Finished something

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!

Richbrau, Continued-- and a bit of reality.

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

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

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.

Axel Haberstroh

My friend Axel Haberstroh, of Karslruhe, Germany, is one of the best artists I have ever known. I first met Axel in 1996 when he was the visiting artist at Columbia College, Chicago (that was my first year as the Wood Shop Manager at Columbia). He did a six-month residency there. He's an exceptionally good carver; not only did he study with Stephan Balkenhol, 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.

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 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

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.