November 21, 2007
November 16, 2007
Humble Arts
I’m in the new GroupShow over at Humble Arts! Also in the show is fellow RIT grad Lacey Johnson as well as two of Chub’s classmates at Columbia, Allison Grant and Mike Reinders. If you didn’t already know Lacey is really good at photography, so check out her site.
Big thanks to Marvin for telling me to submit!
November 12, 2007
Primitive Surveillance and other Random Thoughts
Everyday when I go to work I am checked by security guards. They also check me when I leave. Pant legs, pockets, hat, hoodie, etc. While I am at work I have a hand held computer that records my every move. It knows my location, how productive I am being, and how many mistakes I’ve made. If I duck behind a stack of boxes for five minutes, my bosses can see that I have done nothing for five minutes. The feeling of being watched is unavoidable. As a reaction to this feeling I have been performing my own primitive surveillance. I have been strategically placing pieces of paper in high traffic areas in order to steal people’s footprints. I also have been taking home any other interesting trash that I find in my workplace. Here is my first attempt at a collage from the material that I have found. I would call it a first draft or maybe even just a brainstorm, because I don’t know how to make collages. Everything in the collage was smuggled out of my place of work.
I got a library card to the Salt Lake City Public Library recently, and holy crap is it amazing. First of all the place is gorgeous. Huge glass walls, glass elevators,spiral-typish staircases:
Secondly, and most importantly, they have tons of stuff. You can check out 30 cds at a time, and they have good cds! I have been raiding their DVD section as well. I currently have Art21: Season Three, and I just returned Crumb, a Joseph Cornell movie, and a documentary called Grey Gardens that was horribly depressing. I also got Taryn Simon’s “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” which is one of the best photo books I have seen in a very long time. Every picture in the book could inspire an hour-long television show on the Discovery Channel, or the History Channel. Taryn has such an eye for what I call the “oooh” factor. Not ooh as in “ooh ahh, look at that fireworks display” (even though the photographs are beautiful) but as in “oooo, she’s going to talk about that?” I guess you could say it is the oo at the end of Taboo, although I wouldn’t want to categorize her work as Taboo. That is far too narrow of a term. The photos in the book are so disparate but they all illicit a similar feeling in me. Her subjects all occupy a space on the edge of society. Great White Sharks, The KKK, Nuclear Waste, The CIA, a Nuclear Fallout Bunker, etc. She must be an unbelievably convincing person to be able to gain access to these places. The first words in the forward to the book are a quote from the poet Robert Browning: “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things” I think this is a perfect beginning to her book and a very telling sentence in relation to American culture.
November 5, 2007
The Sunday Post.
I watched In the Realms of The Unreal-The Mystery of Henry Darger last night. It is a pretty sweet documentary about Darger’s life and work.
I also picked up this sweet collage at a thrift store the other weekend:
I saw it from across the store and immediately knew I had to have it. It was only five bucks with the frame! It makes me wonder who made it. They were no doubt an “outsider” artist. Definitely not on the same plane as Darger, but an outsider nonetheless. I wonder if I could make something like this, or if anyone who went to school and was “trained” as an artist could. Bad cut-outs, repeated images, centered composition, terrible print quality, but all of these things somehow add to it’s charm. Here is a quote from a New York Times article on Darger that might help explain it’s allure.
“Darger, however, like most true ”outsider” artists, didn’t have the option of psychic or physical removal. His paintings, painstakingly traced and colored by hand, have the vulnerable immediacy of a personal signature. So that while the grotesqueries of a Barney film (or a Cindy Sherman photograph or a Damien Hirst whatever) come across as cool, self-possessed and public, Darger’s art looks unguarded and exposed.”
Darger’s art was meant for his eyes only. He didn’t give any thought to it being respected or accepted outside of his one-room apartment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to make art like that, without any thoughts about where it fits in, if it fits in, what else it looks like, or even it is really “good” or not? So often my definition of whether something is good or not is whether it is better than or equal to something else. Darger’s definition of good was if it satisfied him, if it satisfied the story. Darger’s hobby sustained him rather than the other way around.
Having been raised in a society that enjoys celebrity so much and having gone to school revering famous artists almost obsessively, I can no longer even write in a journal without considering what someone would think if they read it.
P.S. I found this collage on Craigslist personals and I thought it was hilarious. I like to think that he dreams of dolphins:
