All Streets, Visual Data and a Narrative Atlas: Tracing my tracks on a short derive through the internet

I belong to an online cartography community where someone posted this compelling image of all streets in the lower 48 U.S.states. The topographical features of the landscape are created by the cross-contour effects of the roads alone. No geographical features were added to this map, and yet, look how clearly defined the Appalachian Mountains are due to the routing of roads that either avoid or hug the ridges. This map was created by Ben Fry, a programmer who transfers data into visual form.

Fry's work made me think of a link that an artist friend recently emailed me: the website of Nathalie Miebach, a sculptor / basket weaver who transforms data (in this case weather and environmental changes) into visual (more specifically aesthetic) form.

And a funny little map from an excellent cartography blog by John Krygier who collaborated with Denis Wood to write Making Maps. The Narrative Atlas from Denis Wood looks fascinating.

Performance, Endurance, Monika Weiss and Baptism of Water

I've started another blog, Endurance Studio, to document a long life/art endurance project. Actually, document isn't entirely accurate because the site will become a piece of net art in itself as the narrative unfolds.

The purpose of the project is to organically narrate my shift away from material objects, which has been happening in my work and life for several years. The unburdening process is slow, often uneven and not necessarily a progression.

We shall see where the project goes and how it brings itself into form over time. For now, consider the performance work of Monika Weiss:
baptism of water

And some writing by George Quasha about her work, endurance and the body: conceiving body

March First Friday: Meditations on patchwork, collage and the grid

First Friday has come and gone without much event, which is not to say that the evening wasn't busy or that we didn't have lots of visitors.

In the midst of other projects, I've been working on some hand-made paper collages that I call Meditations (one was hanging for First Friday). I don't have any photos to post yet because the work is being professionally mounted for re-framing (and as prep for a decent photo). The Meditations are grids of inch squares of handmade paper layered on a painted ground. They're a bit like paper quilts but with a mixture of wax and other paint media.

The process and ideas are extensions from the aerials made from paper / cloth covered panels and the stitched aerials. The difference is a more structured and limited format (the grid). But all of these modes are still about the construction of a surface built from a body of coalesced materials that are molded together (almost sculpturally). There's lots of polishing and finishing that draws from ideas in painting though the processes are very different than most painting or drawing in that mark-making, the hand and image are less relevant than the surface and the object itself.

Working with similar ideas, though polishing the surface through photography, Gwenn Thomas arranges fabrics into patchwork patterns and then uses photography as her finishing tool. Here is an untitled piece where the depth of the fabrics and the shadows they cast contrast in relief to the flattening medium of photography. As such, the arrangements become representations of an object that never was constructed.

February First Friday and attachments to place

This weekend was First Friday and though we didn't have much in the way of new exhibits, I did get a chance to talk to Amanda Sparks, one of the artists in the Crave exhibit, which opened last month at UT's Downtown Gallery. I wrote about Amanda's exquisite pop-up book in the January First Friday post in which I lamented not being able to meet and talk to her about the work. But as the calendar fell, we were fortunate enough to have the show run through two First Fridays and I spoke with her about the piece, which is unlike anything I've ever seen. Here's an image from one of the pages.

Amanda told me that she learned "on the job" how to build each page by studying children's pop-up books and adapting those construction methods to her more complex and multi-faceted designs. Many of her pages included composites of (I'm guessing here) 50 or more images montaged together. It was quite the thing of beauty and delight and eloquently articulated a version of childhood in which place and possessive attachment took precedent.

And by intuitive association I'd like to add (for personal reasons which have to do with detachment from place) a link to Roni Horn's Library of Water in which the artist thoughtfully considers the geography, climate and culture of Iceland.

First Friday of 2008

First Friday was a bit too close to New Year’s Eve, I think. People were probably too partied out to show up in frigid weather for yet another event. Though what we didn’t have in quantity, was certainly made up for in quality.

Met some interesting and thoughtful people (mostly out-of-town visitors or the newly relocated) and had some engaging conversations. ‘Delight’ best describes what I felt that evening… both toward the people we met, but also upon discovery of a few remarkable pieces of art.

First, the exhibition at the UT Downtown Gallery is exceptional. The show, Crave, includes 6 artists (whose obsessive processes include some form of collage) and is curated by Matthew Garrison of PA. The curator and one of the artists, Joel Carreiro of NY, were present for the opening.

Joel, who teaches at Hunter College, constructs grid-like montages (many in concentric configurations) on large-scale wood panels. His process is quite remarkable in that he builds his pieces from medieval and baroque art imagery printed onto transfer paper and ironed directly onto the panels.

Of remarkable note is Amanda Sparks exquisite autobiographical pop-up book entitled Half a World Away, in which she reprinted and transformed childhood photos and other photographic images to create an idyllic and nostalgic fantasy world of what suburban life was or could have been. Hopefully, Amanda will be present at the February First Friday, as the show will continue through the first of next month.

And then upstairs from us at 3 Flights Up, are the delightful little snow globes of Robmat Butler in which he creates little suburban vignettes from train shop miniatures… things like dogs on diving boards under clear water with bits of snow or parked cars with rust-tinged water that looks like a the worst L.A. haze on the worst day.

My Necktie Ballgown got another try from one of our visitors. Forgive the blurry pictures; they were taken on my cellphone in dim light.

Here is the very lovely Jo-Jo. David is to her left.

And here are Daniel, David and Jo-Jo.

Pondering the new year: Endurance art, enduring life, yogic sadhana, practice, over-work and letting go

I've always cringed a bit at some of the language Linda Montano uses to frame her endurance projects... (for example). The work itself has been so strong and meaningful for me that I've been able to overlook the bothersome language and construct my own critical apparatus around it.

I'm not so much bothered by the meaning or the ideas themselves, but how they've been articulated through mystical language. As with Ana Mendieta's performances being cast in the understandably discredited discourse of earth mothers and goddesses, there's so much more to the work than those narrow and clichéd explanations. For instance in this interview, which includes Tehching Hsieh, Montano talks more about some of the social aspects of her work – specifically the endurance project with Hsieh and a rope.

For some time now, I've wanted to write a bit about Endurance Art and some artists that I most admire – Linda Montano, Tehching Hsieh and On Kawara in particular. I just haven't been sure how to say all that's jumbling around in my head and relate it back to my own practice in a meaningful way. I considered just putting up some links to their work and then talking more about my own endurance processes. Links and process notes don't seem an adequate documentation of where my head has been recently, let alone my own progression through the ideas of endurance – from being a college student looking for art and meaning in the mundane and functional to a theory driven graduate student situating those same ideas within a critical discourse to a studio artist plowing through to deadlines, resting and repeating. And then... there's that pesky psychologizing and mysticizing language that sometimes attempts to explain acts of enduring art or enduring life.

Enduring life. I put those two words together because I'm intrigued by the ambiguous meaning of the phrase, which could mean a life that endures and is ongoing and self-perpetuating... or could also mean a life that must be suffered through. I see the phrase as a mirror to the acts of endurance art in that the acts are simultaneously poetic (even abstract) and drudgingly mundane as they are carried out over time. They endure only in their presence (as they're ongoing) and then finally only in their documentation. The very nature of endurance art is fleeting... non-enduring.

The endurance project may be a metaphoric, allegorical or abstracted representation of some interaction in the world or a demonstration that exposes (through the doing) the limits and parameters of that same material and social world. The acts also have potential to become a psychological "acting out" as in an hysterical manifestation of a personal or social ill, which before Freud would have been called religious or spiritual (in its more socially accepted forms and in the language of Montano) and called insane or "demon-possessed" in its less adaptable and more reviled forms.

But endurance art ultimately is significant because it is not an "acting out" but instead a conscious, willful and focused act. And here the language of spirituality comes back around because I'm reminded of the yogic practice of sadhana where willful and present intention and attention is key. Acts and practices mean something because they do take effort and because the effort hones a level of skill, strength and accomplishment with regular practice. As well, they're meaningful because they have a frame / focused attention / limits around them.

But acts of will can also be acts of letting go... letting go of a compulsion, habit or even a practice. For instance, for the workaholic, it could be a stop to whatever s/he's doing to make room for something other than the usual. The usual might even be that which has previously constituted a practice or an art (as mentioned above) or a project that has come to the end of its cycle.

Within any art practice are cycles of work, completion and letting go, but with endurance art these cycles (set in time) are as much a part of the content as any other element. They begin with the compulsive or repetitive action, the deliberate intention of setting a length of time and the act of enduring it. In this process... time, the spending of time and the passing of time are what become foregrounded. On Kawara demonstrates this most eloquently with his Date Paintings. And so, with his work, I end the pondering.

Drawing as in walking as in mapping as in writing as in remembering

Here’s an interesting project by Chinese artist, Mengbo Feng. He uses his PDA and a GPS module to draw Chinese characters on city street maps as he walks.

Though the work is very different, the project reminded me of Wenda Gu’s work with Chinese characters and hair. Gu is a Chinese born conceptual artist living and working in N.Y. Several months ago he exhibited an installation that included curtains of hair with characters at UT’s Ewing Gallery as part of the group show Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese art from China and the US.

Gu also exhibited some of this work at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2006 as part of a dialogue with Mee-ping Leung, a friend and colleague of mine who came into CalArts the same year I did. We were both pursuing our MFAs when she began Memorize the Future, which grew in size over the years and went on to be exhibited in several venues. Both links show details of the installation which included hundreds of child-sized shoes molded from human hair.

Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh interview link

My influences have been—my grandmother, who took out her false teeth at most family gatherings and sang, "If I Had the Wings of an Angel"; my mother, who is a painter; Lily Tomlin; Marcel Duchamp; Eva Hesse, and St. Theresa of Avila.

Linda Montano

Quoted from this interview about her year long endurance project with Tehching Hsieh and a rope.

Bas Jan Ader, poetry, presence, the body and risk

This weekend Frank and I had one of our customary coffee-fueled conversations about art and literature. This conversation was specifically about poetry and poetic forms. I told Frank that I used to enjoy poetry (both the reading and the writing) more than I do now. Though I wasn't quite sure why, poetry no longer satisfied expectations I've grown to crave in an art experience. Anymore I tend to seek out metaphor in other forms, mostly visual...

And that prompted me to think about the work of Bas Jan Ader, whom I hadn't thought about in some time. And then I searched around and found these documentations of Bas Jan Ader's Falling performances on you tube.

To me, Ader's work is satisfying in the way Peter Callesen's Dying Swan is satisfying. Here are some of my thoughts on Callesen's work. The performances have a quiet intelligence, humor and an emotional punch without sappiness. He can laugh at himself and his frail but aspiring human efforts without being self-deprecating or narcissistically spiteful. And while the pieces are concise and clearly articulated, they are also open-ended.

The work has qualities similar to other conceptual / performance-based work that resonates with the sensibilities in some of my own modest performances (example 1, example 2). Other artists that came to mind during our conversation were Vik Muniz's Pictures of Clouds, Yoko Ono's Painting to See the Skies and her Smoke Painting and Ana Mendieta's Siluetas.

Because Frank teaches poetry and other literature and has a personal stake in poetry and in me being friendly toward the form, he wanted to find out what it was that I was or wasn't responding to in the written poetic forms.

So what I was able to tease out that I'm not responding to in poetry is the formalism. It's both the formal and expressionistic mark – the literal mark of language or the expressive line – that doesn't hold my attention as it used to. On the other hand, an imprint, a surface or even Pollock's drips are, to me, far more interesting as a trace of absence than the expressive line of other abstract expressionists.

As we talked more, Frank figured that it was the presence and the body that had such resonance with me. And I think he's right. What remains important to me is that there is something always at risk with the body, and any attempts to get around that risk, whether they be willful aspirations for artistic immortality or claims of some promise of spiritual immortality, feels horribly deluded and false to me. It's the impermanence and the flailings that are relevant... at least in my mind.

That being said, I still have a high regard for prose poetry and for fiction that reads like poetry and for work written in present tense (as Frank remarked I often write in present tense myself). My favorite novel is still Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. Curiously, even the title... It seems so obvious now.

The body is always at risk and carries with it the obvious social markers of race and sex... even class. Bodies with and bodies without medical or dental care carry very different evidence that becomes increasingly visible over time. Lack of education or proper nutrition leave their mark on the body as well.

All this is on my mind because today we had a meeting at the museum about an upcoming exhibit of Tim Davis' photographs of canonical paintings, Permanent Collection. I was struck looking at the catalog images of just how bodily and material Davis' photos of art historical "masterpieces" are. The history of each painting becomes embedded in Davis' photos – not just in the way the artist positions himself in a relationship between the museum lighting and the painting itself, but in the age and surface that is exposed with that relationship to the artist-as-viewer. Remarkable. I was really struck by these images and can hardly wait to see them in one of our galleries next week.

Lest we forget the reasons we left Los Angeles…

…David Maisel will show us our immersion, remind us of our experiences and invoke our readings, i.e. Mike Davis.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got on the internet and began searching for more aerials of Los Angeles and happened upon the work of David Maisel – specifically the Oblivion series (Los Angeles) and Terminal Mirage series (Great Salt Lake in Utah).

I feel terribly ignorant not knowing this work, but glad I found it at this time when it's so relevant to my own work. I must have come across it before now… and even have vague memories of reading something in Art in America (5 or 6 years ago?) about someone’s exquisite aerial photography of toxic sites. Something must have lodged in my subconscious… though I can recall no names or specific details about the work.

Maisel’s photos of Los Angeles are haunting. When I look at them I’m both mesmerized and simultaneously sinking inside. I loved so many things about living in L.A. (the diversity, the people, the food), but there were other things that deeply disturbed me and contributed to my misery.

I don’t remember a day of living in L.A. when I didn’t feel trapped and implicated, when I wasn’t engulfed in noise, pollution and over-consumption. I was weighted with an enormous guilt for the near decade I was there – always thinking of the environmental destruction: the driving, the water consumption where there is none, the city sucking the life and resources from elsewhere to support its overgrowth.

This is why Frank and I were so eager to leave. So whenever we begin to feel nostalgic for L.A., we have these images to remind us of why we left… which makes me think that, as cultural and historical documents, they’re already embedded with a future potentiality for viewers to feel both loss for the great project, regret for even pursuing it and resignation that it could have been no other way.

But of course, the consumption and environmental destruction are not limited to L.A., and a lot of what I associate with L.A., SUVs in particular, were less to do with place than time. What was happening on a grand scale in L.A. was happening in sprawling suburbs across the country. There seems to have been a consumption explosion that just happened to coincide with our years in L.A. It’s not just L.A. – the entire U.S. is caught up in the all-consuming destruction. We are all implicated.

I wonder about those North Americans who haven’t had their consciousness raised through lived experience in a place like L.A. where the reality is visible and undeniable – will they continue to ignore the seriousness of the problems because it’s not in their face every day? Does the whole landscape and climate have to transform into versions of Los Angeles before we stop and take notice? And if we can’t even take notice, what has to happen before we take action? I say this because at least in a place like L.A., there is a discourse about the problems (because they are so obvious and difficult to ignore) and activism on a grand scale to meet the grand scale of the destruction. At the same time, many Angelenos adopt a complicit resignation because of the enormity of the situation and recognize their individual powerlessness to effect change on the scale necessary. The problems are deep and structural and bigger than any one of us.

Below are some quotes from David Maisel that I pulled from this interview where he discusses the Salt Lake images and sublime beauty:

…I think there’s also a twinned process of seduction and betrayal involved- a viewer might be seduced by the colors and forms of these images, and then, in a sense, betrayed once knowledge of the subject becomes clear. It parallels the way we are seduced, and ultimately betrayed, by a certain level of consumerism that exacts such tolls on the environment. Yes, I want my SUV and my wide-screen TV and… oops! There goes the ozone layer! Imagine that!

…I’m motivated by the notion of discovering and revealing sites that might otherwise remain unknown or unseen- be they clear-cut logging sites, strip mines, cyanide leaching fields, etc. My photographs of these sites are intended to be reflective of some sort of internal, psychological state as much as they are documents of a particular site. And, I consider myself a visual artist first and foremost- as opposed, perhaps, to a photojournalist or a documentarian. I'm most interested in making images that have a kind of depth-charge, that have a certain poetic or metaphoric impact visually.

…Beauty has been seen as problematic for the visual arts in general because we no longer trust beauty as a serious means of investigation. But it can be. Beauty wedges into artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not yet know or understand. For an object or an image to possess beauty does not mean that it is empty of meaning or shallow. In fact, beauty can be incendiary. It can be subversive. It can make us cringe.

From Philadelphia with LOVE

Frank, my marriage partner of 10 years, is an academic and newbie PhD in English Literature. As such he has been, with nearly every other English Lit academic, at the MLA conference in Philadelphia for the last several days interviewing for tenured faculty positions and presenting one of his articles.

Just thought I’d share this photo of Robert Indiana’s sculpture at LOVE Park that he emailed me from his cell phone:

Remiss in Writing

I’m still here... though busy.

I found an old note that I wrote to myself on an discarded library card that read: Realism doesn't trust memory.

It prompted me to reread Susan Sontag's article, "On Photography," which then prompted me to go to the used book store to find a copy of her 2001 book of the same title. I didn't find On Photography, but did find (and purchase):

Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn

Cold War Pastoral, documenting the photographic work of John Kippin as he explores the Greenham Common transformation from military base to site of protest from the Womens' Peace Movement to common land

Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art

and some fiction: George Saunders' Pastoralia

Ana Mendieta, some links

A Whitney Museum survey of Ana Mendieta's work

Guggenheim art lesson

a Washington Post article by Blake Gopnik

Peter Callesen, the dying swan is dying, poetics, metaphor and hysteria

The Danish artist Peter Callesen says almost everything I've ever wanted to say about loss, beauty, nostalgia, over-reaching and falling short.

So rather than keep these things clutched to my chest, I thought I would share the work of one of my favorite artists. In particular, check out his The Dying Swan is Dying performance and the beautifully poetic papercuts.

Tangentially related to the aforementioned site... Something I've been thinking about... the relationship between metaphors in art and hysteria (in the Freudian / psychosomatic sense).

Maybe this artistic hysteria I'm thinking of is a condition of oppression (like in Freud's Victorian female patients) or a condition of late capitalism / consumer society. The hysteria – where the artist acts out some sort of poetic representation of a cultural malady or personal trauma (because I hardly believe the two can be separated) – seems to be most prevalent in post-modern and contemporary art probably because of the economic, political and theoretical times.

So I'm wondering what a feminized version of Callesen looks like as his work is so much about the subject of the male artist. What are the feminized forms that represent her own particular reaching and falling? How much of the feminine range of motion is kept in check by social forces? ...as opposed to the more physical forces that Callesen comes up against in living and dying and making boats that (don't) float on water or cardboard castles that (don't) withstand rain.

One of the interesting things about Callesen's performances is that they attempt to stand as something of a spectacle outside of cultural forces, while performing the myths of culture. All that might touch him is mockery or shame (the social internalized) rather than actual prohibitions, regulations and checks on his actions. Only physics and weather come to actual bear on his spectacles.

Curiously, with the paper sculptures... the ideas are the same, but when moved into the realm of pure representation (where the artist's body and actions are absent or left only as traces), his attempts are articulated with perfect success... no in the world (body) failing or falling here. All we see are architectural feats of mastery.

again with the aerials

NASA satellite images

Of particular interest is this image of deforestation in Bolivia.

Curiously, and only an intuitive and visual association, the deforestation images remind me of some of the patterns found in Bauhaus textiles. This is probably because my friend Krissa just gave me a book, Bauhaus Textiles: Women artists and the weaving workshop, that I've been looking through. On that topic, here's a great little blog entry about Anni Albers and Bauhaus Textiles.

instances of resistance (with a bit of assistance)

A few years ago, I started a photo project, "instances of resistance," in which I searched out things growing wild in the city streets. It was sort of an extension of my thesis project Fallow where I exhibited a series of narrated still video shots of my walk through an untamed and overgrown space in Los Angeles.

here's the first image of the instances of resistance project taken in 2002

I bring this up because I just happened across the work of the artist Helen Nodding aka Ladybird, and wanted to share...

her weed enclosure

and her moss graffiti with recipe

Situationists meet Wearables

Net_Dérive, by Atau Tanaka and Petra Gemeinboeck with the collaboration of Ali Momeni

And for the upcoming season...

Love these Tree Cozys by Carol Hummel

In the ways "we mock our eyes with air" and more about skies

And one of those near perfect pieces of conceptual work: Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Clouds
...right up there with Yoko Ono’s Painting to See the Skies

"It is one of the first imaginative exercises we perform in the world, looking up to find a horse, a flower, a belching dragon."