Cement Croissants-Garden Art!

at SOMArts Cultural Center



As one of the
100 performers, I made a cement croissant in under 2 minutes!



Click here to get an idea of what I do.





Some cement garden pastries!


Photos by Alfred Hernandez, Marya Krogstad, Claire Bain

Mindy In Japan

A Conversation

From the video in progress called "Mindy the Pet Art Therapist/Trip to Japan!"

In which Mindy goes to visit her former art teacher, Buck Wilson, an American ex-pat living in Japan. He plants the seeds of questioning in Mindy's mind, seeds which grow eventually into a decision to change professions. Not long after returning home, she decides to become a Cement Garden Pastry Artist.

Mindy Goes to Japan!

MINDY:

It’s quite lovely in here, isn’t it? It’s really unexpected, what with that dingy basement…

Mindy walks over to the fake window, touches it, looks behind it.

MINDY:

But this isn’t real, Buck. It’s a simulation.

Buck turns to his computer screen

BUCK:

Min, I read this letter to the New York Times Sunday Magazine, from August 12, 2007. This woman named Lorraine Dittko wrote it. Listen to what she wrote:

“Carl Sagan often said that when you look at the stars, you look back in time. The stars we see now first emitted light billions of years ago. And yet we see that light in the present, although many of those stars have since died. That means our sun, and the reflected light of its planets, are currently emitting light into the future, which means we do exist forever. Perhaps time and space are heaven. We’re streaming through the night sky where the ancients always said heaven would be.”

MINDY:

You’re so far away from everyone, with your artificial sky, this electric sunshine that cold fluorescent light.

BUCK:

Cold Fluorescent Light? You mean CFL? It’s all light, Mindy. Light is all that IS real. It’s as real as memory. We create memories on the spot as we remember them. We don’t dredge up old recordings. It’s all new. The only thing old is the light that’s still traveling through the sky. Where will this light go if it stays trapped in here in the basement? [lifts round light] Our descendents will never see it, unless one winter night they fly over the North Pole. Then they will see this very same light. It’ll be me, after I’m dead, dancing as a stream of light in the aurora borealis. Will you be there with me, those reflections glinting off your glasses melting into Angel swirls?

MINDY:

I think you’re hiding, disconnecting, isolated…

BUCK:

Hiding, disconnected, isolated? How can people connect when they’re all driving in their cars, which become their bodies, their shields with tinted glass, their phones and headphones stuffed in their ears, and back home they all look the same—men with shaved heads, button shirts, fade-dyed jeans, Post Neo Nazis in baseball caps. And the women with the heavy rectangular eyeglasses and clone haircuts that harden them into robots? You can’t tell any of them apart. Now I read that people fall in love with their robot vacuum cleaners, dress and give them names. They treat their pets like baby humans, instead of the species they are. They don’t know what animals need, and they don’t want to know because they do NOT honor them. They have them for their own purposes, not because they like them; they project their egos and anthropomorphize them. There’s no love in that. Loving an animal is honoring its true spirit, its natural way of being. Not pretending that it’s a kid and putting it in a stroller. They even do that here in Japan! That’s not honoring the spirit—of the animal or the human.

MINDY:

Well, people ask me to do my work with their animals because they care about them.

BUCK:

They’re hiring you to treat the animals like people, imposing all kinds of human assumptions on them, instead of delving into the animals’ origins and respecting them for what they are.

MINDY:

But I love animals! So do my clients. They are concerned and want to help them!

*BUCK:

They are so out of touch with nature and physical reality that they can’t even see what the animal is. They live in simulated worlds of ideas, not hard reality! They call the real physical world “meat space,” claim to love animals, and then eat them without a thought as to where they came from, or how they lived. It’s total objectification. In one place, they substitute them for kids, only better because they never have to pass a certain point of effort or connection with them, and the captive animals never gain power unless they run away. Then in the other place, they eat the flesh of animals, wear their skin and fur, exploit and destroy their habitat, and worst of all treat them as fashion—whether as trendy breeds of pet or fashionable shoes.

MINDY:

But therapy really helps the animals, and cures their neuroses!

BUCK:

Have you ever thought about why they become neurotic? Why do the pets get neurotic, Mindy?

MINDY:

Well,…

BUCK:

Why, Min?

MINDY:

I,…they…it’s because of imbalances that can be healed.

BUCK:

What imbalances, Mindy?

MINDY:

Psychological imbalances. They get scared, or angry. They are afraid of being abandoned. They may have separation anxiety.

***

BUCK:

Abandoned? What are they scared of? Separation anxiety? They are separated all right—separated from nature, from their own nature. Like people who work in beige cubicles all day long, eating garbage food under cold fluorescent light, and staring at small screens radiating falsehoods at them. Then they go home and stare at TV screens blaring violence that gets increasingly frenetic in order to continue its grasp on the numbing minds, showing fleshy destruction to those who are ever more distant from their own bodies.

MINDY:

Bur people need pets, and it’s good to have resources for them.

BUCK:

Yeah, like health insurance for dogs! Look at this ad: “Family redefined”! “He’s not just a dog. He’s your baby and deserves the best medical care…” He’s not JUST a dog… God forbid you should treat him like what he is—an animal who hundreds of years ago figured out that if he hung around people he’d get food. Then the people put him to work to earn his keep—hunting, herding, pulling sleds, whatever. Most of those fashion dogs were bred to do work, like kill rats! Listen, Min, those dogs you treat get neurotic because they are being driven crazy by the people who own them and bug them all the time, who don’t know or care about their original needs and tendencies. Thank God it’s probably only a phase, because now robots are probably going to replace pets as the new solid ego.