Woodmere Catalog

A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron

I cannot say this was a page-turner. Many books were able to leapfrog over it when I would curl up for bedtime reading...why? Baron has chosen a fascinating subject - the transformations wrought by changing writing and reading technologies - but his book suffers from an unusual condition: too much reasonable thinking. When the conclusion of your book includes the sentence, "The effects of the technologies [forcing changes in how we write, read and circulate text] have typically been positive, with some negatives inevitably mixed in  - the plusses and minuses owing as much to the vagaries of human nature as to the advantages or disadvantages of the technology itself", you're being a little wishy-washy.

While the book includes flashes of imagination (a good section of Ted Kaczynski as author, an imaginative and inclusive overview of writing technologies form clay tablets to forgotten early word processing programs, a thoughtful meditation on global citizenship in the information age), Baron seems to have written a book that would be better discussed over dinner than actually published. His informal, conversational tone contribute to this impression.

All of this perhaps says more about my expectations than about Baron's book - an effort to consider the ways we are being manipulated by our own communication is a valuable opportunity for reflection. I wish I'd gotten a little more to reflect on here.

Another printmaking test

These are sort of amusing...

After Walter Benjamin, by way of Marjorie Perloff

Back up your Kindle...

I loved this project by Jesse England (described on Hyperallergic and tweeted by Kenneth Goldsmith) that involves copying an eBook and binding it. Those who remember the story about copies of Orwell's 1984 getting removed from readers' devices (can you make this shit up?) will take special pleasure in this work...

New print in progress...

I am very psyched to be going back to the Borowsky Center at the University of the Arts later this summer to make another offset litho with Amanda D'Amico. Last time, I felt like I was learning as we went...and I made a million mistakes. This time, I hope to be a little more organized. Here is the image I am working on for this year's print...

Last year, I was making layers on the fly. This year, I plan to have everything ready to roll as soon as I walk in. That means setting up the image...I realized how much I get out of having something lay around for a few days, so I got this done. Expect some changes (I can tell I am going to be adjusting contrast, for example...)

I'll post updates as the print unfolds...

Secrets revealed....

I'm especially interested in the segment of this where you see them setting up the shot - you can see they have projected the guides on the wall so they can place the post-its correctly...

Revised Dossier

Gerard Brown Dossier by Gerard Brown | Make Your Own Book

Tired of hearing talking about how guns make us a 'safer' nation...(UPDATED 6/18/15)

Also available..."Scene Painting and Bulletin Art" by Frank Atkinson

"A Show At Sho' Cards" by Frank Atkinson

Another scrapbook clipping

I've been keeping an article ("What's the most common mistake artists make?" by Corbett Barklie) open in the innumerable tabs of my browser for a few weeks...and before I lose it I want to pin it here.

Barklie suggests that the most common mistake artists make is that they, "frequently forget to acknowledge the people who help them"... and I have to agree. A bizarrely large number of my professional colleagues conduct themselves as if they expect the world to stop for them and their work. This attitude is one that students pick up on and adopt as part of their professional mannerisms...to horrible effect.

'Help' here needs to be broadly defined, too. It's not just the galleries that hang your work or the critics who notice it,; not just the community of friends that comes out to see it or the foundations that may support it. It's the people who make your life as an artist possible on a day-to-day basis.

For me, that's my family. Especially my wife, Carmina, who gives me wide latitude to follow my work in the studio as a writer and as a teacher. It's also my two sons, who endure openings and afternoons in the studio and patiently tote sketchbooks through the museum when they would rather be home watching TV or at the playground with a foursquare ball.

I'm also grateful for my job, where I am expected to do my work and from which I have been the fortunate recipient of a great deal of support and protected experimentation. I have the great privilege of sharing ideas with students, and of working with a number of talented and creative people whoa re generous enough to share their ideas with me.

The list goes on and there are too many people to name in this post, but I want share Barklie's article with other artists who see that they are part of overlapping worlds, not only citizens of some remote world world or (heaven forbid) 'creative community'...Artlandia or something. In fact, if you're reading this, I should be thanking you...

So, thank you.

Drawing...you gotta have it

While I'm putting up things I don't want to forget (and about which I would welcome conversation...) I wanted to post this piece by Anita Taylor from the Guardian online ('Why drawing needs to be a curriculum essential').

Taylor writes:

Drawing remains a central and pivotal activity to the work of many artists and designers – a touchstone and tool of creative exploration that informs visual discovery. It fundamentally enables the visualisation and development of perceptions and ideas. With a history as long and intensive as the history of our culture, the act of drawing remains a fundamental means to translate, document, record and analyse the worlds we inhabit. The role of drawing in education remains critical, and not just to the creative disciplines in art and design for which it is foundational.

...and she doesn't do such a great job of supporting that claim, falling into the common trap of being very specific about the art and design applications of drawing while being too general about the rest of the world's uses of it:

Alongside a need for drawing skills for those entering employment identified by a range of industries in the creative sectors – animation, architecture, design, fashion, film, theatre, performance and the communication industries – drawing is also widely used within a range of other professions as a means to develop, document, explore, explain, interrogate and plan. This includes the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine and sport.

I am trying to get a conversation that I hope will lead to a major overhaul of the drawing courses in Tyler's Foundation program underway soon. How can we make classes that fulfill the needs to 'develop, document, explore, explain, interrogate and plan' and what - exactly -  are those out in the world these days?

To me, a conversation about drawing as visualization and invention is long-overdue. What do you think we need to talk about when we talk about drawing?

"Enoughness"

I tend to keep a lot of tabs open on my browser - lots of unread articles that I plan to finish, lots of ideas that catch my attention. Too often those get lost when the thing crashes, or maybe they get chucked in the Facebook stream and never thought of again. By keeping them open, I am trying to keep mulling them over. They belong here. I'll try to be better about posting.

Abigail Satinsky's April 3, 2014, essay on Art Practical (Appropriate Technologies) is one of those things...while I don't share Satinsky's enthusiasm for subscription-based marketing, I was taken by an idea she addresses early in the piece:

appropriate technologies [is] a term coined by the Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, first published in 1973. Schumacher calls for economic solutions to globalization that are founded on principles of self-empowerment, self-reliance and decentralization, and local control. He advocates for decentralized working methods, or “smallness within bigness,” in which interrelated but autonomous units work together toward a greater goal. Furthermore, he presents the philosophy of “enoughness,” a Buddhist approach to economics that advocates for self-sufficiency: producing from local resources for local needs at a modest scale, appropriate for a balanced life.

What attracts me to this is the notion of 'enoughness' - an idea almost completely foreign to contemporary American thought. Perhaps inspired by James Elkins' musings on the 'average, normal, mediocre artist', I've been reflecting on what a realistic life in the arts looks like and why it seems not to be enough for so many people who insist that the market is 'too small' or too 'artist-centered.'

In a funny way, it also reminded me of seeing Gerry Lenfest speak at Temple University a few weeks ago, and hearing him mention how the sale of his cable company gave him "enough" money to be philanthropic.

Portfolio of work relevant to Hacktory A.I.R. Application

I work primarily in painting, critical writing, and as an independent exhibit organizer. What unites these different forms of creative research is an interest in the use and function of written language. I have a long involvement in the use of encryption and steganography in my work, and have explored a number of script systems that allow me to conceal messages in images. As a resident artist at the Hacktory, I would like to explore the uses of programming languages and syntax and add these to my 'vocabulary'.

Below is a portfolio of five works that employ codes in various forms. The indicate the rigor of my work, and suggest the thoroughness with which I would apply myself to the opportunity. However, I am not interested in using this opportunity to display language, I am interested in use it to explore the possibilities of employing it to shape a work I have not yet conceived. In this, I am very interested in the language operations of experimental writers from the Oulipo and in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith.

Impossible Book: Principles of American Military Financial Planning (with Mary Beth Brown), 2014, commercially printed counterfeit credit card, edition of 250,  2 1/8 x 3 3/8. This impossible text book deals with the way the United States Congress paid for wars from the 18th- to the 20th-century. Hidden in the sixteen-digit account number are the dates of four major wars; the four-digit security code (1964) marks the year Congress gave the President a 'blank check' to conduct the war in Vietnam.

Impossible Textbook: Four paradigms of Cold War Power (with Mary Beth Brown), 2014, 3D printed ABS plastic, wood, and paper. 6 x 6 x 6 in. This piece is an attempt to produce a low-cost text book that would be useful in a freshmen American history course. The text is printed on eight pyramids that a reader could print from a 3D printer. The book is 'read' like puzzle, by arranging the forms in a laser-cut wooded frame until they describe four metaphors of US-Soviet relations from 1945-1987.

You will forget all the sounds and images, 2013-14, acrylic on canvas. 48 x 48 in. This painting utilizes a tumbling block pattern and maritime signal flags, unlike much of my work, I composed the encoded text in this image in response to the constraint of having three faces of the cube available. 

Blessed are all metrical rules (After Auden), 2012, gouache on paper 22 x 30 in. This image, like a great deal of my work, employs stolen language - in this case a passage by the poet W.H. Auden that praises the use of compositional constraints. The code is challenging to read in part because only one color 'channel' is rendered.

The Recognitions (Umberto Eco), 2009, gouache on paper, 30 x 22 in. This is one drawing from a large series of stolen self-portraits. As I come across words and ideas I closely identify with in my reading, I add them to The Recognitions. In this image, a passage from an essay by Eco describing the way ancient Egyptian scribes employed hieroglyphics to send secret messages alongside ordinary message is encoded in Braille dots - each pixel of the digital photo is replaced by a part of a Braille character. 

Found passages

So, I've been reading Marcus du Sautoy's book on Symmetry and I was some what weirded out by this passage:

Some French mathematicians believe that the quality of their mathematics is a product of the French language in which it was written. [...] Bruno Poizat is particularly proud of the French language and never bows to pressures from journals to write in in English, the universally accepted language of science. One of his most important contributions is a seminal book on mathematical logic and its interactions with the theory of groups. His insistence on publishing in French meant that no publisher would touch it. SO he went ahead and financed the publication of the book himself under his own publishing name: Nur al-Mantiq wal Ma'rifah, Aribic for 'Light and Logic of Knowledge', Because he had complete editorial control the book is rather idiosyncratic. Every chapter starts with a pornographic picture. Poizat explains in the introduction that these pictures are there to soothe the brain before the difficult mathematics that follows.

[...] the last chapter has a picture of the author in a dressing gown, leering out of an armchair at the reader. but the mathematics is so good the book could not be ignored. In Poizat's view, the material is particularly suited to the language in which it is written:

Scientific French, what a beautiful language!...I have no French nationalist feelings, nor a nostalgia for the time when French had a more dominant position...I believe the plurality of languages is use for communication of science has a value per se.

 At a conference I attended in Russia, Poizat insisted on speaking in French with simultaneous translation into Russian, and was obviously delighted to leave the English-only members of the audience in the dark:

Well intentioned people have told me that it is quite rude to address a person he or she cannot understand. If this were true, the community of mathematicians would rate highly in the scale of rudeness considering the number of times its members have spoken to me in English. (174-175)

Is this strange? Or is it not so unusual that people might think that English is re-wiring their brains?
As I was reading du Sautoy, Jun 'ichiro Tanizaki was playing in my mind...

To take a trivial example near at hand: I write a magazine article recently comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like out writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, something like India ink, and it would have been made to seep down the handle into the brush. And since we would have found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper - even under mass production, if you will - would have been much in demand [...] But more than that: our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment {...} has a vast, has a vast, almost boundless influence on our culture.

Tanizaki goes on to wonder how math and science would be different if they were unshackled from English and rendered in Japanese.

Is language really that important to you, dear reader? Or is there some meaning at the core all this that somehow transcends mere words? I would love to hear from you...

This is sad...

Very sad news of the death of critic Ed Sozanski...Use code code D37Q to read the story... http://t.co/UjMrJKlevx
— gerardbrown (@gerardfbrown) April 17, 2014

On Professionalism: Artists in their natural habitats

The conference at which I was going to present some of my research on professionalism in the arts has been postponed, so I stopped posting little teasers about it. But here's one more to think about until it gets rescheduled...

In in 1923 book The Art Spirit, influential teacher and painter Robert Henri discusses the conventions of the artist's studio. According to historian Sarah Burns, the studio of the late 19th century had become an important front in the creation of a professional identity for the American artist. Particularly thought the work of artists William Merritt Chase (whose studio was a frequent subject of his art, see below) the studio communicated a kind of worldliness to visiting collectors who were charmed by the artist's taste in furniture, textiles, and other miscellanea. American artists of Chase's generation (and audiences, as the Godey's Magazine image above suggests)  saw the studio as a stage on which artist identity was performed, and a large part of that identity was the demonstration of sophistication and sensitivity.

William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916). Studio Interior, ca. 1882. Oil on canvas, 28 1/16 x 40 1/8 in. 

Henri objected to such posturing, and suggested the artist had something to learn for a more common tradesman, the barber. He writes:

A barber has an apparatus that is surprising, and all in such remarkable order. [...] An artist proposes to make a work of art, and while his work requires infinite skill, he is generally far behind the barber in the arrangement of the most ordinary necessities. Why should this be so? Why would a studio be a boudoir, a dream of oriental splendor to have tea in, a junk shop, a dirty place, and rarely a good convenient workshop for the kind of thought and the kind of work the making of a good picture demands? [itals. mine]

In opposition to a powerful visual metaphor for creativity, Henri tries to re-position the artist's studio as a kind of workshop, moving it away from the implicitly feminine 'boudoir' of an earlier generation. Connecting the studio with a rather humble job, Henri draws a circle around the creative act, limiting to certain tasks (after the completion of which, one can exercise thrift by cleaning up and saving unused material, he later writes, rather than wasting it by allowing it to become a 'crust of dirty, dust collecting dried up paint'). He doesn't reject the idea that the studio is a manifestation of the artist's identity; but he clearly seeks to shift it to a more masculine and industrial statement - one reflective of the climate of professionalism in which he lived.

David Stephens in Translation

This is a talk I gave today at the Center for Art in Wood in Old City Philadelphia. I am grateful to artist, writer, and curator Robin Rice for the invitation and for the chance to talk about an artist I greatly admire.

I'm posting my speaking notes, and if time permits, I'll go through and add more images and hyperlinks to connect the somewhat loosely structured essay to other ideas. ~gerard

David Stephen, Cenotaph T.O.B.B. (Tower of Brothers' Blood), 2009-2012, painted wood, 108 x 144 x 72 in. 

David Stephens in Translation

Gerard Brown

Presented at “David Stephens: A Colloquy”

Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia PA

Robin Rice, Chairperson

March 22, 2014

I’ve been invited to talk about David Stephens’ sculpture in relation to translation. In preparation for writing about his work in the gallery guide for this exhibit, I went to David Stephens’ studio in late December and asked him how one could utterly misunderstand his work. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that one could ignore the fact that it is to be read.

I began to entertain the idea that the list of materials in his work should possibly be more elaborate than it is. The guide describes the sculpture and installations in the show as being made of ‘painted wood’ and I suggest that they should possibly be described as being made of painted wood and language.

Stephens’s work is covered in thick coats of language. For me, this calls to mind historian Steven Roger Fisher’s descriptions of the ancient world as covered in writing that declared the power and wealth of its ruling class to an almost illiterate public. Rogers challenges the myth of a ‘literate’ ancient world (67), pointing out that in a typical Greek household, the only person who could read was likely to be a slave who read to her master or mistress (55). This description of a world filled with language that could not be read (unless, ironically, by those who lacked freedom) echoes the experience of being in the gallery with Stephens’ work. The fact that David Stephens uses language in such a way that its meaning is not transparent appears to call for some sort of translation. Or does it?

            In her book on translation, Susan Bassnet describes three forms of translation – interlingual (the most common form – one which carries a text from one language to another), intralingual (one that translated within a given language, such as the translations of literature from one period or region into the idioms of another), and intersemiotic translation (in which the work is translated across signifying systems, such as between literature and visual art) (14).

            It would appear that Stephens, whose Braille writing stands for words in English, would be engaged in intralingual translation. This act is sometimes called re-Englishing and happens all the time in varying degrees of inventiveness. Romeo and Juliette was updated and transported to mid-20^th century New York by Arthur Laurents as West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins might be seen as intersemiotic translators who helped move the drama into music and dance) and the Star Wars screen plays are being backdated and transported to Victorian England by Ian Doescher.

Anyone who spends time on translation will be happy to talk about the problems that occur when a text is moved through time or across language borders, and most of those problems involve the use of idioms. Idioms give us a chance to see how strange something is and how far it needs to travel between languages. To keep things simple, we’ll start with an example that’s interlingual (between two languages). Every semester in high school classrooms across America, the French greeting ça va is translated in to the English salutation hello, despite the fact that it more literally means “it goes” (or when inflected in speech, “[how does] it go?”). Students are taught to respond, Ça va bien merci (or, literally, “It goes well, thank you”) and all of this maps pretty well on to the English exchange How’s it going? It’s going well, thank you. The world spins madly on and no one really cares that these acts of interpretation (which is different from translation in that its material is spoken, not written language) are all being played with approximations.

The trick is when we get to translation, which deals with written language. You are reading a French text and one character says to another, Ça va. But the characters are not social equals, the greeting is being spoken by an employee to her supervisor. How’s it going? and its cognates, like how goes it? seem too informal, so you choose to translate the greeting as hello or even good morning to keep from making the reader feel like the French idiom has somehow changed the interaction of characters and to meet the needs of readers for whom you’re translating.

            We need to concentrate on the act David Stephens’ writing. Occurring in English, the only thing that prevents its immediate legibility is the script in which it is written – Braille. Idiom has nothing to do with it. If you walk over to one of the sculptures and start reading, you find what he wrote – lists of names, texts with scriptural allusions. Braille is a specific form of writing, originally developed 1824 and refined over time for greater ease of use and to fulfill specific functions (there is a specific system of Braille writing for the representation of mathematic symbols and equations, for example). One can write in Braille by means of a stylus and slate, and machines for typing and printing publications have been developed over the nearly two centuries that it has been in use (“Braille”). Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, Braille has become a common part of the visual landscape in this country.

            While Braille is an important means of providing access to written text to those who cannot see it, its use has declined precipitously in recent years (Aziz). Its status as writing is not itself universally accepted. Author Charles Mann describes Braille as a representation of writing (“a translation of writing on paper”) rather than a form of writing (1651). Nor is Braille, though it is capable of encoding other languages, a foreign language in and of itself. In this context, it’s best understood as a script developed to meet the needs of a community of English speaking readers and writers.

            What does it mean to regard a text that’s in your own language as foreign enough to imply the need for translation? Doesn’t such a behavior indicate a kind of other-ing of the blind? Braille-dependent reader Georgina Klege writes of her experiences reading in public:

If my braille reading prompts comment it is evidence that the blind, like other disabled people are still invisible in mainstream American life. Our habits and paraphernalia remain unfamiliar and exotic. Blind people continue to be excluded from the educational and employment opportunities which would give them access to the sort of academic and literary venues where they would need to read in public.

There are a few dangers here. One is that Braille might be ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ to sighted audiences (despite its aforementioned presence in the visual landscape) and that its strangeness might invite careless metaphors. Klege spends a good deal of her time discussing Ann Hamilton’s well-intentioned installation in the 1999 Venice Biennale and how, by using Braille for symbolic purposes, Hamilton (perhaps unwittingly) equated blindness with ignorance (215).

In the context of this exhibition, the clear and present danger of seeing Braille as a form of language that requires translation is its equation of people in our own culture with foreign ‘Others’ and the concurrent failing to recognize a common language we share. The ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ code distracts through its surface representation. What is at issue in Stephens’ work is not translation, but encryption. There is an old stand-by claim about translation that if you give a poem to ten translators you’ll get ten different poems back. If you walk over to David’s work and read it, you get back exactly what he wrote. Encryption relies on the ability to pass information clearly – if in a code - between parties while introducing as little room for (mis)interpretation as possible.

            David concern that viewers might not recognize the writing in his work was actually a strategy of the ancient Greeks who sought to transmit secret messages through hostile territory by concealing them under layers of wax on wooden tablets. When the messenger was stopped there might be an innocuous message on the wax tablet that would be melted off when it reached its intended audience. This practice is called steganography, or ‘hidden writing’ (Singh, 5).

            By moving between back and forth between literature to sculpture, David Stephens may engage in an act of intersemiotic translation, coloring the meaning of his texts through the act of inscribing them on his work and shaping our reading of them by embodying them powerful physical forms. In this way, he is more like the concrete poets of the late 19^th and early 20^th century (or the poets who use ‘figured’ or shaped techniques described by Dick Higgins or Charles Boultenhouse). That’s up for debate, and would be another panel discussion altogether.

In my opinion, what needs to be translated in David Stephens’ work is not the language itself, but the way his highly idiosyncratic and original acts of writing and sculpture sit in relation to culture in general – to religious cultures, African American culture, disability culture. For this reason, Stephens’ work requires much closer reading by scholars and critics fluent in its idioms and I look forward to that conversation when it comes.

Works cited

Aviv, Rachel. “Listening to Braille.” The New York Times. 20 Dec 2009. 17 Feb 2014. < http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>

Bassnet, Susan. Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 1980.

"Braille." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. <http://www.britannica.com.libproxy.temple.edu/EBchecked/topic/77257/Braille>.

Boultenhouse, Charles. “Poems in the Shape of Things”. Art News Annual. 1959. 65-83.

Fisher, Steven Roger. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion, 2005.

Higgins, Dick. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.

Kleege, G. “Visible Braille/Invisible Blindness”. Journal of Visual Culture. 2006, v. 5. P.209. 17 Feb 2014. < http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/5/2/209>

Mann, Charles. “Cracking the Khipu Code.” Science. 13 Jun 2003. 17 Feb 2014. http://www.charlesmann.org/articles/Khipu-Science.pdf.

Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. New York, Anchor, 1999.

Notes on Professionalism

“Which occupations have gone how far in professionalizing? Established solidly since the late Middle Ages have been law, the clergy, university teaching (although the church did dominate universities, medieval faculty were by no means all clergy), and to some extent medicine (especially in Italy). During the Renaissance and after, the military provided professional careers for a dispossessed aristocracy. Officer cadres in the standing armies of Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries developed a professionalism based on a sense of brotherhood in a self-regulating fraternity dedicated to codes of honor and service. Dentistry, architecture, and some areas of engineering (e.g., civil engineering) were professionalized by the early 1900's; certified public accounting and several scientific and engineering fields came along more recently. Some are still in process-social work, correctional work, veterinary medicine, perhaps city planning and various managerial jobs for nonprofit organizations-school superintendents, foundation executives, administrators of social agencies and hospitals. There are many borderline cases, such as school teaching, librarianship, nursing, pharmacy, optometry. Finally, many occupations will assert claims to professional status and find that the claims are honored by no one but themselves. I am inclined to place here occupations in which a market orientation is overwhelming- public relations, advertising, and funeral directing”

Wilensky, Harold. “The Professionalization of Everyone” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Sep., 1964), pp. 137-158