9.30.08

Disturbed by the countless news reports that there had been a terrible upset at Wall Street, I decided to journey into the heart of the disaster to see if what they were saying were true.

Things have indeed taken a turn for the worst at Wall Street. In the wake of such extreme circumstances, a sort of primitive conformism has gripped the region. At what appears to be their main temple, men in near-identical vestments convened at hubs replete with Babel-like columns of monitors. Their screens flashed a dizzying, arcane code that alternately mesmerized and sent the cultists bolting to and fro. One could see that these codes were revered as a kind of profound scripture—though my foreign eyes could only read them as pure nonsense.

Nearby, I was horrified to see that an idol had been erected: a bronze bull, its scrotum tarnished to a shine by the ritual rubbing of the cultists, had been brazenly placed at a central intersection for all to see. Clearly a sacred symbol for these patriarchal cultists, the profane effigy embodied an aggressive, tacky virility that its worshippers appeared to aspire to with tragicomic zeal.

I wanted to return to their temple for further study, but a great clanging warned me to keep away. I shudder to think of what rituals these hysteric, homocentric extremists might engage in once they leave their unholy grounds and disperse into the night. I pray that they’ll remain in their weird containment zone, or at least return there in some regular fashion so we might observe their bizarre manners over time.

8.6.08

8.4.08

It's amazing how many art organizations operate in New York City. It's like a rainforest where strange and bizarre creatures multiply and thrive in stunning concentration. NYFA.org is a great resource for artists to job-hunt and opportunity-scour in their field. Imagine some massive stinking digital carrion (i.e., a beached sperm whale) being picked at by every desperate buzzard (i.e., artists) with an internet connection. That's my analogy for NYFA.org, and here's one of their latest job-postings that I couldn't help but reprint. Unfortunate acronym much?

VAGA (Visual Artists and Galleries Association, Inc.) is an artists' rights organization and copyright collective representing artists' reproduction rights worldwide. VAGA works closely with artists, galleries, museums, book and magazine publishers and other users of art such as, authors, television and movie producers, the press, publishers of paper products and merchandise, advertisers, universities,

*UPDATE* Amazingly, the job-posting above the VAGA posting is for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. They're lookinig for unpaid interns (another popular form of "employment" in the arts). The phenomenologist/serendipitist in me loves the pairing of these postings. I saw the last performance at the O-HT; a real brain-splitter.

8.3.08

Beginnings are awkward; there’s too much pressure to start things right. I’m going to make things easy on myself and just stumble into this, typos and all, in an attempt to get this going. I mean, isn’t birth supposed to be messy, eggshells everywhere and placenta dripping from the walls? Well, here’s my purple gush a la that traumatic water-breaking-during-birth scene from The Miracle of Life (1983).

I just deleted all of my previous posts, basically a numbing cache of papers and essays I wrote while matriculating for my MFA. It was weirdly satisfying to flush the academic pedantry into the netherworld, though this very sentence proves how such useless florid verbosity still has its grip on my prose. So what. I've accepted that being polysyllabic, drifting, and arcane is like having leprosy: it's archaic and keeps people away. Unfortunately, both strains have survived into modern times, languishing in quarantined pockets not unlike wilting aboriginal tribes.

7.7.08

I’m thinking of changing the working title of Conan Cancer to Conan Cancer (Chromo-Stone). I was surprised to discover that Oliver Stone co-wrote the barbarian flick. I’m re-watching the movie, and it definitely has a certain over-the-top, Stone-ian flair. So far, the drawing has an every-crayon-in-the-box, tutti-fruity clash going on. Small patches of color and patterns spread like rashes across a slowly drowning under-drawing drawn from the Conan the Barbarian VHS box cover. The cover art is fairly generic and characteristically awful, a painting of Schwarzenegger and his crouching valkyrie/love-interest glaring out in a clump of muscle and steel. Boris Vallejo’s work comes to mind; in fact, I wonder if he painted the cover art? I also wonder what it is that I did with all of those Valejo calendars I got as Christmas gifts when I was growing up…

It’s also funny to think how the working-title sounds like “colon cancer” and “chromosome,” not because these things are at all funny but instead how they reflect on the drawing’s look and content. Excessive, virulent growth and ecstatic cellular processes align well with the aesthetics and nature of a lot of my drawings. I’m back to thinking about drawing-as-disease and how drawings are zones of intense concentration—and why there’s still this impulse to make something pretty or beautiful. For all the apparent randomness of the production with these drawings, they’re already showing clear signs of being systematized, orderly, and otherwise considered. Even though I’m indiscriminately dipping my hand into pencil-filled cookie-tins, there is still a great deal of decision-making going on. It’s hard to unlearn craft, color-sense, and balance—after a certain point, it all becomes fairly ingrained and reflexive, involuntary-muscle-like. Still, it’s good to throw a wrench into one’s process, if not only to provide some degree of resistance and drum up a bit of variety. Then again, it’s still a willful means of generating difference, a kind of meta-control where you’re even programming the errors. So why bother?

7.5.08

One should occasionally, if not often, write indulgently about one's work. All artist statements are laborious and ill-conceived, a toxic, paradoxical mix of justification and mystification. If one of these ingredients were preferred, it should be the latter. Justifying art is like sexualizing arithmetic; earnestly weaving an arcane fog about ones work at least complies with the generative inscrutability humming at the core of any real creative act (here scrutable artists may register indignation—and here I’ll remind them that they are, in fact, arithmeticians).

7.3.08

The working title of the new drawing—the first that I’ve actually stayed with for a respectable amount of time since graduating—is Limning N.I.M.H.. It’s simple and appropriate, since the underlying blue line drawing was made from the cover of Don Bluth’s The Secret of N.I.M.H. (I picked up the VHS from a thrift store in Virginia). It’s a riot of spacey, psychedelic patterns and color on texture black paper, somewhat reminiscent of black-velvet paintings and hippy posters. I’ve realized that one thing holding me from finishing drawings is that I’m growing more impatient with the outline/fill method. With Limning N.I.M.H., I’m allowing myself to start and break patterns as I wish, resulting in a variety of marks and a layering of patterns. It’s just as precious and involved as my other work, but it’s more explosive and diverse. We’ll see. I have a bunch more like-sized toned paper in my flat file, so maybe this is just the first in a series.