Actually it's nothing new; it's Robert's old scanner with the lid ripped off. First I laid it on the dog.Liver Ticked White
Then I stood on it.Feet on Platen
What's interesting is that this is done without digital manipulation.Face Rolled with Optical Scanner
The pattern is from breathing.Robert
Breathing faster.Me
Like the a Holga, there's a certain amount of randomness to what you get.Rolled Around Leg
For some reason, these remind me of an abstract Gerhard Richter.Rolled Around Leg
Since the end of the year calls for looking back, I thought I'd post some of my video stills taken at the Tomkat.
Thought they're not abstract in a pure sense, they do move away from representation.
They also include overt references to a particular 'queer' subculture.
And represent a manifestation of my own personal queerness.
They picture a space haunted by bodies.
And references both the architecture of queer spaces and cinema.
Me.
Happy New Year!
I'm reading Dave Hickey's introduction to Between Artists, where he paraphrases de Kooning:
"One can hardly expect a work of art to do anything in the world when it is trivialized as a scrap of evidence pertaining to itts maker's eccentricity. You make a painting about a crazy world, they say it was made by a crazy artist. That's a loser's game."He goes on to say that work made in the sixties tried to extract the personal from the object, be it through pop, minimalist, or conceptual strategies. But that turns into a loser's game as well. The next generation of critics came along and used Marx, Freud, and deconstuctionist theories to
This discussion started around the idea of what constitutes queer abstraction, but because we're artists, the conversation has quickly morphed into strategies for our own artistic production. As Adam said:"...in going out and 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.I'm not sure how much of my own "queer proclivity" had been incorporated into the images I've posted thus far, but in qualifying my own queerness I've touched upon a few others along the way. So the point is well taken that I need to move from the general to the specific, and specifically to my own POV.
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."
Years ago when I was is grade school, someone on the playground instructed me to make a circle, putting my thumb and index finger together with my left hand. With my right arm I was to bend my elbow as far as possible, bringing my hand near my shoulder.
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.
I headed down to my local ghetto market to pick up some olive oil, when I ran into a familiar face. Ferran Adrià has attached his mug to some middle-of-the-road olive oil. It's been known that el Bulli, even at $400 per person, is an operation that looses money. In the months that the restaurant is closed, Adrià hustles by selling his book, A Day at El Bulli, and making television appearances.
As Adrià makes his appearances, my post on a successful attempt at getting a reservation at el Bulli, the photos and description of our meal, and my brief analysis of the experience receive a surge in hits. Just this week, plenty of folk were finding their way there by Googling "spherical olives," no doubt because of something on the Food Network.
Since serving meals in his three-star restaurant is a money loosing proposition, another way to cut losses is to stay closed even longer. Next year's season will start two months later (in June) and serve 1500 fewer guests. New concoctions include a dehydrated basil powder Adrià developed that costs nearly $3000 USD a pound to produce.
"...there's a mango croquette made with basil powder. It's impossible for people to know what they are eating, never mind understand the technique involved, but when they eat it they go 'Oh my God'."It's made with a dehydrated basil powder that we've developed. This powder opens up a whole new range of possibilities... You see the dish that it's being used in and you don't see the technique or the technology involved - but it's still there. The machine we use to dehydrate products is the only one of its type in the world and it's the only new technique we have at the moment that nobody else can copy."
And from the sublime, to, well, olive oil. In some ways it reminds me of certain artists' practice, charging a shitload for their work and at the same time sinking equal amounts into their production costs.
A nonexistent image to shore all this up would be a life-size aluminum print of Mapplethorpe’s bullwhip photo with a hole where his face is so you could stand behind it and put your face into the hole (heh) and get photographed as a deviant.I imagine the Mapplethorpe face-in-hole idea as a glory hole in a sex club, where it would at least be put to good use. I couldn't find Mapplethorpe, but Caravaggio seemed the best of the choices presented at the site below:
Mark Flood's Publicity Shunt, 2008Mark Flood "Entertainment Weakly"
In Meg Cranston’s recent interview on Bad At Sports, she makes note of the fact that little will endure of some celebrities’ lives. In her cloth-covered stacks of books, the three-dimensional bar graph that represents Virginia Wolf towers over the stub that is Madonna. While folks like Madonna (or Lauren Bacall, Johnny Carson, and Fred MacMurray) may have been hot topics for the entertainment news of their day, little may endure in the long haul; as the saying goes, ars longa, celebrity brevis.Detail of Flood's Publicity Shunt
But in a media-driven world increasingly obsessed with celebrity gossip, perhaps Natalie Wood’s yacht the Splendor has become our Raft of the Medusa.Flood's Commit Suicide / Win Every Day, 2008
In medicine, a shunt is a tubular device used to relieve pressure. Similarly, a publicity stunt may bring temporary relief to paparazzi-induced stress. In Mark Flood’s Publicity Shunt (top), we’re shown Edison’s recording cylinders, and inside the base we can find a couple old movie projectors. In a way we are presented with a model for a kind of self-perpetuating fame, like an eviscerated shark, feeding on its own guts.Flood's Wild Card, 2008
Flood's Fantasize About Violence, 2008
Flood’s filthy found and altered colorplast signs admonish us to do everything from kill ourselves to be a whore, for tomorrow we could very soak in the acid bath of the limelight. This point is driven home in Wild Card, where Joker Heath Leger, River Phoenix, and Wallace Reid—all dead-in-their-prime victims of drug abuse—share their fifteen minutes of post-mortem fame.Flood's Fred in Darkness, 2008
Even the more sensible and conservative stars are cut and transformed; Flood’s X-acto refigures their faces into uncanny horrors—with all the deftness of Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon.Flood's Market Correction, 2008
Flood's Next, 2008
SOLSTICE TRIBUTE
(Sung to the Tune of O, Little Town of Bethlehem)
O, shining star of solstice time,
Your radiant hours are few.
You turn and strike the New Year's chime.
We owe our lives to you.
These darkest days of winter,
We miss your warming rays;
But every year this hemisphere
Returns to brighter days.
Since olden days the human race
Has feared your warmth would die.
The evergreen is ever seen
As hope we will survive.
O, ancient drums, stop beating,
And superstitions fall !
It's time for Reason's Greetings,
For peace, goodwill to all.
Copyright 1987, by Dan Barker
The problem with hubris is that it gets out of hand. The outgoing president could be a case study of this dark art. While short-term benefits may have accrued for Bush campaign donors of ‘00 and ’04 (such as Enron, GM, and Lehman Brothers), long-term deregulated economic and energy policies—along with unfettered free trade and military spending—has driven the proverbial stake through the heart of the Republican Party. What a different world we would live in, if only the low achiever achieved low.
And imagine if Hitler would have been satisfied with the Anschluss. Poland, France and parts of the Benelux and Scandinavia would have to have found another outlet for their anti-Semitism, other than shipping their Jews off to Nazi Germany. If Adolf quit while he was ahead, the rest of the world might have left well enough alone. Bush’s grandfather was making money hand over fist selling airplane fuel to the Third Reich; there would have been no need to loose a paying customer to the original axis of evil.
In the Dec/Jan issue of Bookforum, Timothy Ryback’s impetus for writing Hitler’s Private Library came when asked what had become of the Führer’s immediate family. Willy Hitler, whom Adolf referred to as his “loathsome nephew,” moved to America, eventually settling in Long Island where he raised four sons. At a point when his last name became more of a liability than an asset, it was changed.
According to Ryback, Hitler’s reading was vast, but lacked depth.
“(He) had a brilliant mind for being able to absorb information, but he had very little capacity for the type of critical thinking that comes from serious, rigorous education—the distinction between information collecting and knowledge.”A favorite book of Hitler’s was the encyclopedia, which is in ways similar to the president’s morning briefing: broad in the range of subjects covered, but shallow when it comes to time spent reasoning and levels of complexity. I wonder what Ryback would make of Bush's reading list?
“American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.” That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as “knowable, teachable, and testable.”So if it wasn’t for unbridled hubris, the Bushes of Kennebunkport might have had the Hitlers of Long Island over. Though I expect the conversation would have been light as the beer.
Something my mother used to say.Seeing Sex in the Crotch of a Tree
Since we've been looking at abstract as a transitive verb--which suggests agency--this recursively links back to instrumentality. In FG-T's momento mori (Perfect Lovers, above), the art is in setting the time, simultaneously popping in the batteries, and hanging the clocks tangentially.The Art is in the Action
Somehow, my own agency--specifically my queer actions in real life--need to inform my art practice. But that in and of itself seems to lead down a blind alley, as noted above. In the past, the queerness in my work has manifest as the drives and taboos of death and desire. Like an eroticzed flak jacket or being face down in a bathhouse, the work was about the body, it's desires, and intentionally being in a place where it's possible to cross paths with people who have the ability to shorten your life, and being there is still worthwhile. It's the story of Artemis and Acteon, Mesoamerican sacrifice, and Christ in Gethsemane.Perfect Lovers Immolate
I think Nicholas' new sketches (what he calls random shots) capture the push/pull of of the death/desire dichotomy. The picture of the latex glove shows the body, and the use-function of the object implies a hand that enters the body through either naturally occurring or man-made orifices. There is also implied a threat (from pathogens) and the potential for vulnerability in the body being probed. In a similar way, the photo of the survival manual is primarily about risk mitigation (like the glove) and at the same time implies a threatening environment.
Robert Longo's Study for Caddy
With his Men in the Cities and Combines, Robert Longo was the go-to guy to see rendered the hubris of the eighties. His subject matter and career rode the wave of the previous economic bubble, in a style Douglas Crimp termed Postmodernism, but could just as easily be called Consumer Culture Mannerism. In the nineties, Longo turned to film, a media better left to his colleague Julian Schnabel. With the return of the obdurate GOP to the White House, so too did Robert Longo return to charcoal, giving us signifiers of the military-industrial complex, and now sharks.Longo's The Messenger (from the series: Perfect Gods) 2008
If ever a media has found its match, it’s bits of burnt carbon and Robert Longo. Enormous sheets of vellum and paper are worked into lush, velvety voids, seductively revealing their imagery in pools of light. The difference between seeing Longo’s work in person (on display at Margo Leavin through January 10) instead of in pixels is the difference between getting laid and taking a biology class.Longo's Studies for Jet Pilots (No. 3, No. 2, No. 4, l to r) 2008
His Study of Caddy (top) shows an early sixties Coupe de Ville disappearing into a tar pit of darkness, going the way of the wooly mammoth and perhaps soon, a better part of Detroit. In the left gallery The Messenger (from the series: Perfect Gods) Longo’s shark emerges from the briny deep and the glass protecting the powdery surface reflects the viewer in the shark’s gaping maw. Nearby Studies for Jet Pilot (No. 2, 3, & 4) gives us the anonymized faces of war in the form of Jet Fighter Pilots’ helmet, goggles, and breathing apparatus.Detail of Longo's Study for Jet Pilot (No. 2)
One wonders what will happen to Longo’s re-presentations of efficient killing machines as the era of Halliburton and Blackwater segues into the era Hope and Change.Longo's Phantom Vessel (from the series Perfect Gods) 2008
About 9 by 16 feet...source material here.
