Brain Trees

700 Club, Manhattan, August, 2006.

700 club, Manhattan, August 2006.

Economist dreams mix with apprehension
leading to another overwhelming question:
can you help me understand this?

Acoustic ideas and an increasing slight of hand
for inopportunity,
and misgivings about ping
and pong
and club soda
and the thinking that distance is not relative
but a product of deductible factors,
quite matter-of-factly.

Which still leaves unanswered
how one hits the bell
at the top of the rope
if all this is a gym class,
in practice.

What literature will our time demand?

Byron Nelson died today
and I walked past him once on a golf course,
where (I still remember this) 
he wasn’t nearly as exciting as Michael Jordan
or Mario Lemieux.

- September 26, 2006 

I like Banksy, at least conditionally. "I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me;" broadcasting this decade on the street in degrees of politicicizing. Do you want a rat with a briefcase, gay policemen, or a Gitmo inmate? Or is it Abu Ghraib?

His tagging of the apartheid wall in Palestine forms my conditional liking for Banksy. It is not that I wish Banksy would do more than tag the wall. It’s the presumed effect of the artist’s big move. There is a lot of potential in co-opting Israel’s separation wall for an art project, but I think in substance Banksy ultimately fails. People might look at his graffiti — a clear blue sky sprayed onto thick concrete, a ladder — and that’s it. The humor that fills a fraction of the reaction to seeing the graffiti — there is a level of mockery here, trying to expose the absurdity of the illegal wall — might be the most dynamic reaction anyone has, unless they buy a plane ticket to Palestine to rebuild demolished houses. What more can you do but laugh a little, sadly? What does any of this "political art" do, really?

Banksy moves on to Los Angeles to spray paint more rats on buildings with clever tag lines, his 2005 work in the West Bank over. Has he raised awareness? Made critical light of a huge concrete wall that Alan Dershowitz — this is true — thinks should be on wheels?

What does Banksy expect from tagging the wall? What does anyone expect from a sprayed-on hole on an illegal separation wall that the world condemns and accepts?

Real public art would have been blasting a hole in the wall. But then Banksy would be considered a real terroritst. So far, he just calls himself the "art terrorist."

I want to fuck like a man, so let me do your self-confidence.

West 30s, Manhattan. Friday, November 18th, 2006. 8 PM. Three like-minded people planned to stage a public experiment. I resist calling it a ‘happening’ because of art historical reasons. I will not call it ‘performance art’ because of the cliche connotations that medium carries.

We only want to fuck back in public.

Date: TBD Location: TBD and withheld

Media: three women, four orange traffic cones, one camera man (if you’re intersted please contact me), reflective tape

VISUAL SEDUCTION: In the end, that’s all it is. 

A brief taxi conversation with a friend last week reminded me of the importance of distancing Art from its traditional bourgeoise aesthetic categories. No one should feel they have to ‘get it’. There is a time and place for academic discussion but it should never supersede its own source - the uninterrupted, one-on-one visual conversation between the viewer and the work. Would you buy an audio guide for your sex life? 

Here begins a series of works I have found myself sensually, if not sexually, attracted to. I resist sanctifying them solely in the academic realm and so I have and will continue to post them sans textual supplements (with the exception of the ‘essentials’).

Yves Klein, Monoblue (1960). International Klein Blue (IKB) on canvas.

Kiki Smith, on the eve of her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art:

“I like Betsy Ross as a model, too, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think, so that you get the benefit of everyone’s opinions and so it’s not just about you in your you-dom.”

I’m thinking about doing a roadkill portrait. Media will include crimson, black, and clear rhinestones, oil paint, plastic and possibly black vinyl. Work on it will begin this weekend.

The reasoning or ‘meaning’ behind this project will be explained later.

Hell’s Kitchen is another up-and-coming. What’s down-and-out?

Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. October (2006)

Living Room Feed: A Developing Collection of Audio Visual Material from American Television

Each clip is to be played on loop, at various volumes, on separate yet identical television monitors. Monitors are to be installed 2 feet apart from one another on one continuous shelf running the circumference of a white, sqaure gallery space (Brian O’Dougherty, "The White Cube"). Reference to the 1962 installation of Warhol’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery is intended and open for discussion. Shopping for ideologies within a predetermined and restricted ‘market’ questions not only the agency of the consuming spectator but also the status of television/the ’seen object’ as entirely autonomous. What is prescribed to the viewer? What agency, if any, is the viewer of such ‘feed’ allowed?

July 2006, FOX News interview with Cham Dallas, Director of the Center for Mass Destruction Defense.

You know where we are, right?
By the clunker Victorian with peeling paint
"the purple house!" when I was eight,
where inside you’d find relics
like people used to
in Egypt and Europe:

yellow Art Deco alarm clocks and useless silver tongs
for picking up sugar cubes
because who uses those anymore?
Warren Spahn’s rookie card
inside my father’s notebook from fifth grade
where he condemned his brother
as a joke for being born
on April Fool’s day
between French sentences
and colonial maps,
all balanced on tall glasses for sipping vermouth
thin as a beaker
like you always found
littering the snow
by the harbor in December.

All this junk isn’t that
and it teaches a lesson.

For one,
I don’t think the past is past
but it can be present,
and I know this
from the time I opened the washer too soon
and flooded the basement.

Maybe you can’t tell
but I read too much David Berman,
so similar sounding loops fill my head
while I walk down the street
like a raisin.

And the big houses on the neighborhood hill
that were stations
on the underground railroad
still offer explanation
for why our hill is named after
pills

or, if you like,
old Boston physicians.

LIVING ROOM FEED: A Developing Collection of Audio Visual Material from American Television

April, 2006: Pat Robertson on "Appalling" Academics

January, 2006: Pat Robertson on Divine Intervention and Sharon’s Death

April, 2006: Pat Robertson Conducts an Interview

I began taking and collecting images of construction sites in and around New York City last March. 

I suppose the project initially came out of my increasing anxiety about the fragility of construction and monumentality. At the time, New York was abuzz with self-congratulatory remarks. Her widespread architectural initiatives were unvieled to just enough applause while further deconstruction and construction efforts proceeded without noticeable objection. Yes, even Brooklyn shut up for a few weeks. Under the surface of this ‘progress’, however, the papers ran stories of an unexplainable incrase in accidental deaths and injuries of workers on-site. Architectural journals wrote on the questionable sustainability of new building material and the expectedly shorter lifetimes of contemporary constructs in the 21st Century. Annie Liebowitz chose the midtown construction worker, fragile and susceptible in his chosen labor, as the subject of her biannual spread in Vanity Fair. Naturally, it was in the shade of scaffolding and amidst the incessant roar of jackhammers on my daily 12-block walk that my interest in this subject was cemented. 

Over a period of four or five months, I clarified my understanding of this environment’s duality. On the one hand, the finished site is visible, permanent, physical, reliable, and secure. We are supported, escalated, elevated, and enclosed by our constructions. On the other hand, our confrontations with their parts, structural systems, and origins by means of our proximity to thier modes of construction reminds us that these monuments of the modern age are also transitory, skeletal, fragile, and, most importantly, manmade. They too have lifetimes. Thus, it is in witnessing their delicate beginnings that we come to consider their potential deconstruction and question our environment’s stability. Shaped by such architectural experiences, my New York mind was defined by a tension between deep-seated anxiety and proud confidence.

In April, I began drawing what I suppose were natural parallels between the human body and the architectural construct. I read New York’s construction sites as physical translations of both birth and illness, progressive creation and blatant fragility. I saw organs - becoming, struggling, failing - all around me. Around that time, my father was calling five, six times a day. His physical and mental deterioration could no longer be hidden in telephone lines. My anxiety over his childlike vulnerability to time could not be appeased by some distant memory of greatness. This adult, this protector, this architect (of course) was reduced indefinately. Like exposed wiring or steel i-beams left to wait out the weekend on Amsterdam Avenue for their repair.

My father passed away on May 18th. They say his inner organs gave out, too much wear and tear.

Today, I approach all architectural and human monuments with renewed suspicion. My problematic relationship with construct is inextricably tied to a problematic memory of my father. I see in these images a belief in greatness thwarted by an understanding that all greatness is at best a creation, a manifestation of momentary genius, and I am as fascinated by this tension as I was consumed by the loss of my father. He has become my ultimate case-in-point, my most personal monumental ruin.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Some visual thoughts (higher-res images to come)…

Park Construction. Brooklyn, New York (2006) 

High Rise. 59th Street & Central Park West, Manhattan (2006)

"We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and, if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs. It’s as simple as that."

- Werner Herzog

A notary public stamped your letter
with typical embossment
and I was at home
measuring salt water with a spoon.

the enamel seal was royal blue,
not unlike the buggy that carried
William Henry Harrison after he died of the flu.

though i think he ought to be remembered
for a nickname, Tippecanoe,
that’s far better than Bubba or Dubya or even Honest Abe

or Bull Moose.

you know they used castor oil
and Virginia snakewood
to try to heal Tippecanue
who actually died of the common cold
not the flu
after delivering the longest inaugural address
in the history of the United States.

but what is Virginia snakewood?
what is castor oil?

I moved slowly with the socks
folding them over the clothe-lines
like string was the accumulation of their prospects.

Clipping them in overlaps to amend a lack of clips
reminded me of when I spent more time
explaining the historical theory than what actually happened
to tribes in Transjordan—
it took too much time,
was long-winded,
though I thought it’d be more efficient.

I’m battling my political commitment to eating pills
and my house is closed;
but is anyone really fucked beyond understanding
in old tabloid photos of flapper London?

If society is a field then I am the Denver Broncos
but all my late drama
won’t make up for the early losses

and I am meaning to write another long letter
because your Indian box on the desk 
is looking a little empty in 2047

but before then, even if I see trajectory
on the postage of envelopes sent to Catalunya
(you have to call it Cataluyna, not Catalonia)
I see it more in the fold, the overlap of lots of sock linen.

i understand you’re telling me this
but i don’t care about your grandfather
who was in the resistance

i don’t want to argue about our ancestors,
though if we’re on the topic,
who decided to give me this foundation?
my balcony socks and their thatched roofs,
meeting in space time long after the Picts invaded.