Brain Trees

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."

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

Park Construction. Brooklyn, New York (2006) 

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