Olympia viewed from Spruce Street Harbor Park (Proposed)

Trying to get a feeling for what the banners I'm thinking of would look like from the park...

A few more code signals...

The International Code of Signals has a vocabulary for affirmative, negative and evasive responses...how incredibly useful...

I am not in a position to be able to form an opinion.

I do not know.

I think so; most likely.

Artship Olympia brainstorming...

I'm very interested in the call for proposals for the USS Olympia now available through Philadelphia Sculptors. I've thought about the Olympia for a long time, but never really as a site for art work. But it's been an important place for me for a long time, so I am trying to think of how to work with it.

The Olympia

A few weeks ago, I visited with my friend the painter who makes things, H. John Thompson. This seems made for him - especially after his last show at Napoleon. We looked around the Seaport Museum and were very helpfully guided through the ship by an employee who shared a lot of good info.

John at the place where the remains of the Unknown Soldier of WWI were placed en route to Arlington Cemetery.

I had been to the Olympia earlier this summer, with Carmina and the boys. We stood on the spot where Commodore Dewey began the Battle of Manilla - the spot where you could trace a line through American international relations from May 1, 1898 and the end of the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines to the 1960s and the immigration policies that made it possible for the Ocampos to come to this country.

On this most recent trip, I learned about change to the international signal flag system and was able to get a lead on the way the flags would have been used in 1989. Through the library at Temple, I got a hold of the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations - 1894 edition. My work with signal flags made this a natural course to follow...

Using old work for placement, to see how it looks on the rails

The signal book describes how three-letter combinations are used to communicate certain frequently used messages...much like three letter shortcuts are used in text messages (LOL, etc.).

A version using some simpler banners

Here are a few of the short versions...I am also thinking of making enamel pins of them...

Are you on fire?

We shall have calm.

Will you give me passage?

Clipping

Hanne Darboven wrote by hand, copied different kind of texts by transferring them into her own handwriting. Only in few cases would she have them copied by someone else with a typewriter. This personal aspect of her art-making is reminiscent of the practice of monks in the Middle Ages, copying the texts of the Bible day after day, writing the codex, and this is rather a contrast to the idea of the depersonalized primary structures of the prefabricated or mechanically created, mainly geometrical forms, being used by the Conceptual and especially the Minimal artists of the time. Darboven chose the medium of the book as the classical medium of knowledge of the early modernism, constructing a personal reading of history and time. She practiced cutting fragments of encyclopedias, literature and later of articles out of magazines and newspapers, transferring them into her own handwriting and combining them to form a new text, a privately hand written ‘cultural history’.

 Schoofs, Miriam. "Hanne Darboven: I inscribe by I describe nothing". Flash Art. Jan -Feb 2013, p.

More about care...

...trying to keep track of stories about mending and repair (less about curation, please). See an earlier post on mending.

Here's one, "Preserving what is valued", from University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum...reviewed by Allison Meier for Hyperallergic...

Recent research...

I have a couple or three shows coming up and I am moving away from the literary quotations that have been subject matter for a while...I am looking for new subjects in the argot of various groups. The idea of dictionaries that guide readers through worlds that are intentionally closed off by language is interesting...

This could get messy...

This brochure, produced by a detective agency around 1880, contains a section of the slang of Philadelphia's petty thieves. We are told that "You rarely hear slang form thieves over 30 years of age. Although all crooks are familiar with the terms, its use is chiefly confined to pickpockets, sneak-thieves, and the younger class of criminals, who take delight in mastering the language of their elders and in familiarizing themselves with its use." (21) 

Bruce Rodgers' 1972 book is as personal and idiosyncratic as these kinds of books tend to be. "Slang flourishes in the ghetto," he writes in the introduction, "Those who leave the ghetto shake off its language first, then decry its message. Slang is secretive, a form of protest and an expression of social recognition [...] yet this secretiveness is not snobby; anyone interested can break the code [...] when the secrecy in slang becomes and object in and of itself [...] slang stops being primarily a means of communication." 

More to come. These were found at Temple University's Special Collections Research Center (thanks!).

Further progress...

From the studio...

Some drawings coming together on the drawing board...

Secret Society

Interesting podcast of Fresh Air in which Jamie Barrett discusses his research into the 'dark web'. The importance of encryption is discussed.

Hand Lettering Workshop with Mike Meyer

I am so excited to be going to this in September! And more than mildly anxious...

Michael Swaine: "Mending for the People" Tenderloin National Forest, San...

Some time ago, it occurred to me that a good way to teach some of the fundamental skills that are part of a BFA Foundations program might be to use repair as a focus for a project. (This is an idea I have talked about with artist H. John Thompson a little.)



It would require knowledge of materials and assembly logics, as well as careful measurement and fabrication. One can imagine a number of conceptually engaging approaches to repair that students might take.



I've been making note of examples of work like this, but I I thought this was an interesting take on the subject. Perhaps I'll keep track of examples here, and I invite your suggestions...

Rochelle Toner

Interesting video of Rockie Toner talking about her work and career...

SAI 2015 Rochelle Toner from Senior Artists Initiative on Vimeo.

Chomography Talks - Melinda Steffy

Chromography Artist Talks - Gerard Brown

Listening to swine flu

Swine flu virus (according to Wikipedia...could be a grape juice spill I suppose...)

Using the I-am-a-bulletin board function of this blog this week... here is something I came across that I need to keep track of - protein and amino acid music.

I gather this is an example of audiation (a variation on the idea of visualization) in which patterns and correspondences hidden in data might be revealed through translation to music. Here's another spot to look at...

This example (on a blog by Stephen Zielinski) looks at the sequence of amino acids in swine flu and produces ambient music. I'm a little bothered that he had a goal - ambient music - in this. I suppose I should just accept that as a form of translation, this intends to make something in the target language rather than to find something in the source....but I am just more interested in what happens when you haven't got anything in mind and let yourself go where the text leads...

You can listen here...

You can see the whole post here.

Edit: this link - to a simultaneous ambient composition created by edits to Wikipedia - is what got me thinking of audiation earlier this week...

WHYY-TV Friday Arts visits Rowan University Art Gallery to talk Art & Technology

Video: Other Selections @ the Center for Art in Wood

I want to be everyone sees this piece by John Thornton...it's interesting how the Center for Art in Wood is producing these short videos in lieu of conventional exhibit essays. There is a lot to talk about in terms of the relationship between craft and sculpture in this show, but that's for another post...

My college radio debut...

Thanks to Professor Ron Block at Rowan University's WGLS FM 89.7. Professor Block hosts The Writers' Roundtable, a monthly show where he talks about fiction and poetry with authors. He was kind enough to ask me to come over on April 27, 2015, and talk about the work in Chromography: Writing in Color (currently on view at Rowan University Art Gallery). We talked about abstract painting drag, secret messages and the translations of The Hours from literature to music.

Here's a link to the show's podcast, enjoy the show...

Some photos from Chromography

Starting to think a little less flat...

When I see writing like this. I realize I am doing everything wrong...

The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The professor may get top billing, but make no mistake - this is the madman's story.

I had high hopes for this book...perhaps too high. I kept feeling like I was on the surface of it and wanting to go deeper. The description of how a dictionary gets made was fascinating, but perhaps too scattered to be a useful example of process-analysis. The description of Dr. Minor's youth kept offering tantalizing hints, but ultimately delivered only insinuations. The relationship between Minor and Murray is described with occasional foreshadowing...and those roads go no place, as if the author had some anecdote he planned to use but forgot.

All of this would have been fine but for much greater problems - first, Winchester admits that ascribing Minor's mental illness to a single episode of battlefield trauma is a risky proposition...and then does it and does it again and again. (He later tries this approach with an imagined connection between the murderous doctor and the widow of his victim, and it seems so hopeless it sputters away as you read it). But much more disturbing is the notion, entertained late in the book, that Minor's mental illness was somehow 'necessary' for his work on the dictionary. This kind romantic glorification of suffering as somehow essential to creative work is ugly and unwise. As someone who has struggled with depression, I don't think about how much it's helped my creative work so much...I wish it would just go away forever so I could just work.

A large part of the book is spent implicating the treatment of the mentally ill in 19th century England, making explicit comparisons to earlier cruelties and implicit comparisons to possible cruelties of modern medical treatments. But the allure of madness as a creative fuel is perhaps greater than the author's ability to remain objective. Is a dictionary - even a really good one - worth one man's death and another's misery? At the end of the day, I think the author would say it is. This is too bad - not just for his tale, but for readers who seek to understand the working of the mind in more than cliche terms...

View all my reviews

Can we talk about work ?

I tried to make a living from my creative work alone. I was a number of years out of undergraduate school, had held a few jobs in galleries and non-profits. I was freelancing a lot on the side. I got a really big freelance gig as my first marriage fell apart and, with a ton of help from my friends, tried to relaunch my life in a new apartment in a terrible part of town (where, twenty years later, one can now buy expensive coffees and craft cocktails, and all things 'vintage').

I failed miserably. I worried endlessly about the next gig - to the point where it made me overshoot deadlines so I had at least something to work on. I racked up enormous debt. It seemed that no matter what, I could not patch together enough stable income for one reasonably healthy man in in his early 30s to live responsibly (that is, without being a leech). The idea of starting a family was utterly out of the question.

I didn't come from that kind of childhood. My father was a company man at IBM who had miraculously survived the downsizing of the late 80s and eventually retired after a life-long career. My mother, a nurse, worked in hospitals and doctors' offices except for a brief stint at a department store when we lived in New York. I don't know that they ever 'did what they wanted', but they did what they felt they needed to do to take care of us.

A life in the arts, if it was discussed at all, was - from an early age - equated with poverty and a certain amount of selfishness in my family. "What are you going to do to support your addiction?", my father once asked, in all seriousness, when we used to share a commute that took me to a community college art school and him to his office. Pursuing art was a pathological endeavor, one that was going to drain resources, not provide them, and one that was about what an individual wanted, not what needed to be done. My parents worked hard - I knew that - but they worked for large (and largely benevolent) entities. If they didn't worried where money would come from when they finished this or that project, they never told us.

This is not the life of the artist, the writer, or - in the era of mass adjunct higher education - even the college or university professor. This may be why I was so interested to see Chris Offut's story in the February 5, 2015, NY Times Magazine, My Dad, the Pornographer. Offut's story may have prurient appeal, but it's the mechanics of it that interest me. Offut describes his father's twin motivations for writing porn: what was out there was so poorly written and he needed to pay for his kids' orthodonture.

The article goes on to describe the way Andrew Offut (writing under various pseudonyms) was able to produce a book a month:

Dad’s writing process was simple — he’d get an idea, brainstorm a few notes, then write the first chapter. Next he’d develop an outline from one to 10 pages. He followed the outline carefully, relying on it to dictate the narrative. He composed his first drafts longhand, wearing rubber thimbles on finger and thumb. Writing with a felt-tip pen, he produced 20 to 40 pages in a sitting. Upon completion of a full draft, he transcribed the material to his typewriter, revising as he went. Most writers get more words per page as they go from longhand to a typed manuscript, but not Dad. His handwriting was small, and he used ampersands and abbreviations. His first drafts were often the same length as the final ones.

Manuscripts of science fiction and fantasy received multiple revisions, but he had to work much faster on porn. After a longhand first chapter, he typed the rest swiftly, made editorial changes and passed that draft to my mother. She retyped it for final submission. At times, Mom would be typing the beginning of the book while Dad was still writing the end.

His goal was a minimum of a book a month. To achieve that, he refined his methods further, inventing a way that enabled him to maintain a supply of raw material with a minimum of effort. He created batches in advance — phrases, sentences, descriptions and entire scenes on hundreds of pages organized in three-ring binders. Tabbed index dividers separated the sections into topics.

Eighty percent of the notebooks described sexual aspects of women. The longest section focused on their bosoms. Another binder listed descriptions of individual actions, separated by labeling tabs that included: Mouth. Tongue. Face. Legs. Kiss. The heading of Orgasm had subdivisions of Before, During and After. The thickest notebook was designed strictly for B.D.S.M. novels with a list of 150 synonyms for “pain.” Sections included Spanking, Whipping, Degradation, Predegradation, Distress, Screams, Restraints and Tortures. These were further subdivided into specific categories followed by brief descriptions of each.

Dad was like Henry Ford applying principles of assembly-line production with pre-made parts. The methodical technique proved highly efficient. Surrounded by his tabulated notebooks, he could quickly find the appropriate section and transcribe lines directly into his manuscript. Afterward, he blacked them out to prevent plagiarizing himself. Ford hired a team of workers to manufacture a Model-T in hours. Working alone, Dad could write a book in three days.

Now that is how you answer the question, "How are you going to support your addiction?", which is really a person who loves you but has no idea what you do asking, How are you going to support yourself and your family as a creative artist?"

When I was in college, my parents withdrew their support for my art studies and I had to drop out for a time. I was rescued from a lifetime of working in record stores when the chair of the art department, Stuart Baron, arranged for a full-tuition scholarship that allowed me to finish school. I am eternally in his debt, but I remember the anxiety I had at the time that I might lose that chance, and how I worked as hard as I could to earn its continuation. I am eternally in Professor Baron's debt, but I think what I began learning from the experience was how to make art into a central focus of my life - a career - not a distraction or addiction.

I have to admit, I still grapple with what my employer - a Research 1 university - generously calls my 'creative work and research'. I am extremely grateful for the privilege I enjoy that allows me to pursue my work. I work on some pretty esoteric things. And people I meet still think it's somehow not really work. But when I read about a man who figures out how to write pulp pornography to pay for his son's braces, I think I know what love is.

Which is more popular?

For a while, I've thought that I am sneaking signs into places through my work. Here's why, in one handy chart:

Printer's progress...

Anne Schaeffer's image of a stage of one of the prints for Chromography...this one is one of four prints based on passage by Judith Butler (about how we must be able to read in a democracy - texts, images and everything)....stay tuned for more...

Progress on Chomography...

For a few months now, I've been working with Melinda Steffy on a project that will open this spring at Rowan University Art Gallery. One of the major parts of this - for me - is the translation of twenty four literary passages concerning time of day into short melodies in Solresol, a constructed language invented by Francois Sudre in 19th century France.

Sudre's language employed only seven syllables - the notes of the C major scale - to form a vocabulary of nearly 3,000 words. Here is a link to a play list of the translations, and I am considering ways of revealing the scores themselves. Melinda has translated my translations into her color-based form of music notation, and we are thinking of large decals on the gallery windows...something like this:

Soon I'll post images of other work that's coming together for this show...I appreciate your comments.

On Cyphers...

A couple of Solresol sketches...

Here is a sketch of a translation of a passage from an Oscar Wilde essay (you an see I am struggling with vocabulary in this one...)

this is a line from Auden that I often use as a translation exercise...

Here's a passage from an Oscar Wilde essay - the black dots are used to indicate spaces between words, not stresses or special type (i.e. italics or boldface, which - I would argue - are more immediately needed to make Solresol a useful script)