending up ordering some because I'd bought a tarot coloring book and discovered too late that the instructions suggested colored pencils rather than markers.) The pencils resulted in two drawing puzzles: how to blend and how to draw animal fur. I ended up using blending in one journal entry and animal fur in another. But again, I didn't have any desire to get better at either of these skills.

After the project was over I listened to Roz's video interview and she said getting better at a skill is one possibility for an IFJM project. She mentioned two of hers: one was to get better at landscape painting so she did a project where she drew clouds every day and the other was to get more comfortable with chaos in her journal so she pre-painted pages, used stencils and a Gelli plate, incorporated materials people sent her, etc.

So one lesson learned is that a skill-building IFJM could be a good project for me if I were to choose a skill I really wanted to learn (not tea cups and animal fur or something I think I ought to want to learn) and wasn't likely to get bored with too quickly. I'm actually more interested in abstract than representational art so off the top of my head skills that might be fun would be learning to control acrylic paint better, e.g. making it smooth or not, making abstract collages, or using texture pastes and related materials.

I should point out that for me the need for skill building or for choosing certain materials is more of an iterative process and it's not always clear to me which is the chicken and which is the egg.. The Golden Paint Company's "Just Paint" newsletter often mentions that they've developed a new product in response to an artist's needs. This has made me realize that my mind doesn't work like that. I don't have a clear vision of something I want to create that will require material that behaves a certain way or depends on honing a certain skill.

Thoughts on Using the Tarot (or I Ching)

This project, together with a lot of associated reading, hasn't changed my beliefs about the value of using the tarot. I still don't think it has mystical, occult, or esoteric significance. I don't think it will help you reincarnate at all let alone to a more preferable existence. I don't think it will let you rise to a higher spiritual plane whatever that means. I don't think it will support "the emergence into full conscious of the Divine Spark that lies within each of us, which is stifled by contemporaty education and by life experience reliant exclusively on the senses."

On the other hand, I still believe that thoughtful and judicious use of systems like tarot spreads or the I Ching can help a person to become aware of additional creative, useful, and/or interesting possible answers to questions or solutions to problems he or she might might have. In other words, I think these systems work in a manner similar to the use of Rorschach inkblots or Thematic Aperception Tests.

The usefulness (or not) of these systems is illustrated by the two IFJM blog posts that summarize tarot readings I did and the one post on an I Ching reading.

My question for the first tarot reading was how I could make doing art more fun and a quick summary of my interpretation is, "Stop paying attention to what you imagine others think."

My question for the I Ching reading was what I should do about getting discouraged about the IFJM project and the short version of its answer is, "You aren't getting any sympathy from me; you already know how to handle this."

For the second tarot reading my questions were to summarize the project by asking (1) what worked, (2) what didn't work and (3) what were the lessons learned. The answers were, respectively, (1) no intrinsic shortage of resources, (2) a "laissez-faire" attitude, and (3) if my goal is to attain the particular benefits of an IFJM project, then I should pay more attention to the IFJM guidelines.

Why the Tarot Backstory?

Sometime earlier this year I started to try to avoid the news by reading books and by limiting myself to non-news items on the internet. Around the beginning of March I ran across a review of a recent rather unusual book about the tarot. (My browser history was frustratingly no help in figuring out where I had seen this when I began to wonder.) And then it seemed like a sign that Kindle version of that book is available for free with kindleunlimited so I downloaded it and although I tried to read it, I found it too esoteric and hard to follow to finish. However that made me start thinking about learning more about the tarot as a way to avoid the news.

Then in mid-March there was a second sign: Alice Gregory's article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine validated my general goal. Here's her lede.

In the past few months, elaborate rituals of information avoidance have consumed the lives of people I know. Almost anything, it seems, is better than reading the news. One friend started running; another cooks overinvolved dinners; my mom went hiking in the Andes. I have taken to poring over the often grammatically incorrect half-memories of complete strangers. And I can’t stop. It’s like being on a cozy drug.

After reading of the practical things others are to doing to avoid the news, I thought that a tarot-based IFJM2017 project might be a way I could accomplish something practical along with learning more about a subject I don't take very seriously. That seemed like fun and, as you can read, I enjoyed pulling more of the surprising variety of threads on the internet and creating a backstory starting with this post.

The Current State of Tarot

This is another post on what I learned about tarot while doing this project.

About 25 years ago I bought my first tarot deck, the classic Rider-Waite one, and a book about reading the cards since I was curious why a colleague found them intriguing. More recently I bought the unusual Artist's Inner Vision Tarot deck and associated book. (This deck was produced by 26 artists who each created three of its cards so the cards have a variety of styles.) However I'd only used my decks as intended a few times. Since I hadn't been paying much attention to the tarot world, I was extremely surprised and somewhat fascinated to discover the large size and international scope of the current tarot enterprise.

That enterprise now includes numerous commercial and personal websites; online readings available for free as well as for a price; hundreds of tarot decks for sale (some of which are surprisingly tasteless or even NSFW); instruction, coloring, and history books; online forums with hundreds of thousands of posts; easy to sign up for emailed newsletters and ads; Facebook Groups; professional associations; magazines; courses; conferences; tours; and even a just-begun KickStarter project that hopes to raise more than $65,000 to develop an app to "Transform your world with Tarot as you journey through an interactive map." One could easily spend all one's time getting and staying up-to-date on the tarot world but I don't think that learning much more about this topic is something I want to do.

My Opinion of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck

I really like the iconic and familiar RWS deck. This is not surprising as it is the most popular tarot deck by far and many of the other several thousand decks now available appear to be based on it. I like it because of the appearance of the cards and because of what I've learned of its history including its use of illustrated Minor Arcana.

As for the cards themselves, I appreciate that the illustrations are direct and straightforward; they aren't weird or tasteless as some are. The cards are easy to identify at first glance but also repay closer attention. They are well-designed, which isn't surprising given that Pamela Colman Smith studied under Arthur Dow at the Pratt Institute. Finally, their flat colors and black outlines resembling graphic illustrations seem surprisingly modern.

The deck's history is so well-known that there's no need to repeat it here. I especially enjoy that the illustrations were made by an American woman artist living in England who'd had several shows at Stieglitz' 291 and been part of the Golden Dawn along with W. B. Yeats. I appreciate that it was the first published deck created with Major Arcana labels in English. I didn't realize until doing this project that, other than the rare Italian Sola Busca tarot, it was the first to have illustrations rather than just pips on the Minor Arcana. By the way, surprisingly to me, some of these older pip-and-trump or Marseille style historical decks are growing in popularity as they become increasingly available in quality facsimile editions.