today's clever, tomorrow's whatever

Sound and Language...

2011-10-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

It appears that Encoded sound (language) is dealt with mostly on the left side of the brain, and Embodied sound (music) is taken care of across the hall, on the right. There are exceptions, of course: for instance, it appears that the rhythmic elements of music are dealt with on the left, and the vowels of speech on the right. But generally speaking, the two departments seem to be able to operate simultaneously without getting in each other’s way. What this means is that by dividing up the work they can deal with a total number of layers that would be impossible for either side individually.

http://transom.org/?page_id=7006

Francis Stark via Katy Siegel

2011-10-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

Francis Starck was referring to Emily Dickenson, when she said that a poet can squeeze just about anything into a ball. She’s interested in school and what it means, and adolescence as a general subject. Language stinks. I hate language. The ditto machine. Playing close attention to everything around you and the things close to you. Intimacy, necessity, proximity and closeness. “being a woman.” Friendship over ideology. Kaprow connection. Cake walk. The adolescent acts out on behalf of the whole family as the artist acts out on behalf of society. “Devotion” “the Fan” Goo goo girl and smart intellectual. Active annotation. Barthes. Death of the Author, birth of the reader. The unspeakable compromise of the portable work of art & the disfunctionality of the art system that brings things from studio to gallery / art space. Birds perch lightly and on the edge of things. Class consciousness. The compulsion to make art. which is personal, intimate, and authentic, vs the superstructure of the art world.

QUIT ART - JOIN LIFE

2011-09-27T18:56:00.001-07:00

From now on this blog is only about PLANTS and POLITICS

Recently At Hunter College...

2010-12-09T00:50:00.001-08:00

Caroline Falby

Mateo Calegari

Tryn Collins

Controlled Explosions

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2010-06-11T12:50:00.001-07:00

conceptual painting for dummies

2010-06-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

So apparently painting is not doing too well. It's "beside itself" with grief. What is it so upset about? For one, it's mad about how it gets put on walls, and then bought and sold and put in storage. Well painting, I have something to tell you: even performance gets bought and sold these days. Although in a way you have a point--performance may be purchased but it doesn't get put in storage. When a performance is inactive, it doesn't physically exist. You, on the other hand, have to contend with your fate of prolonged dormancy, which is going to be very sad and boring for you. Perhaps if you can find your place in the network and incorporate that active transient thing where info-context-mood just flows through over and around you, you won't be so bored and stuck in the 'art as commodity' stage of pergatory--you'll be engaged in the present even when inactive because you've accessed the context of the network as part of your highly flexible meaning. Maybe if you incorporate the awareness of these complex forces into the visual aspects of yourself, you won't look so silly and dated and "bought" when you get looked at again ten years later. You know what's going on. You know its all about mood. You've found a new sublime, and it isn't a landscape.

I have to credit fellow Hunter MFA guy Cab Broskoski for turning me on to this article. The content applies to his process for sure, and it contextualized some of the thought threads I've been tangled up in as well. The tricky thing is that this transitive networky perspective can have sort of a constipating effect on creativity. If we think of creativity as a tap into the unconscious (i know, trite, but its true), then this kind of superego over-development is a dangerous game. Of course not working this angle just makes you look like a sell-out, and no self-respecting artist can live with that. Its what psychologists call a "double-bind."

Some Vocabulary Words:
Aporia: A gap in logic or consciousness or a point at which a text is most explicitly indeterminateor self-contradictory, as in deconstruction. It is never completely solved or closed by the author or in the mind of the reader.
Cynosure: 1. a person or thing that attracts notice, esp because of its brilliance or beauty2. something that serves as a guide

Re-

2010-06-06T14:54:00.000-07:00

What I love about the debate over re-performance is exactly what Joan Jonas says is is wrong with it. The circumstances of the original performance can't be reproduced; the re-enacted performance just isn't the same. So the person or institution who buys a performance doesn't get the real thing. The real performance gets away! Its an excellent prank, I think, on a deserving victim. Real experience can't be commodified, the specifics of place and time can't either. Good for them! No where is this more obvious than in the re-staging of "Imponderabilia."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/arts/design/14performance.html?pagewanted=2

Am I A German Romanticist?

2009-12-01T09:29:00.000-08:00

Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1807

The End is Near

2009-11-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

My studio at BOFFO is the best recession special of 2009, but alas, it looks like it will be over before 2010. Fortunately I'll be starting at Hunter in January, thereby won't be forced to deal with the time=money=space love triangle slash catch 22 that keeps life from functioning when one has to pay for studio space and then is unable to use it because one must work more to pay for the space.
Some shots of the space and its billion dollar view:

2009-11-10T18:46:00.000-08:00

Rachel Harrison--the ironic Jungian

2009-09-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

Rachel Harrison gave a lecture at Cooper Union today as part of an an ongoing lecture series in the school's wacky hi-tech new building on 3rd Ave and 7th Street--the opening ceremony for the disorienting educational edifice happened the same afternoon. I am told there were sandwiches.

As cynical as she claims to be about art, the lecture was an inspiring kick in the pants to a way of thinking about the world and objects through a lens of relational narrative and shifting context that activates history and theory and presentness or objecthood in the best way possible. I used to go to Chelsea and be just as impressed (if not moreso) by street trash and passerby convo-snippets afterwards as i was by the art. I hadn't been switched 'on' like that in a while. Few sculptors really challenge you by actively engaging your attention deficit disorder.

Has the internet has destroyed this kind of mentality? There's just way too much out there, you can't take it all in. Web surfing is not an art experience, but in a way it has killed the sort of art experience I'm talking about. All this clicking around, all these juxtaposed tabs and infinite opportunities to follow your next blip of distracted thought--it takes the thrill out of the webby-ness of real life. And then there's Ryan Trecartin. His YouTube channel is pretty amazing. I think I only like his work on YouTube.

Having seen the show at Bard, "Consider the Lobster" earlier in the summer, I wasn't sure what to expect from the talk. Her work viewed en mass comes off as formulaic--maybe too reliably irreverent. You can always count on something being turned on its head; eventually, you wonder if the diatribe is against art itself. The lecture confirmed this. Yes, Rachel Harrison hates art. She said so.

Her process and persona are full of contradictions, and she knows it, and that's part of it. She isn't trying to own a masternarrative, she's trying to explore as many dimensions as she can (or as many as she feels like it), and inevitabley the currents will contradict each other. Is that how whirlpools happen? There are things one loves and things one hates, and things one doesn't understand, and Rachel Harrison believes in following these impulses--she's probably a Jungian or something. An ironic Jungian. She claims to be against research--which i understand as an effort to follow the symbolic connections that happen naturally in ones personal exposure to the world--to avoid didacticness. didactitude? Whatever. Hierarchy is the enemy.

Despite her frequent references to pop culture, Rachel Harrison does not make art for 'the people', as entertainment or enlightenment for the common folk. just for herself, her friends and for people who get the joke. This sounds pretty elitist, no? Well, on the question of the "friendliness" of her work, her Socratic response was "if you are watching the cricket and you don't know the rules of the game, does that make cricket 'unfriendly'?"

She hates museum efforts to lure in the public through non-art related events, like Yoga at the MoMa and PS1 Warmups. Turning the museum into a venue makes people think that art should deliver the goods in a user friendly way and contributes to its widespread undermining by our entertainment-crazed consumer-retard culture. Other things that undermine art: art fairs, biennials, crappy artists, crappy galleries, and hyper-inflated auction prices for relatively mediocre works.

I wish i could remember the line of thought that followed a discussion of her sculptures as still lives versus as blogs. My mind was a bit blown by the personal applicability of these topics, as a painter of still-lives and an aspiring blogger. Some people think of sculptures as still lives... What is a still life? A group of objects composed in such a way so as to create an allegory. A blog is a webpage with reverse-chronological entries, hyperlinks, opinions. If one thinks as the objects in a still life as hyperlinks to a use/history, then there is common ground. Although a still life will always be more vague in its objective meaning than someone's ranted opinions and links. Allthough not really, when you think of the 'form' of blog, the overall meaning could be totally self-contradictory and vague.

Her answer as to the difference between the two: anyone can have a blog, but you have to be really good to paint a still-life. Aware of the holes in the argument (a bad still-life is still a still life, a good blog is better than a bad one), she sticks to it anyway. This was at the end of the 2 hour lecture, and she was hungry.

New Paintings

2009-09-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

Just finished this today. It will be included in BOFFO's "Objective Affection, "opening Saturday Sept 18 from 6-8 pm at 2 Joralemon S

Still life with Flight Pillow, Rocks, Etc
Oil on Canvas,
44" x 28"

This painting was in Best Rapper Alive (W.W.W.D?) Curated by Audrey Berman and Pete Deevakul at Bushwick Starr.
http://bushwickbk.com/2009/08/25/contemporary-art-lilwayne-magic/

Wayne with Earring
Oil on Canvas
12" x 16"

Mowing the Balloons

2009-02-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

jeremy deller at the new museum

2009-02-12T14:19:00.001-08:00

i found myself trying to justify