First day of classes

Today was the first day of classes at Temple and therefore the first day I really felt like I was away in any serious way. I've been busy rearranging the studio at home for the last few days and it's shaping up nicely, but it has kept me out of the sabbatical studio. I brought home the collage notebooks so I could be a little productive and, though I completed a dozen or so new collages, I am beginning to feel the anxiety of having finished a pile of work without exactly having the next thing ready to go.

I read Zahra Ebrahim's post about sabbaticals at Huffington post (which referenced the famous Stefan Sagmeisterand Power of Time-Off TED talk...below) and was taken by Ebrahim's emphasis on the sabbatical's ability to "recharge" artists and designers...I am hopeful that this is the case.


Most of my adult life, I have practiced a policy of keep-working-on-what-you-have-until-the-next-job-rolls-in. I've never really asked myself the question, "what would you do if you didn't have to do anything?" because the concept of not having something to do - even if it's my own assignment - is horrifying to me.

This may grow out of a childhood in which we were strictly prohibited from expressing any boredom. Not from feeling boredom (who could stop a shy, nerdy suburban kid in the 1970s from feeling bored in the endless stretch of summer time?); we were merely unable to talk about it. My mother held to the creed that "only boring people are bored" and it took a lot of torturous semantics for me to realize the value of letting your mind wander (pivotal readings included Barthes and a great interview with Chuck Close on the importance of being bored).

But I doubt, gentle reader, that you find my childhood recollections interesting. I want to return to the main problem - that of making the best use of what's been given to you. I am compelled by the opportunity to work on a scale I have not worked on for a long time. I can produce small things of some modest complexity, but I haven't had the time to focus on anything in years. This is not the model for a sabbatical Ebrahim and Sagmesiter espouse - the model of doing something 'for the love of it', or doign something (like taking an acting class) that has no apparent connection to one's creative work. Maybe it's because there really is no public for my work in the way there is for a designer, but I feel like I am doing that all the time and during this time I am compelled to go much farther (or, dare I say deeper?) than I can under normal circumstances.

The problem lies in getting ahead of one's self. Between the fabrication of panels, the translation of passages of text, the preparation of gridded papers to draw on, the creation and editing of texts for new sign pieces, and what seems like a never-ending list of other little projects I've invented to stave off boredom or the terror of having nothing no iron in the fire, I am confronting the edges of my project management skills. In makign that short list, three more responsibilities I've taken on reappeared at the edge of my mind. Geez.

So watch this speace to see how it all gets sorted out. I am curious what readers would do with a chunk of time off - would you use it to go someplace or do something you've never done? Or as a chance to focus?

Ten collages

For some reason, I have never wanted to use my own writing as the basis for my paintings. I am sure there is some fabulously dark psychological reason for this, but I am not interested in it; I accept that I like to write things that people can read and I like to paint things that are hard to read.

But I have been feeling a little like I need to find a way to put my own writing into my paintings...or at least to make it possible. So I've been making a huge pile of collages that are serving as s midpoint between the texts I feel okay with using and 'my writing' (whatever that is...)...

Here are a few...

In the few books I've filled with these, there are a few pages that seem slightly accusatory...they are there to push me further, I think, and suggest an underlying dissatisfaction with what I've made so far...

It seemed that having some phrases was a good strategy, and some of them enabled me to make passages that spanned a few pages. But they broke down. I am considering whether there should be more small units (prepositional phrases, dependent clauses and whatnot) that could be scanned and combined with other parts of sentences...

I have found that an envelope full of pronouns is really helpful in doing these, but I am also cautious about defaulting to a Jenny Holzer/Barbara Kruger means of addressing the reader... 

Some are jus ridiculous...and that's fine.

Finishing the prints

My study leave got off to a great start in early July when I was the Von Hess Visiting Artist at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia. I worked with the fabulous Amanda D'Amico on an offset print that was - to me as a novice - rather complex. Today I finally finished the edition by signing the completed prints...Here are some photos from the process...

I set up camp at the Borowsky Center with my laptop and notes for the project. To be efficient in the limited amount of time we had, I knew I would have to do a lot of the work digitally so that I would have time to hand cut some of the stencils later in the process... 

The first few runs were very carefully selected yellows and reds. In all we did at least eight separate colors and innumerable runs of overprints of very transparent grays to adjust the relationships of values...

At the end of the second day of printing, it was beginning to look familiar to me...

Amanda D'Amico checking the color. 

One of my favorite parts of the process was cutting the rubylith stencils for the various grays we used to shade colors that had already been printed and to formulate the ground. This whole process has evidently been largely replaced by digitization, but there is something extraordinarily satisfying about directness of cutting the stencils...

...of course, it required that one think backwards and reverse positive and negative, so it was extremely complicated for me and underscored how much I have come to rely on the directness of my painting methods....

Checking the prints as we near completion.

Working with Amanda and the enormous Heidelberg press at the University of the Arts was a real treat. The press, with its breaths and rhythms, is an almost-living thing. Here is a some footage of it at work...

The conventions of signing prints are strange. I numbered the edition and signed it with the title I give the drawings. The complete text in the print reads, "Blessed are all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, and free us from the fetters of self." This has become something of a mantra in the studio...there are a few letters that are not formed correctly (M's are reversed from what they should be, and there is at least on funky A in there...)

I took fifty prints and the Borowsky Center kept 50 for its archive and its use. I also got a l the stages we pulled as we were working, which is an interesting timeline of the development of the final piece...

Famous First Words

For some time, I've wanted to use conventional letter forms. I have been searching for a good set of text to use and have begun amassing a file of 'famous first words'  - communications that are the first recorded attempts to bridge enormous distances, cultural, and even interspecies divides...there is something interesting to me about about building these on sharp contrasts of positive and negative, as if one had to figure out which was carrying the message...

After Bell, gouache on paper

At the moment, these are just sketches...I'm not sure they will go any farther. It is hard to find the texts for these, though I am considering using various creation stories as sources...and there are plenty of letters describing encounters between European explorers and Native Americans...). We'll see...

After Washoe, gouache on paper

Washoe was a chimpanzee who was taught sign language in the lab of researcher Dan Fouts. At ten months, Washoe began stringing together terms to make elementary sentences and eventually acquired a significant vocabulary of signs that she used to communicate with human researchers and other chimpanzees...

After Armstrong, gouache on paper

After Morse, gouache on pepr

One thing that makes it likely that I'll make more of these is that I am interested in the simple constructed letter forms. It took me a ridiculous amount of effort to figure out how to construct some letters from simple geometry, and I'm curious what would happen if I gave it a little more time and thought...

Readings

Fridays in summer are not studio days, so I took the boys to the library to keep up with our summer reading. I have a huge stack of books related to the paintings I'm working by the bed that I am working through, but I was looking for a little distraction and found Alec Foege's book The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors who Made America Great.

As I took the book off the shelf, I knew I was being inspired by a story on NPR earlier this week ("Hacking Real Things Becomes Child's Play at this Camp"). The report described kids at Def Con learning the basics of programming by hacking televisions and other household electronics. I was enchanted listening to these children describe finding bugs in Facebook apps (an accomplishment that could have a payoff of up to $1,000 to the child). I thought about my own childhood, and the countless hours spent unintentionally destroying things at my father's workbench. I have long maintained that the difference between artists and engineers is that while both people can take things apart, only the engineers can put them back together.

Listening to the story, it occurred to me that hacking is tinkering in the 21st century - that the ability to take something apart, modify it, and make it go in a new way is a function of being fluent with code. Just as one generation manipulated mechanical tools, and the next generation manipulated electronics and circuits, this generation has to manipulate chunks of script to reshape its world.

Foege's book only gets about one page before the identity of the hacker and the tinkerer are conflated. To his credit, he touches on the idea of the perergon early in the book. It seems almost essential to the idea of the tinkerer that there is something going on that takes up most of the frame, and then there is the tinkering...which calls to mind an important detail: a couple of people are missing from Foege's index. Samuel F.B. Morse and Abbot Thayer. Both were painters and inventors - Morse perfected the telegraph (its writing system of dots and dashes bears his name) and Thayer's observations about wildlife helped make him the father of modern camouflage. Morse is much better remembered for his code (despite his paintings continued exhibition...) and Thayer is remember as a painter, if at all.

But we'll be back for them...so much to read...

Studio Visits

Painter William DiBello came by the studio today and I visited his space to see the work he's finishing up for a show that opens in September. Will kindly indulged my interest in photographing studios, and the details below are from his workspace along with some reflections on our conversation.

Two paintings from William DiBello's upcoming show at Artspace Liberti

A big part of the fun of studio visits lies in seeing how differently people put together the world. Will had several large paintings underway, and was wrestling with a number of ideas about the paintings relate to prints, about the way screen-vision differs from traditional painting vision, and about systems of distribution in the arts that reenforce social hierarchies. This is a lot to consider. 

Some works one paper at DiBello's studio

Nowadays, it seems that artists are being asked to take on a lot of responsibility for situating their work that formerly belonged to curators and institutions - especially when exhibiting in independent spaces. Will wants to have a wide range of options as an artist (and as a person, I would imagine) and the art world's pressures to construct a unified bodies of work appear to press in on him uncomfortably as he searches for an midpoint between breadth and depth in his work.

Customized tools for working on a monumental scale

Making paintings that are exquisitely calibrated color ideas, Will appears to be searching for ways to connect the huge, almost inherently institutionally-scaled paintings he makes to more democratic conversations and experiences (but really, who besides a bank or captain of industry could fit these canvases in a domestic space?). He described interesting ideas for putting out take-aways with the paintings at the show, stressing how these would not be just reproductions of the pictures, but things in themselves, related to but different from the paintings. In this, DiBello reminded me of Chicago artist Gaylen Gerber, whose monochrome paintings address social spaces as well as (perhaps more than) art historical ideas to which they initially appear connected...

A place for color

But the most arresting thing about William DiBello's painting is their breathtaking color and near-overwhelming sense of too-much-ness. One needn't have a lot of theoretical tools on board to be blown away by a picture like Buzz Field, a tightly-knit abstraction that seems to be unravelling before your eyes. I look forward to his show next month, and appreciated the chance to step into another artist's working space for a few minutes...

Wrapping up the first month's work...

Spent yesterday working on six drawings at once - a definite luxury of this new studio configuration. In the standard studio, I can go between two or three drawings at a time. The advantage to working on a large number at a time is that I get ideas for variations faster and can start to spin them out...the disadvantage is that I have to finish the six of them before I can move on...

Here's a closer look at the drawings I am working through...

After Auden (Blessed are all metrical rules...)

In this one, planes of color are lifting off the cube structure. I am interested in following through on the plasticity of the form in future drawings, extruding and bending the forms....

After Marcel Duchamp (Each breath is a work of art....)

This and the next drawing are less about the role of writing than about the way speech lingers in the air...there used to be this idea among 19th century spiritualists that spoken words left traces in the world, and I wonder if Duchamp is reflecting this notion...

(Both) After Babbage (The air itself is one vast library...)

Both of these drawings take one quote from Charles Babbage (“The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered”), each configured slightly differently. I am curious to what extent they are the same drawing (their content is identical, but the configuration is different...)

After Jonathan Lethem (All writing consists of conjuration...)

Lethem's remark about writing ("All writing, no matter how avowedly naturalistic or pellucid, consists of artifice, of conjuration, of the manipulation of symbols rather than the ‘opening of a window onto life'") gets at something very important about inscription, I think...

So these are coming to a close and I'll post completed images on my website. I have been trying to figure out the correct relation between this diary and the sketchbook page on my site, and have concluded that I will just use this for everything until January, but I would appreciate your thoughts on the work in the sketchbook, as it is likely to appear over here at some point, in some form...

Sabbatical Diary Begins

I should have started this a few weeks ago, but I've actually been terribly busy. I wanted to take some notes on what I am doing during this time off - a great gift - and have a place to put out pictures and ideas. So, here's the diary...

Actually, a lot has already happened in terms of research and in terms of work, but I'll loop back to some of that in future entries (part of what has slowed me down about this diary is what always slows me down...the wait for noteworthy news to report. The problem with this condition is that sooner or later, nothing looks like it's worth reporting and you end up with nothing to share...I am trying to overcome that and hope to avoid being tedious...)

Before we go too far, I have to say it's a little bewildering to be on leave from work to do research. I am so used to fitting writing and painting into the spaces between other projects that it feels strange to focus on them. I am a little concerned that inspiration for pictures and essays might be like some mysterious particles in physics that disappear when one turns one's attention to them.

Sabbatical Studio at the Crane Arts Building...it's a little like a base camp for a long climb...

The best way to combat this fear is to try to maintain continuity with earlier work. I have started a number of pictures that deal with the relationship between writing and painting (examples of these are on my website).

A lot of what I'm trying to do with this break is complete work for future shows. I also have several completed bodies of work that need to be photographed and 'packaged' for possible exhibition. While I'm doing this, I'm trying to come up with a workshop for a community agency I'd like to work with and complete a show I've been asked to curate for Bucks County Community College (opening in January). And there's always work-related stuff lingering on the fringes of my mind...there is plenty to do.

So please check in from time to time as I describe my progress. Thanks for reading...

Thinking about workshops with writing...

On re-enactment

I'm very curious about The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's film which got a feature in today's New York Times. I saw the trailer the other day and thought 'this is not for me', but I may not be able to avoid the discussion of revisiting historical events...

Painter Painting

Ideas evolving

Four films on Remix Culture by Kirby Ferguson...

This is reposted from Open Culture. I'm thinking about it because of an essay by Tracy Thompson in Salon on the way the causes of the Civil War still inspire revision and debate. For more on this, see the collection Remixing the Civil War: Meditations at the Sesquicentennial.

Article of the day: Cut-up Technique

You may know a lot of stuff, but you never know when you need it...or that's what I've been thinking as I wrestle with texts for new paintings using the cut-up technique pioneered by Tristan Tzara and William S. Burroughs. I don't know that what I'm after is quite the same...I want something else - I want (I expect) the randomly combined bits of language to give me something I cannot find on my own...here's what they look like...

From the studio - Kandinsky Paints

I first came across this through Open Culture. Had to share it here, as I love to see people work in the studio...

Send in the clowns

Here's one for the medium-is-the-message file: I was clicking through the trailers on iTunes the other day and noticed one called Silver Circle. Being that I'll watch anything computer-animated, I took a look.

Wow. It's like a right-wing, financial survivalist's Matrix.

Trailers are meant to give you enough of a film to get you interested - to help you see if you're in the audience for the picture. So when in the first seconds you see a character attacked by an army of faceless drones behind shields that read 'Federal Reserve', you know that you're watching something whose target market is waiting for the U.N. black helicopters to touch down.

Go on and you get an especially hoary piece of conspiracy theorizing. It seems that these characters live in a world where currency is supported by governments, rather than quaint things like precious metals (which haven't supported economies since the Bretton Woods Agreements...). "Rebels" have begun minting their own currency which they claim has "value"  and that draws the ire of the Federal Reserve (remember when movies were about mysterious foreign threats? James Bond, anyone? Please?)

Zoe, our spunky, lo-res heroine, is a freedom fighter. Her ultimate foe may be Victor Brant, Chair of the Federal Reserve, but her proximal adversary is Jay, who's investigating an arson and is drawn into a  romantic entanglement (with explosions, the website promises!). They live in 2019, which, with hyper-inflation, sounds a lot like Weimar Germany, and the dollar has lost its position as a lynchpin currency. It's notable that its not predatory banks or industries that are capitalizing on this crisis - it's the our own government.

Yawn. Ron Paul made this up in 2009. Or rather, he gets a ton of credit for what has been talked about in a mess of fringy groups for decades. But when the fringe starts releasing its own animate feature films, you know it's time to start getting active.

We've seen movies as vehicles of allegory and protest before. What's amusing is when the medium of cinema gets put to use clumsily. Really? Silver Circle is lower quality than the animatics you see in bonus features for a major studio release. It is painful to watch a two minute trailer, almost as painful as watching SIMs act. It's implied on a page about the studio that director Pasha Roberts picks lo-tech 'South Park-syle' animations because they give the work counter-culture cred. Don't believe it. This thing looks like one of the (once) popular animated news re-enactments.

But why are they doing this? (Who are they? I'm not there yet - hang on) Let's read a from a post on the Silver Circle Underground Blog:

Science fiction movies often introduce ideas that are later produced by science. After all, science fiction writers spend a lot of time dreaming up technological gadgets for their heroes and villains to use. In the Terminator movie series, cyborg assassins were equipped with built-in technology that allowed them to see in infrared. In addition, their eyes could access software that provided a heads-up display full of useful information about objects and individuals in their field of vision.

To me, this looks like a classic case of if-you-can't-beat-'em, join'em. For years, citizens on the right have decried the liberal bias of the entertainment/media complex. But with the success of FoxNews, it appears that a wholesale effort is afoot to craft an alternate universe. The story quoted above goes on to describe how the government is 'compiling untold volumes of unconstitutional data' on citizens. Don't bother asking about evidence, there is none. In the real world, there are plenty of allegations - supported by data - of corporations collecting consumers' private data and selling it or turning it over to the government, but that's not exactly the same thing, really. It seems that every sin that could be committed in the Silver Circle universe must be committed by the government, and one assumes that power is the motive. Corporations, motivated by the much more fungible concept of profit, seem to be nowhere to be seen...

Hmmm...wonder why that is?

No really. We were just treated to a whole year of politics based on the idea that a lie told loudly and often becomes truth. Now see a new kind of lie - one predicated on omission, one that claims that everything wrong with the country today comes from the doings of its government. With citizen ire directed toward the government - an institution that carries out the will of its people - no one has time to care about the greed and indifference of corporate entities whose greatest concern appears to be that there is too much money out there - too much for them to control it all.

Lately my work has led me from a once-sunny and mildly postmodern/ironic attitude toward codes to a much more sinister place lately. We are hearing all sorts of weird newsspeak like 'liberty filmmaking' and 'truth language'.  I have become interested in the various cyphers and verbal secret handshakes or hate groups and anti-government organizations, most of whom operate under the delusion that they are the ones with real freedom and a frightening responsibility to save the rest of us.

We could ignore this. That may be the best strategy. But I am afraid that the people who think that it's a good idea to oppose our government through violence and fear-mongering propaganda rather than through the political process will keep up their rhetoric and some people may start believing them. Critical thinking skills are not something we can count on in the electorate these days, and Silver Circle looks like the latest attempt to take advantage of that situation. We are living through the consequences of unchecked access to guns and ammunition no, something we should have had the political will (if not the moral responsibility) to oppose. I have enough trouble letting a bad movie ruin my day, let alone my country.

Some times it IS the worker, not the work...

Charles Kraft's Hitler Idaho

Most interesting read of the week? Jen Graves unnerving essay on ceramic artist Charles Kraft who - it turns out - is not ironically interested in Nazi imagery, but is actually a frightening person.

To me, the best part is reading as Graves sorts our her own feelings toward the work, for which she previously professed admiration.

Ongoing stories...

An interesting reading of the Bush-is-a-painter story from Lee Rosenbaum at Culture Grrrl...

When Presidents Paint

Images from Gawker.com

With the discovery that George W. Bush has been secretly at work on paintings, the art world experienced something on the order of a tear in the space-time continuum. 

Citizens of that utopia called 'the art world' have had to deal with the severe cognitive dissonance that results from liking the work and loathing the source.

Bush, after all, is remembered as the man who cut taxes and relaxed regulations on the wealthiest American citizens and industries. After 9/11, Bush squandered the good will of the world and led America into two wars whose primary purpose appears to have been to provide unending work for defense contractors. His administration perfected Orwellian newspeak with educational reform programs that had such benevolent names as 'No Child Left Behind' that rewarded 'achievement' while fundamentally skewing the goals of education. In the last election, we watched as chagrined candidates from his his party pretended his administration hadn't existed.

But W's paintings have been popping up on Facebook and all over the Internet (1,590,000 Google hits for "George W. Bush paintings" and counting). People seem to like them for their naivete. People are reminded of art they love, from history or from the present. One of the funniest lines of reasoning (one Jerry Saltz touches on) is the symbolism of the bathtub in Bush's pictures and its connection to other artists. Art, after all, is about art, right? So it only makes sense that if George W. Bush is making paintings, they should be connected to other paintings.This is the sort of pop culture soul-searching Slate was made for.

Some people have been quick to point out that Hitler was a painter, too. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was a poet. Being Hitler didn't make Hitler's paintings 'good' or 'bad' any more than being Jimmy Carter redeemed the ex-president's verse. The confusion of the person for the product - the most profound muddle faced by artists in the 21st century - is at the core of this problem. People who hate Bush struggle to figure out how they can like his paintings...or even rationalize their existence.

But it's startlingly easy to resolve this conflict - one needs only to remember that not all paintings are art. Before crowd-curating, Marcel Duchamp described how things made by people are ratified by discussion in a 1957 statement, The Creative Act (you can listen to Duchamp here...). W's paintings need to be seen for what they are - the products of a hobby enjoyed by retired individual who emailed them to his sister. He didn't put them on display in a gallery or museum. They weren't discovered - they were hacked into. The assumption that they are art appears to rest on the medium in which they have been made - paint. As an industry, the art world is pretty good at separating things made with paint into categories of 'works of art' and 'museum-quality oil paintings' that wish they were art. Here is yet another opportunity to practice such discernment.

What' really tragic about this is all the wasted time. I am as guilty as everyone else of giving Bush's pictures more attention than they deserve by adding to the melee. While thousands of artists produce work that we could be talking about - attempting to contribute to a millennia-long conversation about cultural value by producing objects and images and setting them into a context of other objects and images - we are spending time rooting through the private emails of someone who much of the world regards as a war criminal.

Let's make sure the former president is remembered for the right things.

Media Seen

 

 

I was rather taken with this piece by Ben Rubin called And that's the Way it Is....hope you like it. More info here.