On Appropriation

On Appropriation

On Appropriation

Stink Ant

George Saunders

Having to reread him slightly more than the others on my shelves as there are only four publications in existence has a new one in May....hooray!

I know it's wrong, I couldn't resist.

John Cage : Samuel Beckett

Wall Drawing

Wire, paper on wall.

Untilted

Scotch Tape and Wire on Canvas

Untitled

Plexi on coated fiberboard

Natures wonderful enhancements

Unfinished Installation: 27 wire cubes 3' square all suspended but for 1

Model for a much larger scale

Untitled

Dealing now with reflective surface as another element

Untitled (the combination of illusionism and illusion)

Rectangles as mentioned below hanging in the drawing show

Donald Judd

Untitled
1992
Woodcut on Japanese laid paper Mitsumata, in oxide of chronium

On the justification of specific measures taken to create as well as value certain ideas.

I am interested lately in work that seems to come from a sensory connection, an overall experience taken from the object itself. In reading through some of Donald Judds thoughts I have found many similar ideas in my own work. He says that the first two necessities in creating a work are to create a new reality and a new wholeness; the only things they [a work of art] can claim to be whole are themselves. A person thinking, feeling and perceiving is whole. The dissimilarity in a work preserves the identity of their distinct qualities within the wholeness. Judd is seen as a skeptic, I am not a skeptic per-se, though I do agree with what he says about thought and feeling being two dissimilarities of a whole, even one and the same thing, feeling as the process of thinking to fast to be thought, as the experience of a work is both thought about and felt at the same time. “Things that exist, exist and everything is on their side. By existing the things that exist have beaten the odds. Existence alone is sufficient to develop a personal interest on the part of the viewer especially when the qualities [characters] are specific, escaping familiar categories making this existence interesting.”
I enjoy the idea that a work of art is a hypothesis materialized, an aesthetic proposition, or as my painting instructor puts it, an investigation, rather than a formal/final statement. “You have to look and understand both, in looking you understand, it’s more than you can describe, you look and think and look and think until it makes sense, becomes interesting.” Judd believes in illusion as a natural condition of vision, a physiological effect. Illusionism as a constructed effect for the pictorialy indoctrinated. In other words the illusion one sees in the rectangles I created from the shadows of mylar (soon to come), as opposed to the illusionism of space I created in the abstract dot painting. “Illusion is the way things are, illusionism is the way things aren’t” I do understand this difference, but fail to see the significance of it in a hierarchical light. Though I do feel more inclined toward illusion these days for perhaps, I think, its immediate reality, or because it refers to nothing that’s outside of itself, or maybe even more so I am interested in applying both to invoke the sensation of the difference of the two. I am very interested in developing space as a main aspect, as it has begun to grow from the walls with wire and surface in the cubes of the courtyard, space has become for me a dynamic component rather than an inactive element. It’s true that just a few years ago I dismissed Judd along with Stella and Whiteread and others of a like mindedness, and so am a bit shaken by the sudden bounding enthusiasm I have found in their work, an enthusiasm I attribute to an understanding, an understanding I attribute to a maturity of the eye and a willingness to appreciate (as I do both, say, Caravaggio and Kline). This appreciation is necessary for painters on any side of the spectrum i.e. figurative versus abstract, or rather artists of any and every medium, in order to come to an understanding of their own work.

In memoriam Nam June Paik 1932 – 2006 .Dieter Frose.

White Rectangles (and detail)

A few more

Untilted with Dot

The dot was slapped on during a discussion about the redundancy of painting a typical organic abstraction with my teacher, David Harrison. Standing back, we saw that this knee-jerk reaction had in fact helped, the red dot seemed to activate the painting, though existing outside of it. We both giggled like school girls.

Untitled

after rembrandts 'Woman Bathing' (oil on canvas)

The Thick of It

When you're in the thick of it
passing for that thing you're not
or the part of something that
you once were, might still be now,
when you're in the thick of it.

When you're in the thick of it
you once were, might still be now,
or the part of something that
passing for that thing you're not
when you're in the thick of it.

Listening Post

As shown in my video and multimedia installation class by Rebecca Dolan. It saddens me not to have seen a piece like this in person, though the documentation isn't bad. (part 3 is something to see/hear as well)
We will be using the same software (max/msp, of which I currently know nothing about) to create our own installations around campus.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Dec. 17th, 2002 - Mar. 9th, 2003

Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.

Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it's own data processing logic.

Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.


Ben Ruben.
Mark Hanson.

Untitled Installation

(paint, wire, string, mylar)

Fun with Harry Partch

The objects I was working from and thus those that have been abandoned (charcoal on paper).

Hole Punch
Nail
Match Book
Spoon

White Rectangles, and side view (wire, oil, graphite on canvas)

What I've been working on most recently

Mel Bochner

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bochner a few years ago while working in an art supply store in New York. I asked how the painting at Yale had been that year, I think it was 2002 or 2003, and he replied, 'Same as it is every year, enviable.'
I lacked the understanding for his work then, I definitely appreciate it now.

Jo Baer
White Vertical, Blue Line (from a set of four, series of 16)
1964-1965
Oil on canvas
122 x 152.3

Jo Baer

When Thou Cometh to Woman, an odd publication by an artist whose line paintings strike me as wonderful.

BOB

Robert Irwin, On the Nature of Abstraction

bye bye birds

a lament for the passing of my friends, Werther and Charlotte, who were poisoned by a plant I neglectfully put too close. I will miss them.

Breakfast

It is morning, a man lies in bed, blinking.
Outside, the sound of chirping birds,
barking dogs.

The man rolls over to find
another man in his bed,
with the head of a king.
It is recognizable as a king
due to the golden crown and royal beard,
though the kings' head is three times
the size of the mans, and plastic.
The king is smiling a large toothy smile.
He is decked out in
full king regalia.

The man looks shocked to find
this smiling king in bed with him.
The king, noticing the mans obvious discomfort,
holds up a finger as if to say,
'hang on, just a second.'

The king turns toward the bedside table
and turns back to the man with
the new double crissanwich...
'New, the double crissanwich,'
the voice over says as the man takes a bite,
really enjoying himself now.

'egg and meat and cheese,
and meat, and cheese.'
It says, as pictures of meat
and cheese fold on top of one another.

The man and the smiling king
sit in bed hysterically laughing, though no
sound is heard other than the deep pitched
voice over saying, 'That's right,
the double crissanwich.
Wake up with the king.'

The laughing king puts his hand
on the mans knee as a bonding gesture
to signify the mutual joy they are experiencing
over the new double crissanwich.
The man places his hand
on the kings' hand in reciprocation,
though this has created
an awkward sexual tension
and they both snatch their hands
quickly away.

New photographs by my friend Ava

First Snow

A brawl was churning near the river,
my temperament leaving me to watch
though I had just been sucker-punched
when someone called out in alarm
and to the fire they fled in haste.

So soon should I in their wake
with hand cupped to my wounded face
though in truth I would rather lie
ice-pack or slab of cold meat
to my ripened eye.

Blinded by the burning barn,
came tears from the slits of a wince,
and turning with boot tip
a leaf of the brightest red
to find its underbelly white
as that of a common tree-frog.

The embers sweeping passage
heralded snow to come
as the night-sky seemed to shudder
with the blazes booming meter
and a frost bitten wind to boot.

The original owner would be displeased
if he knew the outcome of his labors
and had he not been killed in a duel
over the purchase of some oxen,
a couple of decades ago.

We danced and stomped the flames
to cinders, pissing and hooting
into the night as the first white flakes
dissolved and descended
on the rickety wood of the angular bridges
and the blackened ruins that
hissed and popped in the morning silence.

Hooker

At the intersection
of 4th and Mulberry
she let out a howl
as a speeding De Ville
clipped her hip
running a red.

It was broken,
nothing to be done.

She lay agonizing
under a lamppost
in the darkening shadow
of a blue mailbox
clutching desperately
at someones discarded
paper-sack.

A schnauzer came
and sniffed her arm,
and then her face.
Its cold wet nose
touched her lips, and
she licked them instinctively.

With Praise for composer Mara Gibson and video artist, Barry Anderson