dystopia

dystopian wandering

Slowness is painful. it follows that the experience causes anguish; nothing, it seems,

is being learned and no thought can find expression

without being dragged through a purgatory of recalcitrant materials
slow work can become a chronic low level pain where the mind is continually chaffing against something it cannot have.

last night and this morning

Thoughts on Goethe

The gentle impiricism that Goethe advocates evokes these origins within us needed for the deeper understanding of nature. Again the metaphor of seeing is omni-present. Every new object well contemplated opens up a new organ within us. The ambitions of Goethe succeeded in that his science is one wherein the full rich content of nature is retained but is now penetrated and illumined by human faculties shaped by the hand of nature itself. Nature includes not only what impresses the eye as color or form but also inner dimensions, for example; the moods of color. Goethe called these dimensions the moral aspects of experience and he believed deeply that they are also part of our experience of nature and ultimately must be included in scientific knowledge .

if you say so, say so

excerpts below from James Elkins essay On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History
seeing is embodied and it should no longer be separated from touching, feeling, and from the full range of somatic responses
Clement Greenberg's high modernist trust in eyesight is no longer viable now that works of art are so often also textural, olfactory, tactile and auditory. Synthesthia, empathy and sympathy, emmersion performance and embodied encounters are now central to the art experience. Art history is no longer an archivist or iconographers paradise, driven by the textural sources ; it has become attentive to the physical stuff, the presence, the material of the art work, its bulk, its human scale and even

its "base materiality"
The optical models of modernism are part of our past.we can understand the ideologies and desires that produced them and we can see how they supported a certain kind of art. Now those optical models are fading. The first decade of visual studies in the 1990's with its emphasis on disembodied media and digital images has been supplanted by a new and more versatile awareness of the real range of images.
What I really want to do I am beginning to do. eliminating steps that are no longer necessary .........like thinking too much.

the way string falls

lines

scratching an itch

stray alchemist

Testing testing 123

If an artist is invested in what he/she does there is little possibility of disassociating the maker from the work.

When work is specifically about the artist or

if the work is dependent on what the artist-figure is occupied with,

then the maker can have no real distance from the work.

The artist and the work are unified as a hermetic structure, isolated from outside influence.
critical theory ruptures artistic practice

even as its aphoristic obscurity is lampooned

by the way string falls
wondering if its just another paranoid inscription onto full forms of evident energy,

still mysterious and essentially arbitrary

like the way string draws

embracing uncertainty

Striving for a kind of openness while accepting a certain level of mystery,

the understanding that you cannot know everything.

Getting to know ones world becomes less about living in it

and more about sifting through its amusing fragments.

Without indulging in nostalgia for what is gone

one suggestion might be that the means of seeing and showing supplants what is to be seen

potential assumptions dictated by process

Remnants of what seems to be destroyed

or the remnants of one act manifesting into a wholly new form,

there is a fluidity that becomes truncated and frozen
These two are on drop cloths I admired while painting backgrounds.

In a way it was sort-of like painting blind,

or printmaking, pressing and bleeding through unprimed cloth.
again, I find ,what I see as, beauty in what lies on the floor protecting a surface.

The catch of random mark-making ,

the unintentional composition brought to intention,

the ragged edge of the cloth

The one above also includes dried latex paint. This I discovered while cleaning out old buckets of paint to use for fresh.

I like the incredibly opaque and flatness it provides in juxtaposition of the silver and gold...

SURFACE SPEAKING TO WHAT I DON"T KNOW
Here are the pieces I was working on exploring methods of gilding with leaf metals, gold, silver and aluminum.

My favorite is the silver but it proves to also be the most expensive .

Tim did a nice job photographing them. thanks tim

controlling aesthetic determination

Arranging pieces of drop cloth

the final decision is here if you scroll down

This is gilded leaf on top of and old waxed and plastered surface
waiting for tack

I will post the final images of the three metallic paintings I have completed later this week.

I cannot wait for them to tarnish.

photography happening tomorrow at the studio

good images to come

Per Kirkeby at Michael Werner.

light in the darkness,

a quality we share. That's why.

This is for you aris, it was in the back room at MIchael Werner Gallery .

An Italian artist they just started to work with whose name I cannot recall.

sorry its blurry, i was thinkin of other things

Exploring materiality

both above and below are my most recent pieces.

Made from drop cloths I used to protect the floor of the studio while I was painting backgrounds for clients.

The backgrounds were painted on large sheets of craft paper saturated with watered down latex house paint

which I squirted on to the paper from water bottles.

The saturation leaked through soaking the drop cloth and staining it.

I also used a heavy saturation of inks. The unprimed surface has an insatiable thirst.
For the duration of this semester I will not talk about personal issues in the work

but try to achieve a more critical understanding of the work.

The next few images are from some of the shows I viewed while in NYC last weekend

I went to Gagosian looking for Zack Faur but the always impressive found Richard Serra there instead. I love Rust so yes.

Nick Cave at Mary Boone

me thinks of lost DNA found

cotton in my mouth

did not want to touch

even though i love him
Trudy Benson at Michael Wiess

I thought of Liselott

hope she saw this show
there were some materials that turned me on as well as methods

of application but over all it sort of made me want to throw up

A Clinton Hill construction from Pavel Zoubok Gallery
These looked incredibly familiar.....I had never heard of this artist but now I plan to follow him around

or maybe he is already following me
His name is Sterling Ruby and he is at Andrea Rosen with Lucio Fontana

As significant as process is in both of their works there is a potential assumption

that the artists were dictated by process, but yet the work is still sophisticated.

They are able to simultaneously make physical process decisions and make very specific aesthetic decisions.

So while there is deep interest in the nature of the material and the limitation of the material,

and the creation and the destruction of the material,

there is also an over riding ability to control aesthetic determinations.