March 31, 2004
Checklist VI
Booked our dog Juno on our flight to Barcelona. Check.
Juno de Les Ombres Valereu
also known as:
Junocieto
Cheetos
Chewy
Sugar Bear
Chupacabra
Choo choo
Joo Joo Bead
Poo
Pee Wee
The Pooper Scooper
March 29, 2004
Another Surf Report
Here's another article culled from a blog called "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts". I found it in this supercool blog (The Ministry of Minor Perfidy) that excites several topics I'm fascinated about:
-The problems that issue from Modernity and the scarring stretch marks that technological innovation wrecks on the social fabric. (Don't get me wrong here. Modernity and tech innovation rocks.) I remember reading Marshal Berman's "All that's Solid Melts into Air", wherein I got a vivid picture of how this scarring takes place and how we are compelled to persist in it. Dr. Faustus, big time.
-My earlier adventures in visualizing a schema for expressing the urban/suburban and finding a place for human scale in nesting pedestrian cities that relied on Leon Krier's "Houses, Palaces, Cities." and recalled Louie Kahn's prescription for Philadelphia. I called this "Parallel Cities".
-Our recent experience in Texas. We realized two things: 1. Things aren't necessarily less expensive as you go farther inland, away from New York and Los Angeles. And 2. There is no cultural lag in the satellite cities. Everyone has the same hip tip. Gentrification is national and perhaps, now global.
An excerpt:
Geitner Simmons of Regions of Mind (an excellent blog that everyone who appreciates American history and culture should read) has a wonderful entry on the disappearance of the "South." The problem that he underlines (through a newspaper article written by his friend) is the disappearance of Southern culture as it is preserved in rural society.
You could argue that the farm South wasn't the only South. There was the small-town South of Andy Griffith, the mill village South of Norma Rae. ... Yet both of those Souths had roots in and lived on top of the foundation of the rural South.
The journalist continues:
I wonder how the young urban people of today can have a consciousness of being Southern. When I see them on their skateboards or in bands wandering through the mall in [a North Carolina city], it doesn't seem possible they could be any different from kids in California or Michigan.
The journalist whom Mr. Simmons quotes faces a classic dilemma of modernity: the disappearance of one's milieu in the face of progress. Europeans began lamenting the decline of rural society in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1870 English aristocrats stopped earning significant rents from their country lands. It became more of an obligation to manage the resources of their lands and to deal with the requests of their tenants (whom increasingly were small agricultural capitalists than peasants). The productivity of their lands dropped as grains and meats from Australia, South America, and USA drove down the productivity of farming. At best, they could profit from animal husbandry. Most aristocrats sent their children off to the urban world. They took advantage of the privileges of rank to profit from service to the government (there are historians who would relate the intensification of British Empire to the boredom of the elites). The Germans had a unique reaction: the Heimat movement: preservation of ruins, objects of everyday life, dialect, history, study of geology, museum making, etc.
Jumping down:
I think the problem is not so much the growth of the city (or urbanization) but (what Mark Clapson calls) the dispersal of the urban. The problem for rural America is that too many elements of urban life are allowed to seep into the rural world, and rural villages and towns never had sufficient organization to provide for an independent cultural life. It became more necessary to leave one?s hometown to get what one needed, and much easier to reach a place to get it.
...But how different is urbanization from de-urbanization. Both refer to the construction of malls. Both refer to the decentralization of economy into office parks and industrial parks. Both refer to planned communities. I assume that re-segregation is as much a problem in the rural South as it is in the urban North. I don?t want to raise the complaint about having a Starbucks in every Wal-Mart, but the rural and urban worlds are becoming too similar. And culture is preserved by the balance between the two.
Surf Report
In checking out an article via ArtsJournal which promised ideas about how the brain begats mind, I'm hooked by the first paragraph:
Spend enough time talking with Dr. Gerald M. Edelman, and eventually his theory about how consciousness develops will seem confirmed by experience. Somehow, out of anecdotes about Andy Warhol, Friedrich von Hayek, Jascha Heifetz and Linus Pauling, out of free-floating riffs, vaudevillian jokes, recollections, citations, arguments and patient explanations, out of the excited explosions of example and counterexample, associations develop, mental terrain is reordered, and ever grander patterns emerge.
He had me at Hayek. The article was about the ideas of a Dr. Edelman, who says:
... "The brain confabulates." It associates diverse sensations, defies contradictions and creates coherence. It even seeks explanations for its own unfathomable behavior.
At 74, Dr. Edelman is one of the most renowned neuroscientists as well as one of the more controversial. Some have hailed his views about neurobiology and consciousness as revolutionary and revelatory; others have dismissed them as unoriginal and unclear. With his maverick stance, immense ambitions and proven accomplishments, the man himself has inspired similarly polarized reactions.
I love mavericks. And confabulators. The article describes his Neurosciences Institute which is my idea of an academic wet dream. (I now remember walking through the complex a few years ago, checking out the architecture of Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates in San Diego.)
The article wades into the idea of minding:
The theory's first principles and assumptions are relatively simple: There is no overseer in the brain setting rules and making connections. There are also no "spooky" forces, as Dr. Edelman puts it. Neither is the brain a machine or a computer. For Dr. Edelman, there are only the "unlabeled world" and the "embodied brain," a confrontation of unstructured immensities.
Fricking fabulous. No overseer, no authoritarian ruler prescribing the system. No mistake of seeing the world in the image of the current technology, as in ye olde clockwork universe... or in our case, the machine or computer universe. I see hints of Hayek's spontaneously self regulating system. Reading on:
Dr. Edelman calls his theory "neural Darwinism." He believes that what organizes the brain is precisely what led to the organization of the eye ? or the evolution of species. It is also the process he found at work in immunology: he showed that the body produces the precise antibody required not by manufacturing it according to a specific set of rules, but by making available an incredible diversity of material from which the appropriate antibody is selected.
The brain develops in a similar way, he suggests: connections among groups of neurons that are most effective in their reactions to certain stimulations become strengthened and succeed in affecting perception and behavior. These connections are modified by what Dr. Edelman calls a "value system," the impinging realities that affect the brain's evolution. The brain cannot be conceived of apart from the body, which provides its first and continuing "values."
I would refer to Darwin in my presentations, describing how I came to my current mode of alla prima painting. I'm no expert in Darwin, but my impression is that people know only of half of his ideas: natural selection in an environment marked by scarcity. There is also a proliferation of types that occurs within an environment of plenty. For me, Darwinianism conjures the pendulum swing between the diversity that thrives in fat times and the cultivation and pruning that occurs in lean times. Each pole serves to ratchet up a movement that is increasingly articulate, vivid and intelligent.
And how did I model this in the development of my painting? Coming out of grad school (where I felt the problem was how to continue painting in the affirmative after the negation models of the late PostModernism of that time), I fashioned a "sandwich" schema of background and foreground imaging (kind of like Ruche but in reverse) and because both grounds could be variable (the power of that particular schema), I let myself range far and wide in methods and manners of painting. I would proliferate types for a time, and then I would select the ones I thought were strong and push them farther along. Back and forth, I would proliferate and cultivate in succession. The paintings you see here in this weblog are an outcome of this process.
One last excerpt for you:
What, for example, does it take to recognize an object? Stimulations spurred by the color red and others by the shape sphere must be coordinated before a red ball is recognized. But such coordination doesn't require a manager. These first stimulations may trigger other stimulations that associate the earlier ones with one another; in turn, these groups of neurons become elements in ever more intricate mappings. Patterns evolve and interact in a dizzying dynamic. The brain is not a logically structured organ; these processes of connection resemble the processes of metaphor more than those of logic. Eventually, consciousness is a consequence of these neural mappings.
In the knotty working out of this theory, Dr. Edelman's supporters see him developing a new view of the body and mind.
March 28, 2004
Hello to the Old Neighborhood
As our schedule is easing with exhausted checklists, I was able to borrow a car and drop into ChinaTown to say hello to the guys in the 'hood.
Here's a photo album for y'all.
After crawling in the congested traffic of noontime ChinaTown, I make my way for Joel Mesler's new hangout on Bernard Street, a new triad of DianePruess, Chicago Project Room and Golinko-Kordansky galleries.
We hung out in the courtyard out back.
Dan Hug, owner of the Chicago Project Room kicks back with us too. He shows me the work from the last five shows, lots of German, Berliner connections.
The talk is about real estate. There's a mania going on here in LA, it resembles the dot-com era. Thoughts veer towards an imagined immanent crash as those who have engineered a variable interest rate will be raked over the coals when the interest rates soar. People are building everywhere, buying buildings. Since we left last year, ChinaTown alone had grown five, nearly six galleries.
The artworld has surpassed human scale.
After that, I cruise over to Bart's studio where he's wrangling with a few paintings.
Bart's from Texas, Amarillo... and since we were recently driving thru that city, I was able to put an image to his description of it. He spoke of this wealthy collector there who helped Smithson create his Amarillo ramp (the project that led to his fatal helicopter crash), and Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch.
Next door was Phil Wagner's studio. This pic is a little blurry, but it's a good one of Phil and the paintings in the background give a good feel for his work. Phil has moved recently from a non-objective approach (abstract, for you civillians out there) to a representational, photo-based, cinema narrative type of painting that has a lot of noir-ish coordinates to it.
Black, White, a single brush painting alla prima and an image that is inflected towards a larger story that surrounds it (think of a still life that might have an ashtray that has just spilled with a crumpled paper with telephone numbers written on it... that's the kind of image he might conjure).
We sat in the cafe in the midst of the thronging tourists with cups of coffee and noodles and talked about painting until the sun went down.
A good day.
"And as the lights on the lanterns flicker on in ChinaTown, I've got to make my way back home to the hills as the family are flying in from all parts of the country." Yes, I actually used this line to exit.
It seemed natural at the time.
Tujunga and DTLA
A juxtaposition for you: urban and suburban.
This, a shot of Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, taken as Stephanie and I are taking care of banking chores in downtown Los Angeles.
Our dog Juno enjoying the grass the way dogs like to do.
We are staying with Stephanie's Aunt Eileen and Uncle Bobby in Tujunga, the very edge of the city against the rim of the Los Angeles metroplex. The are so generous that our two and a half weeks here is completely at ease. The final week here will auger a small family reunion, a great send off to Spain.
March 27, 2004
Monkey
Surfing the web, I come across a reference to the Monkey King. I remember reading this ancient Chinese legend when I was in the Navy so many years ago. So I google:
It is said that in ancient times there was a magic rock on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit of Aolai County in Tungsheng State.The rock had been favored the elements of nature for millions of years.Then,one day,suddenly,it burst open,giving birth to a stone egg from which a stone monkey emerged.
Still googling, looking for the whole text...
March 23, 2004
Checklist V plus Update
Consulted with our accountant, taxes done, paid. Check.
Going to the dentist for teeth cleaning today. Check.
Both feel the same. Check.
Tossa, 61 degrees, 6:30 in the evening.
It's colder here in LA.
March 21, 2004
Goin' Back to Cali
Just as the door of our Dallas loft clicked shut behind us, we realized that we had left the keys and the maps inside. It was midnight.
What a way to begin.
Luckily, we had a spare key (thanks to Penske, who advised us to divide the keys amongst us just for this eventuality). We got maps along the way. Twenty one hours to Phoenix, two naps and a lunch in Old Town Albequerque. (The old town was a pleasant surprise due to its unpretentious scruffiness.)
Weary from the drive, we slept for the night at Stephanie's Aunt Chickie and Uncle Dick's place in North Phoenix. Off again the next morning, bound for LA to stay at Aunt Eileen and Uncle Bobby's place in Tujunga, we get another short night of sleep before the big offload.
This, a shot of the truck halfway unloaded, doesn't show the fifty stairs to the house and the stuff and tuck of our possessions into the nooks and crannies of our house. Ninja landlords. Tired ninja lanlords, even though we had hired a couple of guys to help (Felix and Humberto, thanks to Home Despot's street labor facilitation), the job was physically exhausting. We are still wincing, creeky bones and strained muscles.
With the bulk of the work behind us, we enjoy the company of friends. Greg and Dinah took us out for noodles and sushi in the WestSide. Nothing like hot noodle soup to soothe the tough day we had. Sake and toasts. Good friends.
The next night, Jean Milant cooks dinner for us at his house atop the hill in Echo Park.
Me: "Jean, do you eat like this all the time, or are you munching on pop tarts in your bathrobe when you're alone?"
Dinner guest: "No, he eats better than this!"
That's about right. A beautiful and delicious meal, great conversation.
The next night, an overnight stay with my old friend Troy and his family (two beautiful baby girls). We had to miss an opening in ChinaTown, a tough night to miss as Dave Deany had a solo at China Art Objects. I wish I had known earlier, but the calendar was already hardened. Troy is one of the few guys I consider a brother, seeing him is like coming home for me. (And speaking of home, I have no pics of Troy's house, sorry 'bout that.) He's transforming a house that sits on the side of a hill in Ojai, amazing work. Troy has a genius for manifesting a sense of place, it's no wonder that he's a production designer in Hollywood.
March 15, 2004
Hat Tip to Texas
The last few days has been a whirlwind. So many times we felt as if we had stripped oursleves of uneccessary material possessions... only to find that we had to strip off more and more. Still, with a Penske truck packed not entirely full and our suitcases pushing the overweight limits, we still intend to find the lurking nonessentials and strip them off as we go.
Midnight approaching here in Dallas, our loft nearly empty, we are about to load the last of our stuff and make off into the lone star dark night. Phoenix for dinner at Stephanie's aunt and uncle's house, an overnight there.... onto LA the next day to encamp at another of Stephanie's aunt's and uncle's place.... and the next day still for the momentous feat of stuffing our essential belongings into the nooks and crannies of the attic and basement of our house there. Then we can begin to let our hair down a little to hang with friends and family before we take off for Barcelona in April.
So long, Texas!
The news of the bombings and the impact on the elections in Spain is ominous and gives us pause. It is clear that this is a victory for terrorists and that we can be sure to see more such attempts to influence the course of elections in the future. It is terrible that the socialist party has recieved a tarnished victory and I will be curious to see if there are those who might feel strange that their victory is shared by terrorists. I hope so.
In any event, we'll keep our head down, stay street smart and keep out of trouble. No worries, my friends and family. It will all be good over time.
March 13, 2004
Yup.
Jerry's right about this one:
In defense of the staggeringly radical act of really looking, the wildness of the imagination, and the limitlessness of pictorial invention, I propose a 48-month moratorium on the reproduction of photographs via overhead, opaque, or slide projectors in paintings (this means tracing too). Call this the Richter Resolution, the Polke Principle or the Tuymans Rule. Whatever you call it, it means that photographs, film stills, snapshots or whatever may be used as starting points, references or inspiration, but for the next four years let's pretend there's a ban against the use of mechanical devices to replicate these images in paintings.
This is not a geezer rant about loss of skills, bad drawing, laziness or cheating. I'm not trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Like brushes and rulers, projectors are tools. This is about how these tools are used, which lately has become unadventurous. I address this mainly to students and do so provisionally, not prescriptively or prohibitively. Basically, this is a celebration of artists who find original ways to use these devices and an indictment of those who have turned this type of depiction into a tedious tic.
March 12, 2004
Checklist IV
Deliver more bags of stuff to Goodwill. Check.
Feelin' a little more free and easy. like an American Indian. Check.
Double check the online business change of addresses. Check, check.
Send out the email change of addresses. Check.
Send out the ChinaTown bar hop invites*. Check.
*We'll be in LA's ChinaTown on Friday April 2nd to toast our friends before we take off the next Sunday. I probably don't have all my email bases covered, so y'all are invited to clink a glass or two. 8-ish to 'round midnight.
March 11, 2004
Gut Check
Note the terrorist bombing in Madrid this morning. Check.
(John Chappell of IberianNotes is blogging the breaking news in an excellent fashion. Be sure to check out the comments too.)
Remember that there is no place that is "safe", that freedom isn't free (I won't wince from the bumpersticker), and that the good will prevail. Check.
Checklist III
Turned in Stephanie's car, closing the lease. Check.
Packed the kitchen stuff, emptied the cabinets. Check.
Reserved a minimal set of kitchen utensils. Check.
Repacked and consolidated the rest of the house stuff. Check.
Closet emptied. Check.
Moth balls deployed. Check.
Salvation Army set to pick up unwanted furniture. Check
(Bye bye sketchy marginal slightly scuzzy furniture pieces.)
Throw out three more heavy bags of stuff. Check.
Feels good to be living lean. Check.
March 9, 2004
Shudder
We've just had a thought: What if we can't get internet access in our house in Tossa?
Thumbs twiddle.
(Think abundance. It's going to be alright.)
Checklist II
Packed eleven boxes of clothes, art supplies, office stuff, tools and lotsa whatnot. Check.
Cancelled all subscriptions and sent change of addresses and requested our erasure from various junk mail maillists. Check.
Delivered the eleven boxes to the shippers, all bound for Barcelona. Check.
Throw out more stuff. Check.
March 8, 2004
Checklist
OK.
Rental Truck Scheduled and arranged. Check.
Crate of Five Paintings off to Japan. Check.
Pack a majority of the boxes to ship to Barcelona. Check.
Keep throwing stuff out. Check.
The past year for us:
1. You first go through all your stuff and throw out the stuff you can't get into a third of a moving truck.
2. A year later you then go through it all again and throw out the stuff that you can't get into eleven boxes, four suitcases and a 15 foot rental van.
What's important to you? Do you really need a library when more and more can be had digitally online or in your hard drive? Of course, there's the books I want to keep handy, some you want to read on the beach or on a rainy night.
Once I digitize my slides and transparancies, I can lighten my load by fifty or so pounds of files. Do you need CD's when you have an iTunes file backed up? We pulled the DVD's discs out of their jackets and sleeved them into a folder. Forget the VHS tapes. And clothes. For me, no sweat. For Stephanie, it's as complex as calculus.
Sharon's Studio
Sharon has recently signed on with Mixture Gallery, and with this, her next solo show was moved from April to September. She's been sculpting organic volumes as long as I've known her and Aaron in school, and she always finds something new. From plaster to inflatables to computer fabrication and now to hand modeled clay, it's always exciting to see what she's up to.
Here are a few shots of her studio:
She's always modeling form with her hands, even when she does it digitally (hands become "hands"). Biomorphic anime. Organic emulation. Her inflatables reminded me of Super Studio and Archigram's Walking Cities. Now, she left the computer monitor for the studio, squeezing wet clay into "life".
It makes me think of Art Nouveau and the era of Frank Lloyd Wright where people took their lesson from nature. I can relate because in many ways I do too. I'm rendering with forms of paint varioiusly deployed. (I'm thinking of the idea of repose, as in "line of repose"...but I can't figure why as yet.) I feel muy sympatico with Gaudi's work in Barcelona, and I like the century wide connection.
I think of Noguchi too, an artist that might seem sentimental to a jaded artworld, but no one can speak ill of his work. Sharon doesn't evoke the nature of the source (organic) material like Noguchi did, she works -as far as I know- in syntheic materials like plaster, or plastics, and when she is now working in clay..it's grey, and synthetic looking.
There's a sense of humor in her work, and maybe that comes with the biological territory and the arc of being alive is nothing but organic and therefore happy.
University of Houston
I had a great day at the school of art, morning and afternoon visiting student's studios and a slide lecture after lunch. The university has a tropical feel to it. Houston was built in a river delta, swampy land. Nature is sprouting everywhere, the air is thick and humid. As an art center, Houston has a healthy set of all the things a city needs: the top end of museums; a broad middle of galleries in a full spectrum; schools and residencies sprouting knuckleheads and new thinking, new work; and collectors (both locally and across Texas and beyond). Since Houston is the strongest art center in Texas, it tends to own all things Texan, conceptually annexing Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Marfa. The tropical air there seems to color the ferment in the art scene appropriately.
As for my slide presentation: although I recieved many a postive feedback, attaboys and good reviews from students and faculty after the talk... subjectively, I felt it could have been much better. I had rested in my plan to show my work in three ways: this weblog and the work I did in the past year here in Dallas, a carousel of slides that tell the linear story of the work out of school and into the thick of this wet in wet work, and another carousel of what I call the lunar lander view: a topographical series of slides that are on an automatic setting. Immediately, scrolliing through the weblog was a non-starter. I should have created an iPhoto summary of the images instead. The content in the blog was impossible to convey to the audience. So I jumped into the linear storyline carousel... but as I cruised into my description, I felt as if I was tracking over old territory (I gave a similar talk to the school several years ago); and to top all this off, the lunar lander strategy was a no-go as the school didn't have a slide projector with an auto setting. After what seemed like too many awkward silences and rolling past glitches, I got to a conversational space with the audience in the the Q&A part.
I want to do it again and get this right. (Note to self: rehearse next time)
What was better was the studio visits with the students. They are graduate students, interesting people with facinating backgrounds. Most of the work is pretty good, all are on or in range of their own track in making and thinking of their own art. Most of what I had to do is to get them to see what might be truely theirs in their work and what is derived from looking at other, mostly contemporary work. At the end of the talk, I mentioned Lawrence Wiener's reply to Buchloh when he said that he had to question the answers given to him in school. I asked the students what questions they had for the answers presented to them here in this school. And although stutters and silence greeted this query, I repointed it in the studios. I hope it stuck somewhere.
This is Joe Ives, who was painting in a performative manner, and spread into sculpture with the same motive. Although the studio was strewn with debris, a piece could be seen in the upper left of the pic above. His stuff reminds me of Paul McCarthy's early painting perfomances and Mory Baden's work that's scribed by human activities.
Here's Luc's work. An economist by an earlier degree, he began studying under John Pomara, painting with a strong Twombly vibe. Moving past that (thank g-d), he is now painting directly on the wall, inspired by calligraphy/language. A challenging crit, he had his defenses up. But I think I was able to get an idea or two across.
Aaron's Studio
It's great to watch a good and old friend prepare for his first museum show at Houston's Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) next month. He is stepping up his project and evolving away from his history of enamel edge abstractions to a harder edge taped acrylic "word paintings".
Aaron and Sharon share a building split into a studio duplex.
(note: for some reason, I can't upload three pics of Aaron's studio. I'm going to move on and try to figure this out later.)
UPDATE: I still can't figure why some pics won't load up. I can't figure why the URL won't show up for me. So, there are three pics of Aaron's studio I can't show you yet.
(!)
Rubber meets Road
We've been to Houston and back. I've shot a few photos, so I'll blog them in separate posts. The road between Dallas and Houston is dotted with Dairy Queens, a perfect opportunity to get the soft serve fix along the way.
Getting back, we have the bulk of the move to take on still. About a dozen boxes are going to Spain via a shipping service we found on the net, based in Houston. Packing clothes, books, and office stuff for an indefinite future into such a discrete volume is quite a task. Figuring out what should go to LA (to be stuffed into the deep attic/basement storage of m=our house) is another daunting task. When we returned, we were a little befuddled at first. The rental truck was three times more expensive than we had originally anticipated (a bad quote and bad information from U-Haul). We trimmed even more from the pile of stuff... to stuff into LA attic.
We're feeling better now.
March 3, 2004
Two Digit Midget
32 days to go.
Tossa: Six in the evening, 54F degrees.
Goin' to Houston
Today, we're goin' to Houston, gonna talk about art...
..for days.