The Psychogeography of Art School, Raphael’s Transfiguration, sequences, stills, what's above and what's below

Some weeks ago I gave an artist's talk. Coincidentally, the week I prepared my talk was the same week I taught Renaissance painting in the Art Appreciation course. As I traced the development of my ideas and looked at the work of Raphael (et al), I was reminded of the originary point of a longstanding conceptual / formal concern that began when I was still an undergrad student.

Undergrad studies in art school typically consist of ½ studio courses and ½ art history courses. So, as a young art student, I spent half my time working with materials and the other half writing / using language to talk about images and ideas. Through the labor itself, a dichotomous structure (shifting between sequential and holistic) was building in my mind that would make me susceptible to ideas and concerns I still pursue.

One of the art history courses I took in those early years was Italian Art. For this class, as with most art histories, we had to write a weekly one page response paper on a work of our choice. One particular week, I wrote about Raphael's Transfiguration because I found something conceptually / structurally compelling about the artist's representation of time in a 2-D medium, which is obviously not time-based.



The Transfiguration depicts a story told in the Christian Bible in which Jesus is transfigured on the mount while the disciples below attempt to heal (unsuccessfully) an epileptic boy. The painting represents what's in the text, but also represents what the text cannot – the simultaneity of two separate events.

In the gospel verses, the events appear one after the other. Through the basic limitations of language, we experience a lag as one short narrative follows the other. However, in the painting, the events appear together as they are in the real time of the story -- coexisting in a single moment. Though the eye still moves around the image creating something of a sequence, the overall impression is holistic and simultaneous. Even the separation of places (the above with Jesus and the below with the disciples) are collapsed into a single place within the space of the painting.

So with this painting and my short response paper to it, I began to wonder not only about the holistic visual representation of narrative sequences, but about turning still images (non time-based media) into sequences – turning Raphael's Transfiguration on its head, so to speak. I wondered: what if the given were the image and not the text? What if the image gets translated into language? What if there were no translation but, instead, the syntax of a collection of isolated images?

Eventually, I began to pull stills from video and arrange them into other narratives. Like The Transfiguration, these "Horizon Line" pieces are about the sequence and the still and about what's above and what's below.

The future belongs to them: drifts through downtown, equestrian statues, monuments to shade and reversing nostalgia in a cold place

I have a mental image: a 4 miles square grove of shade trees in the desert... lost objects that never were. And I'm thinking about this passage from Guy Debord:

A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of partial, less difficult projects, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration from the locations where we are used to seeing them.

For example, in the preceding issue of this journal Marcel Mariën proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby — the future belongs to them — the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge, which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history...

Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
Guy Debord
Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955)

As the leaves turn and weather goes cold here in Massachusetts, I'm beginning to change my expectations. I'm no longer that person who lives in a hot climate, but am someone who lives in a cold place... with snow. I have a bit of fear about this unknown thing called 'New England Winter,' but also a child-like curiosity about another way of living and moving about in the landscape that involves things like snowshoe lessons (??) and cross-country skiing and driving with special tires. Compared to my previous experiences, I might as well have moved to a different country.

Not long before moving from Knoxville, TN to Fitchburg, MA, I made an unremarkable walk from my studio to the post office, which is to say I walked from one end of downtown to the other in the heat of the day. As I walked, I became increasingly aware of how much my dread of relentless sunshine (a mental holdover from living in Los Angeles for so long) and the oppressive heat (in which we were to pack up and move house again) was directing my movements through the city.

Being on the academic calendar, Frank and I always move in the hottest months. Three summers ago, we packed up and moved across country from Los Angeles, CA to Knoxville, TN in record heat through multiple desserts. It was a wretched and cursed event involving a car break down in the Mojave Desert and the heat exhaustion of one of our cats, Salvador. Salvador was so traumatized by the heat and sunshine that he, for several weeks after the move, cried and ran away whenever a patch of sunlight came through the house windows.

Like Salvador, I'd become over-sensitized (if not outright traumatized) by years and years of relentless heat and baking sunshine. To survive, I covered with hats and long, lightweight sleeves and searched out pockets of zigzagging shade that I would cross streets to follow. My shade-finding skills had become so naturalized and reflexive that I hardly even thought about them anymore, which is why this unremarkable walk across Knoxville's downtown is still something I'm thinking about.

As I made my way through the streets, my goal of getting to the post office became secondary, and at times contradictory and back-tracking, to the shade-searching desire. Becoming more aware of the impulses that were driving my walk, I started to see how I was always walking ahead of myself, scouting and calculating... the buildings on one side of the street, the overhang on the other, the trees by the sidewalk, the two-block alley, the park with more trees, the archways and courtyard. My search for shade had become an almost obsessive-compulsive kid's game akin to not stepping on cracks.

From this awareness, I began to sketch out mental "shade maps" and "sun maps" of different cities that change with the seasons and times of day. I wondered what it might be like to use one shade map to refer to pathways in another city. I thought about the Guy Debord quote. I thought about taking the Thomas Guide from L.A. and using it to map my way through Boston. The act could be my own "feeble beginning" and play on Nostalgia in that I'd be making visible what I'm already practicing: imposing the past on the future, learning about what is unfamiliar through what is known, designating categories where before there were none.

It would be near impossible for me to drift through any city free of all categories without some severe mental impairment (intentional or not). I mean, I'll continue to know what a subway is, what east and west are, which side the ocean is on... though that one may be easier to upset than other categories since my whole west coast sense of direction was based on my orientation to the ocean and the mountains.

So from this cold place with the ocean on the east, I'm wondering which features of the landscape will consistently navigate me and what role snow will play in directing my drifts through New England.

The City Without Clothes and the 4-year process

For the New Year, I've been doing a major de-stashing -- donating and giving away to fellow artists many fabrics and materials for which I no longer have use. In the process, I've been clearing out some older work as well. Some pieces I'm re-working or mining for materials, others I'm destroying, but many I'm bringing back out into the light of the studio as that's often my process.

I've heard other artists say similar things about their own work -- that from its conception to the final completion, a piece or series often undergoes about a 4-year process. Some ideas are born fully formed, but many need to ferment in a notebook or project box or even sit partially-formed until mature enough to make their way into the world.

Below is one of those works-in-progress that I started while I was still in Los Angeles. It's another in the aerial / psychogeography series. Forgive the dimly lit image.

City Without Clothes (potentials of paradise) work in progress

The materials are velvet, velour and fleece. The colors may be a bit difficult to read in this dim studio image, but they are very vibrant, yet fleshy: reds, golds, purples, browns, pinks and tan.

In the de-stashing, I also brought out small buckets of velvet buttons in some of these colors that I'd like to add to the piece once I get it stitched together on the machine.

A couple of links in reference to the title:

"The Naked City" is Guy Debord's 1957 psychogeographic map of Paris. Here's an interesting English language article with an image of Debord's map (mid-article). The paper proposes contemporary collaborative and digital mapping of usage (rather than the geometry) of urban spaces.

The "Body without Organs" is a deterratorialzing term from Deleuze and Guattari. This Wikipedia entry offers one explanation that's pretty easy to understand.

My work-in-progress is a sort of map to nowhere (as in utopia). It's bodily, bold, joyful and full of hope. It's personal, in that it's potentially everywhere I may have imagined living, but have yet to even visit. It articulates possibilities and parallel lives that have yet to be lived.

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.

Quote On Photography

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been – what people need protection from. Now nature – tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

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.

Situationists, psychogeography and the derive

another concise explanation of these ideas

The text on this page is taken from The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age by Sadie Plant:

"...to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed."

For further reading, nothingness.org has the most extensive library on the SI.

deterritorialization concise

"A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world."

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.

here's a link to a course description which might be helpful in explaining deterritorialization

Situationists meet Wearables

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