I was struck by a comment by Nicholas that money was never not a factor. This was in response to my comment about making art in a particular financial circumstance. My own sister's involvement in fiber art was partly due to having the materials around, and little else to make art with. When I think of Miriam Shapiro and other "pattern and decoration" artists, I've usually thought about (their medium) as commentary on gender roles assigned to things like quilt-making, and how the materials associated with women get relegated into craft rather than fine art.
I can also see how the communists made bourgeois associations with decoration, and also the queer lifestyle. Anything that was not in service of their agenda--especially acts related to personal pleasure--were considered acts against the revolution. I remember feeling quite disappointed that my queerness was rejected by the communist party.
Then there's the idea of queer money, a slang term for counterfeit bills. The phrase, "queer as a three-dollar bill," came from counterfeiters as a determination for money that didn't "pass," and later it became another slang term for a homosexual. So is the misrepresentation of counterfeit money another type of abstraction? At least for those bills that don't read as real money, if they were created intentionally as misrepresentations, they become a sort of queer abstraction, moving away from the real.
Without any money, I took a card from Nicholas' deck, and headed down to Michael's, taking pictures in the store without buying anything. It was a fairly queer experience, looking for queer abstraction and not being sure what I was looking for.
December 27, 2008
Money is Never Not a Factor
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It's like you're discovering your proclivities and coming out all at once through the photography lens.
ReplyDeleteDo you mean my new proclivity towards photography? I've been inspired by Nicholas' use of the medium, and have been treating it as a kind of sketchbook.
ReplyDeleteLooking again at the images on this post, it seems like I found rather hackneyed signs for queerdom: the feather boa, rainbow colors, and the like. I don't see it as representing my lifestyle, but more of an exploration of pattern and decoration. My feeling at this point is that the flatbed scanner images of the bandannas was a more fruitful (heh) path.
What I mind most interesting about this ongoing conversation and 'sketches' is how my mode of production has changed so much from when I was at CalArts. It seemed that my work then had to spring fully formed, like Minerva from Zeus' head.
It's sort of ironic, because CalArts paints itself as an place for experimentation, but in the end a lot of folks there play their cards fairly close to their chest.
I couldn't spot the feathers as boas.
ReplyDeleteNo, not photo proclivity. I meant the proclivity of being a gay man. [I feel proclivity sounds a bit like a word a conservative might use.] Proclivities may be the wrong word. But what I was meaning was that in going out an searching for this specific breed of abstraction, which you and Nicholas are trying to pin down, you are qualifying your own personal queerness through discovering potential moments of it in the world.
Thus far the queer abstraction dialogue has been centered on defining/describing the thing in an objective stance (as far as one can be objective with abstraction). The variable I been thinking about is an aesthetic one. I'm thinking that to discuss queer abstraction you have to discuss A queer abstraction, that of a particular individual's outtake. In this sense an artist working out of a position of queer abstraction would invariably be coming out in an aesthetic sense.
This is all very Sherlock Holmes.
ReplyDeleteI'll comment more (at length) on your previous comment on Monday. I'm not sure what you mean by Sherlock Holmes.
ReplyDeleteI think it's easy to get the different ends and means of art production confused, especially when that production has to do with claimancy on the part of the artist.
ReplyDeleteMeaning: implicit in exploring queer abstraction and sketch making is status as queer as well as the deferred realization of the "final project." Most of my work ends because I run out of money or interest, not because I feel I've resolved anything.
If anything, my impulse is more to make sure things are left unresolved, which rubs up against my didactic impulse in an uncomfortable way. Photography is great for this because of its "sketchy" nature, though.
To me, the sketchy bits become vocabulary building. Eventually they find their way back into the conversation.
ReplyDelete