Blank Stare

A conversational tidbit today:

My friend Tom: “Your problem is that you don’t have any money.”

Me: (hysterical, slightly unhinged laughter)

I checked out the adult services section of Craigslist this week ’cause I am that desperate but there was nobody trolling for any m4m.   So, sigh.  Otherwise I spend my time trying to curate art shows nobody wants to be in, and making new work, for which my whole m.o. now is: find something at the Dollar Tree, buy it, photograph it, can it.  I can’t even find any models for any portraiture ’cause everybody wants to get paid, now, even ugly people like me.  But whatever.  You just push push push push push and then something eventually happens or you die of exhaustion.

So here are some dollar store pics, plus bonus profanity.  Enjoy!   (This streak also has to do with Warhol; I will write about him soon.)

Shibari, Milwaukee-style

So here you go.  An art show (attended by a whopping 15 people) about heavy/scary/hardcore things would not be complete without a shibari demo.  Shibari is the Japanese art of erotic rope bondage, and what was going on in the gallery was not erotic but it was defintely something.  And no, that’s not me in the photos.

I’m worried that if I do raise the dosh to apply for an embed and the Army looks in to me they’ll find this and get scared off, but here you go anyway.

Wait, what?

Sometimes, when you are an image scavenger like I am, you come across something just totally mindbending and, well, wrong.  As in, “this should not exist, and yet here it is.”  I’ve been doing a lot of image scavenging lately vs. the other kind (traditional photography) because it’s a nice switch-up now and then.  Mostly I’ve been scanning the covers of old westerns and blowing them up to very large scale but then I got an anatomy/physiology workbook and encountered within its pages the images below:

So, you say, that’s an anatomical drawing of a box of crackers?  Why yes it is.   Why does it exist?   Who can say.   But now it’s sitting digitally on my harddrive and will probably someday soon be a large color lightjet print, so that many more people can stop and look at and say what the fuck is this?, which is (I’m not kidding) one of art’s primary responsibilities: to jolt people cognitively out of their expectations.  You would maybe expect a photo of a box of crackers to hang on a wall as part of some sub-Shore or sub-Goldin project, but no: all you get is a large, clean anatomical drawing.  No easy explanation forthcoming.  It’s this jolt that I look for when I look at art, and I think it’s where a lot of the pleasure comes in when you make the non-touchy-feely kind of art that I do, because I’d stand firm behind my statement that my art’s just as pleasurable as some kind of gooey painterly abstraction.  (Which, now that I’ve painted big 6×4′ paintings, can I say I’m a painter, too?)

Art dump/Fire Sale

So I’ve initiated the process of going to Iraq by going about renewing my passport and getting a highly discounted four-month gym membership.  But that costs money, you say!  Yes.  Yes it does.  I have been making a lot of work with hopes of selling it in hopes of raising the $200 I need for a passport and gym membership and the $5000 I need to actually go to Iraq.  Below are some examples of stuff I’ve made; prices range from $250 to $1000, and most of the stuff is painting or drawing and most of it, expecially the explosion photos, is large.   Contact me if you’re interested, all six of you who read this thing.

There’s a big Warhol show coming up at the Milwaukee Art Museum and I’ve been thinking about Warhol a lot lately because my recent work and “subcontracting” echoes a lot of what Warhol did.  More on that later, but for now, some art.

untitled prints from the Mayhem series

an abstract painting consisting entirely of denim

FAIL

diptych of paintings, 16×20″ each

drawing of text taken from a news story on Pitchfork.com

Drawing from last year, though it works with the metal/heavy stuff.

Not sure if this is readable at this size.  Small drawing of fake metal bands.  If I ever start a metal band I’m calling it Evil Bakesale.

Large painting, acrylic on velvet.  The text is from the Coil album of the same name and the full title is Stolen and Contaminated (for Sleazy, after Christopher Wool).

Sleazy emailed me, by the way, if that kind of thing knocks your socks off.  I emailed him about using a Coil track in the metal show and he emailed me back and said yes and was very nice.  I nearly wet myself with hero worship joy.

Total F@#King Mayhem

I’m getting deeper into this “metal” thing.  Everywhere I look, I see something that seems to point toward the hyperextended masculinities of metal and horror culture.  Maybe all those CDs I’ve been listening to have been starting to pay off, even though now I’m listening to The xx, which if you haven’t heared them stop right now and go listen.

Okay.  So we can all agree about that how there have been three perfect pop songs this decade, and The xx’s “Crystalised” is one of them.  (The others are “Hey Ya” and “Crazy.”)  Back to extended masculinities.

The hands stuff below works for me on two levels.  First, it just fucking looks metal.  Actually, if you put anything a little overdrawn in white against a dark background I would say that’d be true, but especially for these diagrams, which show the articulation of the fingers, there’s a sort of uncanny/macho feeling to them that seems to link up with metal’s often hyperextended articulation of cover art, where the super-realistic meets the fantastic somewhere in a land of majesty, fantasy, and gore.

The other reason the fingers are metal is the mastery of the drawings themselves.  This kind of complete mastery, like the mastery over an electric guitar, seems like a trope of masculinized excellence that you only see in certain strains of jazz and metal.  That kind of mastery goes in and out of style, culturally, but it’s been a constant in representational drawing, which is something I know nothing about.  This is where biography creeps in: I “came of age” musically during The Grunge Era where mastery was looked with skepticism and the idea was immediacy and indelibility, and I think those are values that have crossed over into my art work, where “hard work” is less important than grabbing the viewer.   Which begs the question of the masculinity of something that’s opposed to traditional masculinity; I don’t think you just automatically get femininity, you get some kind of androgyny I’m still interested in exploring.

Hands:

Very Metal Noise Pollution

Two images from a metal project-related set, here.  The impulse behind this was I wanted to do something totally crude and MS Paint to a photo vs. sophisticated fine-tuning.  So I took the two crowd shots I found of metal fans throwing horns and cut out everything but flesh and hair.   I sort of like the results, but what I’m faced with is whether this is more of a one-image project or whether it should be best seen as a series.  I’m having a hard time coming up with appropriate source pics for this, though, so these may be the only two.  Actual size: 20×24″ each.

Bonus points if you caught the PWEI reference.

Cops!

Cops.  I love Cops.  I am totally unabashed about my love for Cops.  Here are some images:

Scritch….Scratch….

So I am trying something new, here, by actually embedding some audio.   This is because, as part of my meavy metal wanderings, I’ve actually gone past “immersed” and become submerged in early ’90s British underground music.   And since this stuff is, generally speaking, out of print and has been for 15 years, I wanted to share what I’ve been walking around humming at work.

First up is Coil.  I am a huge Coil fan, but wait, you’re saying, Coil aren’t metal.  This is true.  They were sort of a jumping-off point for me in the ’90s to explore underground-ish music though so it counts, plus it was a scene where seemingly everybody knew everybody, etc.

Standard disclaimer: these tracks are for educational purposes and will be taken down immediately if requested by the owner etc. etc.  They’re only up for one week anyway.

 Coil — Blue Rats 

“Blue Rats” is taken from Coil’s 1996 “Black Light District” LP and was partly inspired when the band found an old litho in an OTO book of a girl being menaced by, you name it, blue rats.

Getting slightly more metal now, I’ve got some nice Scorn for you.  Scorn was founded by one of the people who started Napalm Death, Nic Bullen, and an erstwhile Napalm Death drummer, Mick Harris.  Bullen eventually left the project and what you have here is a 1994 solo track by Harris as Scorn off Anamnesis. 

Scorn — Get Up

Finally, we have God.  God is one of the many collaborations between former Napalm Death guitarist and Godflesh leader Justin Broadrick and dub producer Kevin Martin.  This is about as metal as things are going to get, even though it’s a remix (by Broadrick) of the original track. 

God — On All Fours (Biomechanical Mix)

More later about how all this ties together with pictures of horror novels and hair.

Knock Stuff Down

I just got finished reading a panel discussion in the just-published book Words Without Pictures, a book about photography put out by LACMA, and the text was sort of distressing because, in so much artspeak, the whole idea was “nobody makes art from ideas ha ha ha everybody just relies on intuition.”

Now, wait a minute.  There are two things wrong with that assumption.  The first is the tacit agreement that impulse and idea are separable things: as if, for example, a painter just starts painting on a surface with no idea whatsoever what she or he is going to do.  Many painters (Ab-Ex folks) would probably claim this, but it’s literally incapable of being true.  You might not be clear on what you’re going to do, but if you didn’t have the idea/impulse of “hey, I’m going to paint…something” you wouldn’t be standing in front of a canvas in the first place–or, more relevant to what I’m talking about, you wouldn’t be picking up a camera or sitting down in front of Photoshop to, as the panel discussants put it, “push pixels around.”  It’s disingenuous to claim that something comes from nothing, or else from random acts of labor.

The second problem is that lots of people start with ideas: like, me for example.  The post directly under this was an idea/impulse: I knew I wanted to isolate just the titles of horror paperbacks before I even pulled the first one off the shelf, much less scanned it and stared at it, waiting to be creative.  The final result was fully realized in my head before I did any labor whatsoever.

And this is how it goes for me.  Conditions necessary for me to have these sorts of ideas will slowly germinate without me being fully aware of various connections and then all of a sudden bang bang bang a week later I have three sets of images and two sculptural pieces done, all of them fuly realized in my head before I lifted a finger but all of them in debt to circumstances that were informing me.

The circumstances that are informing me now: the rediscovery of a lot of obscure British post-metal (bands like God, Ice, and Scorn, as well as not-metal Coil and not-British Swans) that I listened to when I was younger, pre-internet, by reading magazine articles or buying whatever was made by people who remixed NIN tracks or picking up things in stores that just looked good.  Some of these CDs came through in a buy where I work, and hit a nerve of nostalgia that sent me 1) searching Amazon for super-rare early-90s CDs, 2) thinking about the masculinity and homosociality of heavy metal culture, 3) making work that explored thoughts raised in #2, and 4) putting the threads of various things together in what is, for me, a new way.   It’s certainly the first time my own autobiography featured heavily in the creation of an idea-world, namely the winter of ‘95-’96 during which I never left the house except to buy CDs and was crippled by anxiety and depression.   So it’s the history of that blackout period in my life that I’m really jabbing at, so it’s not as if all the new work I’m making (and it’s a lot of work) came from nowhere.

Here are some examples.  First is a response in my own writing to the heavy metal horror novel titles in the previous post.  After not really writing anything since leaving school and having 5 books rejected by publishers, I just sat down and wrote this in 20 minutes: conditions were right.  Then I printed out the text and scanned it back in and clicked “invert” in Photoshop.

And this prompted me to redo and finish an old work which consists of pages dumped from the CalArts archive because of their heavy state of decay.  I scanned the pages in and digitally erased the text.  Enjoy:

And PS I have the WWP book in the first place because I contributed two contrarian little articles to it.

You Scratch My Back

Because I have four prospective shows I’ve curatd coming up in the next year, and only 1 opportunity to show work, I’ve been wondering the following: why don’t more artists organize shows for each other?  If I can do it, anyone can.

There are, I think, two answers to this question.

1) Curating/organizing a show is a tremendous pain in the ass.

2) Artists, maybe necessarily, have to be sort of self-serving.  By this I mean: there are only so many “slots” out there for artists to show work, and muddying the water by dabbling in the dark side of showing work doesn’t necessarily get you, yourself, anywhere as an artist.  In fact it can be a drain on your time and energy, and can obscure the fact that you yourself are a working artist.   There’s no concept of mutual help out there because what everyone stands to lose or gain is always to complex of an equation.

That being said, I’m not a saint for putting my friends into shows, ’cause ultimately I see organizing shows as part of my artistic practice.  It’s at one end of a continuum of doing something totally solo that’s organized by someone else and curating a show for other people in which you don’t show your own work at all.

I actually like the gooey middle of that continuum: doing solo shows that are also group shows.  But that confuses people, even in 2009, and there’s not a lot of opportunity to do that kind of solo show unless you’ve established yourself as a locally/regionally/nationally known name in certain art world circles.

But, yet, the mutual backscratching is, I think, both a good thing and a time-tested technique for gaining recognition, so how do you show people that curatorial willingness can end up being a kind of self-promotion?