Idea Capital Atlanta With Artist Ruth Dusseault

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We are thrilled to connect with two-time Idea Capital winner Ruth Dusseault on her upcoming project with H Johnson, radio, film and inspirations.

Gone my lovely dreams
Lovely summer dreams
Gone and left me here
To weep my tears along the stream
Sad as I can be
Hear me willow and weep for me

- Ann Ronell, 1932

 

 H JOHNSON

Keeping a personal library is like an ongoing conversation with oneself. It’s part of what James Baldwin would call “a personal life.” In his canny dissection of mass culture, he targeted American ignorance as a symptom of our lack of a personal life. It leaves a void in the American psyche to be back-filled with consumerism and xenophobia.  

Someone who sustains a personal conversation, an inner dialog, through a collection, archive or library, is more likely to interpret the present as a conversation between the past and the future. My Idea Capital project, H Johnson, is partly an attempt to record an example of someone who has sustained an inner dialog through a collection.

H has a personal jazz archive that he has shared on the radio for decades. You can hear his deep connection to it when he speaks. It is a nostalgia for a past that predates him. His show creates an aura of constancy and orientation. It infuses our homes with a feeling that everything will be okay, like a familiar landmark on the road home. I hope this short film helps recall some orienting landmarks of memory as we reconstruct our lives after the crisis. Thanks to Idea Capital for sending me on this valuable road home.

BOOKS + POLITICS

This may come as a surprise to a lot of people, but due to the exorbitant cost of a college education, many faculty are discouraged from requiring students to buy books. Instead, students open links and download pdfs that they don’t keep; seldom receiving the full-meal of a complete composition of thoughts. 

As a college student, I resold most of my books. But I kept a few that were specific to my major, as well as some anthologies of literature and philosophy. This was my starter library. Some of the writings were over my head at the time, and I wanted to re-approach them later in life. Some of them included ideas that I wanted to absorb into my own work, but I didn’t know how. My collection of books has expanded and contracted over the years, reflecting an inner conversation that is only interesting to me but it helps me to make art and process life events.

I am deeply disturbed when I hear terms like “intellectual elite” or “cultural Marxism.” They are attacks on free thinking and attempts to politicize open-mindedness. They are antagonizations of rational knowledge and objective truth. They are especially dangerous when pushed by people that are not unintelligent.

In her recent book The Age of American Unreason, historian Susan Jacoby writes that we are in the midst of a thirty-year period of anti-intellectualism. It crept in gradually, like an invisible virus. I never heard news of any book burnings, but somehow the books are gone; along with the voices of reasoned debate.

ARTISTS pt. 1

I am loving the work of John Akomfrah, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Stan Douglas, for their creative mix of archival and original material. They build essays and convey them using new technologies. But the technology does not overwhelm the presentation. The new visual syntax refocuses our attention to content by avoiding the familiarity of traditional documentary forms. I think the future of lens-based media will emphasize content. Without it, spectacular technology becomes an empty container. These artist use new visual language to reinterpret history and landscape using theory and personal voice. It’s a difficult weave. 

ARTISTS pt. 2

I love artist who reinterpret the destroyed landscape, a topic that fascinates me. One the most exciting cultural events in Atlanta in recent years was the Making Africa exhibition that came to the High Museum from Germany. I saw artists like Francois Beaurain, Fabrice Monteiro, and Cyrus Kabiru engaging with the damaged landscape. The waste stream of today is a real resource for the future. Artists and designers in the developing world have known this for decades. I have done a national survey of homemade recreational paintball fields and documented hand-made architectures on contemporary communes. Those groups had two different political agendas. Both were deeply engaged in garbage. Maybe I should become an archeologist.

  

Ruth Dusseault

April 2020