Shannon G Wright

Shannon's Rules and Rants

2011-06-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

This is my answer to "Lester's Laws," which I love. I had my students read them this semester, and I realized that by now I have my own set of issues that come up semester after semester in my teaching. I thought it might save some time to just write them down and give them out in advance, to each of my classes. These are nowhere near as cool and succinct as Lester's Laws, but they do have their own very specific purpose. I intend to add to this list as I remember things that frequently come up.

Purely Practical Issues For Students In My Classes

Michael's Arts and Crafts

Please don't look for materials for use in my classes at Michael's, unless the piece you're making is about kitsch and potpourri.

You can find everything you will need for my classes at Home Depot, Orchard Supply Hardware, McMaster-Carr Supply, Douglas and Sturgess, Aura Hardwoods, junkyards, recycle centres and thrift stores.

Don't go to Tap Plastics to buy plexiglas unless you want to spend four times what is necessary. Sabic Polymer Shapes is the best place to buy acrylic sheet locally.

Test it on a Scrap

Whatever you are planning to do, do a test first on a scrap. "Scrap" doesn't mean a one-inch square morsel of your material. It means a decent-sized piece that you have set aside for testing purposes. If you are planning to drill 20 holes that need to accommodate certain hardware or a certain size of dowel, drill a test hole in a scrap of the same material, and try the hardware or the dowel. This will tell you if you've chosen the right size and kind of drill bit. If your wood (for example) tears, then you probably need a brad-point bit, not a twist bit. If you are planning to put a finish on your piece, you need to use a decent-sized scrap of the very same material you are using, sand it thoroughly, and do a series of colour/ finish tests before you do anything to your actual piece. Test EVERYTHING first.

Never Drag Anything

"Dragging" is not an acceptable method of moving materials, art objects, furniture or pedestals from one place to another. Dragging scrapes off the surface of one material and leaves it embedded in the other. In my classes, you will pick things up and carry them. If this requires two people, then you need to ask a classmate to help you. Alternately, check out a handtruck from the wood shop.

Aesthetic Issues, and Some Historical Precedents

Illusionistic Paintwork

Unless your piece is ABOUT optical illusions or camouflage, illusionistic painting of sculpture is usually a bad idea. The illusionistic modeling will cancel out everything "real" you've done. By "illusionistic" I am referring to any use of paint that involves modeling or colour gradations (such as spray-paint "fades".) I suggest using flat areas of colour within any given plane.

More on this, from the art historian E.H. Gombrich's book, The Sense of Order:

"Pugin detected such an illogicality at least when illusionistic design was used for wallpapers. For if a naturalistic representation in light and shade is repeated all around the room the shadows in the design will inevitably be found to conflict somewhere with the real fall of light from the windows."

So, if you're going to bother to make sculpture, let the three-dimensional object do its work, in tandem with light and shadows. Don't muddy it with illusionistic paintwork.

Fishing Line

Hanging an object from fishing line does not fool the viewer into thinking the object is hovering unsuspended. Your viewer probably has as well-developed an understanding about how gravity works as you do. For this reason, suspension systems should look intentional and be fully integrated into the piece, and conceived during the earliest developmental stages of the piece. The material and system used for suspension should contribute meaning and references to the piece.

If you insist on using fishing line, at the very least, please don't buy it at Michael's! Buy it at a fishing-supply store. Mel Cotton's sporting goods store on Race and San Carlos St, is a good place to buy fishing line locally.

Stain, and Integrity of Materials

Stain is just thinned-down brown paint. There is nothing mysterious or alchemical about it. If you want a decent-looking dark wood, then use a dark wood (for example, mahogany, walnut or cherry.) Don't buy a blonde wood and stain it. The exception is, if you are making a piece predicated on the idea of trompe l'oeil, "fooling the eye." And then you had better fool us well. Otherwise, first try making some successful projects that rely on the sculptural qualities of your object, and the natural colour of the wood. Once you have demonstrated a thorough understanding of sanding and application of a clear coat ––I suggest Minwax Wipe-On Poly, Satin finish, three to four coats, sanded very delicately with 320 grit sandpaper between coats–– then it would be reasonable to start doing tests with more complicated finishes.

On the subject of getting the greatest effect from an affordable material, please read this excerpt from John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849):

It may be that we don't desire ornament of so high an order: choose, then, a less developed style, as also, if you will, rougher material; the law which we are enforcing requires only that that what we pretend to do and to give, shall both be the best of their kind; choose, therefore, the Norman hatchet work, instead of the Flaxman frieze and statue, but let it be the best hatchet work; and if you cannot afford marble, use Caen stone, but from the best bed; and if not stone, brick, but the best brick; preferring always what is good of a lower order of work or material, to what is bad of a higher; for this is not only the way to improve every kind of work, and to put every kind of material to better use; but it is more honest and unpretending, and is in harmony with other just, upright, and manly principles, whose range we shall have presently to take into consideration.

Of course, if your piece is about artifice, contrivance, cheap illusions or even hard-won illusions–– then Ruskin's treatise, or the famous architectural mantra of "truth to materials," probably won't apply to you.

Expressionism/ Expressive/ Self-Expression

Do not confuse the art movements called "Expressionism" and "Abstract Expressionism" with the word "expressive." Work that looks like it was made while the artist was having a temper tantrum is no more expressive than work that looks like it was done while the artist was meditating. To put it another way, a contemplative drawing made with technical pencils, rulers, and compasses communicates just as much as an "angsty" painting made with bold, gestural strokes.

On a related subject: the frequently perpetuated myth that the artist's self-expression is the sole purpose of art, is a meme that was generated, at least in part, by a few influential individuals during the late 1800s. In his book, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, (1979,) E.H. Gombrich explains one of the origins of this myth:

"Before the [19th] century was out, the designer Godfrey Blount wrote in a book 'for teachers, handicraftsmen and others' characteristically entitled Arbor Vitae: 'A mathematical pattern is always a bad pattern... Let us rid our minds of the idea that there is any abstract value in Art apart from expression. Expression is the all-in-all of every kind of art, patterns included.' Things could never be the same again after precision and finish had been so violently denounced as inartistic and indeed wicked. Even though we no longer hate the machine and have learnt to enjoy the mathematical precision which it can give to functional products, we are still under the spell of the polarities introduced by Ruskin and like to see the handmade article display those signs of happy carelessness which he praised as a sign of life."

(Yes, oddly enough, this was the same Ruskin who made such good points above, on the subject of the integrity of materials!)

Personal expression is, of course, one of the things that art is good for. Equally interesting, though, is art's ability to look outward, to comment on the larger culture beyond the individual "self." In his book, Vision in Motion (1947,) the artist László Moholy-Nagy offers an inspiring interpretation of the "function of art," as follows:

"It tries to produce a balance of the social, intellectual and emotional existence; a synthesis of attitudes and opinions, fears and hopes. Art has two faces, the biological and the social, the one toward the individual and the other toward the group. By expressing fundamental validities and common problems, art can produce a feeling of coherence. This is its social function which leads to a cultural synthesis as well as to a continuation of human civilization."

There Are No Innocuous or Neutral Materials

No material, connective system, or finish choice is "neutral," or a "non-issue." Any material you can use comes with its own baggage: the meaning and associations connected to that material. Sculptor Tony Cragg, in his catalog A New Thing Breathing, writes:

"...in our language and our thoughts about natural things like wood, stone, fire, we have around these things a sort of balloon of information and associations, and natural things always have very substantial balloons of information around them; the thing has its physical qualities, but the balloon around it is metaphysical. It's the aspects we bring to that object. It's history, mythology, meaning, and beauty."

When designing a piece of sculpture, consider these associations as carefully as you consider the material's physical or structural qualities. The material that is perfect for one idea will be all wrong for another, even if you feel that you are technically more proficient in the use of one material than another.

Inspiration and Realization

2011-01-31T09:36:00.000-08:00

My friend Tom Rebold just emailed me a fantastic quote from Wendell Berry. Although I can assume Berry was not thinking of sculpture when he wrote this, his words happen to sum up perfectly the enormous and complex challenge of making sculpture. And they parallel and complement the words of sculptors Arthur Ganson and Tony Cragg that I have included below.

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." — Wendell Berry

"My materials keep me honest. Because, as you know, you can imagine anything, but you can only make a small percentage of what you can imagine."
––Arthur Ganson (speaking at the DeYoung Museum, SF, October 2010)

"... although sculpture remains for the greater part useless, unlike designed objects, it is an attempt to make dumb material express human thoughts and emotions. It is the attempt not just to project intelligence into the material but also to use material to think with. Sculptures are often and at their best not just the result of an artist taking a material, for example a piece of stone or a lump of clay, out if its normal environment and forcing them into a form which expresses a preformulated notion, but rather the result of a dialogue between the material and the artist. The material finds itself in a new form and the sculptor finds himself with new content and new meaning."
––Tony Cragg, from the exhibition catalog, A New Thing Breathing

It occurred to me after juxtaposing these quotes, that they bring up another, more practical, issue for sculptors. That is, if I succeed merely in "realizing" my "preformulated notion," then there is a good chance that another artist is out there realizing the same notion a week or two before me! This happens with many of my projects. In these cases, the only things that can save my work from sudden obsolescence are the richness and specificity that arise solely from process. This reminds me of yet another quote, from my longtime mentor, Elizabeth King: "It's our process that saves us from the poverty of our intent."

The Best Artist in the World

2010-10-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

I first learned of the work of the Cuban artist Alexandre Arrechea in the Spring of 2009. I was dumbstruck– but I wanted to imagine I could keep my discovery to myself for a while. I just checked his website to see what he's done since then, and I am re-dumbstruck. It is my duty as a good citizen of the art world to sing his praises from every rooftop, or at least every blog, that I can. Here is a link to his website, and here are a few images of his work.

“Elastic Time, 2010”

52 x 5 x 26 cm

Transparent Lacquered Aluminum 2010

Metropolitan Tower

Aluminum

91 x 30 x 220 cm

36 x 12 x 87 inches

Orange tree, 2003-2010

lacquered aluminum

7 meters height

Location/ Jing’an Sculpture Park, Shanghai, China

“Masculinity”
170 x 130 cm
Watercolor on paper
2009

Dead bird flying 4”
170 x 130 cm
Watercolor on paper.
2009

“

February

2010-02-22T10:43:00.001-08:00

I suspect this will be my last post from Finland, as I'm leaving soon. As I write this, it is 0° Fahrenheit, and has been between 6° and about 12° all week, with lots of snow.

Midday sun a couple of weeks ago.

Residency house.

A Valentines Day Snow Carving event attracted more people than I had ever seen in Ekenas. Where have they all been hiding?

Double bunnies, carved by Kim Simonsson and the other resident artists at Villa Snacksund, another Pro Artibus residency house for Finnish artists.

KUVA, the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, in Helsinki. I gave a lecture about my work there last Wednesday.

The handsome entry area/ student hangout area of KUVA, with swing and ping-pong table.

The auditorium at KUVA.

The Helsinki railway station at night.

The cafe area in Eliel Saarinen's famous railway station.

Michael Shanks on Craft versus Fine Art

2010-02-15T11:25:00.000-08:00

I recently came upon this passage about the relationship of 'craft' to 'fine art,' by Stanford archaeologist Michael Shanks, who was the keynote speaker at the 2009 SJSU Art History Symposium. This is transcribed from Shanks' paper on "The Craft of Archaeology" from 1996.

Craft is the intention of a unified practice–hand, heart and mind combined in critique and affirmation, a harnessing of pleasure to learning. Craft is opposed to alienated labour, the separation of working from what is produced, to a division of labour which separates reasoning from execution (as in management and workers for example) and divides tasks in the making of something (as in a factory production line). It denies the separation of reasoned decision and execution, the freeman and the slave, the philosopher and the artisan. Craft involves a rediscovery of subjugated knowledges, recovering practices made marginal in the rationalized organization of productive routine. These knowledges are to do with the affective involvement of the body in the things we do: people's experience of themselves in a sensuous understanding of materials lived and worked with. Such forms of knowledge are know-how and may be subjugated, concrete and sensuous, rather than public, abstract and intellectual, but they do not involve a primitivist reliance on the 'natural'; craft may legitimately draw on any technology relevant to its purpose.

Shanks then proceeds to discuss how the practice of archaeology is itself a craft. But, as it pertains to the frequent discussions in art school about the division between art and craft, this paragraph is more useful than anything I have come across previously.

This discussion of the separation of "reasoned decision and execution" was particularly salient to me when I came across it the other day, because my own absence from my fabrication/ shop facilities has forced me to separate decision from execution in my own work. While I have designed many projects that I would probably never have conceived back in California, most will have to wait until I get home to be realized.

As my last blog entry discussed, having a substantial stretch of time to work for the first time since graduate school has taught me a lot about how I work, and my parameters. And my numerous forays into the realm of "what can I make without my woodshop" taught me one thing for sure: although I loved it at twelve, I am no longer cut out to use watercolour. All the watercolour materials I brought with me occupied valuable suitcase space and precious pounds, for naught!

Hard-Won Revelations About My Own Artmaking Process

2010-01-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

I have just now compiled some rules by which I (and I alone) can gauge the potential of any one of my art ideas, before committing to the grueling task of giving it tangible form.

If it isn’t funny (at least to me,) it’s probably a dead end.
If it doesn’t have an elegant internal logic (with some peripheral room for interpretation) it’s also a dead end.
If it relies on absurd amounts of obsessive labour just to get to the point where I can visualize it as an idea, it will never happen. (Obsessive labour is fine and necessary in the later fabrication stages.)
If it has the fussy/trippy complexity or "density of information" of an image that I might see in a dream, then I won’t know how to actually make it visible to others, and I should accept that I’m not the right artist to make this piece.
If the “style” an idea requires is not dictated by the story it tells (its internal logic) then I will change my mind so many times that I will never commit to it. I am enthralled by style but I tend to want to show my appreciation for all possible styles rather than accepting that I have to exclude most of them…
If I start with an abstract concept (like “animism,” for example,) and try to summon an image or object to embody that idea, I am doomed to failure.
Only when the image or idea arises fully-fledged as the result of seeing an existing physical object in the world and envisioning a specific alteration to it, will the piece have a coherence of materiality and concept. Alternately, if the idea arises from a word or phrase that has caught my attention, the piece may be successful.
If the title isn’t obvious to me and crucial to the idea from its inception, then the piece lacks clarity and is most likely doomed.
If a two-dimensional image is to be the final product, that image must arise from a preordained system that is integral to the concept. Generally, my own interpretation and “intuition” during the making process have no place in such a system. It is the system that saves it from being “picture-making” and makes it sculpture. I am, after all, a sculptor.:-)
If the project isn’t virtually impossible to realize, (with my limited means,) then it’s probably not worth making.

Other notes to self about the “physical manifestation” of an idea:

Materials testing/ testing of the fabrication process must happen before too much labour is invested in “designing” the object. The convergence of an idea and a viable means of realizing it can easily extend beyond a year.
If the finished piece could be (mis)taken for design, then I guess that makes me a designer as well as a sculptor.

Will my list save me from further agonizing and wasted energy? There's no telling.

Trip to Tallinn, Estonia

2010-01-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

In the first week of January a friend from California came to visit and we made the ferry trip to Tallinn, Estonia. It happened to be the same week that the BBC was declaring "the cold snap of the century" across Europe. We stayed in Tallinn's Old Town, most of which was built in the 13th through 16th centuries. A hotel staff-person mentioned that we were visiting during the week of Russian Orthodox Christmas, and that the Old Town was full of visiting Russians. This indeed seemed to be the case, and in spite of the bitter cold there was a very festive atmosphere in this jewel-like medieval city.

On the second day we left the walled Old Town and ventured into the Kadriorg district, with its 18th century Russian palaces and parks, to go to the Kumu contemporary art museum. One piece at the Kumu that was particularly brilliant was Villu Jaanisoo's regimented assembly of about one hundred and fifty sculpted busts by as many different artists--mostly from the Baltic region, I believe. Unfortunately I saw neither the title of the piece, nor any information about it. I was already familiar with Jaanisoo's work because of a bit of prior web research-- he happens to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, and I've been hoping to meet him at some point during my stay in Finland. Oh, I see the Academy has an available five-year position for a professor in Site and Situation Specific Arts... any of my friends interested in applying?

Anyway, here are some pictures from my trip to Tallinn.

Ice seen from the ferry.

Another Tallink ferry, seen from my ferry.

One of many noteworthy house facades in the Old City of Tallin.

More facades, and icicles.

These windows reminded me of Christopher Alexander's discussions of "pattern language."

As did the carving on this door.

Elegantly patterned wrought-iron gate-- this may have been an ambassador's gated complex, I'm afraid I'm not clear on this!

The Christmas Market, (named the best in all of Europe,) lasted until January 7th. Hot mulled wine (glogi) and hand-knitted sweaters and mittens were in ample supply.

Evening in the Old City. Cold, and the snow was really pelting us.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral at night, busy during Russian Orthodox Christmas week.

Me, freezing, on Toompea Hill, with a view of the towers of the city wall.

Kumu Art Museum

Villu Jaanisoo's installation.

One head made of concrete.

Bust of a child, in plaster.

Waiting at the Tallinn ferry terminal for the ferry back to Helsinki.

Ekenäs, Finland

2010-01-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

I moved from Fiskars to the Pro Artibus residency in Ekenäs, Finland, at the end of December. Ekenäs (its Finnish name is Tammisaari) is a predominantly Swedish-speaking town of 14,000. Here I have supermarkets, a variety of shops, hardware stores, a library and a public swimming pool with a sauna-- all within walking distance of the residency house. The house itself is amazing, a stone building apparently built in the 1700s. The stone walls are 17 inches thick—I measured the depth of the window sill seen in the picture below. The temperature in southern Finland has ranged between -6 degrees Fahrenheit and the mid twenties in the past two weeks. I will do a post about what I'm working on, once it's further along. I've put most of my time into research since I've been here. Having this library close by now is a great advantage, saving me loads of money over resorting to Amazon UK! I have been unable to use the Helsinki National Library while I've been here, because they require me to have a Finnish social security number.

Pro Artibus residency house.

The living room in the residency house.

Window in the residency house.

Trees on the way from the residency house to the downtown area.

Snow-covered trees.

Snow-covered trees by the water's edge.

A pier and boat in the snow.

A house on the main street of Ekenas.

A school building on the main street of town.

December Update (a month late)

2010-01-13T11:12:00.001-08:00

So, although I came very close to the precipice, I'm pretty sure I didn't end up losing my mind after all. This, I believe, is because towards the end of December the snow came, and stayed, and brightened up the dark days considerably. And, on some of those dark and rainy November and December days prior to the snow's arrival, my co-resident Laura Baruel and I worked in the well-heated basement of the residency house making a "swan boat" that will appear in an ambitious multimedia spectacle/ performance this March. The project is authored and directed by the Fiskars-based playwright/set designer/ multimedia artist duo, Julian Garner and Hanne Horte. Their previous performances, and information on upcoming projects, can be seen on their website: Culturamobila.com.

The swan boat will cross the Fiskars river, igniting a huge "fire sculpture" in the middle of the river on its way. Here are some pictures of the swan in progress and completed. Although the process is very similar to the "wireframe" project I teach in my 3D Design Foundations classes, using willow branches was a new challenge for me. The branches must be painstakingly pieced together into usable lengths. They are fairly flexible while they are wet, and become rigid (and shrink considerably) when they dry. The shrinkage was enough to change the swan's original proportions to the small boat on which we built it.

The swan is scheduled to sail in Fiskars on March 9th, playing its small role amid many large creatures and puppets made by Culturamobila. Fiskars schoolchildren will be the chief performers and prop-operators in the spectacle.

Look, no 3-horsepower cabinet saw! No combination square! Just two pairs of Fiskars gardening clippers, a pair of pliers and a drill.

The finished swan-boat at Culturamobila's workshop in Fiskars Village.

Fiskars Residency Window

2009-12-29T14:29:00.000-08:00

The view from my window at the Fiskars residency house, from October 1 through December 29th.

The Darker Side of Sabbaticals

2009-12-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Although I always run across the room to turn off Garrison Keillor's radio show the moment I sense it approaching after Car Talk, I do find his writing quite entertaining. Mr. Keillor made some extremely astute observations on the subject of sabbaticals in the February 17 issue of his weekly newspaper column, "The Old Scout." He quotes from the obituary of an English writer named Edward Upward:

"The middle decades were bleak for Upward," wrote Mr. Walker. "During a sabbatical year designed to give Upward the chance to write, he suffered a nervous breakdown." And then when he did publish again, he had become an antique. His autobiographical trilogy, "The Spiral Ascent," was received by critics like you'd receive a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.

Keillor draws the following moral from Mr. Upward's obituary:

And thanks to Edward Upward, I have decided not to take a sabbatical after all. You go off to the woods for a year and it puts you under terrible pressure to write "Moby Dick" or something worthy of having had an entire year in which to write, and the longer you work at this masterpiece, the shabbier it looks, the whale turns into a guppy, and at the end of the year you have torn up almost everything you wrote and you are filled with self-loathing and bitter regret. No thanks. I am sticking to my post and recommend that you do, too.

No comment from me on this subject. It took me seven years of labour, forgoing weekends and evenings, to earn this sabbatical in the woods.

Nature Walks and Chocolate Cake

2009-11-22T10:35:00.000-08:00

(Two of the most excellent things about Fiskars Village, Finland.)
Well, an art blog is supposed to turn into a "travelogue" when you're on sabbatical, right? Yeah, I guess so.

The view from my window about two and a half weeks ago, after our first snow.

Hobbitty grass in the woods.

Pink granite and pale fluffy mosses on a nature trail just up from the residency house.

More delicate fluffy mosses and lichen-covered trees.

Life indoors is pretty good here too.Here's me and the other Fiskars artist resident, Laura Baruel Poulsen, at the new Fiskars chocolate shop. The cake, which is mind-blowing, did not last long enough to make it into the picture.

Finland So Far

2009-10-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

The fact is, Facebook kind of killed the blog. With Facebook I can haphazardly throw up a few pictures and comments and get an immediate response from my friends, whereas with the blog I have to edit and organize pictures and thoughts... too ambitious for me these days! But a few people have emailed suggesting I make a new blog post, so I will.

This is day 25 in Finland. Where I'm currently staying, in Fiskars, it's very pretty. It looks a lot like Vermont, with the addition of Aspen trees.

Nighttime view of the Fiskars Copper Smithy building.

Fallen leaves on a walk in Fiskars Village late this afternoon.

A rather Tolkienesque house encountered on the same walk.

Cool joinery at difficult angles.

I've made two trips so far into Helsinki, the first time by train (to purchase a colour printer to use here) and the second time by car, with my Danish neighbour/co-resident. The first trip cost me 48 euros ($72) in travel, even though it's only 100 km! The second trip we spent 33 euros for a day of parking. So, anyway, trips to Helsinki will need to be limited.

Two cool tin toys in a shop in Helsinki, depicting intense, serious Finnish skiing children.

Jugendstil building in Helsinki

About a week and a half ago I took the bus to Ekenäs, the town where I'm scheduled to do another residency in 2010. This is primarily a Swedish-speaking town, and not very far from Fiskars. The town is adorable, and I met the two current artists-in residence, a German sculptor and a Danish installation artist and painter, and hung out with them a bit. The residence house is huge and eccentric, a very old building on the parklike campus of a university of applied sciences. So, here are some pictures of Ekenas.

Novia University campus, location of the next residency house in Ekenas.

Awesome house in Ekenas.

Residency house of Pro Artibus, Ekenas.

Residency house.

Pro Artibus Art Center, Ekenas.

Cool row houses in Ekenas.

Another nice house in Ekenas.

Onoma Fiskars

2009-07-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

So, it's time to finally post some information about my upcoming residencies in Finland. I will be doing the residency at Onoma Fiskars from October 1st through December 31st, then going to Ekenas, Finland for the period from January 1 to March 31st. Here is the link to the Artists Residency Program at Onoma Fiskars. Onoma Fiskars has a beautiful new website that just went up the other day. The picture below is from their website-- I hadn't yet seen an image of this gorgeous exhibition space.

I also found a series of images of the many buildings that comprise the Fiskars complex, that I hadn't seen before. I have attached a few of these images, which come from the Fiskars Village website. I am deeply saddened to learn that the Belgian Chocolatier In Residence will leave for the winter exactly three days before I arrive...

Fiskars Assembly Hall

Fiskars Wärdshus (restaurant and inn)

Fiskars Granary, with exhibition rooms

Copper Smithy

Clock Tower Building

Laundry Building

"Workers' Tenements"

Remote/Control Show

2009-06-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

Wow, my first blog entry in months! So, I guess the semester is finally pretty much done for me, and I can attend to things like this blog again. I spent a fair bit of last week installing a ten-year-old piece, Toy (Collapsing Elephant) as part of a show called Remote/Control at Works Gallery here in San Jose. The show was curated by Jason Challas and Sheila Malone, and is part of SubZero, which is in turn part of the bi-annual phenomenon called Zer01. It was kind of fun to be installing this piece, even though it's an older one, just because installing art is such a welcome change from the bureaucratic parts of my job. And the other artists were there, assembling things and troubleshooting them, and it was nice to be in this environment again. By shipping pieces out east as soon as I'm done making them, I've been missing out on the sense of community that arises during the installation of a show.

Works Gallery counted two thousand visitors during the opening reception of this show. The reception lasted seven hours--from 6PM to 1AM, which was enough time for the little elephant toy inside my piece to be broken once, after the first three hours of being played with. My friend Mike Lowell, a recent Photography graduate, happened to be there when somebody managed to break the elephant (his head was laying sadly beside him, and people just kept on playing with the joystick!) Mike kindly helped me remove the massive box that hides all the mechanical parts of the piece, and then he videotaped me replacing the elephant. Here's his video on Vimeo.com-- it's pretty funny (although I'd rather not have to hear my voice recorded!) And here are some pictures of people playing with the piece again, after the new elephant went in. I had forgotten to charge my own camera battery, so I only got a few pictures.

One very cool piece in the show was Monterey-based engineer Tom Rebold's robotic walking chair, "Chairisma." Here's the video of the chair at the Works show opening. I like how the cute little chair poses a constant threat to the inordinately large vase that orients it.

Kylie Wright in a BBC Documentary

2009-03-01T11:47:00.000-08:00

Someone recently forwarded a link to a section of the BBC documentary, "The Genius of Photography," to my sister, Kylie Wright. Kylie had forgotten about the filming, which took place back when she was pregnant with her son, Raphael. In the clip, Kylie and Gregory Crewdson discuss some of the convoluted processes of digital photo manipulation.
Watch video clip. Kylie and Gregory appear in the second half of this clip.

David Byrne!

2009-01-30T18:57:00.000-08:00

I had to go ahead and nab this photo off John Pollard's blog (he's the director of ADA Gallery.) I could not let this go. It's David Byrne, of course, with John, in front of my work at Scope Miami in 2006. Too cool.

I only wish I could bump David Byrne over a foot and a half to the right so I could see how well the kidney wallpaper complements his complexion.

Spatial Art Faculty Show opens Tuesday

2009-01-23T18:34:00.000-08:00

I'll be showing the two tire-tread pieces in the faculty show at the Thompson Gallery (SJSU Art Building) that opens on Tuesday. There's a gallery walk-through/ talk by the artists from 5-6, then the reception from 6-8. There will be openings for all of the student galleries also.

Uninvited Objects

2008-12-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

Back to this discussion of "household objects". It's Christmas, and I had been going along quite pleased and surprised that I was getting away, for once, with a sort of Christmas-routine boycott, without even having to announce it or define it as such. The "recession" and all the attendant hubbub about thrift, seems to have veiled my refusal to play the Christmas game this year. I got up this morning and it's all rainy and blustery outside, and not fitting well into any particular cliché about what Christmas day should look like. Unclear on what exactly Bruce and I are going to do with ourselves today (aside from a couple hours of more-serious-than-usual cooking,) I made some tea, checked my email and looked at the New York Times online.

Well, it turned out that we had not made it through completely unscathed; a few foreign objects had insinuated their way into the house and are now our property, our responsibility.

As a maker of objects myself, I am deeply and permanently offended by the abundance of aesthetically (and environmentally) inexcusable objects in the world. I do my best to keep kitschy and faddish objects, and most things made of plastic, out of my midst. Every now and then, someone bestows such an object on me, with good intentions. After an appropriate amount of time has passed, all of these objects enter a box called "stuff people gave me," that I then guiltily, sadly, return to the closet. Even garish or noise-making birthday cards present a moral dilemma to me-- admiration for the person giving me the card makes me display it, even though it is aesthetically reprehensible and corrupts the serenity of a room. I see objects that have been "gifted" to me as being intrusive and beyond my control. Kind of like television.

I rarely read fiction, I tend to be too impatient for it, but I read Ian McEwan's Saturday this week and really liked it. There's a part in the book where the protagonist has moved his elderly mother to a nursing home and is, many months later, sorting through her belongings in the house she left. This reminded me of my last blog entry about the meaning attached to household objects.

"She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts-- without her, her old teacosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no-one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end."

This also reminds me of the strange nature of student "art projects". An object being made by one of my 3D Foundations students might have many, many hours and much mental anguish invested in it. If it were to be dropped and broken, or, God forbid, stolen from the class storage shelves before it was due, this would count as a crisis. However, after an object has been critiqued, its value to its maker seems to drop precipitously. And, no matter how brilliant, once an object has languished on the shelves for two weeks after the semester ends, it officially becomes part of the pile I have to haul out to the dumpster.

When I ran the woodshop at Columbia College, my friend Chris Kerr and I once came up with an idea: we would make a hoop about 25 inches across and mount it on the wall. All 3D design projects must fit inside the hoop, just as a carry-on bag must fit inside the special bag-sizer at the airport. The hoop would in fact be the exact diameter of our 55-gallon trash drums, reducing our labour at the end of each semester.

Throwing away student art projects always reminds me that to teach sculpture is to participate in turning valuable materials into waste, and that sculpture is itself a somewhat environmentally unethical pursuit. However, in the catalogue called "A New Thing Breathing," the British sculptor Tony Cragg absolves sculpture in the following way:

"Sculpture, of all the objects and things that human beings deem necessary to make their lives more liveable belongs for several reasons in a rare and extraordinary class of its own. Rare, because even just looked at quantitatively, very few kilograms of sculpture are made on an average day, while many billions of tons of materials are made into other more 'useful' things. Extraordinary, because although sculpture remains for the greater part useless, unlike designed objects, it is an attempt to make dumb material express human thoughts and emotions. It is the attempt not just to project intelligence into material but also to use material to think with."

Some years have passed since Cragg wrote this, though, and it now seems essential that sculptors be more accountable for their use and disposal of materials. It's an issue that I thus far have not given adequate time and attention, but one that I should, particularly in the context of teaching.

Well, it's Christmas, so I should go and do something more festive than writing gloomy thoughts about how offended I am by ill-advised inanimate objects. I'm secretly saving up all my Christmas spirit for next Christmas, when I'll be in Finland, the Christmas capital of the world.

Visual Values, and Spock

2008-12-19T17:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was my last day of exams. Today I've spent the whole cold, dreary day trapped at home waiting for the UPS guy, knowing full well he'll show up right at 7 PM, as always, but forewarned that it could be anywhere between 8 AM and 7 PM. While waiting, I read an essay called Design and Order in Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

The essay starts out by proposing that the purpose of art is to impose order on the chaos of our lives, and on all the irreconcilable bits of information we deal with. Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist, discusses numerous studies he conducted over several years which showed that most people don't see art as contributing any order or meaning to their lives-- in fact, he concluded that art seems to slip completely under most people's radars. He learned that a variety of seemingly mundane non-art objects apparently hold the meaning and symbolism that he had at first assumed would be connected with art objects. I took issue with this, partly because the discussion of the irrelevance of art to "most people" was depressing, but mostly because I was annoyed by the assumptions about the nature of art as something that must be owned by (and occupying the home of) the person supposedly appreciating it. This is absolutely at odds with my most essential understanding of the purpose of art. The way I see it, ideas are manifested and put forth into the world, one at a time, by artists. They are seen, either in person or in pictures in books and magazines or on the internet, and they simply exist, as a commentary, a response, a distillation-- or maybe, as Patrick O'Doherty has put it, as a gesture or a project-- hovering in a sort of ether of "contemporary culture" and art history. When I make a piece of art myself, I see it as entering this immense matrix of constructed meaning, which grows ever more complex as each addition affects and is affected by the artworks already in existence. In my mind, ownership doesn't enter this equation.

Of course mundane household objects hold symbolism and nostalgia for people, but I don't really see what this has to do with art, and its potential to "impose order on chaos". I don't own art, partly because I can't afford "good art," but also because I can't envision good art inhabiting a house. I do own some beautiful and quirky antique prints and the like, oddities originally intended to educate or illustrate a concept. I guess I also own good number of "designed" objects, but these, also, are more like "accidental design" --objects that happen to be minimal, probably without a lot of art-historical consciousness on the part of their makers. Instead of owning art, I buy art books, so that I can store up a tangible image bank of art that I don't need to own. It's in my head, and it's there in the books if I need to renew my mental image of it.

Anyway, on to the point. What I did find interesting and valuable in this essay was the discussion of "visual values."

The social construction of visual values
...Visual qualities obviously have a lot to do with how we react to an object or an environment. But our reactions are not direct "natural" responses to color and form. They are responses to meanings attached to configurations of color and form.

The extent to which a visual stimulus helps create order in consciousness does not depend on inherent objective characteristics of the object to trigger a programmed response from the brain. What happens instead is that some people in a given culture agree that straight lines (or curved lines) are the best way to represent universal order. If they are convincing enough, everybody will feel a greater sense of harmony when they see straight lines.

Visual values are created by social consensus, not by perceptual stimulation. Thus art criticism is essential for creating meaning, especially in periods of transition when the majority of people are confused about how they should be affected by visual stimuli. Art critics believe that they are discovering criteria by which they can reveal natural esthetic values. In reality they are constructing criteria of value which then become attached to visual elements.

I think the importance of this portion of Csikszentmihalyi's essay, for me, is its relevance to a conversation that comes up semester after semester in my classes. Students will claim that they have chosen to use meandering curvilinear lines and have ignored perspective, correct proportions or some aspect of traditional "good craftsmanship," because they prefer to be "expressive." I ask what constitutes "expression" for them, and they say, "You know, like this, what I've done here." I ask if correct perspective, accurate proportions, straight lines and right angles are "unexpressive," and they generally insist that they are. There is this persistent idea that the work of someone like Donald Judd is, perhaps, Spocklike-- and therefore unexpressive? Was Judd's refusal to adorn his materials (or Mr Spock's refusal to emote,) any less quirky, less expressive than, for instance, Jean Dubuffet's primordial, schizophrenia-inspired doodles on canvas? I try to explain that these ideas about one particular style being more "expressive" than another are in fact constructed, and reinforced in art school. The fact that an artistic movement carries the name "Expressionism," is perhaps largely to blame for my students' confusion over this issue.

Anyway, I may find a way to work this essay into some course materials.
The UPS guy showed up Exactly at 7 PM.

Dudes coated in feathers

2008-12-15T20:16:00.000-08:00

The whole purpose of my blog is becoming to direct people to Momus' blog. He has found/ resurrected the coolest/ most ridiculous 80s video, "Collapsing New People," by Fad Gadget-- a preposterous name for a band! This video is worth watching-- it seems to capture the zeitgeist of the early eighties scene.
I was wondering about the Einsturzende Neubauten reference-- I just looked up Fad Gadget on Wikipedia, the song was played with them. Hence all the homemade instruments, etc. Maybe that's Blixa Bargeld on the keyboard.
http://imomus.livejournal.com/2008/12/13/

Okay, Okay!

2008-12-08T21:24:00.000-08:00

None of my friends will be satisfied until I get the tire tread ONTO a tire. And I promise you, that's the next step on the agenda, and I'll be beginning the work as soon as classes are over. I did a large portion of the research toward this end, last summer. So, Jonathan, just chill, I'm on it already. And Christopher Tse, my trusty assistant on this project so far, is ready for me to throw him some more "OCD" jobs (like cutting 800 tiny nails down to 1/4" using a jig I made for this purpose.)

All Terrain Ass-Kicker

2008-12-04T21:19:00.000-08:00

Well, over the summer I was planning to have four variations on this theme done for this Scope. As it turned out, I only finished one. But now I have the (very, very complicated) process figured out, and I can make more designs over the winter break. For now, here are some pictures of the two-part project that is up at ADA Gallery's booth at Scope Miami this week. I got it finished, boxed, and shipped out the day before Thanksgiving. Now, its fate is out of my hands.

All Terrain Ass-Kicker, 2008.
Proposal for military Hummer tire tread pattern, inspired by Afghan war rugs.
Black and white C-Print.
18" x 24"
Many thanks to Pat Enright and Kylie Wright.

All Terrain Ass-Kicker, 2008.
Proposal for military Hummer tire tread pattern, inspired by Afghan war rugs.
60 durometer urethane rubber, aluminum hanging hardware.
71.75" x 12" x 1"

The tire tread resting in the fancy shipping box I made it for traveling out east by FedEx overnight.

Me with the tread, after four weeks of late nights, making sure it would hang on the wall before doing another all-nighter to make the fancy shipping box.

Reverse Alchemy

2008-11-11T20:13:00.000-08:00

So, I've got every hour of the next two weeks accounted for, trying to meet my deadline for Scope Miami. I had previously given up on the possibility of showing anything at this Scope, because school had so completely derailed my work on the project. Now I'm trying to make the deadline after all, and it's a crazy feat because there is so much experimentation and trial and error necessary to figure this project out. The ridiculous thing is, I'm essentially trying to make an insanely expensive material look like a fairly cheap, common material. This is not by choice, but because the process of working the cheaper material costs exponentially more than what I'm currently spending, and requires specialized, heavy-duty equipment unavailable to most people.
Bad advice from a "tech support" guy yesterday, led me to ruin $120 worth of material in about three minutes! I called him back after this disaster, and he said, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't have suggested that."

D'ohh!

Beautiful Chicago

2008-11-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

Photo: Anthony Jacobs/Getty Images

Watching the scene unfold on my neighbour's big-screen TV last night, I felt a rush of pride for the beautiful city I left six years ago, and a sense that if there is one place I could think of as "home," Chicago is it. If only I could have been there for this world-changing event.

After September 11th, people said that "irony" couldn't work anymore, it had been rendered null and void. It revived quickly. Today I feel that irony has been rendered irrelevant, replaced by this nebulous, completely alien sensation, of being welcomed "back into the fold" of the world.

From an art-making standpoint: I will finish the piece I'm working on, a piece responding to Bush's "worldview"-- but it already feels obsolete. It's very "Before-Obama."

Postscript: I see Momus captured this feeling I have, and worded it much better, on the day of the election: http://imomus.livejournal.com/412130.html?mode=reply

Thomas Huber

2008-10-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'm on the email list of Galerie Akinci in Amsterdam. I received this announcement this morning, for a new show of Thomas Huber's work. He has amazed me since I first saw his work in the early nineties, and this new work is no exception.

Thomas Huber 'Messe', 2008, oil on canvas, 200x180 cm

Time for a New Wallpaper

2008-10-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

When I drew the urinary tract wallpaper, it was as a superstitious/ preemptive measure-- sort of a celebration of the "god of healthy kidneys," since I have only one kidney and want it to function perfectly for the rest of my life. So far, the wallpaper seems to have "worked." Now it appears that the time has come for me to make a new wallpaper design, this time honouring the God of Patellar Cartilage. I knew I had lost a lot of cartilage in my knees (an MRI in 2000 confirmed this,) but now a new MRI shows that the cartilage behind my kneecaps is essentially gone ("stage three" chondromalacia.) Doctors all ask, "Did you have some bad injury in high school?" or something to that effect. "Nope," I answer. " *
Anybody else in your family have this problem?" "Nope."

Just bad luck, I guess. Nothing a good wallpaper design can't fix, though. I have to really, really mean it, for it to turn out good. The kidney wallpaper had a lifetime of fear and paranoia behind it.

The director of the gallery that shows my work is still waiting for me to make him a bronchial wallpaper to address his asthma. Looks like I have a lot of work to do (as soon as I finish my current project...)

* I was never an athlete. I was a furniture maker and wood shop manager: the equivalent of having been a professional "furniture mover" for about eight years.

A whole winter in Finland!

2008-10-24T21:34:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I found out I was accepted to a second artist's residency program in Finland. The first residency kindly accommodated me so that I can do both residencies back-to-back. A solid, six-month period in Finland, from the beginning of next October until the end of March! I am super excited, both residency programs look amazing. I will need to learn some Finnish and some Swedish before I go. And buy a lot of down clothing. I've been researching the history of the locations, there's lots of cool info and pictures to post, soon.

Lester's Laws

2008-10-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

This document came to me via the VCU Sculpture Department email list the other day. It's a list of "Lester's Laws" -- basic rules of thumb for art-making and critiquing, from the mind of the inimitable Lester Van Winkle, Emeritus Professor of Sculpture at VCU. I was unaware of the existence of this list when I took Lester's classes (1987-1990), but the content insinuated its way nonetheless into my psyche. It's nice to have this wisdom codified so succinctly now.

Unfortunately Blogger keeps messing up the formatting. I give up on trying to fix it.

Lester's Laws:
The following I circulate at popular request and with serious misgivings that they might be mistook. These advisories or faux-rules were first instituted in 1974. They were applied to a class of sophomores whose insistence on repetitious inanities, like solutions and non-thinking was awe inspiring. Out of desperation these notions were circulated to insure some modest degree of creativity, or possibly a small revolution in a class of really comfortable underachievers. Although I intended them only as beginners' guidelines, they have become known as Lester's Laws. These "Laws" have been widely circulated at popular request and which edition this is, is not known.

1. Do not arrive on time for this class. Be early and appear busy. Punctuality and thrift precede cleanliness in the eyes of "You Know Who."

2. Have ideas in your work. Mere personal expression is unavoidable, highly overrated, and can be sloppily self-indulgent.

3. If you have no ideas, check your pulse.

4. If you have an idea (one) you are in trouble.

5. If you steal ideas, cover your tracks. Be the master thief. Do the perfect crime. Or don't. Be a postmodern, deconstructivist, conceptual appropriationist. Plagiarism is in fashion. Fashion is vicious and violent.

6. Remember that in our game an idea is no better than its articulation.

7. Speak up in critiques. Ye shall be known by your words.

8. In critiques do not say, "I like." For obvious reasons, like you're talking mostly about yourself . . . or whatever.

9. If you believe that criticism is only personal opinion, quit school now. Save your money. Personal opinions are absolutely free and in infinite supply on the street.

10. Beware of art jargon. No one knows what words like balance and rhythm mean.

11. Believe me, there is nothing negative about space. The constructivists considered space a tangible material.

12. Never let your story be more interesting than your art.

13. Never explain your choices by what you did not want. What you did not want or intend is an infinite set.

14. Do not let American industry make the color, surface, image, proportional or scale choices in your work.

15. High tech, avant-garde or expensive traditional materials will not improve bad ideas.

16. Simple repetition never doesn't work. Repetition, like contrast, is a visual phenomenon, not a conceptual issue.

17. Do not make things the same size without good reason. MODERN REVISION: No, do not make things the same size.

18. Do not center or divide things in the middle. The middle is such a swell place; it should always be reserved for special occasions.

19. Do not use obvious proportion ratios. 1:1, 2:1, 2:4 etc.

20. Avoid bilateral symmetry and 90 degree angles. (See special occasions.)

21. Do not arrange things that "lead" your eye in a circle, square, rectangle, triangle, cube, cone, etc.

22. If you want to use black, white, or gray, see me first.

23. Always make primary colors secondary choices.

24. Give color significant jobs to do in your work.

25. Paint all carvings, particularly stone carvings.

26. Find significant terminations for three-dimensional lines.

27. Always radically modify or rectify found objects.

28. Remove source references from found objects.

29. Make weird things. It is an artist's job to do so.

30. Remember that all things in the same context relate. Any further similarities, connections, parallels, vectors, or threads only compound an already existing relationship.

31. The only thing worse than a bad piece of sculpture is a big, bad piece of sculpture. Even worse is a big, bad, red piece of sculpture.

32. Trust your instincts. Trust your intuition. They are your best tools.

Stanford is a Parallel Universe

2008-10-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

So, I tried to meet my class at Stanford yesterday to see the Vik Muniz lecture. And I did meet them, after spending an additional hour completely lost. Some of my students got lost too-- only one of them got more lost than I did, though. I thought I was familiar with area-- I forgot that the minute I enter the Stanford campus I'm in a parallel universe-- a territory immune to Google maps, and one which has evolved beyond the use of old-school technologies like stop signs. We missed the show we had intended to see at the school gallery, but most of us made it to the lecture, which was quite entertaining and fascinating for being two and a half hours long. I would venture to say that there were more attendees from SJSU than from Stanford (I saw two faculty members from my school, plus one professor from our Philosophy department, in addition to my own students.)
Starved and brain-dead, we then made our way to the Peninsula Creamery, where we got diner food and shakes. It was 10 PM when I got home from this field-trip that started at 4 PM. Here is what Google maps showed me, versus the map I should have sought out prior to the field trip.

See, how the laws of nature apply up to the borders of Stanford, then it gets like a Borges story.

Laser-Cutting Problem Hopefully Solved

2008-10-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

So, what I didn't understand about the laser-cutting process before, was that the machine doesn't acknowledge the "kerf" removed by the laser beam (the thickness of the cut) and make adjustments for it. In woodworking, you always acknowledge the thickness of the saw blade, and measure from that. I had never guessed that the laser-cutting world would just cut right down the middle of an object's outline. It seems so primitive! Once I understood this issue, the problem was pretty easy to solve. On my illustrator drawing, I just made an "offset path" around the objects to be cut out, half as thick as the laser kerf, and added this to the total dimension of each object. I will have a test done in the next couple of days to see if this works.

Good News, and Urinary Tract Humour

2008-10-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

I recently applied for a year's sabbatical leave in order to make art, elsewhere. (Eligible faculty can apply for a semester at full pay, or a year at half-pay.) I learned this morning that I am one of four artists (or artist duos) that have been accepted into an artist's residency program in Finland for 2009! This is the best news I've gotten in a very long time. The other accepted artists look great. I'm really, really happy.

On an unrelated note, some friends emailed me to tell me that my kidney wallpaper had shown up on BoingBoing today. Thank you, Mark Frauenfelder! I especially love the comments, numbers 12 (analyzing my anatomical semi-correctness,) and 13!

The National Kidney Foundation was considering buying this wallpaper two years ago when ADA Gallery showed it in Miami. But it never happened. (Apparently, as a non-profit organization, they don't really have a budget for art...) Anyway, it's nice to have the kidney wallpaper get an audience after all. It took me six months to draw it. Now I'll have to finish the other two wallpapers I started (the urinary tract one is called #1, so #2 was the next in line.)

Project

2008-09-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

My project for Miami was going well, then school (three studio classes, two coordinatorships, five school committees, seven graduate tutorials, four advancement-to-candidacy committees, etc) forced me to abandon it for two solid months. Today is the first day I have had some time to resume work on the project. However, I have now had a technical setback-- a laser-cutting problem-- for which I am currently seeking a solution. I hope I can get this figured out soon, and get on with this project.

Fiction, continued

2008-09-29T21:16:00.000-07:00

Back to a subject from an older post: the popular theory that all artwork is the logical extension of its maker's personal biography. In that post I described how Salman Rushdie expressed his annoyance at the prevalence of this theory. While reading about the recent death of David Foster Wallace, I came upon a review of his in which he expressed indignation at another writer's crude attempt to "explain" all of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories through the lense of his biography. Wallace found these explanations trite, forced and ridiculous, and asserted that "the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant."

The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself.‡‡‡ His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.
And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same.

For the full article, see this link.

No More Model Train Stuff

2008-09-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

I have never really comprehended the meaning of the word "hobby". The very concept of a hobby always sounded so noncommittal, and connected to the baffling concept of "killing time."

I met up with my T.A. down in Salinas and we spent at least ten minutes watching guys play with trains in their cool clubhouse. I guess they had put most of their energy into "train stuff" that I (in my search for impressive feats of geological simulation in miniature) could not discern. Most of the "scenery" in this setup appeared to be assembled from store-bought parts, and offered me no special insight into diorama-fabrication processes. Afterwards, at lunch, we decided to eliminate the planned class field trip to the Model Train Expo later this month, in case it should prove to be, umm, totally lame. I'll go on my own, to possibly purchase some materials for the class.

At any rate, I actually enjoyed the drive down to Salinas and back. I hardly ever drive anymore since I moved back to San Jose (two blocks from where I work) over a year ago-- so driving offers an opportunity to briefly clear my brain of school-related bureaucracy, and so forth.

Back to the subject of the artist, Michael Ashkin (from a prior post). I remember discussions of his work back in the 90's, in which the implication was that he had taken the genre of model train landscapes, and "elevated" it into something less mundane, perhaps less "hobby-like." Years ago, my friend Chris Ware (whom I rarely see anymore since moving to California) was hailed by literary and art critics as having singlehandedly "elevated the genre" of comic books into something more. Chris always vehemently objected to this intended praise, insisting that the comic-book genre needed no elevation, by him or anyone else-- it was already a genre with an illustrious past. This ostensible elevation was accompanied by a new title for the genre-- graphic novels. Chris always maintained that he made comic books, not graphic novels.

More Model Train Stuff

2008-09-10T20:46:00.000-07:00

So, I've learnt that an important "figure" in the model train world lived in Monterey, and nowadays there's a posse of model train folks working in Salinas. They are occupying the "Railway Express Building" in exchange for restoring it. From what I can glean from the website, they are building a giant model of the Monterey and Salinas Valley Railroad in this building. They have an open house with workshops now and then. One is this Saturday, so my Installation Art TA and I are gonna go check it out, and talk to these train folks. Here's a picture of the in-progress model, from the MSVRR website.

Congratulations, Jonathan

2008-09-10T19:59:00.000-07:00

Check out Jonathan Brilliant's show in Williamsburg, NY: http://www.jonathanbrilliant.com/dsg.

Crate, continued

2008-08-18T14:48:00.000-07:00

Update: my crate made it home. I removed the plastic I had wrapped it with to protect it from further rain, and now the poor mildewy crate is baking in the sun in the back of my truck. My socket set is on its way home in a separate box (travelling by UPS,) so I can't open the crate until that shows up!
New update: got the crate open and emptied out. The fence parts did fine (I guess if it survived a year in snow and other weather, this was no big deal.) The crate is a mildewy nightmare, and has gained so much water weight that even empty we can't get it out of my truck yet. Now I see why the shipping cost went up $150 beyond what was originally projected.
At least the fence saga is over.

East Coast Trip Part 2

2008-08-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

So, when we were driving back to Connecticut after our highly technical tour of the bike factory, I noticed a few place names that sounded familiar. One of these was New Lebanon, NY. I knew there had been a Shaker settlement there in the 1800s. There was no time for us to stop and look for it, but it turned out we had an extra day at the end of the trip, so we could afford to go back up there after all. A bit of research showed that an even bigger Shaker village was nearby in Hancock, Massachusetts. I knew this place well from my many books on Shaker furniture and architecture. In fact, I show slides every semester and drone at at length on in my Woodworking class and my 3D Design Concepts classes, about this very place. Needless to say, I was very excited to have happened upon all this, completely unplanned. I knew my Spring 08 Woodworking class would approve of my going there.

When we got to Hancock, Massachusetts, the rain let up for a few hours, so we got to explore most of the buildings. A demonstration had just started of the water-powered wood shop, right when we arrived! This was more than I could have asked for. I frequently tell my students that a Shaker woman invented the table saw-- now I know it was the table saw blade that she invented. The rest, I don't know. I always thought the Shakers had worked in some crazy reckless freehand manner on their table saws, but in fact they had a pretty logical parallel fence system, and a precursor of the sliding feed tables popular today. The docents did a lathe demo and a bandsaw demo, with all the machines powered by overhead leather belts running from a water turbine under the floor. I had a brief conversation with one of the woodworker docents after the demo, and he said, "Here, come on in!" and let me into the wood shop. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do in there, so I just kept taking pictures of stuff.

Lathe demo and belt-powered shop.

A jointer very similar to the one in SJSU's wood shop.

Luckily, SJSU's table saw is not too much like this one.

Taking more pictures from inside the shop...

I got to look down into the water-powered turbine zone.

Next we moved on to the other buildings, including the round barn shown below, and the Shaker Dwelling House-- a place I've been in awe of for years based on my books of photographs of it.

Inside the round barn.

The shop where bentwood boxes are made. We missed the demo, but we got a verbal explanation. They make these a little differently than I thought. I will pass the information on to my students.

The Dwelling House has the most spectacular built-in cabinets and iconic, minimal furniture. It was amazing to finally see all of this firsthand, but I also had a nagging feeling of disillusionment. In art school one is incessantly lectured to about the importance of experiencing authentic works of art directly, as opposed to viewing them in photographic reproductions. The original, physical object apparently has an "aura" that will spill onto us if we come within a few feet of the thing itself. I have always preferred the pictures in books, and that is why I spend a lot of my money on art books. The "real thing" is often a bit shabby, beat up, and plastered with educational plaques and explanations. In the case of the Shaker Dwelling House, the real thing required us to wear fluffy blue shoe protectors-- quite reasonable, but a rather unromantic distraction from the elegant building. One became more conscious of oneself as tourist/ intruder, and of all the other tourists/ intruders.

There was a second source of disillusionment as well. Although I knew better, I had developed an image of the Shakers as a posse of precocious minimalist designers and efficiency experts. I had lost sight of the fact that, like their celibacy, their ostracism of ornament was part of a relentless quest for a limited number of available spots in the afterlife. Well, whatever the motivation, their aesthetic helped pave the way for a lot of Modernist furniture. And I now have my own images, free of copyright issues, of their beautiful furniture and Spartan interiors. Good enough.

Built-in cabinets.

Communal dining room.

"Adult cradles". The Shakers took in homeless and sick people, some of whom eventually became Shaker converts.

East Coast Trip, Part One

2008-08-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

Hmmm, where to begin? We're back from our eight-day trip out east, and I feel that the trip has provided a hefty amount of art-blog material. I'll be lucky if I finish this blog entry tonight.

Mass MOCA
We started out in Connecticut, visiting Bruce's parents, then drove up to Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, en route to Vermont. We last went to Mass MOCA about a year and a half ago. I notice the same phenomenon here as at the Headlands Art Center in Marin: the amazing historical buildings outshine and overwhelm the art. In my opinion, the only work that really held its own against the space, and in fact claimed the space as a logical extension of itself, was Anselm Kiefer's. I made one of my first "art pilgrimages" to Philadelphia in 1988 to see an Anselm Kiefer retrospective. I was surprised to see that although my interests have changed since then, Kiefer's work still had a visceral effect on me. His buckled concrete path appeared to have been dropped from the sky or violently expelled from the earth. For me, the piece's elegance arose from the "obviousness" of its materials-- concrete and rebar--and their ability to function as a "memory" of immense physical force.

Anselm Kiefer, Étroits Sont les Vaisseaux.

Anselm Kiefer, Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem.

Jenny Holzer's piece in the museum's biggest space involved projected lines of text rolling slowly from each end of the room to the other, spanning the ceiling, walls, floor, and some geographic-looking mega-beanbag blob things on the floor. (See video excerpt of this piece.) It was a fairly riveting spectacle, but I couldn't get past the thought that many of the projects designed for this room seem like art school assignments: "What would you do with a space the size of a football field, and a limited materials budget?" I wondered what my friend/ former professor/revered art hero Elizabeth King would do if offered such a space. She once described her work as being intended for an audience of one, for close scrutiny at an unhurried pace. She would surely figure out a brilliant and subtle way to direct our passage, and our attention, through the massive space.

Another show at MassMOCA was called Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China. The gist of all the work, by my reckoning, was this: China is big. It has a lot of people, and they make big dams, big ships, big toxic dumps, and big traffic jams.

Art and Water Don't Always Mix Well
Our next stop was West Rutland, Vermont, the site at which my piece, Feral Fence, was installed for the past year. My mission was to get the piece, which had been dismantled and put back in its crate, on its way back to San Jose. The crate was a beautiful one I had acquired on Craigslist from an art shipper-- it was worth $500. Unfortunately, no longer. One week spent outdoors during the recent downpours in Vermont had waterlogged and warped the crate so that we could barely get the lid bolted on. We had to drill big holes in the bottom and pick up the crate (550 pounds of art and water) with the forklift and let it relieve itself for about 15 minutes. It's on its way home now, and I'm anxious about the rust that's consuming the fence parts in the wet crate.

Returning to the quarry site where my fence was installed for the past year. These rusty steel rods were all that supported the 13 foot-tall fence. The monstrous difficulty of the installation last September came flooding back to me.

My crate as it looked last September...

Carbon Fibre Tubing
Next on the agenda: the Serotta bike factory tour in Saratoga Springs, NY. Now I know that Serotta has smaller tolerances than any other bike company: 1/10 mm! I think Bruce enjoyed seeing how his bike was made.
Bruce thinks I didn't do the Serotta tour justice here. I suggested that he start a blog that will do it justice.

NYC Museums
Next: a day in NYC. First we went to the Buckminster Fuller show at the Whitney. As I looked at all the models, drawings, documents and films, I thought of a phrase from my favourite Borges story: "with less clarity than zeal". The review I had read a couple of months ago in the New Yorker gave a refreshing view of Buckminster Fuller as a bit of an earnest, enthusiastic kook-- a generalist rather than a specialist-- with more failed projects than successful ones. Many of the objects were cool, and there was a "model room" that seemed to be a precursor for Olafur Eliasson's model room in his big touring show.

Downstairs from Buckminster was an odd show of installations by Paul McCarthy. Odd, because the work seemed to have nothing in common with the work I think of him as being "famous" for. But I soon saw that this work was the same in spirit. Bang Bang Room kept me laughing as long as it was turned on. A freestanding room in the middle of the gallery had walls that were hinged onto corner posts. Each wall had ugly wallpaper on the inside face, and a door centered in it. When the room was unexpectedly "turned on" by a guard, first the walls themselves slammed into place to form a room, then the doors within the walls started gratuitously slamming, until it was time for the walls to slam open again. I was reminded of pieces like Bruce Nauman's video of his own head spinning and saying, excessively, "thank you!" I was happy to see that Paul McCarthy is another "genre-less" artist who makes brilliant pieces in whatever genre is appropriate for a given idea. (What is it about all these great, uncategorizable artists who teach at UCLA?) The house piece made me remember that I abandoned "kinetic sculpture" years ago because I didn't want to be put in shows with artists who identified as kinetic artists. Paul McCarthy chose to make one or two kinetic pieces and they are amazing because they came from his brain; they are not amazing because he is a "skilled kinetic artist." I have no interest in whether he understands motors and gears or is a good welder. He can hire "skilled kinetic artists" to do that part!

Paul McCarthy, Bang Bang Room, 1992

Elevated Water
Next we took a nauseating taxi ride down to the South St Seaport to check out Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls. We could see all four from where we were. Pretty cool.

One of Olafur Eliasson's four "NYC Waterfalls".

New Museum
We walked to the New Museum, which had a show called "After Nature" that had been reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker. I was immediately depressed when I saw Zoe Leonard's bolted-together dead tree, whose existence is an affront to my piece called "Salvage (Adjustable Orthotic Structure) and some variations on the theme that I was still intending to make, but probably won't now that I've seen this piece. Peter Schjeldahl had described a piece involving dancers writhing on the floor; I thought he was describing a film, and was surprised to encounter an actual writhing woman at the bottom of one staircase. Embarrassed for both of us, I quickly skirted around her and moved along to the recreated Unabomber shack. I witnessed more than my share of tortured, writhing performance artists back in graduate school at SAIC, and my instinct is to remove myself immediately from their presence.
A couple of times during this visit, I passed a person whom I recognized as Michael Ashkin, from my last blog post. A funny coincidence.

A detail of Zoe Leonard's piece, Tree, 1997.

The best piece in this show was the one you can rent on Netflix: portions of Werner Herzog's amazing film, "Lessons of Darkness," (1992) were being projected. This is a starkly beautiful film depicting the aftermath of the Gulf War in Kuwait. Long camera shots from a low-flying helicopter show the devastated landscape, and later, the oil-field fires and the American firefighters working to extinguish them.

Still from Werner Herzog's film, Lessons of Darkness, 1992.

Still to come: East Coast Trip Part 2.

Model Trains, Model Ships, Etc.

2008-08-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

So, I've realized that one of the purposes of this blog is to contextualize for myself information that I would otherwise lose track of. I have 4,694 bookmarked websites in Safari, and fewer than that in Firefox. I was debating whether or not to go ahead and start a new blog for my installation art class, but I decided that perhaps this information relates also to my own art-making.

One of my assignments in the class involves a certain amount of simulation/ representation of objects at a small scale. For a long time I've been considering how I might incorporate the "model-train scene" into a project like this. Back when I was in grad school, an artist named Michael Ashkin, who had finished at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago right before I got there, started to get noticed for some pieces he was making that used the visual language and materials of model-train dioramas, although he was doing it ironically, "subversively". I liked these pieces.

Michael Ashkin, No. 92, 1998

Michael Ashkin, Untitled #29, 1996

A couple of years after seeing them, though, I made a trip to Milwaukee and went to a really heavy-duty model-train/ hobby shop. It had its own museum of railroad models. It was obvious that these "hardcore" train guys were extremely quirky, and just as nihilistic Michael Ashkin.

I see that Michael Ashkin is now teaching sculpture at Cornell and showing at Andrea Rosen gallery. And the dioramas-in-art thing has been in and out of fashion enough times that it's fairly standard-issue as an art genre.

A personal digression from the subject: when I finished grad school I really wanted to learn how to make serious dioramas, and applied for a job at Chicago's Museum of Natural History. I took their woodshop test, which involved building a box with a sliding lid in an unfamiliar shop while a supervisor watched and took notes. The test involved an error in the blueprint that you had to catch and acknowledge in order to pass the test. I passed the test, and was due to come back for a "respirator test"-- but the funding fell through, so the job was cancelled. Probably a good thing for my brain cells, considering the amount of polyester resin I would have worked with daily.

Anyway, the scale model/ diorama thing is a pretty good candidate for a sculpture assignment because technically it can involve some rudimentary woodworking (the small scale obviates the need for actual joinery or an understanding of expansion and contraction of wood), moldmaking, and resin casting in small enough amounts to not be too toxic. And the fun part is, there's a model train expo coming to San Jose in September! Nerdy, indeed, but one can imagine how hard it is to find any local class field-trip opportunities in San Jose.

Another personal digression here: all of this web searching about modelmaking brought me to model ships, and I was reminded of the fact that at age 8 or 9 I saw an impressive collection of model ships when we went to London, and I said to myself then, "That's what I will do when I grow up." The word "anal" had not come into its own yet then, but what I was thinking was that I could make model ships even more anal, more elaborate, more exquisite than the ones in front of me, if I set my mind to it. I have veered a little bit off this track, but not that far really. What I do now is close enough to making model ships. A bit of searching showed me that it must have been the Science Museum in London that housed this collection.

T.S. Mauretania, 1906, in the collection of London's Science Museum.

Uh-Oh.

2008-08-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

At dinner tonight, my friend Sheau said: "Well, the thing about having a blog is, you have to have something to say."
This is terrible news, and spells certain doom for this particular blog. I've been blundering along in ignorance of this piece of information since January.

The blog started out innocently enough-- in fact it was going to be a tool to explain the motivation and inspirations behind a certain project I wanted to do (and still plan on doing.) But then, I was seduced by the daily opportunity to talk about myself--to an unspecified audience, of all things. It's not so long ago that I used to make fun of my friend Jonathan for having a blog. When he would ask, "Have you read my blog lately?" I would scoff, and say "Why would I do that?!" Now he's kind enough to forgive me and even read mine, and leave comments. The whole thing seems perversely egotistical. But if I veer the blog back to being mostly about cool things I've found that other people have done, I might just redeem myself.

Finished something

2008-08-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

I finished the drawing that took me over a month to do (nothing compared to my kidney wallpaper) and passed it on to an industrial designer friend, who has agreed to do something else to it. Then it goes to two other people before the project is done. Am I being mysterious enough?
What I like about this project is that it seems to elegantly merge many of my sometimes conflicting interests: "fine art" with design, art history with contemporary manufacturing, "global" imagery with local imagery, and two dimensionality with three-dimensionality.
Time to start on the next drawing.
Correction: these interests don't conflict. Only in academia do they conflict, not in the real world. This is just a blog, I don't have to convince anybody here that it's okay to merge art and design!

I would like to play tennis now.

2008-07-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

Since I have applied for a couple of impossible-to-get artist residencies in Germany, I am trying to decide whether I can cram a German class in with teaching three studio classes, coordinating the Spatial and 3D Foundations areas, serving on committees, and trying to finish a bunch of sculptures by early December. I ended up hunting down my notebook from the German class I took in college (only one-- I took a bit more French than German). I found most of my college notebooks a couple of years ago when my parents asked me to get all my junk out of their attic before they sold their old (built in 1770) house in Virginia. Anyway, it appears I learnt more German than I remember learning. There's this pretty funny little drawing I did in the notebook, of myself standing with crossed arms, scowling, and thinking in the kinds of sentences my textbook was teaching me. A thought bubble rising from my head says, "Do you like fish? I don't like Paul. I would like to play tennis now." I also drew the fish, whose thought bubble contains only a hopeful question mark.
I used to know how to say, "They didn't think much of the film, but Fritz liked it" in German. Also, "We have often heard the songs in the pub and we like to sing them at home." That line will surely come in handy now and then.
Perhaps I can re-acquire these skills just by studying my notebook, which also contains the notes from the German Intellectual History class I was taking. And tons of angsty drawings. Which made me rethink my earlier post about how I don't think artists become better artists over time. I definitely made, if not "worse" art, at least much "dumber" art when I was eighteen. But I was twenty when I made the video called "Air Drill", which people have probably liked more than anything I've made since...

Cool Video

2008-07-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

I just found this excellent video,"Close Caption", 2008, by a current VCU Sculpture Department grad student, James Sham, and performed by Jessica Maloney. What makes the video so successful for me is the way it sets up our expectations, then delivers something more subtle and complex than we expected. Unlike in "normal" sign interpreting, there is no lag time between spoken word and sign, making the whole performance a peculiar hybrid of sign interpretation and music video. The sign interpreter remains serious, earnest and seemingly immune to the music itself. Her prettiness is in keeping with our expectations for music video dancers-- but her functional clothing, her no-nonsense demeanor, and her stoic attempts to resist dancing (and laughing, most of the time), are not.
It appears that the performance was done in slow motion and sped back up later.

On a related note: we had a sign-interpreter training program at Columbia College, where I used to teach and run the wood shop. Occasionally I would have an interpreter translating my safety demonstrations in the shop. It really made me hyper-aware of any superfluous information I might be providing, and also of the fact that a lot of the language I was using was technical jargon that must be really difficult to translate-- and was probably difficult for students who were non-native English speakers also. I sometimes found myself addressing only the interpreter, since she was the one person clearly paying attention to what I was saying.

Richbrau, Continued-- and a bit of reality.

2008-07-24T22:21:00.000-07:00

So, regarding my prior entry about hardware and Richbrau Brewery in Richmond: it turns out Richbrau is producing beer again, in another, trendier part of Richmond. I was able to find a picture of the old brewery, where I lived for less than a year in 1988, but it's all fixed up now. In fact, it claims to house 37 apartments! When I lived there we had no plumbing except a toilet at the other end of the building, reachable by going through several heavy fire doors. We built our own floor out of pallets and found shelving wood, and used some kind of electric burner to cook. I took showers by standing under a cold hose over the same drain we used to wash the dishes. One day we realized this was just a hole in the floor, that emptied into the basement level--there was no pipe there! There were random holes in the concrete floors, and a fair bit of asbestos. We paid $75/month each for $1500 square feet.

I sound like one of those Monty Python skits: "we used to have to crawl home on broken glass, and lick the road clean, and we didn't complain!"

Sure, those were the good old days, but I must admit I like having indoor plumbing and a real stove (I'm not even worthy of the six-burner Viking stove I currently have!) Maybe when the Governor's plan for state workers goes into effect, I'll have to get used to no plumbing again. This afternoon I got an email about how all California state employees may have their salaries cut to $6.55 per hour, until the state budget is passed. Tenured or not, in the end I'm a "state worker".

The "old" Richbrau Brewery in Jackson Ward, Richmond, Virginia.

Nature and SUV's

2008-07-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

We went camping in the Sonora area of the Sierras for Bruce's birthday. On the first morning, Bruce did a 4000 ft hill climb on his bike, to the top of the Sonora Pass (10,000 ft up) and back. I did nothing of the sort. (I'm not capable of such cardiovascular feats.) Instead I went for a hike and took pictures related to my current project. Although "leisure time" generally makes me anxious, I actually found the trip very helpful in terms of visual and conceptual research for my project. This area epitomized the monster-SUV/ monster-truck culture that partially inspired the piece I'm working on. And then of course there was the "nature" thing, which is also relevant to my project. And also there were the helicopters frequently overhead with their balls of water that looked too small to put out any fire, and the sound of people shooting at something for hours at a time. And the knowledge that those little chipmunks running around were carrying fleas that in turn carried the Bubonic Plague, still with us so long after its heyday.

But back to art: because I now have a deadline for this project, the project I thought I would be pursuing this summer will have to wait. I delayed starting it because it involved an uncomfortable level of intrusion on other people's space(s). I'll have to keep thinking about how to approach this, because I still think it would make a cool piece, and perhaps the individuals whose spaces I want to use can be convinced that it's cool, if I get up the nerve to ask. I guess it's just something that comes with the territory of being an artist: apologizing and explaining a lot, and frequently looking ridiculous.

My former professor, James Elkins, writes at length about the uncomfortable relationship of artists to "the rest of society" in his book, Why Art Cannot Be Taught. He first explains that artists' educations are myopic and just plain inadequate compared to the education of doctors, lawyers, engineers and so on. He then discusses the ways artists have generally been perceived throughout history. "Today the situation is significantly different. According to the newspapers, artists are something of a blemish on society-- or, more strongly, they are parasites on public largesse, or just jerks. The general attitude of the public, as it is reflected in the media, is annoyance."

Hmmm... my colleague in the Industrial Design department insists that I'm a actually a designer. People like designers, that's what I should be. Both artists and designers turn perfectly good "raw materials" into useless stuff. On the whole, though, I'd have to say that artists produce fewer cubic feet of useless stuff annually than designers, who are aided by mass-production in the dissemination of their stuff.

Progress

2008-07-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

Cool, so a bunch of things are finally going as planned, and some even better than expected, on my project. And I have a venue for it, Scope Miami in December.
The material tests went well, and I can't go into more detail than that, because I have to keep it all top-secret. There's this funny zeitgeist thing that happens with art-- whatever you're making, suddenly everyone else had the exact same idea at the same time*, and the one who makes it a week ahead of everyone else wins. Speed in art-making has never been my forte. Maybe "obsessiveness" is my forte.

*Actually, it's not that other people have the exact same idea. It's more like they express a similar attitude, or are inspired in a similar manner by a manufacturing technique, or a concept like infinite bifurcation.

Also, I came upon this pretty good phenomenon today: callforentry.org. It's a way of posting images, artist statements and resumes in a database so that different institutions can look at it, instead of having to laboriously prepare a separate application for each proposal. So far it looks like it's being used by calls for public art, etc. It still took me most of the day to format the images and fill in all the information, but hopefully my "file" can now be re-used for other applications.

Surgical-Grade Door Hardware

2008-07-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

I came across this intimidating hanging-door hardware today. It's made by a German company called Bartels. I've always thought sailboat hardware was pretty fancy, but this goes way beyond that. My first thought was, "I should make something with this hardware." But then I had second thoughts. I remembered a quote that I wrote in a sketchbook years ago, but have never been able to find and substantiate the source since then-- supposedly by the French painter Fernand Léger (1881-1955):

“The manufactured object… clean and precise, beautiful in itself… is the most terrible competition the artist has ever been subjected to.”

This hardware is indeed fierce competition, and although one reviewer once referred to the "autistic precision" of my drawings, anything I could do will look sloppy in its presence. So I will just put it here on the blog so that others may be equally shocked and awed.
But I won't rule out doing something with it eventually.

I have always wanted a rolling library-ladder, and a high-ceilinged room to accommodate it. I once lived in a decommissioned brewery in Richmond, Virginia. It used to make Richbrau beer, until about 1980 I think. These ladders would have fit well in the brewery, in this one crazy tall room that was tiled all the way up, with shiny faucets and plumbing fixtures everywhere.

Axel Haberstroh

2008-06-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

My friend Axel Haberstroh, of Karslruhe, Germany, is one of the best artists I have ever known, but you probably won't find his name on the Web. He's more interested in riding his bike than making websites for his artwork. I asked him if I could put some of his work on my blog, since he has no website for me to link to. Crazy Luddite!

I first met Axel in 1996 when he was the Wisiting Artist at Columbia College, Chicago (that was my first year as the Wood Shop Manager at Columbia). He did a six-month residency in which he painted flesh-coloured, upholstered things. He's an exceptionally good "carver"; not only did he study with Stephan Balkenhol (the equivalent, I believe, of being Balkenhol's fabricator for a while), but he also held a job carving tiny cowboys and other characters to be injected-molded in Malaysia, then packaged in German breakfast-cereal boxes...
Anyway, here are some pictures of his work.

Pokalverteidiger/ cup defender, 2003

Ohne Titel (Tischrelief, Buche), 2005

Ohne Titel (Tischrelief, Buche), 2005

Raumfahrer /astronauts
Tuschezeichnung, Papier, bemalt /ink drawing 2006
Ø 25,0 cm
Courtesy Axel Haberstroh

Silbergirl,
mixed media, 2006
Ø universe sphere 45 cm
Courtesy Axel Haberstroh

Untitled (tide)
Gips, Ton, bemalt /plaster, clay, paint, 2005/2006
h 40,0 cm
Courtesy Axel Haberstroh

Untitled (tide)
Gips, Ton, bemalt /plaster, clay, paint, 2005/2006
h 40,0 cm
Courtesy Axel Haberstroh

Another Gum Graft Down.

2008-06-10T17:06:00.000-07:00

The combination of a lifetime of aggressive brushing, a few adolescent years of braces and congenitally thin gum tissue has sent me on an odyssey of gum grafting operations in the last year and a half. My (former) dentist sent me to an old-school periodontist, who did some medieval-style grafts that didn't cover my exposed roots at all. Then I found the amazing (young, German) Dr. Jochen Pechak in Palo Alto (he also has a practice in Monterey.) He's been redoing the other doctor's grafts and doing some more where I needed them. After the first surgery six months ago-- the one my dentist had said couldn't be done-- Dr. Pechak said, "See? Piece of cake!" He's done a beautiful job. I'm very impressed, and I give him my highest recommendation.

I'm not sure if I'll be inclined to post "before and after" pictures on this blog, which is supposed to be about my thinking about art, mostly. But sometimes the attrition of the body infringes for a while on art-making. Here's a way-before picture, with the braces that caused much of the trouble (and the remnants of a perm, as well)!

Year 7, Cheltenham Girls' High School, New South Wales, Australia.

Postscript: while camping this past weekend, it was necessary to brush my teeth with numbingly cold water. I instinctively braced myself for the familiar pain-- and there was no pain! Instead of exposed roots, I have gums. It continues to surprise me.

New Project

2008-05-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

I won't discuss the details yet, as that will ruin it, but I am happy to be starting a new project. Oddly enough, I am returning to an idea I made a prototype of when I was a junior in the Sculpture department at VCU. That means I've supposedly had nineteen years to work out the kinks. With my luck, the project will turn out to be just as incomprehensible as it was the first time around. On the other hand, I don't believe artists ever become "better" artists over time. I think we become more informed, more "sensitized" to technique and historical precedent, and more prone to experiencing what I recently saw referred to (in a non-art context) as "options overload". These options can be debilitating.

Tenure and Promotion

2008-05-25T16:40:00.000-07:00

On Friday I received the official letter informing me of my tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. It has been a long and difficult journey to this point.
I'm supposed to celebrate, but I'm just too exhausted from the semester.

Enrollment-Driven

2008-05-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

From J.M. Coetzee's novel, Disgrace:

He earns his living at the Cape Technical University, formerly Cape Town University College. Once a professor of modern languages, he has been, since Classics and Modern Languages were closed down as part of the great rationalization, adjunct professor of communications. Like all rationalized personnel, he is allowed to offer one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrolment, because that is good for morale. This year he is offering a course in the Romantic poets. For the rest he teaches Communications 101, 'Communication Skills', and Communications 201, 'Advanced Communication Skills'.
Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Fiction in Art

2008-05-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

So, in thinking about the ubiquity of the idea that art must be confessional or autobiographical to qualify as art, I was reminded of Salman Rushdie's lecture at SJSU about six months ago.
He started his talk out by saying, "people suspect that a writer's work is autobiography in disguise." He proceeded to use Vladimir Nabokov as an example: he wrote Lolita, but he was not in fact a pedophile! Rushdie pointed out that knowing Nabokov's biography did not deepen his understanding of Nabokov's work at all. The "gap between public life and private life" has diminished, resulting in the contemporary assumption that there is no fiction, only confession.

Some Notes from Marfa

2008-05-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

John Waters' poster extolling the wonders of Marfa, Texas.

We're back from Marfa. I definitely know more about Donald Judd than I did before. The trip was great overall, with the exception of a few instances of mild to extreme stupidity, shame or embarrassment.

The mild cases were as follows:
1) Bruce spilled Coke into the seat next to him on the plane
2) I got a bad paper cut from the US Airways magazine

The extreme cases were as follows:
1) I threw up on the flight from Phoenix to El Paso due to extreme turbulence
2) I almost walked into one of Judd's aluminum pieces after we were told to give them a wide berth, because I was looking at something else through the viewfinder of my camera.
3) My iPhone had a random alarm set from some time in the distant past, and it decided to go off during Roberta Smith's keynote address at the symposium. Panicked, I pressed every possible button to make it stop, and it would not, so I stumbled past two seated people to bring the phone outside. I was shunned by all but a few symposium attendees after that. I thought the phone was turned off (also, the ringer was set on vibrate!) but I have since learned that the iPhone has two levels of "off" and it wasn't really off. I can never again hear the "marimba" ring on an iPhone without feeling a lurch in my stomach.
4) Once I finally mustered the courage to return into the lecture hall, I had a severe coughing fit and had to run out again, during the next speaker's talk. I decided to stay away from the symposium for the last presentation of the day.
5) I threw up on the flight from El Paso to Phoenix.

Me and Bruce in front of the Marfa Prada store. It's an art piece by the Danish/ Norwegian artist duo, Elmgren and Dragset. Actually, it's not even in Marfa. It's on the way to Marfa. We slammed on the brakes at the same time as another couple of surprised drivers-- they took the picture for us.

One of Elmgren and Dragset's photos of Prada Marfa. Photo by James Evans.

Me and Donald Judd's mill aluminum pieces at the Chinati Foundation.

One of Donald Judd's big concrete things.

The wall surrounding Donald Judd's house, with adobe bricks eroding far past the mortar.

So, on to my notes from the symposium. I will distill them down to a few things that were particularly relevant to my own philosophy of art-making or art-teaching.

Mel Bochner
Mel Bochner's (also http://www.melbochner.net/) talk was excellent. He pointed out that art writing in the 50s and 60s was "uniformly bland" except for Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Donald Judd took the stance, "Why let the critics speak for you when you're perfectly capable of speaking for yourself?" Bochner said, "I'll leave it to others to discuss" why so many contemporary artists are willing to let others speak for them.
Judd said, "I wrote criticism as a mercenary and would never have had it otherwise."
Bochner continued, "Judd wrote to get out of the studio and into the trenches... writing about art forces you to see shows you would otherwise miss and consider artists whose work you would otherwise skip." He explained that writing about others' work helps you define your thinking. "Judd's paintings from 1950 were "old-fashioned, derived from Cubism but not in a very smart way. By 1959, a newfound interest in flatness and materiality appears in the paintings. This appears at the exact moment that Judd starts writing reviews for Arts Magazine... The work slowly cools down under the combined influences of Barnett Newman, Frank Stella and Yves Klein."
Eventually, Bochner said, Judd found his own voice in 3D paintings such as the red "Untitled" piece (picture not easily available.)

"Judd wrote with the immediacy of a war correspondent," and made it clear that the artists he wrote about made work that was "worth arguing about." He had a "deceptively casual tone, (as opposed to the usual bombast)-- his voice came across as an indicator of the obviousness of his claims, which were by no means common."
He continued, saying that if Donald Judd's essay, "Specific Objects," was a manifesto, it was "reticent for a manifesto, making its claims in oddly general terms."
"Specific Objects," (1965) begins: "Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other."

Bochner eventually moved on to talk about the importance of "things as a whole" to Judd, citing his comparison of Brunelleschi's Badia di Fiesole to Alberti's Palazzo Rucellai. Judd' opinion was that Alberti's building is the lesser of the two because its important relationships occur within the parts (windows, etc) rather than within the whole (ratios and proportions.)

Bochner then pointed out that Judd posed the same problem for artists of his generation as Picasso had for artists of his own: "you had to either go over, around, or through him." Some artists responded to Judd's emphasis on "wholeness" by exploring fragmentation and process art, as a rejection of "specific objects".

David Raskin
David Raskin made interesting points but they were less salient to my own concerns.

Richard Ford
Richard Ford gave a fascinating and entertaining talk about Donald Judd's writing, from a writer's point of view. I will elaborate later, but here are the most important points for now:
"There's a big difference between thinking about someone else's work and thinking about it so that others can understand it."
"A practitioner can always make a philosopher nervous."
Quotes Judd as saying "No-one but a working artist should teach art. Otherwise it's like a non-plumber teaching plumbing."

Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith: "Artists don't own the meaning of their artwork. They have a say in it, but they don't own it."

Richard Shiff
Richard Shiff: "Judd's work is about our (the viewer's) perception, not about psychoanalyzing the artist."

Alan Antliff
Alan Antliff: talked about Donald Judd as an anarchist, and the anarchist imperative "to stop being represented and represent oneself."
He said that Judd called art that was critical of other art "parasitic". Artists should replace the flawed art with better art.
In reference to Judd's often-expressed concerns about the life of a piece of artwork once it leaves the artist's control, Antliff said, "It's a tricky path once the art leaves the studio. The way Judd dealt with this was to take control, to write about his own work."

Notes from the Panel Discussion
Bochner: Judd's definition of specificity: don't make your work around generalities-- make it around things you know from your own experience.
Both Judd and DeKooning set a definition of style that was a huge hurdle, causing many artists to fall on their face. Another example of this kind of stylistic hurdle was Philip Guston. A number of bad artists came out of Philip Guston, but they were not Guston's fault. To make Guston's work required an understanding that couldn't be bypassed by merely imitating his "look".
Ford: Judd was more interested in the art of criticism than in the criticism of art. Much of his writing was for effect, it was not always "truthful".

More soon...

The "Self" is our Principal Burden

2008-04-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Richard Sennett's book, "The Fall of Public Man," (Alfred A Knopf, 1977.) (The book was included in one of the course syllabi of Anthony Raynsford, the architectural historian who will be joining SJSU in the Fall.) This paragraph seemed to address one of the chief problems I have faced for many years as an art professor: the deep-seated belief among students and others that the sole purpose of art is to "express" the "inner psyche" of its maker, rather than to find and interpret interesting relationships among the objects and ideas of the world through which the artist navigates. Sennett writes:

Few people today would claim that their psychic life arises by spontaneous generation, independent of social conditions and environmental influences. Nevertheless, the psyche is treated as though it had an inner life of its own. This psychic life is seen as so precious and so delicate that it will wither if exposed to the harsh realities of the social world, and will flower only to the extent that it is protected and isolated. Each person's self has become his principal burden; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which one knows the world. And precisely because we are so self-absorbed, it is extremely difficult for us to arrive at a private principle, to give any clear account to ourselves or to others of what our personalities are. The reason is that, the more privatized the psyche, the less it is stimulated, and the more difficult it is for us to feel or to express feeling.

And later, he continues:

Masses of people are concerned with their single life-histories and particular emotions as never; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation.

The search for a new "category" other than "art", from my prior post, could perhaps involve the prerequisite that the new thing not be about "self-expression".

Escaping the Category of "Art"

2008-04-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

On the subject of Olafur Eliasson, Peter Schjeldahl says:

"...there should be a nice, clean, special word other than "art" for what he does, to set him apart. There won't be. "Art" has become the promiscuous catchall for anything artificial that meets no practical need but which we like, or are presumed or supposed to like."

-from his review of the Olafur Eliasson retrospective, the New Yorker, April 28, 2008.

Momus Song

2008-04-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

I was remembering the the beginning of a song by Momus, (Nick Curry) from about 1987, called Bishonen, presumably inspired by Yukio Mishima's writing.

I was born in the town of Paisley, in early 1960
And placed in the care of an old, determined bachelor
A strict disciplinarian, a passionate antiquarian
His collection of myths and legends was spectacular

Here's a current Momus song from his blog (http://imomus.livejournal.com/). Actually, it says it's his cover of a never-released David Bowie song from the 70s.

Me and Will Oldham!

2008-04-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

I got to meet a longtime hero, musician Will Oldham, today. He's doing a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. He said he's never done this sort of thing before. I asked him to pretend like he was my best buddy long enough to get a picture, so he did:

Me and Bonnie Prince Billy, AKA Will Oldham

He had a brand new rocking chair from Target, and a banana, in preparation for being on display all day at the Headlands Open House. He talked about the elephant seals you could hear from his studio. He said something like, "Imagine the top fifteen most horrible sounds you've ever heard: vomiting, screaming, etc. The cute little baby elephant seal looks up at you with its massive black eyes and then suddenly makes all fifteen of those noises in succession."
I hope he doesn't mind my paraphrasing him.

New Artist's Statement

2008-03-27T21:55:00.000-07:00

In the process of applying for a couple of residencies, I ended up writing a new artist's statement. It's not radically different from my others, but hopefully clearer. One residency asked for a 400 word statement. This one is 403. They can ignore the last three words.
I'm posting this because I edit harder when I have the possibility of being embarassed by something I've written. This is a temporary place to edit it before I put it up on the website.

Statement March 27, 2008

I make objects and environments, and vector-based drawings that also turn into objects such as didactic-looking wall charts, enameled metal tiles, or wallpaper. I have also produced some animations with the help of another artist. Most of my work explores our apparent cultural preference for virtual or simulated experiences and things in favour of their “authentic” or “natural” counterparts.

I intend for most of my projects to appear as awkward, misguided solutions to contemporary problems. For example, when I designed the galvanized and chain-link trees depicted in Surrogate: Modular Outdoor Fixture after Hurricane Katrina, I imagined a mass shipment of soulless steel trees issued by the government to restore the devastated Louisiana landscape. Another piece, Ride, supposes that we might prefer the predictable, virtual experience of riding a mechanized “bucking bronco” ride rather than the live horse that plods in circles below, powering the contraption.

Crucial to all of my projects is the choice of materials that will best communicate a given idea. I am most skilled as a woodworker, but I need to learn how to work with a new material for every new project. I approve of sculptor Tony Cragg’s attitude towards materials use. He has written:

Because of the way and speed in which we produce new materials and objects, we do not have the time to develop a meaningful relationship with these materials. Trying to give these things more meaning, mythology and poetry is the clear predicate of art in this century.

Rather than forming a material in order to infuse it with meaning, though, I’m interested in allowing the industrial or commercial connotations of a material to direct the meaning of the artwork. I find it hard to distinguish between materials and products, since most materials I purchase are in no way raw, but are coherent things in themselves, laden with associations.

I’m fascinated by the notion of style, which I consider an inevitable byproduct of any juxtaposition, accumulation, shaping or connection of materials. Even as I intentionally design dysfunctional solutions to ambiguous problems, I try to do so elegantly, saturating each object with art-historical (and design-historical) references. These range from the aesthetics of museum display and “cabinets of wonder” in my early kinetic pieces (please see Quicktime movies on my website, http://www.shannonwright.org) to the Victorian decorative excess in my wallpaper that glorifies vigorously healthy urinary systems. This wallpaper and several upcoming pieces resemble designed products for mass consumption, while also attempting to critique the culture that would encourage their production.

Some Artists Who Confound our Perception of Space (and some that I just like for other reasons).

2008-02-25T21:46:00.001-08:00

Paul Klee
I came across this watercolour painting by Paul Klee for the first time the other day. If I've seen it before, I don't remember it. I think it's a brilliant analysis/ parody of the conventions of pictorial space, with its shifting horizon lines and transparencies. The application of the "scientific" perspective-construction approach to a flat stick-figure is cool, and like so much of Klee's work, the painting seems uncannily "ahead of its time".

Uncomposed Objects in Space, 1929

Thomas Huber
(b. Zurich, 1955)
I first discovered Thomas Huber's work around 1990, and his work has continued to amaze me ever since. I'm particularly interested in his experimentation with different (and conflicting) levels of pictorial space "beyond" the picture plane. As described on Galerie Akinci's website,

Huber conceives of the pictorial space as a place to live. The fact that paintings are open on the spectator's side means that the spectator can enter the picture. According to Huber, the painting is not a surface but a boundary, a dividing-line between appearance and reality.

I'm also interested in the references to "instruction" in Huber's work-- each painting seems to function (self-consciously and with ironic intent) as a sort of fable.

Lachen und Weinen, 1996

Winkelsumme,2003

Entresol, 2003

Paolo Uccello
(b. circa 1397)
The Miracle of the Profaned Host (1467-1468, tempera on wood)
For many years, I've been fascinated by Uccello's use of cutaway views (and a sort of accordion-folded perspective) in this painting, allowing him to show multiple, seemingly discrete stories simultaneously.

Royksopp Video
The beautiful video by H5 of France for Royksopp's song, "Remind Me", achieves everything I always wanted to do with microscopic-to-macroscopic vantage points, but better, in a couple of minutes. Play video .

Maginot Line
Below: murals and frescoes from the underground tunnels of the Maginot Line.
From Wikipedia:
The Maginot Line (IPA: [maʒi'noː], named after French minister of defense André Maginot) was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defenses, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in the light of experience from World War I, and in the run-up to World War II. Generally the term describes either the entire system or just the defenses facing Germany, while the Alpine Line is used for the Franco-Italian defenses.
I really like the earnestness of these attempts to create illusionistic "outdoor" spaces beyond the claustrophobic tunnel walls. And the fact that art, in this case, acquires the status of a necessity-- a contributor to the mental health of the tunnel occupants.

Yi Eung-nok
Korean, born 1808

This is an eight-panel screen. I am inferring that the objects are depicted at approximately "real" scale. I am intrigued by the choice of one-point perspective, and how the painting suggests only a slight deepening of the space of the room. My initial take on the stacks of paper and knick-knacks was that they appeared surprisingly mundane and contemporary as subject matter. Apparently, though, these objects are "symbols of the scholar's life, evoking the Confucian ideal of self-cultivation as a duty to society" (Kenneth Baker.)

Rik Hagt
I saw this artist's work for the first time the other day, on a Dutch blog that also showed a few images of my own work. I think that what attracted me to this painting was my interest in "style", as a set of visual characteristics that allow us to immediately pinpoint the time period in which an object was made. Hagt's methodical rendering of the quirky bedspread pattern (not once, but twice), gives the room a sense of austerity. There is something about painting a picture of a patterned fabric that is sort of like painting a picture of a painting-- an interpretation of an abstraction.

Damian Ortega
This appears to be "3-D" version of the early 20th century attempts to capture rapid movement in a static painting (such as Duchamp's "The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes" of 1912, below.) I like how all the chair parts seem to compete with one another for space, and the fact that Ortega carried through with the tedious joinery necessary to realize this piece.

Marcel Duchamp

The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, 1912

Kenny Hunter
(b. Edinburgh, Scotland 1962)

This Scottish artist stylizes his figures in a way that seems to refer simultaneously to a sort of Lego aesthetic, and to the kinds of figures one might see in Chinese propaganda posters. The contexts of the figures suggest the history of "the monument", but the figures' attitudes suggest humility and isolation. Each figure's "gaze" seems to be contained within the space that is claimed by the sculpture.

Seated Couple

Reclining Man, 2004