March 30, 2012
March 28, 2012
March 27, 2012
El Color de los Dioses
El Color de los Dioses is another of the vitrines that I have made over the years. If you want to see this piece, it's at Michael Kohn Gallery. I've parked it in the private salon, so you'll have to ask for it when you visit. Details here and here.
(Photo Credit: Karl Pulchlik)
Installation Shots at MKG
Flatter images can be found at the Michael Kohn Gallery website.
March 26, 2012
March 23, 2012
So Dervish
So.
I want more dervish.
Not much time for new dervish.
Therefore the history of dervish.
So far.
YAM Shakedown
First, the YAMS had a plan, now a shakedown.
Notes on YAM:
[Notes in outline, pending revision...]
The Genesis story. Who are the YAMS? Andrew Hahn, Jason Meadows, headliner YAMMERS. fil r?ting is onboard. I'd like to get Sean Cassidy onboard, he's a natural YAM. I'm the YAMAGER.
(YAM as the echo of CIC)
Once a friend asked what I would do if I had his community gallery space for a month as a guest artist.
I'd make another Combat Information Center, CIC: take the gallery space, paint it flat black, fashion light lockers at the entrance and exit, fill the room with tables and flat screens, red lights, even edge lit plexiglass status boards if I could find a way to rescue them from nostalgia. Multiple, overlapping information sources would fill the room, and from this, models or maquettes would be built under the lights, stirring in architecture into the mix.
The problems with that idea.
(the inspiration is fine, the notion of the execution was problematic)
propensity to be bogged down in fabrication
the burden of preconceptions and prior knowledge
individual expression vs teamwork
over-literal mapping on CIC as a model (friendly/unknown/hostile) a soldier/sailor is an instrument of the nation state, an aspect of an entity, hence "GI", the artist is a sovereign
YAM as a kismet engine
using the internet, multiple browsers, multiple sources of information, overlap and collage of sound and vision, limited only by bandwidth, vulnerable to the caprice and capacity of the various servers around the world that trade data packets at variable speeds? incident and coincident rule
the kismet engine generates the power of beautiful moments
the human propensity of projection, to see pattern where none is previously structured, the uses of post rationalization : a self discovery process,
But our perception of the world is not all projection, there are genuine incidents and coincidences in life. Somehow if monkeys could type out Hamlet, given an infinite amount of time, then it might be possible that something much more modest in scale can be generated (far, far short of the monumentality of Hamlet? towards the other end of the scale, for example, a simple yet ironic match between moving image and music) theoretically, this could be made to happen with some enhanced frequency.
What's kismet?
1. fate: fate or destiny
2. Allah's will: in Islam, the will of Allah
Synonyms: fate, fortune, luck, destiny, lot, doom, portion, providence, end, karma
The difference between luck and kismet?
G-d.
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Shipmates Dale Olsen and Glenn Eastes in the CIC of the USS Truxtun, 1976.
March 22, 2012
Painting
humbly small, impossibly large
2012
#403
60"x48"
March 21, 2012
Black Monad
The folks at The Partially Examined Life. were kind to send me a high five in an earlier blogpost about them in this blog.
Gents, they are.
Check out their recent podcast about race, episode #52. As they laid out their analysis, I kept mapping the structure of ideas that they presented to the overarching dialog in the art world. See if you do too. It's worth your while watch their blog because all of the interstitial posts between podcasts are great, even the commentary within them.
Part way through an already interesting discussion, they drop monads into the conversation... my ears perked up even more. Then guest Lawrence Ware let loose with "Black Monad" and I doubled over with a big smile.
Shortly before I knew much about Leibniz, I named the spiny hemispheres in my paintings monads. All I knew at the time was that the venerable philosopher imagined a universe of indissoluble individuals rendered as mirrored spheres. Later the more I learned, the more I felt justified in my nomination. Each monad was an empire unto itself and to describe how they could communicate, Liebniz has them vibrating like tuning forks. (By the way, Voltaire was so revolted at the optimism -positivism?- of Liebniz's Monadology that he wrote Candide. Two more poles in the world: optimism and pessimism.) Click on the wikipedia link and you'll find gems like: "True substances were explained as metaphysical points which, Leibniz asserted, are both real and exact ? mathematical points being exact but not real and physical ones being real but not exact." It's like he was anticipating the position/velocity marvels of particle physics!
March 18, 2012
March 17, 2012
March 14, 2012
DH @ MKG LA
The opening will be on Friday, March 23rd from 6-8pm, hope to see you all there!
March 12, 2012
Studio Music
"He told me, he says, 'I respond to what's around me,'" remembers Tyner. "That's the way it should be, you know? And it was just?I couldn't wait to go to work at night. It was just such a wonderful experience. I mean, I didn't know what we were going to do. We couldn't really explain why things came together so well, you know, and why it was, you know, meant to be. I mean, it's hard to explain things like that."The Story Of 'A Love Supreme'
by ERIC WESTERVELT
March 8, 2012
Franklyn Liegel
I just found out that Franklyn Liegel has passed away.
Back in 1985, I had just graduated from architecture school and I moved to Los Angeles to plant my roots. My objective was to get my license and enroll in one of the many art schools in Southern California for my MFA. I was working by day in architecture firms and painting or otherwise making art at night. In those years, I took night classes in sculpture and painting at Otis when it was located at MacArthur Park, Franklyn was my first painting professor.
He had thick glasses, which made his eyes big, but I bet that without them, his eyes were always wide anyway. He would pour over the student's work, marveling at the richness of touch and facture. He was big on facture. He was infectious. He would focus on the natural bent of each student and try to bring it out and make it vivid. I guess most art instructors do this, they research and bring books and catalogs to show each student the context and potential of their work, but Franklyn was my first, and his memory is flagged in my mind.
LA Luna
Ana and I?aki returned to LA from Spain and we met up at their house in Laurel Canyon and this is their view from the deck of their home. The moon was full and the sky clear, the lights of the city twinkled from the atmospheric thermal layers, planes stacked up to land at LAX, helicopters danced like dragonflies and it was no surprise that our conversation centered on that most of the time. I was thinking of the astronomical motifs that dominate the paintings in my upcoming show, but I didn't want to nerd out narcissistically about it... luckily, I?aki spun out what he knew about astronomy, specifically about the sun and the evolution of stars.
He said that stars have an evolutionary arc, clouds of hydrogen spun out of the big bang and the great inflation coalesce and shine as the first stars. Each star has a life cycle (ten, by his account) and with each one, elementary elements are compressed and fused into heavier elements and it isn't until the fourth generation does a star have the elements needed to spawn life as we know it on earth. We all know this by and large in part or whole, but he was focusing on the wonder of how we are... stardust (cue Joni Mitchell) and how little we really know about the world and how much we will get to know as time and science marches on. Again, these thoughts are well trod in our time, but can we really exhaust a well of wonder of this dimension? I?aki drilled into his wonder at levels that renewed my awe. He made me think of Hiroshi Sugito, who in his own subtle but pointed way, in his art, dwells on similar themes about the wonders of scale in tension, of the humbly small and the impossibly large.
A couple of days after, I found this video:The Most Astounding Fact from Max Schlickenmeyer on Vimeo.
March 7, 2012
Studio Music
I've blogged about this recently, but it bears repeating. WHO'S GONNA TAKE THE WEIGHT? is a wonderful clearing house for breaking (cough) music. Generous and encyclopedic, I'd like to find more of this kind of portals.
March 3, 2012
Vortex of Social Media
Jean Milant dropped by the studio last night, our conversation moved as it always does like a perpetual motion machine. We talked about the success and progress of his year long exhibition program at Cirrus Gallery, Once Emerging Now Emerging, which is entering its fourth phase this spring. If you are not already acquainted with this ambitious program, please click on the link and check it out, the final phase is participatory in multiple ways, one of which is that artists are encouraged to submit digitally based work that will be included in several venues both online and off. Jean showed me the submissions to date and they are inspired and inspiring.
Jean's work in creating his website Once Emerging Now Emerging, a significant feat of engineering, a story of many chapters and hairpin turns. Flush with this effort, Jean is a borderline evangelist for digital and social media... and here we were, preacher and apostate, face to face again. When Facebook and Twitter popped on our radar, I resisted its siren call. The logic was simple: this blog took enough time and mental energy, why add on a social networking service that was created to hook up college students, or a micro blogging service alongside the full featured blog that you are reading now? Jean was relentless, arguing from several directions for a fuller embrace of the IT thing.
Alright, Jean. I'll give it a shot, a strong one. This might be a trial run but I'll give it a decent length of time to prove its worth.
Starting now.
I've dusted off my Twitter account, my nom de guerre is DennisHollingsw (not the best warrior face, I know... monikers such as Monad Maniac, BigD*ckBastard, SchizoidHealer didn't cut the mustard). I'm going to refurbish Facebook and strap on the apps for my phone and iPad.
Let's do this.
March 2, 2012
Car City
What Intersections Would Look Like in a World of Driverless Cars.
It looks a lot like this. The future (as illustrated by the video of a world of driverless cars) looks like the present in some parts of the world today. A curious issue.
The state department website cautions about safety issues in Vietnam, but I crunched the numbers for shits and giggles, and the percentage of traffic deaths in Vietnam is nearly equal to that in the USA.
