Thread Count In Book Cloth. Important? (Day 1)

Jasper Johns Grey (The Metropolitan Museum)

I had problems with this show. Presumably because the whole thing was Jasper Johns pounding on one idea over and over, just like my neighbors playing Rock Band at four in the morning. I get it. Grey. It’s fantastic you’re trying to purge color from your work. Good going Johns, this is about as grey as it gets. Could you maybe do it on a hundred more canvases and a couple drawers? Perfect. Done.

What I’m really trying to get at though is this. If I had a friend working on a novel and he, we’ll say is on his tenth draft, and feels it’s time to show it around to people. So, he comes to me and tosses down a tall stack of paper, classic triple at Wendy’s thick. And I’m like hey buddy, what’re all these? And he’s like, they’re my ten drafts, I want you to understand my process. Now, being a good friend I decide to play along and I read the first draft and I bite, it’s fantastic. I’m amazed, how’d you think of this? So, excited, I get to the second draft and realized that nothing is really that different. The grammar and spelling are a little better, a character has a different name. As the good friend I previously specified myself, I read the rest of the drafts. And they’re all the same thing... small grammar changes, word choice things, chapter titles are now just numbers. And after a lot of reading I, finally, put down the tenth draft which is largely unchanged from the first that I loved so much. But, this time when I put down the draft I hate it, I don’t want to read it again. In fact I don’t even like the first draft anymore.

The Jasper Johns Grey show is reading the same novel ten times in a row, expecting a great revelation with each new beginning. Just like my friend’s novel there are great moments within it, but they feel like a series of paintings that was not meant to be shown like... that. Were I to look at them on an individual level though...

Separating color from his methods allows Johns to lean heavily on the text he is using within his paintings, they become representations of objects that exist theoretically somewhere else. Of course it being Jasper Johns they probably do exist somewhere else. What’s particularly amusing about this though is that a grey painting thought of in terms of color wouldn’t be interpreted as the existing color version. Take “False Start” and “Jubilee”, in “False Start” words describe colors but are themselves painted in a color that they are not (blue is orange for example), but the type in “Jubilee” is greyscale. We imagine the colors that are being described without the confusion present in the original painting.

Violence in Cai Guo-Qiang (Guggenheim)

Despite the large percentage of the surfaces within the Guggenheim that were pierced by arrows I found Cai Guo-Qiang works non-violent. I didn’t even find them psuedo-violent or Tom and Jerry violent. They were Disney theatrical, Disney ice capades theatrical executed in such a way that I would be as likely to be startled by the unused toilet paper under my bathroom sink. Even the “exploding” car rocketing up the middle of the museum starts and finishes with a car sitting safely on the ground. More so, the wires that support the cars look so rock steady that the whole thing looks like less of a series of frozen moments and more like changing snow tires at Les Schwabb.

That said I really enjoyed the exhibit. Guo-Qiang appears to have the tennis balls to keep materials materials. Because resting immediately behind his vast series of illusions is their origins in normalcy. There is a distillation of the spectacle in his work. As if Cai had spent his career in an Appalachian pig farmer’s back field with a series of tubes, funnels, and boilers, ending up with a clear liquid that will get you shit-faced ten seconds before you drink it. We were all lucky not to have gone blind.

davey board time savers (Day 2)

We went to the Dia: Beacon today. I would describe it as a museum with an unusual amount of windows. My attention was caught in the basement, where there was a series of cast bronze hands by Bruce Nauman. The castings were of two hands; one coming up out of a pedestal and a second resting on top of it cut off just above the wrist, both hands meeting at the fingers. The perched hand was left open at the wrist so that you could peer inside the hollow bronze casting to which there were still traces of ceramic mold clinging. The outer surface of the hands were left raw after the initial sandblasting of the bronze, seams running the length of finger and hands. Each hand split hemispherically, divided by equatorial seams.

In this way the construction is an echo of the hands’ gesture. The meeting of fingers and the meetings of molds. The roughness of the gestures and the rough unfinished construction. As viewers, we ourselves meet with the sculptures. Again, this is not a seamless meeting. There is a sense of intrusion when faced with the two implied persons who are already meeting. In my own work I have become increasingly interested in the means of execution reflecting the concept. I feel this a prime example.

I would have taken pictures, but such things were not allowed. Lest we steal the art works soul. In substitute for photos here is the Dia’s logo.

You know it’s good because it’s Helvetica. And then here's the pathway outside.

Here are some more things I have found out of doors.

When dogs fly.

Judith Supine. And changing gears...

I was worried when I saw this. Did I need to throw my sandwich wrapper on the ground before I threw it away?

paper clip faux pas

I am currently sleeping in Williamsburg in Broklyn where everyone is so hip that my pants size is somehow the largest you can buy in the store and in restaurants people loudly discuss the wikipedia definition of American as it concerns motherhood.


Our loft is very nice. It has a spiral staircase. I feel that it is very New York. Something I would expect to see on a television set. But filmed in LA.



This is the deck outside.



If you turn around a hundred and eighty degrees you can see Manhattan.



Unfortunately this is interrupted by Val Kilmer’s disrespect for property. The kind of thing I would expect from a 1985 “Real Genius” Val Kilmer, but for present day “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” Val Kilmer I’m disappointed.

Here are a couple more things I have seen on walls.



Space Invaders.



Faile.



Garlic?

twelve tiny tips for catching back up after falling behind

I am in New York. I have been here for over 24 hours at this point. Caitlin and I spent the first part of the trip in SoHo.

Where there are buildings like this that make my trip look like it was to the future. Which of course... it was.

This is where we stayed our first night.

In room 424. I would liken the room to a cage.

But, only because it was. Clearly the choice of low perspective photos on their website was a conscious one.

This is not clam chowder. Just because there are chunks of potato floating in it does not make it so.

There are many nice things pasted to the walls. This is not Swoon as I originally expected, but is well carved none the less.

Where do you go as an artist after you make something like this. I like to think once you get to this point you reach some sort of pinnacle from which you need not make any more art.

Morality Test... Questions raised by this terrible age of computers.

I barely have to make a choice anymore.

pre-yellowing your pages for that old time scrapbooking feel

I felt very professional yesterday. Why you ask? Just look at this picture.

With some assistance I was working on this...

It's large, about twice the width of what you can see here. At 22 feet long it's the biggest thing I have ever made, stretching out over six tables. And, despite being printed on paper, is unbearable to move. God knows how I'm ever going to present it to my class for critique.

I think it's a lot like this table I made last term.

In a similar, but not quite that similar, way I made this print out of typewriters.

On a side note, when I was up on top of all the lockers next to the silkscreen room I found this.

I'm not sure under what circumstances someone would tape a naked picture of a woman to the top of some lockers, but by god I bet they're interesting.

Finally, this is a little depressing...

also it was raining.

seven deadly scrapbooking sins

I have two container related things today. And one non-container thing.

Oh, the ecotainer. What a terrible 'tainer. I appreciate that it is made of ecologically friendly materials (possibly even recycled), but my god, it doesn't really 'tain' anything. Were they to poor my coffee into the air it would hold about as well and presumably be even more ecological. My second container related incident is as follows...

I did not even know I was capable of such acts of, for lack of a better word, heroism. I am impressed with my self. JohnNils was impressed too, and it was his waterbottle.

I have been thinking about this for awhile. I finally started to work on it today. Typographic wallpaper, though not actually for walls--unless of course that's where you want to hang it. I'm going to start silkscreening it tomorrow in big chunks. Now I just have to figure out the best way to do that.