chimera

chimera: 1. an illusion or fabrication of the mind ; especially : an unrealizable dream, 2. an organism, organ, or part consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic composition, produced as a result of organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering.

~

Arte Povera: Poor or impoverished art; Italy, mid-1960s

The term Arte Povera was first used by Italian art critic Germano Celant to describe a broad category of art being produced by an international cross section of artists in the late 1960s through the 1970s, although it is now generally used to apply only to Italian art of this period. Celant related street theater and other antielitist, poor forms of expression and protest to this artistic style; the term poor also referred to the humble, often ephemeral materials employed and the anti-institutional quality that originally pervaded this art. Arte Povera usually incorporates organic and industrial materials in ways that reveal the conflicts between the natural and the man-made. Through sculpture, assemblage, and Performance, Arte Povera artists became engaged in subjective investigations of the relationships between life and art and between seeing and thinking.

They include Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero E Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio.

From the Guggenheim website

MU

I'm rereading Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and had forgotten how much I love the word "mu." I remember how excited I was the first time I came across it- how satisfying it was to find that there was a word for "no thing" ...

"Because we're unaccustomed to it, we don't usually see that there's a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unasked direction. We don't even have a term for it, so I'll have to use the Japanese mu.

Mu means "no thing." Like "Quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says."

-Robert Pirsig

containment

I've recently become quite interested in the process of kilncasting, where you make a mold from an object and fill it with glass. Since glass traditionally has functioned as a way to hold the fragile and perishable- food, drink, perfume- using it to preserve the ephemeral feels right.

dust

When does something become so fine that it disappears? Layers of dust sift over the edges of books, on the periphery of furniture, in the corners. Hair and skin ground down into a fine powder, an ongoing residue. My hair drifting on the wood floor, gathered and burnt, turned into ash yet still a ghost.

Currently I am fascinated by dust- how it is a residue of our bodies that we constantly seek to remove. In this piece I coated my hair in gum arabic and powdered glass and then fused it in a kiln. My hair burned away, leaving ash and traces in its shape. I find this remnant very evocative- it stills holds the presence of something that has been discarded, just as my hair is still a part of me even though it has been cut.

"dark matter"

I just came across this quote on the Version 08 website- it's an interesting articulation of the idea....

“Like its astronomical cousin, creative dark matter also makes up the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society. However, this type of dark matter is invisible primarily to those who lay claim to the management and interpretation of culture - the critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators and arts administrators. It includes informal practices such as home-crafts, makeshift memorials, amateur photography (and pornography), Sunday-painters, self-published newsletters and fan-zines, Internet art galleries -- all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world. Yet, just as the physical universe is dependent on its dark matter and energy, so too is the art world dependent on its shadow creativity. It needs it in much the same way certain developing countries depend on their shadow or informal economies.” - Gregory Sholette (gregorysholette.com)

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This reminds me that I've been trying to locate my copy of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" for a few weeks now. There is a beautiful passage in the book where he describes coming out of the subway and suddenly seeing Harlem- all the lives that happen on what he calls the "lower frequencies," that are left out of history and elided....

speaker

Often I don't "see" parts of an image until after I've taken the picture. In this one I wasn't conscious of the red on the speaker or the red strip on the left until I saw it in the camera.... That discovery- seeing things my unconscious mind must have noticed- is my favorite thing about photography. (I try to keep analytical thought out of the process as much as possible...)

Doris Salcedo

"This fragility is an essential aspect of the sculptures. They can even be affected by someone coming too close to them; they show us how fragile another human being can be... We are even exercising an influence on the world by delicately touching the surface of an object, because the object changes."

-Doris Salcedo

"coloured glasses"

My grandfather was a research chemist for Libbey Owens Ford Glass Co.- his specialty was developing different types of glass- mirrored, one way, bullet-proof. This is a text book from the LOF library, and a cut glass piece they gave him when he retired. It's quite fascinating to me- all the chemistry of the color of glasses.
(I always felt an affinity for him, so I think its interesting I’ve ended up working in his material.)

4,000

4,000 US troops dead in Iraq.
I would need 5 more buildings to show all their faces....
http://www.chicagoprintmakers.com/docs/gallery/facade.php

murakami

"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire,they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking, 'Oh, this is Kant',or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition', or 'Nice tits', while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction - they're all just fuel."

from "After dark"
by Murakami

flickr

I’m not sure why flickr is so addictive- voyeurism, yes, but it’s also strangely reassuring to know that all around the world people are taking close-up shots of peeling paint and cement… to see all the visual connections and similarities. And I love that I can belong to groups called “I ate this,” “writing machines,” “aesthetics of failure,” and “vintage floors.”

Obama

Photo from Barack Obama's flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/
Why do I support Barack Obama? Because it would be fantastic to have someone who is articulate, nuanced, and truly a citizen of the world represent the United States as president.
Check out this great interview (yes, it's from awhile ago!) with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show... http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=91960&title=barack-obama-pt.-1

camera obscura

I’ve recently started playing around with my photographs, placing them in pairs. Thinking about images in this split screen/reflective way reminds of an interest I’ve had for sometime now- the camera obscura. I’ve been contemplating how to incorporate a large scale one into an installation… I remember hearing about a very cool project where someone converted an 18 wheeler truck into a giant camera and drove around the south, taking pictures in little towns...

I'm thinking of a version that would create multiple spaces- the camera itself would be a central enclosed room surrounded by exterior rooms that are shiny and bright- enamel? glass?- and have variations of the same image repeated subtly beneath the surface on the walls. The projection is on the floor of the central dark room, but murky, so that it’s hard to see when you’re in the brightness of the outside rooms…. Ideally I'd love to do this in an abandoned space, so that its like you're looking at an xray or history of the building.

diptych

The image on the left is from my studio; the image on the right is from a squatter's camp in Berkeley, CA.

outside/inside

antidote to winter

double-sided

I recently had a very vivid dream about a new series of work... Now of course the images are fading, but it was a room full of glass panels, each one with an image on the front and back side so that they could be viewed from either direction, shifting which image was clear and which was blurred. Somewhat like pages of a book, that you could flip back and forth. I'm interested in trying a similar thing in printmaking- maybe on rice paper or vellum?

whitfield lovell

Image from: Kenyon Art Exhibit

southern art

What makes art southern, exactly? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately… there’s certainly a tradition of outsider artists creating elaborate environments out of found materials, and of course quilts, and sewing, and embroidery... but I can’t really think of a “fine art” parallel to the southern literary movement. I’ve had to give a number of artist’s talks about my work lately, which has gotten me thinking about my visual background…. Growing up I spent a lot of time exploring abandoned buildings and houses- in the woods near my parent’s house there was a whole abandoned community of “freemen” houses built right after the civil war. In most of them the kudzu and the vines had taken over, leaving brick chimneys and sometimes even just vines in the shape of a house. There was also a more recently abandoned church camp, which had rows of beds, books, magazines- even clothes and shoes. It was eerie, as though the people had just left, and would be back momentarily. There were trenches, and tree stands and roadside shrines. Everything was always perpetually falling apart, splitting and being spliced back together.

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This reminds me of something I wrote awhile ago, about visiting Howard Finster’s house (above) in Georgia:

So instead you decide to lean back and imagine a porch where you can contemplate yourself as well as the wall across from you covered with leaves, recall the bicycle repairman turned painter who saw God’s face emerge from a splatter of grease and began building mirrored structures, houses, obelisks, coffins, cars, and still has not stopped. You can visit his house in Georgia, a sprawl of painted tires and ploughs and walkways, a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. All this set up in a yard almost overgrown by plants, as his carnival keeps expanding, flexing its mirrors, taking in the surrounding counties. You wonder what it takes to keep going like that, to continue building until the center point of the structure is lost, a snail’s shell of accumulating rooms, a hall of mirrors. It is the passion of collecting objects and turning them into something else, the idea of a house made of bottles and cement, fragile and perilous.

underlying

Ah yes- my unexpected studio excavation! A few days ago I was startled to open my studio door to an enormous mound of dirt. (A pipe burst, my landlord had to cut a hole in my floor...)

But, although it’s inconvenient, I love it. Its so simple- cutting the boards, digging and moving all the dirt beneath- and yet so radical. And the potential for it was always there- just beneath the surface. A good lesson in the metaphysics of re-arrangement…

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Oddly enough, that transformation seems like a perfect visual metaphor for the series of prints I’ve been working on lately.
They all deal with hidden and underlying structures- computer circuitry, medical imagery, surveillance imagery, war imagery- and how the patterns in those images parallel and resonate with each other.

"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumor and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honor."

-John Berger

(Every art site needs a little John Berger to get things going!)

Currency

the flash of the dead in the living the muddy slope
leading down to the ravine bushes chopped close and flat
a mass of birds turns and dives under the bridge water filling
the grate white paper churning into pulp with the rain

Here is my father’s death certificate; here are his pictures
in a ziplock bag. Keep them until the war is over.
Keep them until they come home.

There is a stream of water on the embankment. There is a white mask. There is a plastic bottle floating downstream. There is a bag over his head. There is an arc of water spilling down his side. There is the man who has washed a thousand bodies hosing down the tile. There is a boy's face risen ghostly in his mother's. There is a young woman crossing the street. There is no breath. There is the paint flaking off a brick wall. There is the bomb. There is the debris. There is the flicker of electricity, the screetch as the train rounds the corner. There are the doors clicking shut, the young men stopped in disbelief, the cloud of smoke. There is the sidewalk. There is the gun aimed at the gap between the vest and the arm, there is the gun shooting. There is a flattened patch of grass where a man lies every day. There is a broom sweeping. There is the boredom, there is the sudden wire strung between the trees, there are the bridges flashing past. There is the horizon, there is the blink of an eye, there is the figure handcuffed and tearful, saying please. There is the swoop and script of Arabic. There is the plane plummeting icy into the ocean.


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It's been awhile since I've written a poem (or anything, really!....)