Murakami

Vija Celmins- 2005, 24.2 x 28.2 in.

"A dark omnipresent pool of water.

It was probably always there, hidden away somewhere. But when the time comes it silently rushes out, chilling every cell in your body. You drown in that cruel flood, gasping for breath. You cling to a vent near the ceiling, struggling, but the air you manage to breathe is dry and burns your throat. Water and thirst, cold and heat- these supposedly opposite elements combine to assault you.

The world is a huge space, but the space that will take you in- and it doesn't have to be very big- is nowhere to be found. You seek a voice, but what do you get? Silence. You look for silence, but guess what? All you hear over and over and over is the voice of this omen. And sometimes this prophetic voice pushes a secret switch hidden deep inside your brain.

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart."

_ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

dumb type

image from the Walker Art Museum website

I've been thinking about boundaries and borders lately, which reminds me of one of my favorite performance pieces I've ever seen... "OR" by the Japanese group Dumb Type. Here is their writing about the piece, excerpted from their website.

"OR - binary system.
OR - alternative A or B.
OR - 0(zero) radius - invisible circle - point / dot.
OR - operation room.

It is about the state of "white out", like in the blizzard,
where you are deprived of ability to see,
where you can't recognize anything,
where you don't know where you stand any more,
where you may not know whether you are alive OR dead.
But what distinguishes one from the other?
Where is border?
What is death?
What is it?"

~~

Unfortunately they have now disbanded (I believe) but here's a little history:

Dumb Type's work is as formally complex as it is socially involved. Their most well-known works fall somewhere within the bounds of performance, often accompanied by installations. In many ways, such work fulfills their original declared intent to "develop an art/performance form to fill the gap between static visual art and performance dependent on dialogue." The 'dumb' in Dumb Type thus does not denote a level of intelligence, but rather describes a desire to create without words. "When we first came together," explained Furuhashi in High Performance (Summer 1990), "we just had too many things we wanted to say. We decided not to shout. We try to keep it simple." Although Dumb Type's work spans a much greater range than performance, they are generally perceived as a performance group because touring outside Kyoto forces them to modify works to fit more conventional settings and traditional schemes of venue scheduling. When they work in Kyoto, they are known for spending weeks or, given the opportunity, months just preparing a space for one of their events, often completely restructuring an interior to meet their demands.

The first major work, The Order of the Square (1985), moved from site-specific venue to site-specific venue over the course of a year. They constructed twenty small telephone booth-size buildings, each housing an individual performance to be observed through a peep hole. The first presentation was in a gallery, but later presentations were held on the street, in a department store, in a temple garden of ("There was one crazy monk we knew who let us do it, noted Furuhashi) and other sites. Audience members contracted to see the whole year's performance, receiving a key that opened one of the boxes. Once a month they got an announcement to come see a new work. Other early performance works by Dumb Type include Plan For Sleep (1984-86) and Every Dog Has His Day (1985).

Read more here: http://dumbtype.com/intro/work.html

undercurrent

Translucency, veils, things hidden and revealed… this piece is part of an installation I’m currently working on called “undercurrent.” It’s a site-specific piece in the lobby of a government building.

When thinking about what to do for the installation I was struck by how most of the systems that run the building are hidden from those who use it. That seemed like a poignant metaphor for both our individual bodies and the corporate world…that the bulk of what makes both us and our surroundings function are hidden from our sight. And “corporate” comes from the same latin root as “corporal,” meaning a group of one body…

invisible man

"I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home. And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc washtubs with dented bottoms- all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been: And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky- why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects? And why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?" - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

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

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...)

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.