Instead I’m thinking about chaos and failure.  Why?  Because 85% of a successful writing or art event/credit/etc. involves a fair bit of chaos and failure.  And things are resolved but doubt lingers because of factors I’m not inclined to discuss even though this is a pretty raw and unvarnished forum, generally.  And what I’m also thinking about is the precision of both the men in suits and the butterflies in the Armory show, the precision of slowly inscribing a sonnet and placing a square of color in just the right place, plans executed calmly and gracefully.  But that’s not how things work.

So I went in search of chaos and failure in my archives and found some that really appeals to me right now because there’s no real possibility of precision here, no way to enhance the photos below.  What they are: I had a Holga in 2004 and used it to take some purposely overlapping and leaky photos, which I later scanned in four long strips.  I cut the strips up digitally so you have the twelve sections of the final presentation, which in my head is the beginning of an installation, not a settled body of work.  So things are unsettled.  Because that’s just how things work.

Which brings forth two kinds of questions of me re: LA.  I have many friends in LA, right?  So what do I do between 2pm and 7pm on the day I’m in LA?  What I need to do is calm down, but how?  My friendships at this point are mostly tenuous and slim because of time and distance so I don’t know who it is I’d call to ask out for coffee or something, wherever I end up, so what does it really mean for me to be in LA now as more of an outsider than a former resident?

And there’s the other being there: being at the reception.  What should I expect from being there?  There’s the panicky thrill of being there itself, but is there anything else I should be looking for, meaning could this show to lead to other things and could that process start at the opening so I should be prepared?  I have no idea.  I don’t know who will show up or what they’ll have to say to me, and as much as I’m thrilled to be there in person, I also still have that dread of making casual conversation with friends who are strangers for two hours.  So I don’t know what to expect out of going.  All I know is I’m glad to be there to be there and whatever happens, happens.

Edit: this is also my 401st post here, meaning about 100 posts per year, or a post every three days, so that’s a ton of verbiage and photography to collect in one place and it makes me shudder to think what the first 100 posts were about during a time in my life that was let’s just euphemistically say less than great, health-wise.

There’s a big “on the other hand” involved in a remotely installed installation, though, which is that I’m really terrible at all of the aspects of installing a show so things probably will run much, much more smoothly if they’re not left to me.  I can’t get work to hang level, and I get things measured/spaced wrong, and I’d be awful at applying wall text in any way other than thumbtack form, and trust me I’m even bad at just painting the wall.  So it’s good that all I have to do is deliver the work and the instructions and then show up later (and I actually get to show up later, about which I’m thrilled), but there’s so much decision making left to do, and Photoshop work and text work left to do after that, that part of me wants either a little more autonomy or some very clear instructions to follow.  (Which, edit: I’ll be getting instructions Saturday.)  Wednesday is the cutoff for when I’ll be able to send files for printing, and it’s Friday afternoon as I write this, so you can see what I mean about time.  But I also feel completely confident that at everything will make it onto the walls.  I’m just not sure what work yet or how soon, but I should know that soon enough.

And but so: why the autism and Oneida connections?  Simpler than it seems.  If it’s not already apparent to the four of you who read this blog, I’m autistic, which in part means constantly being overwhelmed by sensory stimuli especially when you up the chaos factor by doing something like driving or grocery shopping.  It’s not that I’m easily distracted, it’s that there’s no background, everything’s in the foreground–colors, shapes, noises, movement, etc.  I’m constantly parting through a beaded curtain of overload in order to focus on what I need to focus on.  This is habit by now and not always forced labor but it’s all there; hence the blog title.  Everything everywhere all of the time indeed.

Oneida: Oneida are a hard to classify and very ambitious NYC band ten albums deep into a discography of athletic workouts in which repetitions of brief patterns get built into massive overloads of interlocking elements, sort of like Philip Glass with a fork jammed in an outlet.  It’s a lot more sophisticated and various than that, of course, but the relevant part here is macro and micro: you can focus on any small riff or drum pattern you want or you can let the song move onward as a whole and it rewards you both ways, especially if you like fast, loud, repetitive music like I do.  The key thing is a shifting sense of scale.

So, now this is all relevant to why I think of myself more as an installation artist than a photographer because what I want to do evokes micro elements like small pieces of text or photos (small being a relative term here) rendered into Motherwell-sized walls or environments that ask you both to stand back and absorb and to get close to inspect.  Background and foreground, both emphatically present.  When I have a whole enclosed room to work with things get even more complex and I’ll pull everything imaginable, even other artists, into my orbit, but even just with the show I have coming up I want the viewer to have the sense that she can stand back and see one single large-scale work and also move forward and get close enough to the wall to lean over a bit and read a hand-written sonnet.  And that the sonnets can be a frame for reading the photos of men, and so can the butterflies, and the men can be a frame for reading the other two main elements, and the small blocks of pure Photoshop color that’ll be pinned to the walls can be code for how to read the show–as gestural painting rendered as digital photograph and hand-scale text.

The colored walls and sweep of too much information is meant not as a demand that a viewer stay and scrutinize every single wall-mounted object, but that it’s one work–everything everywhere–sensory overload that allows and rewards focus and repetition.  I’ll post some older installation shots to reference what I mean when I’m talking about too much and macro/micro and invite/reward but for now here’s a few more men and butterflies to bounce off each other as radically different kinds of work that have a metaphorical overlap (or at least I think so).

First, though, “Up with People” (Don’t know why the embed isn’t working but maybe turn your speakers down a little and click away)

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So I need to probably make some money magically appear to get another low-end Rebel until I can finally afford the solid $1700 7D I want when I win the lottery.  But below is the basic idea; I also need to reshoot because the tilt and scale varies too much from word to word and I’m using a friend’s camera for that but this is a small part of the “all my new work” I was writing about a while ago before life interrupted and I couldn’t pull myself away from making those abstract squares, which I still can’t.

Planning everything in my head accounts for I’d say about 70% of the text stuff; the rest is impulse that either gets quietly deleted or works immediately.  And I’m not always sure why.  This is one of my favorite photos from last year and of course the word is loaded but there’s something about the torn cardboard and the blobby stencil and the cat hair that just works, none of which I could have planned in advance.  Photos of that new work soon if it’s salvageable but first because it’s on hand here’s the blunt, aggressive photo I’m talking about:

Even given the odds it stung a bit that I didn’t win because I am human after all but the bigger thing it made me think of is what will happen with this work, thousands of images, if the official wars end and I stop visiting training grounds?  Does it still make sense for me to think of showing these images in a gallery context now after being removed from the historical moment?  How of-their-moment are they, and if some art is of-the-moment and some is more “timeless” (not in the grand sense just not historically specific) does it make sense to still have a deep urge to continue to examine a moment that may have passed?

I’m not sure.  The Fake Iraq work is the largest and most expansive body of work I’ve ever made and right now I can’t imagine any documentary project like that consuming me like that again, though you never know.  I do feel frustrated that I don’t have a decent camera and that I’m low on money for anything I’d want to document, though I feel like I’ve been able to make something decent with the materials and procedures I can afford.  But the prize results being announced pulled me back into wanting to “document” instead of create, or else document as creation, and those two things aren’t separate but I want to go out into the world now and look but poverty is blinding me to what it is I could see.  But I’m not a painter or sculptor and you could call me an installation artist if I could persuade anyone who hasn’t seen my CalArts shows of that but still, what gets made are prints, usually photographic ones.  Post-photographic ones.  So my documentation has to be more inventive, more loosely defined, and light on its feet.  And I’m not sure I’m pulling that off.