ALL OF MY FORMAL WRITING IS HERE: WWW.WOWHUH.COM
This page is an archive of older writing. Some of it has influenced performances, most of it is entirely unedited, raw content.
The Fact of the Matter is That Subject Matter Doesn’t Really Matter: An Essay Centered Primarily on Selection Processes and How Context and Things Like Titles Can Do All The Work For You, Right?
A selection process for subject matter in the field of art has become an almost obsolete practice in the 2008s and on. We have entered a period (and have been for years when you really consider it) where we no longer are truly asked to provide a justification for making or thinking. We can reference things endlessly (like theory, people like to reference theory and things that happen within the Text, notice the capitalization. Like, people (artists, thinkers, designers, etc) will use parenthetical statements over and over because it shows that you are interested in something that is tangential to your overall statement but you still want to fit it in so you use parentheses. Roland Barthes did this a lot too, he constantly used parentheses to talk about all kinds of interesting things (!)). Not that what he talked about really matters all that much, it is just important that I know he talked about consumer products and wrote a text called ‘Mythologies’, that stuff is important in this context.
Back to selection. Artists (depending on their posturing) can theoretically select any topic they want to talk about and it will still fit into the overall of their work really no matter what as long as they present it correctly. Like, by writing something about it, that can make it uber legitimate because viewers will look at things with a ‘Huh?’ expression and a good solid piece of writing can fix that. It is like Dave Hickey said when he quoted Ed Ruscha: “Huh? Wow! Not Wow! Huh?”. I think that quote of someone quoting someone else really resonates in what I am trying to say. Viewers and audiences are interested in the visual first and foremost, things need visual continuity (like Jeffy Koons, Damion Hurst, Louise Booshwa, or Steven Spielberg). Lets be fucking honest, as much as you want someone to give a shit that your work is questioning the economic stability of a post-colonial and post-modern world through the construction and implementation of self sustaining systems of creation that perform Sisyphean tasks, no one really does. If it looks pretty, we dig it.
Art is great that way though. You have this whole group of people that are looking at art as a kind of hobby, something they might be interested in. Then you have this whole group of people like artists and the kind folks at Artforum that sit around and jack each other off all day long and write things for each other. It is like this big discrepancy of meanings and everyone is always confused on both sides about what the other side wants or is doing (this is at least what I think about the whole thing, some people will have a different opinion on this, but it is just a weird phenomenon that no one understands anyone else, we need to just come together on these lines of thinking I think).
In conclusion, this essay intends specifically but not acutely to address the role of text in guiding a dialogue and providing a reasoning for things where the actual point may deviate slightly from the subject. It embraces a disconnect, you know?
‘A Light Multimedia Explanation of a Small Grouping of Things.’
This is a text regarding, first and foremost, the need for a quantification both verbal and physical of the conceptual framework for my studio practice. I plan to demonstrate a variety of tactics, which I use to thoroughly explore, inside and out, my source material. Perhaps it would benefit me to briefly outline, via a list, some of the basic tenets and inspiration that informs my work.
1. American Culture. A culture of excesses and indulgences. My work is charged by this dialogue, a pop cultural stew, the guy at the grocery store bank branch telling you about your finances and how you spend a lot on your debit card. Perhaps it would be wise to upgrade to the twenty-five dollar a year point program. This way, you reap rewards at the same time as you spend your hard earned money. This makes sense, yes? Furthermore, I like to drive. I don’t have a bike. My carbon footprint is enormous. I drive around and observe my environment and make visual notes of the things that I like a lot and disregard the things that I hate or don’t like enough to make a visual record of.
2. The Internet. Or the Interwebs or Intertubes or whatever you want to call it. We can wax philosophical all day about memes and the proliferation of culture in the digital realm. The way things grow and grow and grow, small bits of information creep slyly into the subconscious until eventually something becomes viral. Baudrillard beat us all to the punch, the hyper real. We no longer understand the terrain on which we live. We understand the blanket of simulation that covers everything until we wear through it. This could be wrong or out of context. The Baudrillard reference comes from light reading of ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ and a conversation with Rob on the way home from the Bronx after listening to Gregory Green blab for about a half an hour too long. Who knows if that was real or not, it very well could have been something of a simulation.
3. Theory. I hate theory so much. So much thought is predicated on theory that it makes me want to barf all over someones American Apparel t-shirt and matching pants. These are the only people who know and really understand theory, people who shop at American Apparel. They understand how to appropriate a reading list and something as intangible as thought as a part of their fashion. This is important, if you can make people believe it then you know it. Fashion can help with this, it is interesting to wear clothing that makes you look like you are informed. Theory is about this idea, the illusion. However, this could also be wrong and I am sure that scholars will correct me so I will leave things open for interpretation.
4. Nonsense and Ambiguity. Two things that frustrate people endlessly are nonsense and ambiguity. You can use these tactics to make something entirely impenetrable because only you understand it and the audience knows this and even though everything is recognizable and familiar, the context shifts content and calls into question an entire belief system (!). Though there is no nonsense in nonsense, it all makes perfect sense to the purveyor of the nonsense. Even something nonsensical has a sense that it is nonsensical. This is its content, the knowledge of itself. Can I use the word meta yet? Meta. There, I said meta. Putting meta in front of anything makes you more intelligent, it makes you meta- intelligent. No one will ask you to explain when you say something like this because they want to understand too. The need to understand is pretty powerful and pretty exploitable.
5. Lists. Lists are good because they give people information in a way where they can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It is very digestible information that is catered to a short attention span. People appreciate lists no matter what they try to tell you. Almost everyone likes them because conversations do not generally extend beyond the knowledge that can be acquired from a small blurb about something. In this way, conversations can happen effortlessly in any situation and about nearly any subject.
METAPHORICAL DOCUMENTATIONS RESULTING FROM VARIOUS AFFECTATIONS: A STATEMENT FROM AN ARTIST IN LIST FORMAT.
“I am a deeply superficial person” -Patrick Gantert
1. AMERICA: America is my inspiration and my influence. I live in America and I work in America. All of my work stems from the fact that I love living in America and I love looking at the things that are in America. People in America perceive artists in a certain way and I like to live up to their perceptions as best as I possibly can. I am interested in making work that people like and that they might think an artist would make.
2. METHODOLOGIES: I work in the method that I think best disseminates the information I want to communicate. As I mentioned, my work is primarily about the place that I live in and the things that I do in that place. Most of my work, as a result, communicates in metaphors and does not direct the viewer in any one concrete direction. It is open ended. I make installations, pen on paper drawings, canvas paintings, videos, performances, and combinations of these things. I take influence from the things I see driving to Home Depot, Kroeger, and Whole Foods. For this reason, I employ text in my work to make statements that are open and suggestive of American culture in that the fonts are loosely based on fonts found in my environment. I also utilize iconic imagery such as mountains because I have found that people generally enjoy things that they recognize and have a mediated perception towards.
3. APPEARANCE: My work is generally brightly colored and highly aestheticized. Most of my work is based, art historically, in traditions of pop and minimalism so this is the way that I make my aesthetic choices (flat color, singular objects, clean lines, etc.). I like my paintings and drawings to be attractive, informational, and satisfying. The decisions made are highly calculated and considered so there is little room for chance and experimentation.
IT IS ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MEANS SOMETHING AND NOTHING THAT MEANS NOTHING.
‘The author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his individual perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic design).’-Michel Foucault
My work finds a primary trajectory in the exploration of created cultural beliefs and preoccupations such as superstitions, the occult, and mystic symbolism. Ideas of signifiers with multiple meanings (mountains, wood, canvas, etc) are mixed with and influence a creative system contingent on self-referentiality and seemingly opaque, deflective gestures. I purposely offer the viewer visual information that guides them in a variety of different directions allowing for an experience that does not resolve the questions it poses regarding belief structures, spirituality, and other social constructs.
When creating my work, I am interested, first and foremost, in conveying an autobiographical and personal narrative that stems from a large, eclectic set of interests (spiritualism, mysticism, art and critical theory, and art history). The utilization of oblique and ambiguous signifiers and gestures allows my work to directly engage a subjectivity in the viewer that, at times, goes unused in culture.Many of my installations and drawings employ text as an entry point for the reason that text is a base level form of communication. However, the text used often serves a contradictory function in that it confuses and disorients at the same time as it attempts tohelp and guide. In this way, text serves to mimic the structure of some philosophy and critical theory.
The materials I choose to create my work are reflective of my conceptual structure in that each has a personal connotation and role in a system. Many of the materials (cardboard, canvas, pencil) are repeated in successive installations and works to allow a concrete place of reference for both viewer and artist. Furthermore, many of my material choices are reflective of traditional artistic mediums. In the end, I intend for my work to be attractive, informational, and satisfying. It should offer a variety of entry-points and exits and never entirely resolve the questions that are posed.
A Large, discursive, stream of consciousness text/essay/pre-text for study prior to a lecture that may be given in the future, written while listening to ‘Strawberry Jam’ by Animal Collective right before I go to sleep and also while drinking a beer. It is imperative in this text that the title exceed the length of the actual essay for the reason that titles denote nearly entirely what you will outline/pursue/engage with/ tackle/question/investigate/deconstruct/re-construct/fuck up in your actual writing (or at least it very well should depending on who you are. Dave Hickey generally has very short titles but Dave Hickey writes primarily memoir, kind of anecdotey art theory and cultural criticism for people who generally hate the nose in the air, head in the ass theory for people who like theory and theoretical jargon and using words that do not need to be used and mostly out of context. This is not to say that Dave Hickey is wrong, it is only to say that titles are of the utmost importance to your varied utterances(!)).I will make reference to no one in this essay about titles. I absolutely/completely/ wholeheartedly/unflinchingly refuse to engage with any sort of bibliographical record for my investigations. I will assume, rather, that these explorations will not meet the eyes/ hands/ears/general face areas/general body areas of anyone that will call foul for the choice to ignore the basic prescribed structure of whoever wrote the MLA handbook.
On Things Not Working and the Possibility for Things to Work if Only Something had Happened to Allow them to Work: A Writing About Fluorescent Lighting, Relationships, Bad Habits, and Other Things with Things in Common.
Purchasing things from Home Depot does not always necessarily imply or guarantee that they are going to work out. Sometimes, you spend twenty dollars on a mounting bracket and a fluorescent light tube only to realize that the bracket does not have any plug. Thus, it does not plug into the wall to gain its power, but rather it pre-supposes that you (the purchaser) has a power row into which the light should be clipped. This is not always (usually not) the case. Frustration, in this sense, may be contingent on the non-existence and non-presence of a non-existent thing (power) that actually exists intangibly. This is not power in the theoretical sense where power is interesting, it is power in the sense that power gives things energy. It is much more than an institutional kind of power, thought that is what the other kind of power, like energy power, happens inside. Power is fucking bullshit, especially power contingent on energy (this paragraph has been a reaction to Nato Thompson’s lecture that so thoroughly excited everyone while it depressed everyone at the same time. His lecture was like eating a fucking enormous bowl of tasty, awesome ice cream that someone had just thrown a bunch of salt in. I no longer understand my role entirely as an artist. It may be that I am supposed to engage a larger public forum and act in that context to explore and question the identity and social situations of culturally and politically subjugated peoples. I cannot handle this responsibility, I do not possess the critical ability to synthesize a Samuel Beckett play and apply the narrative to post-Katrina New Orleans, this is someone else’s job and the power of Nato’s words drove this in. When do these projects become the very spectacle that they purport to refuse? When do we give up? Are things worth making? Is it still okay for me to be self-centered like I always thought it was? Do these questions matter?)
That is the end, desire is a producer. This idea leads me to my next topic of import in a transgressive discussion towards a new infinity of de-materialization.
A New Discursive and Sometimes Conjectural Guide to Understanding Self- Referential Symbolism in the Context of the Work of Patrick Gantert: Primary Investigations into Installation Work with Emphasis Placed on Separate, Un-Equal Parts (In List Format).
Wood: Wood shall include all things made from or suggestive of the physical existence of wood. This could mean sticks, boards, cardboard (though not entirely wood or even tangibly similar, cardboard does suggest wood in its coloration), and various other wood based ephemera.
Wood is selected nearly entirely for its purpose as a means to a constructive end. This is to say that it builds things. You can make things out of wood. It can very easily make structures for things like canvases, panels, galleries, homes. All things I work with in a
more cerebral way are called forth through the application of wood. Wood is also about the woods. I like the woods because they are a very metaphorical space where one may get lost. This is not only physical woods, but a kind of theoretical or philosophical or post-modern or deconstructive woods. I like the idea that we might be able to entirely quantify our confused experience in one kind of space. This is what the woods means to me. People also hang out and have parties in the woods. Lots of high schoolers have experiences in the woods like getting drunk and listening to heavy metal and smoking cigarettes when they shouldn’t be and things of that ilk. However, my application of wood(s) is geared towards metaphor.
Cinder Blocks: Cinder Blocks suggest a heavy dense weight. They are made from concrete and concrete is a synthesis of different things. I like the idea of a synthesized material forming a heavy, complex, banal, simple object. I put cinder blocks on top of things usually and I also draw them. I feel like their function is entirely realized when they demonstrate their weightiness, they are symbolic of the heaviness of thought, the weight of history, the dynamic pull of theoretical thought and discourse, the burdensome significance of all that has been and will be. Cinder Blocks are heavy (!).
Furthermore, Cinder Blocks, in their basic design, suggest infinity. There are two holes in a Cinder Block that are loosely situated in a close proximity to each other. This makes a Cinder Block look almost like an infinity symbol. I use it this way in addition to my other application as a quintessentially heavy object. (See also: The use of iconic mountain imagery to suggest an unattainable and thus, something that is infinitely fictionalized and misunderstood until it is surmounted).
Painting (Two-Dimensional Components): Painting allows something to be pictorially addressed. By pictorially, I mean you look at it as a picture and not something else. It frames something. I like to paint and draw things that are impenetrable and difficult with vastly expansive narrative potential. This is to say that signifiers are pulled apart and re- arranged to fit an ambiguous mode of dissemination. Oftentimes, text is employed to complete this task as text is a basic communicative mode that is widely understood. For this reason, it is maddening that text has the ability to lead someone in a variety of equally complex directions. Following are some examples of text I have used:
-EVERY THING
-Dog Head
-Self Portrait: Cinder Block as Infinity Symbol: For Willy and Darren.
These are a few examples but the list is non-exhaustive. Also, painting and the history of painting and two-dimensionality is a commanding power structure in the history of art. For this reason, I use this method as an investigation into the powers of histories as they relate to my own ideas. I excavate theories on the history of history to better understand my context and how my subjective decisions are made and defined by inherent societal, cultural, and political power.
Occult and Mystic Ephemera: I use ideas of the occult and mysticism to explore the overwrought topics of death and life. The occult and mysticism offer suggestions for ways of transcending and better understanding our lives. They are interesting to me from the standpoint that they are socially constructed structures of control in that they afford us the ability to communicate with things that are non-tangible. I am speaking in terms of things such as ghosts, people passed, and other levels of reality. Objects such as ouija boards attempt to resolve our confusion surrounding things that are not now. We are constantly interested in knowing what will be or what was before.
Furthermore, these things are complex and confounding objects in that we can in no way entirely quantify their functions because there has been no tangible proof. For this reason, they may be able to expose a subjectivity entirely based on perception.
Perimeteters and Boundaries: I often use different methods for delineating spatial relations. This translates to building wood structures in ways so as to cordon off a portion of an installation, establishing windows and small spaces in which to place related drawings and objects, or using color and form to establish a more formal, immaterial space. A space, at times, of suggestion rather than physicality. Of ideas rather than objects.
Something About Quotes and How Quotes Can Define ‘You’ so Succinctly That it Makes You Smile and Feel Better When You Are Driving in Your Car On A Sunny Day: On the Weirdness of My High School Friends Facebook Profiles and the Way That They Appropriate MGMT Lyrics As A Way To Specifically Define and ‘Soundtrack’ A Certain Portion of Their Lives (A Conjectural Essay for Karen Soell As I Understand Her Through Her Digital Presence).
“I’m feelin’ rough, I’m feelin’ raw, I’m in the prime of my life.” -MGMT
This essay is somewhat tangential in relation to the greater theme of this packet of information but I felt it important to consider Facebook ‘favorite quotes’ as a kind of lowbrow philosophy. They are generally (while not always) appropriated from a relevant contemporary or historical source (this, however, is not limited to just singular people, it may be entire groups or bands or a deity or a text written by someone important (a kind of distant connection to a person since you essentially cite author when you cite a text by default, right?)).
But this is not about that, this is about that magical moment when music or something cultural touches you in a way where it feels like the first time a girl (or boy) held your hand. You kind of felt funny and then started to get an erection and then had to sit down (this is, of course, different if you are a girl but I will not approach that since I am not a girl and this isn’t about other), you know how it went. Sometimes cultural things give you this same feeling, plus or minus an erection. You realize that someone you do not know or feel any real, concrete, permanent, definite connection to has summarized the way you feel about things but you do not know who or what or where they are or when they said or thought these things, you just know that it sounds good with the windows down when it is 85 degrees outside and you are wearing clean shorts and a nice short sleeved button up shirt. Or if it is a book, it feels good when you read it in the sun, sitting in a chair, kind of talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend while you are reading it but not actually really listening to them because you are reading the quote or the part of the book (its not really a quote until it is taken out of its context in the book or the song or the magazine or the comic book or whatever it is). You just say ‘yeah’ to everything until you are finished connecting with the thing you are trying to connect with. Or, you know, if it is a quote that you hear from someone else talking to you, it feels good when they tell it to you in the kind of way where you start to think about things on your drive home and then apply your new knowledge to certain scenarios and, through this, you kind of start to cry a little bit and wonder if there is anything inherently existential about the experience you may or may not be having. I mean, you get the idea of this, quotes happen in different ways but they are things that shake you and somehow introduce a kind of clarity. What follows is a list where quotes come from a lot, some are specific places and some are more generalized things:
-Indie bands (The Decemberists, MGMT, etc etc).
-Movies/Film/Cinema/Documentary/Docu-drama/Melodrama.
-Ghandi.
-Ben Franklin.
-Various philosophers or theorists (Socrates (via Plato!!), Simone De Beauvoir (SP?), Dave Matthews (called by some ‘the smartest man in the world)).
-Artists (like Picasso or Van Gogh or Andy Warhol or someone else famous).
Again, this list is non-exhaustive and merely a suggestion of what may influence the idea and selection of a quotation to define a person. There are also various iterations of the idea of the quotation. Things like karaoke, sketchbooks, slogan t-shirts, and various other cultural phenomena can also encompass quotation in the sense that they are about paying homage to something you see as relevant to you and, consequently, important to many people that are not you. A prime example of this kind of shared experience of the quotation may be simply quantified in the karaoke mainstays ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond and, in the south, ‘You Never Even Called Me By My Name’ by David Allen Coe. Both of these songs have exuberantly catchy choruses that generate a sing along throughout the crowd.
I do not wish to dwell for any great length of time on this proprietary reasoning as I think, as stated, it is a digression and is exuberantly tangential. It is just important to realize we can still connect with things. That first night somewhere, that first car ride downtown with new people, you start to understand the idea of shifting context. A song is more than a song is more than just words spoken with different voice inflection is more than just some dude that wrote down some things one time is more than someone far away, completely unconnected to you, thinking about maybe starting a musical project. There is a kind of transcendence in these moments. It is good we can still have these experiences, they really make us who we are. It is a lot like the first time I saw ‘Garden State’ and I put all of my friends in the faces of the characters. I was probably Zak Braff and everyone else was soooo silly because they were still at home and I had to come home to visit them. ‘Garden State’ taught me about existentialism.
I Listen to Multiple Conversations at a Time Because I Am Worried That People Are Going to Say Something Really Relevant That I Might Want to Listen to (Or At Least They Might Say My Name In Some Context and Then Insult Me When I Am “Not Paying Attention”): An Essay About Standing Around and Talking About What is and is Not Art And What We Are Going to Do.
I will drink a beer and then a Maker’s mark...on the rocks...a strong pour. People will file in and out and I will kind of direct my ear attention in their general, sometimes stupid, direction. The conversations become multiplicities...right? Multiplicity, that is the right word. Sometimes it evades me as to whether or not I am saying the correct thing. For all intensive purposes, multiplicity sounds more than correct. Multiple (as we know from art history and fucking math) means a lot of something, it means we can have many at once or, at least, that there are a lot in existence. I am going to say multiplicity. So the conversations/convos/discussions/dialogues/interactions or whatever they function as start to become this one thing. It is a lot of voices trying pathetically and hard to figure something out...anything out. It eventually blends and you start to find yourself in them or at the very least listen for yourself. You want to hear your own name and, when you do, you want to know why the fuck someone would talk about you when you are (technically) not listening. It seems preposterous. It might be preposterous.
I wish I could give everyone a list of how to do everything that they want to do and validate it and legitimize it and make it not suck shit. I wish there was a manual that pushed people in the right direction that somehow applied to everyone. But then, sometimes, I realize how much I don’t give a fuck about being generous and that this attitude is so stridently naïve that it hurts my fucking feelings.
Come to think of it, writing this stupid/didactic/reaching shit while G chatting makes me think back to the first paragraph about listening to multiple conversations at once. This is the same fucking thing. This is like talking to someone who is polite enough to just shut up and listen and then also actually engaging conversation. Clearly, there is a hybridized crossover that is something yet to be named. Something that should have a name... writing while digitally talking and making something from those two. That should have a name. We should name it.
On A Series of Disappointments After Disappointments That Led Me To Consider Why There is Any Necessity to Make Anything, Ever ( I Guess I Should Qualify Anything By Saying That By Anything I Essentially Mean Things That Are New Things, But This Isn’t An Essay About ‘Newness’ or ‘Why Not to Try To Make Something New’. It Really Is About Why Not To Use Long Processes That Require Your Attention For Extended Periods Of Time; The Reason For This is Encompassed By Amassing A Group of People to Sit Around and Talk About a Place Where People Try To Make Things With Extended Processes And You Kind of Realize You Were Right All Along, There is No Point. If We Could All Pull Our Heads Out of Our Asses And Assess The Situation With a Fresh, Critical Eye Then We Might All Get It. We Might Get It That Isolation Destroys Us From the Inside Out): Partially A Treatise On Things I Do, Validate, Rationalize, and Regret And Why These Things Render Me Anti-Social In Situations In Which I Disagree With The Prevailing Attitudes.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, clank, fuck. I don’t get it anymore, if you get the first sentence then you get what I mean. I am going to move on to other things rather than entertain something that doesn’t necessitate text. If you talk about feminism and your nipples getting hard in the same sentence then there is something to be problematized (I must clarify that I borrow the term ‘problematize’ from a large grouping of theoretical writing that has consequently formed a large mass in my head and is no longer differentiated. But also, I borrow this from Lane Relyea who I don’t know yet but will know. Lane used the term problematize in one of his lectures to say that something needed to ‘be problematized’. I feel that I have severely misused the word for my purposes and spell check does not think it exists. Essentially, one may say that I have problematized the very usage of the word problematize). Regardless, this is about anti- socialism but not socialism in a political sense; socialism as in anti-social but making anti-social into an ism so that I can dissect it and break it down and examine why, over the course of such a small amount of time, I am much more comfortable alone than I am with a group.
Groups are, for all intensive purposes the same in functionality as a list. Granted, groups are generally, at least for the interest of this essay, comprised of living, breathing, thinking, shitting, pissing, fucking (Deleuze and Guattari(!)), eating machines. BUT they have their own agendas, their own feelings on things. So, where lists are a grouping of things gathered under a singular thematic header (and generally limited in their dispersal...textual, verbal, etc), groups are selections of people, animals, things, etc that do things, they act. Groups are verb-al. That is why they are such a nerve wracking entity to be around. Groups can, and often do, contain a smattering of individuals that one can assume or outright deem smarter than them and this is a frightening prospect. It places certain person(s) in positions of power as they wield a sense of personal agency that vastly exceeds your own. Groups are problematic in this way unless you are someone that self-consciously embraces this feeling and pretends to enjoy it as a ‘learning experience’ or a ‘new perspective’. These are terminologies that mask realities. Unless you are a really great person, then this assumption is inherently flawed.
What follows is a list of words I initially found to be off-putting and complex but later (now) find to be simplistic and usable in every day speech and essays:
Discursive- digressing from subject to subject. Rampant discursivity (also not classified as a word by Microsoft Office’s spell check function; This poses a problem because what structures then do we have to base our utilization of language on. Surely, I should not be dissuaded from using discursivity because it is dictated as not a word by a human programmed computer function) has become a large portion of my sculptural, performance, and textual practices. The ability to bounce from topic to topic with disregard for an objectively (a difficult word) defined linkage between them is liberating. It feels like pissing on the toilet seat and not wiping it off only to find yourself unsatisfied and guilty later. It feels like climbing a chain link fence only to find yourself on the other side looking backward. It feels like running a marathon only to find yourself done and more tired than when you began. It feels like pursuing something you love indefinitely and never finding the end.
Hegemony- of or relating to the ruling power structure. Noam Chomsky rules at using this word. Anything I can say would be invalid and de- legitimized in comparison to Chomsky’s application of such a finely flowing but ultimately awkward word. Hegemony feels like the way you are kind of embarrassed to say band names sometimes because they are stupid names (like Barenaked Ladies for instance). Hegemony also sounds great if you say it to a baby and may make a semi- decent baby name if you lived in a part of the country where no one knew what it meant. If you lived somewhere where people got it, you’d come off like a dick.
Entropy- lack of order or predictability, gradual decline into disorder. Great word. Entropy is short, concise and widely applicable. Any number of things can be rendered entropic (theory (done), philosophy (done), artistic movements (aaand done), really whatever the fuck a critic wants can experience entropy, it is a fancy way to say that something sucks or once was awesome and is currently sucking or on its way to sucking at some point in the near future...it is kind of a great transitional word). Nothing in my practice has entropy...once I reach that point, I fucking let it go. People should take lessons. (Addendum: After a conversation with my peers, I understand that the above consideration of the word entropy is not entirely correct and I think it may be useful to consider the above section but it is in no way a piece of writing to adhere to.)
Empiricism- based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or logic I still barely have any idea why the word(s) empiricism, empirical, empiric etc exist. They sound nice and you know that the old folks were tossing this word around (Kant, I am probably looking in your direction....but I am not entirely sure, this is where this writing was interrupted by a rather unfortunate and ultimately disconcerting set of text messages. They spiraled down and down into a state where there was an air of positivity to them but everyone involved (all two people) understood that they were flawed...they were fucked because text messages never remain text messages...they escalate to face to face meetings/discussions/dialogues etc. It became a discussion where I ultimately wished I was somewhere else, anywhere else, where I actually considered death and how death might be better...if I was dead, it would go away. BUT not in an angsty way, like I am fifteen and someone has broken up with me and they were the love of my life and I want to die and I am going to go to heaven and I don’t die like trees but rather I die transcendentally, it isn’t that kind of death thinking. It was more reductive, I was all like in my head: “Man, what if I just died here, a brain embolism or some kind of freak blood clot, she would have no idea that I have no concrete idea of what the Frankfurt School is. Yes, it is old people (mostly men) whose ideas may or may not hold any substantial relevance anymore...I know that people mispronounce most of their names and that Jurgen Habermas might have the most successful name of the group phonetically”. Bullshit ran through my head for most of the conversation and I could not shake the feeling
Regardless, I thought about death and then I kept thinking about it and then I gave the person a jump drive and the jump drive had music on it and it was a meaningful exchange of value, all things considered. I was excited to speak and she was there to receive music and was in turn excited by my gesture of exchanging a jump drive so we both turned away satisfied. Death hung over everything throughout the discussion from my point of view and it was substantial that the idea of death never presented itself as an end, simply an exit, an exit from the difficulties of the day to day exchanges that make your heart pound, the kind of heart wrenching bullshit that makes you question your own morality, asking yourself if you are a shitty person internally, like an internal monologue, I have an internal monologue that I cannot beat out of myself like in ‘I (Heart) Huckabee’s’, Mark Wahlberg will not hit me in the face. I deal with it. Discussions and conversations with people you have just met are a lot like e-mails, there is a cover, like a film, like that shit that gathers on top of yogurt and pudding while it sits in the fridge. Both individuals are implicated in an exchange. I’m losing it, I’ve lost it, this writing was much more relevant when it was interpersonal and not so removed from itself or from me, as the writer. That is an interesting role, the writer because I am also the artist and the curator, all of these things are things that I ‘am’.
I understand that referencing Boris Groys constantly is problematic and has maybe even, by this point, been problematized BUT Groys said something really interesting about this idea of ‘Multiple Authorship’, essentially that in terms of art we no longer have any singular authors and that the implementation of a work of art into the world of art (the gallery, the museum, the transcendent infinite space outside of reality) is contingent on any number of people ranging from the artist to the curator to the director to the preparator to the writer of the essay in the catalogue (notice the use of the definite article ‘the’ in front of these titles, it makes it more authoritative, it is like saying ‘the line’ rather than just line, somehow it aids things in becoming subject rather than object, does that make sense?) to the board members of the museum board etc etc. So, artworks are dependent on many people to become an artwork in the proper sense because in a studio or in an alley or really anywhere else, they are forms of documentation or things that recall artwork, subtracted from their transcendent properties. Granted, there is a large amount of loopholes in this theory (i.e. things that are outside of institutional settings but still funded and encouraged by the institution achieve the same presence or do they not? I am not entirely sure, I need to go back and do my reading).
This leads me to a short script that I have been meaning to write for a performance that will take as its basis this theory of the ‘Multiple Author’, but rather than employing multiple individuals, one individual will embody multiples (namely the roles of artist, writer, and curator). The performance will occur as an investigation of studio spaces as spaces for exploration and subjective complexity. Places where the roles of future artworks shift fluidly and meaning and metaphor and identity and concept are loosely defined and changeable, a theory solidified by ‘the critique’ scenario. A setting in which future artwork is critiqued formally, theoretically, and conceptually to improve its content, shape, meaning, and, in some cases, negate it entirely. In this sense, critiques are not a static action where a group (see the earlier writing on groups) projects and yells at an object and its maker, they are, rather, a mode of abstracted production. Critiques produce meaning, opinions, suggestions and, in some cases, improved or entirely new forms. Thus, critiques employ the technique of ‘Multiple Authorship’ in a way that is almost silent and dormant but, in hindsight is active and aggressive. It’s a bunch of motherfuckers making objects. Altogether. And they don’t even know it. The script begins this way: (Before I begin, the script for the performance of a discussion has a narrator, the narrator is omniscient and exists outside of the characters that are introduced and therefore the narrator has the ability to not only tell the story but present observations that the characters would not understand or ever acknowledge, the narrator is sort of like the inner monologue for the story itself but the narrator will also be embodied by one person-the same person that embodies the three characters, the relationship will be delineated by a shift in voice and mannerism. The narrator will, of course, speak of the three characters by their name and tell a story rather than participate in a dialogue).
CHARACTERS
Artist- An art student primarily, struggling through the various traumas, dramas, and ins and outs of a graduate institution. Self doubt mixed with a healthy dose of egoist, hedonistic narcissism. Uses the term ‘instrumentalist’ in regards to artworks often and without hesitation and has an attitude that vehemently questions the production of objects and a conflicting theoretical mindset that encourages their production.
Curator- Complimentary and encouraging leaving little space for conceptual, formal, and theoretical breakdowns of objects. Speaks with a thick accent that comes out vaguely European but refuses a fixed nationality or region. The curator is concerned
primarily with British post-minimal conceptualism (Mark Leckey, Martin Creed etc) and makes this abundantly clear at different junctures. Has Starbucks in hand always and holds the cup close to his head when speaking in lengthy, conjectural bouts of abstract utterance.
Writer- An abstracted self-referential speaker and thinker, the writer does not play a large role. He sits back and watches as actions unfold within the encounters between both artist and curator.
The structure of the performance is a ‘meta’ narrative in that it takes as its departure point the performance itself. I am performing in the performance as all three roles but the artist depicted in the performance is also performing for the curator and the writer.
Narrator: (Sitting on top of a 15 foot ladder that is surrounded at its base by figurative sculptures, beer bottles, and other small detritus sculptures. On the wall are three modified posters (popular music and films) that suggest an advertising campaign or an image based depiction of each character, the narrator speaks. All is lit by fluorescent lights placed on the floor and attached to the wall, and the narrator orates while holding a small flashlight to be used later in the performance to illuminate different sections of artworks while never illuminating something in its entirety.). This is an active story about three familiar characters, namely an artist, a curator, and a writer. They are engaged in a performance that is also a critique and thus it suggests production. The act is collaborative. As the artist attempts to dissect and critique fellow students as a method of assuming a critical position, the curator and writer join the discussion as antithetical beings to the artist, they challenge his notions about subjectivity and inherent complexity in the unfinished studio practices of his peers. (The narrator loosely describes the roles detailed above of each person included in the performance).
Artist: This is a performance about artworks, it is about looking at artworks or... analyzing artworks. Looking at things connected to things that are initially not artworks, rather they are future artworks. They are the initial documentation of what will be an artwork eventually but just isn’t yet. It needs another space and it needs the obligatory critique to shift its content and meaning. Critiques are a producing event and then it totally needs the spatial shift too. Things in studios aren’t artworks, they are just things, they don’t have their artworkiness quite yet. Museums and collections and galleries solidify that. This studio is loosely linked to social practices, all the artwork produced identifies with a connection with its viewer. It suggests interaction, nice things, talking, things like that, things that are kind of absent with the progression of technologies like ipods and cell phones that also have the internet. Things that take you outside of yourself but never let yourself be disconnected from things. You can talk and check your e-mail and read an article and never really engage. This work kind of gets at that...you know.
Curator: Through dance steps?
Artist: Yeah, you know because dancing is the kind of thing where it unites people and encourages fun things, things that are fun but...but they are also based in reality, like they have a connection to tangible things. You have to jump and move and it encourages interactions and things like that.
Curator: Do these dance steps not suggest the individual rather than the group, there is nothing inherently social about footprints on the ground is there? These look as if they have been made for one person.
Artist: Well no...but yeah, but it is kind of like how in ‘Footloose’ when Kevin Bacon spurs everyone else to dance even though they are not supposed to and it is like he spurs their own autonomy and personal agency through this thing that becomes connected to the group
This isn’t really correct. It is too clunky to write a script, it needs to be more automatic, the way this performance goes, it should be like automatic writing or like something where you kind of black out and contribute vast amounts of information taking other things as catalysts but then in the end it has this illusion of profundity but no real REAL content. That is what this needs to be, it needs to be loose but tight at the same time.
A curator and an artist having a conversation and somewhere a writer will listen but never speak. Meanwhile, a narrator with a southern drawl dictates everything that is going on. A performance about a performance, about a critique scenario, about settings of collaborative production that do not necessarily embrace the individual despite common opinion. Every studio (in the room sense, in the sense that the studio is a place where you go to make things, a little room somewhere where artworks are produced...I know that the studio is everywhere anymore but for the sake of this, let us assume that the studio can be the room) is an arena, a stage, for burgeoning ideas and collaborations. Places of rampant subjectivity and redistributions of meaning, unique to the individual but crafted through the group.
The performance will start in the tall space with me sitting on top of the ladder talking as the narrator addressing the audience. The story I tell will navigate that it is indeed a story being depicted and lay out the basic theoretical components of the performance/story (Boris Groys’ writing about multiple authorship and the structure of the critique as a producer of objects). These things will be interlaced with other ramblings and also an introduction of the voices of the other characters...how the viewer will differentiate them during the action. Something about looking at future artworks in partiality rather than totality (flashlight, fog?) thus allowing for subjective interpretations that implicate a variety of signifiers and ill advised cultural connections in the reading of the work. In this way, looking at work is kind of like a choose your own adventure novel. It is all contained to the same space...that of the book or, in the case of art, that of the studio and within that structure, individuals are allowed certain freedoms of meaning and trajectory through a conceptual, theoretical, and physical space. After this, I will assume the character of artist and curator together and proceed out of the main installation space.
As I move upstairs, towards the upstairs studios (mine, toms, etc), I will discuss the connectivity and combinatory nature of ladders and staircases. While one is a fixed form of transcendence, the other is a transitory one. Also, talk about darkness and how darkness implies a confusion and a complexity that is inherent in contemporary art. Darkness and selective lighting may also imply the nature of the reveal...the revelatory moment of looking at things where concept and form unite and form a coherent object or statement, they coalesce. I don’t give a fuck about this stuff, I am going to come upstairs and talk about how Lemonheads call to mind the baffling sub cultural complexity of Anton LeVays bald head and use the sculpture sign as my backing to discuss satan, death metal, and how I once knew a guy who played in a death metal band and what this might mean to my own psyche in terms of whether or not I am pre-disposed (after meeting him) to utilize satanic imagery for shock value rather than sincerity. If it is the case that I have taken this imagery then it must mean that we have in some way collaborated whenever I appropriate death metal imagery or signifiers of the black metal sub culture. Forgetfulness of past orthodoxies brings to mind a necessity for the grasping of ones history, namely in art practice. The internet is a large and viable source of information for all of us involved in making art in that we can be informed of both our past and our present. This is like Lauren’s work with her various connections in the sculptures but a lack of a real centrality. The internet is de-centered through its many nodes and connection points. I will call to attention the placement of the sign in relationship to the box of Lemonheads
Studios are sites of production for objects that can be transcendent sometime in their life as a thing. Not transcendent like if you are driving on a sunny day and listening to Nirvana and then thinking about Nirvana as a concept rather than just a grunge band. So then Nirvana kind of becomes this dual thing where both iterations speak to something transcendent because Nirvana sounds so great when you are happy and excited to be going somewhere with little to care about. You might feel like suffering has lifted itself from your body. It may feel transcendent. This is not the kind of transcendence I am speaking about, it has nothing to do with Kurt Cobain. Rather, it has to do with the appropriation of materials and things and objects and random other ephemera of the everyday that compile art or future art (I will speak to future art rather than art because the objects being addressed are (maybe) going to be art but they aren’t art technically speaking, they are what will someday be art. The objects are collaborations that are on their way to transcendence of some sort or a failure if they do not reach this stage.).