Some beginning drawings

So, like I did when I was in the lame duck period of Venice, before the residency, I've been brainstorming on ideas for the project in some drawings, I thought I'd post some up now, though right now I don't have much access to photoshop or imageready so the quality is a little low in terms of lighting.

Working this way usually helps me to frame some ideas too, to have to physically do things in a series- in this case, of the 2 inch borders, the text, the square space to work in. Getting the itch to work with markers recently, and trying to synthesize what I've been looking at. In some cases, like the band of colors in the bottom drawings, it is a direct rip-off of a friend's work- just working with it anyway to see what it can do...




A look at the same pile/collection thing, with a quote from robert musil about living for the moment versus being in it.




A breakdown of the abstract comic you gave me the prints of.




Um, yeah.











An installation idea? Seems like a way to work as yard art, too.




Thinking of working with planograms from that temp job I was doing.




Just a reminder to look into the portrait idea again.








A few works after I got a stash of markers- I kind of like the "humpin' beans" idea though I don't know why.

Some good things from the weekend...

I was up in New York this weekend, a friend from IU, Grayson, had some things he said I needed to see- and overall he was right on the money...

I stopped early on Saturday at the William Kentridge show at the Marian Goodman Gallery- what was nice about this was that it was all the drawings that went into a project he did with a theater company for a production of Mozart's Magic Flute. So there was the actual film, shown in this case in a maquette that looked like a puppet theater, and the galleries were full of the drawings, tacked to the wall- you could get right up on them and see how worked they were from the erasing, just really nice to look at.








Then I met up with Grayson in Chelsea to check out a few shows, including one my Micahel Rovner- I hadn't heard of him before, but it was a really interesting show. A lot of the work was on flat video screens, kind of slow moving images like the one below- nice, but not really great. But they all seemed to lead up to the big video, projected in this large black room, the image was of the one below, basicallt blowing across the screen (about 15x30 feet) rapidly, with loud sound effects, that changed as the colors changed. Kind of hard to describe, but really visceral and captivating, inclusing watching other people enter the room, adjusting to the light, etc. Good to see video work DO something...



Also, down the street was a show by Jin Meyerson, a younger artists, kind of reminds me of Franz Ackermann. Kind in mind these were probably 12x12 ft paintings, but fascinating to look at, kind of a nice mix of space, some parts really flat, sone really renderred.





On sunday I swung over to PS1 and caught a variety of shows- it's a really great space and I hadn't been there before, but unfortunately not very interesting. There was a show of 13 Chinese video artists, that were boring, a Wolfgang Tilmans show that was nice how it was installed (a big white room, with hug 6x10 ft photos, some high contrast, some just supersaturated colors), but conceptually dry. Some Peter Hujar photos that are more of the mythicization of 1970's New York, and some graphicy cartoon stuff, like a lot of the Vitamin D stuff but second generation. Also some random video things, some sewn objects, more graphic stuff. Look at the websit for images, but not really exciting. But that was solved by stopping my the American Folk Art Museum, next to the MoMA, what had a great show called Obsessive Drawing featuring work of five artists, including Chris Hipkiss, who had a huge work that really just blows Dargar away. Seriously, just riduculous. I don't knwo the story behind the guy or anything, but on a pure reactionary level, just amazing. The smaller works he had were okay, but the long drawing really holds up to the scale (4x20 ft.) I know i've mentioned size here a couple of times but in all these examples the pieces really needed to be that size, to hold that detail and contain so much. The drawing below doesn't quite do the large work justice (I haven't found an image online yet, and no pictures were allowed.)

Other project related things

Another thing I was thinking of, in relation to the first year or so, is the possibility of doing visiting artist gigs in exchange for either money (the honorarium would not be much) or perhaps better, to be able to stay for a week or so and work on a short term project (something we can't do with what we would have at the time, say offset litho or whatever.) I think I have a decent number of contacts that could be put to use for this, if it's later down the road we could work in an exhibition too.

So, a visit would entail some sort of slide talk, or showing work and talking about the project, optionally individual crits with upper level students, maybe a reception or something. Could be nice, as the project goes on, to take a pause and organize what we're doing, while also putting out the option to students of not going the job-whore route. Places off the top of my head i know somebody at:

Drexel
Uarts (philly)
Muhlenberg (allentown- amze)
OWU (we could be due for an allumni show, eh?)
IU
Univ of south carolina
columbia college (chicago)
mary baldwin college
herron (indianapolis)
univ of kyoto (looongshot)
univ of toledo
highpoint press (minneapolis)
univ of texas (san marco)

other options also include: i pretty much have a standing invitation to go back to IU and work if needed, so again, if we really need to bust something out, especially in screen print, it would be worth it on a long weekend to just go up there, no strings attached as far as doing the visiting artist thing. another option is the prof from columbia- her family lives out in the country in indiana, she has a whole papermaking setup there and has invited me to come whenever. i will show you some of the stuff i did while there, there are some great possibilities with that too. they would also be cool to visit, they make their own soap, beer, wine, have a garden they can food from, etc. but not hippies.

Website?

Also, I was thinking about the role of the website. I like it as a promotional thing, something that we keep updating and changing, and as an outlet for getting the ideas out there. One way we could do it would be to have an intro page with one of the comics, that would change every week or every few days or whatever. From there you could enter the site, which I think could have a running blog-like things of updates- shows, new things going on, etc. From a tool bar we would have options to click to the various things we would want to cover- an archive of the comics, images from the main projects, perhaps music available, separate archive for our previous work, bios, etc, and perhaps a section with things more professional- basic cv's, a statement, contact info. Perhaps links to friends of the project.

That is, when we decide how it should function- can it be a place to sell things though, or is that too unrealistic? Or should it be considered part of the whole, or as a separate thing for promotion. Something to consider, too...

The actual design we can work on when I'm there (I know Dreamweaver and Flash so it shouldn't be too hard), though if you have any site you've seen that works well, let me know- how the design of the site works with it's function, etc)

Music ideas

I was thinking we could have the music part of this complement the visual work, though I'm interested in this in a couple ways. One, right now, I'm really interested in making music just recorded, not really ever performed, so taking advantage of the ability to multi-track, so it sounds like 14 guitars or 12 drummers. Lyrics could be worked in at some point, perhaps as a way of verbalizing ideas from the visual work, I would think we would be able to do that both in broad and specific ways. And maybe the goal of making as much as we need, short and long tracks, etc, but coming up with one musical statement, something that could fit on a cd. Perhaps we could think of ways to make it as a product (a case, graphics, etc), or just downloadable from the website- to make it available, but also to be able to make something from it...

I think just discounting the performance aspect would remove the rock star/starfucker/confused artist aspect of working on this too.

Possible touchstones:

Halo Benders, specifically the Calvin/Doug overlapping. Also, that moment in Virginia Reel Around the Fountain when it gets all loud. (how can you be... in your SOLID STATE!)
Yo La Tengo instrumentals
Dirty Three, Mogwai, God Speed You Black Emporer
The Clean mostly the older stuff
Folk Imposion
Velvet Underground Sister Ray, noisier stuff
Half Japanese output, and lyrics
Young Marble Giants for be able to rock in the simplest way possible

Art v. Entertainment round 2

you wrote:

Firstly, I've thought alot about that your art/entertainment thing, and I'm really uncomfortable with it. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the bias issue. (I don't like musical theater, therefore I don't disagree with your take on it, but I don't necessarily think we're right, ...) More about that later.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the comment about how Bach et al are *what they are* because they are intentionally ambitious. You also say they are genre breaking, and I think that was true, but I think it is no longer as useful way to look at art. I also wouldn't agree that Bach and the first V.U. lp are Art without entertainment. They were ambitious, and they were pushing what their participants would find acceptable, but they were still operating clearly with the goal of pleasing their intended audience. Bach releasing John Cage's 4 minutes of silence would have been more art than entertainment.

I think more than ever I am getting tired of mediocrity and maybe the entertainment angle is my way of trying to define it- I would think for the audience I am looking for musical theater would be a benchmark of badness, not even in a Showgirls sort of way, just bad. (you would think it was apparent after the "everyone had aids" song in Team America.) I am perfectly happy at this point to make these broad statements, and would also be happy to be proven wrong.

You may be right about the genre-breaking, though I would guess that VU is a good example of that still- the audience for that was pretty small, but the staying power of the music... Maybe the lesson is, you can't be genre-breaking because you'll be meeting the expectations of some audience, even if that audience is very small. Looking at work like that would be wrong then in that it lets you think of yourself as some sort of pioneer, like the rest of the world will catch up with you at some point, when it might be the case that your work is just bad. I mean, VU's work got more accessable as the third and fourth albums rolled around, and Lou Reed's stuff is basically straight-up pop music.

But I think the main point of this is to consider the accessibility of the work, while challenging the intended audience with something...

you also wrote:

An interesting quote, from an Artist:

My mother, who was poor, never bought objects, she bought symbols. She used to save up to buy something hideous to put in the best parlor. What she bought was factory-made and beyond her purse. If she had ever been able to see it in its own right, she could never have spent money on it. She couldn't see it, nor could any of the neighbors dragged into admire it.

--Geanette Winterson

This quote seems to have a similar problem to what you're proposing. the "it" she talks about in the line "She couldn't see it..." implies that things have an it-ness to them which transcends cultural differences, and I'm not sure such a thing exists.

I could be misunderstanding you, so yeah. Incidentally I do feel like you've hit on some of the other things that are important to me in what I do, specifically the idea of challenging preconceived notions, and the importance of being ambitious in art making.

Don't mean this to be negative, just something I've been thinking about.

If you chose Winterson because of her snootiness, well played. I know there's a danger of coming off as an asshole with these kind of statements, and part of it a lingering unease with people using things like the theater as some sort of cultural currency, and how easy it is to see through that, but... again, I think if there's another way to look at this, let me know. Maybe it isn't worth the effort, but I think defining it in some way will help us out. I'm reminded of Matt Cole's friend, the one really, really into his accapella group, and how Matt never could say anything to him about how really, really lame accapella is as a genre. If someone really repsonds to something, who am I to shit on it? But I don't have to like it...