For creative people, the word “should” is a curse spelled by small minds bent on recreating a present secure in its familiarity.
bunnygirl. drawn while gallery sitting at the mattress factory. 2004
A meditation on drawings made by David Grim.
Ink drawings of people, maps of human bodies, made on phone book pages.
Image of the person, the picture made by looking at them, drawing in lines over lines of information about people, lists of numbers that allow us to reach out and make contact with a person.
White pages, lists of people, people with numbers next to their names. Index of human beings reduced to ten digits by which they can be reached. Connectivity.
A portrait of a person drawn over a list of people. An individual as a collection of people.
Knowing a person by seeing them. Knowing a person by reading information about them. Knowing a person through the metadata attached to that person. Phone number as tag.
Knowing some one on sight. Knowing some thing about some one. A piece of information is intimacy. Nudity is intimacy. Hearing a voice on the telephone is intimacy.
Drawings are seen. The numbers are seen. The numbers imply voices. Figures on a ground of numbers. The numbers imply connectivity. The numbers imply communication.
Art as the mediating object between bodies, carrying information in a container more dense than words.
The first three stills sketch out the setup.
The remaining six were taken during the course of the screening – work by Matt Wellins, Ben Hernstrom, and myself are represented in these six stills.
The installation is projected in the natural space. The back wall of Gooski’s back room has a reflective quality, visible electrical outlets, and some graffiti.
The PostApocalyptic Movie Theater created a beautiful environment to inhabit. There were some threatening moments, as in Mr. Hernstrom’s datamoshed stuff, but the show was really about beauty. I screened mostly atmospheric works that captured particular moments and moods here in Pittsburgh, punctuated with pure abstraction (Wellins) and narrative humor (Files, from the 2006 Braddock Film Frenzy! film production challenge weekend).
Attentive, small audience, as I have become accustomed to for this experimental work. Thanks so much to Susan Constanse for the invitation to create the work. Thanks ever so much to Billy Wright for being the essential chauffeur – the work couldn’t have happened without his assistance.
It is really satisfying, making the idea real.
Tonight I’ll be installing the Post-Apocalyptic Movie Theater in the back room at Gooski’s in Polish Hill.
Pretty simple stuff – a desktop projector, a computer, a Fender amp, a power strip. Gooski’s back room has a short ceiling and a stage with a fairly reflective silver back wall. This allows me to turn the room into a fishbowl of light and moving image.
I’ll be ‘screening’ locally made video from my library of work. I used to run screenings at the Brillobox and before that, the Shadow Lounge, under the name Viewer Discretion. Many of the screening artists gave me copies of their work. The stack of discs I’ll have on hand includes artists like Matt Day, Christopher Smalley, Ben Hernstrom (Ambulantic), Justin Crimone, Will Zavala, Matt Wellins, the Film Frenzy DVD (a 48-hour filmmaking challenge done in Braddock in 2007), and more.
The Post-Apocalyptic Movie Theater made its debut in Braddock in April of 2009. During Braddock Light, I created a screening by projecting to a blank brick wall from the trunk of a car. Open to the environment and its influences, by screening on interruptive or intrusive surfaces or environments, the Post-Apocalyptic Movie Theater references Plato’s Cave, graffitti, and the notion that we can install & experience art anywhere.
The Post-Apocalyptic Movie Theater also points to the processes of perception in the viewer’s mind. Each of us has shaped the screening surface of our mental recepters with our beliefs, experiences, biases, tastes, preferences. Like the changing screen of each installation, the subjectivity of each audience member’s experience shapes what any art experience looks like inside the viewer’s head.
Of course, someone walking into Gooski’s probably won’t get that. Have a beer, blow your mind a little. FLIGHT, the film of mine I’m screening at the end of the 2-hour slot, is a head trip.
This work is part of the larger Polish Hill Arts Festival, featuring poetry reading by the best of the New Yinzer at Lili Cafe starting at 2 pm. Hope to see yinz out there today!
Two excellent shows hang at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts right now. Interplay is on the second floor. On the first, the Fiberarts International 2010.
A particular work at the Fiberarts International is an exemplar for the visual tradition of painting vs. quilting. This particular work of art speaks to the historical fractures around material choices, gender, artmaking, creation, and what kind of art is publically valued.
Ruth Tabancay's Garden Variations. Teabag, acrylic paint, muslin, embroidery thread, batting.
When I saw it, I said out loud, “This work is really important.” Its a benchmark, it captures the moment between painting and quilting.
Quilting has a complex abstract vocabulary and history, with visual results competing with the highest of abstract paintings. However, quilting is rarely provided the public and social rewards … In this work, Ms. Tabancay says it all without saying it. Tea, that feminine drink. Embroidery, that feminine craft. The design resonates with traditional hexagonal garden quilt patterns. Ms. Tabancay points to the design history with the work’s title.
Ruth Tabancay's Garden Variations. Detail.
Painting and sculpture remain prioritized as modes of cultural expression in part because historically they have only been used to be art. We can sleep under quilts. Their familiarity makes them deniable as having meaning. They are connected to our bodies, through the act of sleeping. They are connected to our day -to-day, covering our beds.
Objects need to be foreign in order to have power. They also have to maintain the illusion of uniqueness. A painting may be a painting, and may be a part of a series, but it is still foreign, not familiar, not stitched with leftover clothes and thread.
Both quilts and paintings are constructed skins. An oil painting an even skin of pigment built by touches of brush and curing oil. A quilt, a skin patched together of bits and pieces of fabric. In this case the painting a surface composited of used teabags tinted with paint.
Creativity making with refuse, refusing to allow used teabags to become garbage.
Objects have value because we assign them value. A painting housed in a museum (in general) has more value than a quilt housed in a musem. On a frigid winter night, a quilt in a house has more value than a painting in a house, when watching one’s breath frost in the air.
This painting quilted together of what would otherwise be valueless, and hung in a gallery. The refuse becomes a carrier for meaning. It becomes a part of visual language. It becomes art, like a painting.
Can that collage be painting? A collage of objects stained with paint? Why parse all this about making? For classification purposes, to answer to the burden of history? To catalogue the object, the artist? To provide it with the right price for the collector?
Boundaries. Categories. What is valued? Which is more important?
I haven’t posted much lately here. This is not to say that I don’t think about the blog, or the creative dialogue I’d like to have. I’m still adapting to the wordpress thing; I am, at last, satisfied with my blogging method. I’m also adapting to more change in my life. I was offered a full-time position at my job midway through May. I took it, with some relief.
If there isn’t enough time to continue to develop the vocabulary, to bring forth, wow I become cranky! I became an artist in part because of this necessity. That energy builds, and it needs to go out into the world as images, as words, as created stuff. My friends Karen and Tait both talk about being channels for their work. I think of it in terms of the Sufi dervish – we are flutes, or instruments that are played by the cosmos or the Great Friend (g-d). Or, in Kaballah – each person is a gate allowing energies into the world through the choices made every day.
Having had the privilege to lose everything that was important or precious to me on two distinct occasions in my short life, I wonder at the grasping for creature comfort that drives most human activity. Its not that important. Things are not the point; instead, it is how human beings use the thing to create in the world.
Painting remains at the center of my creative practice, in part because the technology is so simple. A wooden stick with animal hair, some refined pigments from the earth, a glue, some paper, some fabric. Make a picture. I don’t show the paintings, in part because they are things. I want the audience to have the experience of seeing the work in time. I want everybody who sees the work to have the same access to it. Nobody can own the original of a digital video work – it is always a copy, from a master file, a bunch of data housed in an electric box somewhere.
Video is work without class access or privilege.
So why not make art honoring our daily disappearance? Art as ephemeral as us? The LITANY has disappeared, having flitted across the consciousness of the community for a week or two. So will we. Stop and smell the roses. That’s all we are.
LITANY on the jumbotron, downtown Pittsburgh
LITANY installed in 937 Penn Ave gallery show
LITANY installation in the Harris Theater, downtown Pittsburgh
Installation view of video in HD at Harris Theater
More documentation to come …
I talk to strangers every day at my job. But they’re expecting it – I work in customer service, and they walked into my place of employment. Unsolicited communication on the street is usually tossed off as “catcalling”. Unsolicited email? Spam.
One of the rules I set for myself on this project is that I get permission from every person whose name I publish in the work of art. When a large group poses for a portrait, they know it. They opt in by standing still in the group. Same is true here.
How do I get all those ‘yes’s?
One afternoon in April was spent emptying the contacts of my address book, for Pittsburgh artists. I invited them to invite their creator-friends. A first wave responded, a smattering of seconds and thirds showed up as well. Then it tapered off.
There are a few online resources where Pittsburgh-based artists have collected themselves and published forward-facing personal information for anyone to mine. Its labor-intensive, but bears fruit. I’m picking through the Pittsburgh Artist Registry, pulling email addresses, creating lists.
For a culture that is up in arms about how private or public personal information is on Facebook, I’m surprised at the amount of personal information artists make available on the registry. Still, I have created a “page” on Facebook, to encourage creatives there to share the project with each other. I like to keep a modicum of privacy over there; I do actually use the FB to socialize with my friends near and far, and am really not that interested in ‘audiencing’ my friends. That is a totally separate issue altogether …
… However I am directly contacting well over a thousand people in order to make this work. It reaches the strange threshold where a decent segment of the audience becomes direct participants in the creation of the work. Since the LITANY is about community, about a particular community within a greater community (the nesting box of ‘makers’ inside the community Pittsburgh) this is bound to happen. The work is a self-selected almost-ethnography; since people are volunteering, omissions are bound to happen.
What a human activity this is … almost as slippery and impossible as defining what art is, this collection, this community …
Street Museum : Shepherd Fairey's work alongside Pittsburgh artists' wheatpastes, 14th & E. Carson St. (Beehive corner) South Side
I’ve enjoyed finding Shepherd Fairey’s work in its tapestried bits and pieces around Pittsburgh. They are familiar friends, these images and icons. When I was an undergrad in Wisconsin in the 90′s we talked about the whole, send away for the Obey the Giant stickers and things and how genius it was. Someone had stuck one to either a parking sign or something near the hot glass studio. I looked at it alot when I sat outside, smoking, cooling off. He got other people to spread his imagery for him. That’s cool.
Street Museum : check Fairey's note at back of the streetlight
It is beautiful. Like the pretty boy who gets chicks easy and never develops his character … I kiss those pictures when I find them, in my imagination. But I liked it better in the museum I saw it in, in Boston, last year. Now Mr. Fairey’s glossy varnished gloriousness fans out with its peacock-perfectness against the red brickwork of Pittsburgh’s south side. I miss the stretcher bars; I want to see it as painting, for in its perfectness the screenprints have become paintings.
I’m most interested in the local work, the fresh stuff I get to see evolve and change day by day, moving and changing as much as I am as I move around the city. Discovering their vocabulary as they discover it, as they argue with landlords and others for their patch of canvas.
Shepherd got privilege. His work is still here, is still crisp and clear and clean, unbothered. This nags at me, rubs up against watching Ladyboy‘s wheatpastes degrade and be pulled down and erased. I liked those strange flying crystals and characters he made! Whoever’s doing the ASVP images are making fun straight-up re-appropriated screened images.
I truly miss Juicy’s angels, those spraypainted stencils, little sticker things I found ’round Squirrel Hill & other bits of the east end. Reves got it right every once in a while but worked streets that I didn’t walk so often. Rumor has it KIDS died; at least one other street artist now works Whole Foods.
I have my suspicions who’s pasting ASVP but hold my tongue and enjoy watching them pop up and be torn down.
Street Museum : local wheatpastes
Shepherd made this a street museum. He’s taken and defined the space; everyone else has responded to his shape. There are a few marks, if you look close, on his stuff. The ASVP is hung square right up against. Right museum-like. And it hasn’t been disturbed.
Street Museum : the image I'm actually interested in
This crazy thing, this misprinted face wheatpasted onto the electrics box is the most compelling image for me. Caught on its way to disappearing, the image barely made it to the paper to begin with. And what about the painted over sticker to its right?
Below, Google Maps gives us our gallery prior-to. I think this was shot in the summer of 2009; at least, that’s Google’s copyright hangin’ in the screenshot for timing’s purposes. You’ll notice, too, something was erased from that transformer box I like so much. That’s the way it is here, ordinarily, for the locals. Shepherd got privilege. Don’t think I didn’t notice.
Creating a litany of Pittsburgh-based artists’ names. The video – simple animated text, in a clean font – will be installed during the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Deployed on monitors in different spaces, and projected on an exterior wall, and (hopefully) as bits that surface on the digital billboard that overlooks the Benedum center downtown …
LITANY : traditionally a Catholic prayer listing the names of saints or characteristics of Jesus, Mary, or other elevated human beings. As a meditative practice, it encourages the practitioner to contain something imagined and limitless (G-d) in the particular (specific names).
I want the work to remind viewers of the presence of this community of people who live in Pittsburgh. More often than not the public discourse around the creative community here points to other things as referents – cultural institutions, larger performance-based organizations, gallery spaces. This distances us, conceptually, from the creators themselves.
The art object stands between the artist and the audience as a medium for communication, as the carrier of meaning. The art object replaces the body of the artist, stands in for the artists’ voice as a particular articulation of vision. The art object usually a necessary form of communication – replacing words – and the artist must, necessarily, be absent in order for the viewer to pay attention to the work of art.
Art is a way of knowing. Making relies on direct experience; so does being an audience member.
The names become a stand-in. Names are easy referent-connections – we can imagine these people, these actions. All of them living in this community. All of them present, making.
See the video samples for the LITANY at http://www.drawclose.com/litany_1.html
I want to include everyone working with audience – musicians, filmmakers, performing groups, writers who read, writers who publish, painters, sculptors, etc. etc. etc.
Use of creators’ names is only by permission given by the artists themselves. The work grows because of published artists’ direct participation in the project. If you would like to permit me to use your name for the LITANY, please email me at pgh.artist.litany >at< gmail>dot<com with some discussion of how you put your work in front of an audience. Links to web documentation, places where your work is for sale, or ongoing projects are welcome.
Be Hope To Her Flier : my design
Tuesday and Wednesday nights (March 23 & 24) I’ll be reading poetry with backing film. Yes, the film includes audio as well. Tuesday’s at Shadow Lounge in East Liberty, Wednesday’s at Istanbul in Lawrenceville. Both nights’ events called Be Hope To Her.
The 20-minute set will feature longer story-poems, the ones I make in my feeble attempts to mend bits of history with words … the supernatural punishment of soldiers who abuse the citizens of the town they occupy, the transmigration of a Jewish soul after he dies in the Holocaust, the exorcism of Stockholm syndrome through yoga.
This benefit is designed to raise awareness about clean water issues facing those living in the second and third world. The people faced with solving the problem, daily? Women. They spend most of their waking hours bringing clean water home, carrying it in containers on top of their heads.
April 1 there’s going to be a walk in the North Side of Pittsburgh. Demonstrators will carry buckets on top of their heads in solidarity with those women who carry water every day of their lives.
I’m lucky to be sharing the stage with Kellee Maize, Brian Francis, Joy Ike, and Gene Stovall these two nights. Check out the organization behind all this – Nuru International.
