700 Club, Manhattan, August, 2006.
700 club, Manhattan, August 2006.
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.”
Painting Proposal - Spectacular Roadkill
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.
Reading Construction in Light of Recent Events II
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?
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
Reading Construction in Light of Recent Events
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)
This Need to Accumulate Imagery
"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
