IMAGE/OBJECT/THING

Blog Post 7

image-object-thing

For The essay THE UNCANNY to have its full effect, I suggest that any person, but especially one who is teaching an advanced contemporary sculpture class, save all their curiosities or re-readings of the texts until the week before Halloween.

I suggest this because that is the time of year in which you may receive the undivided attention of your class. The majority of undergraduate population embrace the holiday fully, especially those Greek-affiliated students.

As Dan Savage (the Samuel of my internet) prophesizes:

Halloween is being coopted as the Straight Pride parade.

If the majority of your students are Cissies or Straight Identified (which is statistically likely) by the time Halloween rolls around, they are so pent up with repressed abnormativity that they can hardly think about anything except for how wild the upcoming Carnival will be.

In this ripe time in their young intellectual lives, it is tempting get your blanket as wet as possible before laying it down in the syllabus by making them read Society of the Spectacle, thus forcing them to analyze and then drain any Jungian Joy from the experience. I will warn against this, because it breeds resentment, and you still have 5 weeks left alone in a classroom with these creatures. Their attention-spans will Mutiny.

            But the subject of The uncanny, in this anticipatory week, already sweeps through their unconscious like a deep fog, the kind which makes a hand invisible, creating a stump in the greyness, with the disembodied fingers still touching damp air.

THIS IS THE PERFECT TIME TO TEACH THEM ABOUT THAT.

            They won’t think Clown Torture is “creepy” or at least is not as creepy as IT, or Paul McCarthy’s ketchup stained Nixon is any more “gross” than the fake blood in Psycho, or that Louise Bourgeois is any more “morbid” than their own sexy-zombie-bride costume.

What they will think it is natural because it is Halloween.

It is like watching Baby Ickie goes to Burning Man. The spectacle is the new norm. It is opposite week, and so in spirit of opposite week, instead of texting, they are listening, taking copious notes, and thinking about how they are going to make the most abject possible costume out of what they have learned from the life-casting demo (that I strongly suggest you work in to this lesson plan).

Next I will offer some conversational points to aim towards while you are discussing the uncanny, I think of them in my mind as small, predominantly catholic tourist villages scattered along the main road through the Uncanny Valley.

The Segmented Body

            This is where the Addams Family keep a summer-home.  The major landmarks are: Reliquaries, Breasts on a Plate, Victorian stuff, Bruce Nauman’s hands, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, and the Woodman’s Family Estate.

Mechanimorph

            Futurism, DADA, Metropolis, Robocop, BladeRunner

Ghosts

            Japanese woodcut prints of object-based Ozu, Holy Ghost, Hamlet sees his father’s ghost, Mr. Marley, Beetleguice, That woman who put a spell on a pedestal and called it a sculpture.

Undead (Different from ghosts because they are physical/visible)

Christ, Lazarus, Night of the Living Dead, The Last of Us

Dead Animals zoo

            Dead Dinosaurs: Jurassic Park.

Dead Birds: Jury of Her Peers/Petah Coyne/Annette Massager

Dead Deer: Bambi’s mom/Kiki Smith

Dead Cow: Goya bullfighting, Picasso, Damien Hirst

Sexual Depravity

            Drive-in Double feature: Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising before Rocky Horror Picture Show. If the students are really serious, you get to show HASU!

These are some suggestions, but you can basically figure out how any primary text in the space of culture embraces or denies the uncanny, that feeling of discomfort in our bodies when we realize that we are not sure about whether other bodies work like our bodies do and what that might mean for our survival.

ARTST STATEMTNT REDUX

Blog Post 6

Artist Statement

There was a joke that my cousin Javier told my brother Gabriel when he was five years old. The joke went, "Fat and Fat-Fat and Pinch Me were in a boat. Fat and Fat-Fat fell out, who was left?”

And my brother said, “Pinch me” so my cousin pinched him.

So when my brother got home he told my mother he was going to tell her a joke, and he said, “Fat and Fat-Fat were in a boat. Fat and Fat-Fat fell out. Who was left?”  And my mother said, “Nobody.” 

My brother repeated the joke, and when my mother said “Nobody” a second time, my brother kicked her.

Its been 20 years, now, I was always older than my brother, and my Mother still talks about this; How it didn’t occur to him that he was telling the joke wrong, but still he was furious about her incorrect response. He just wanted to do to her what had been done to him.

I was talking to Vick, she lives in Boston, on the phone. We hadn’t talked in a while and I had been telling her about the program.


“Is it really all that bad?” she asked  “I was thinking of applying to something like that”. I could tell she wasn’t listening. “Victor,” I said, “Its not New York, but the girls still have hundred dollar hair cuts and sterling silver belt buckles. Next time, if they ask me, I will take the job at VICE.”

I didn’t know the situation with her work, but honestly, it didn’t sound all that bad. I said, “I’d better go, this is my only chance to get groceries this week,” and hung up. I felt it for quite a while.   

What I really should have told her is: See, Fat and Fat-Fat fell out, and in Gradschool, all that’s left is Pinch Me.

At the grocery store I remembered another joke Vick and I both heard, when I was 22, which went like this:

“There was this guy I knew. Freshman year in the dorms, I had this roommate, he was a total Asp and he just played W.O.W. and never left our room.

 One day I went over to him, on his computer, and invited him to a party. I wanted him to do cocaine with me. I thought it would bring him out of his shell. So I talked him into it, we did about 4 bumps and we went to the party. Two days later (I met a girl there and didn’t go back to the dorm right away) I saw him again and asked him how it was.

He said

“Normally when I try to communicate with people it is like they are on the other side of the wall”

And I said “Yeah…. What about that cocaine?” fully expecting him to say that on the powdery confidence, the wall was scale-able, or maybe even crumbled down, like when they tore down the berlin wall when we were kids. Instead he said

“Well….on the cocaine…. It was like not just a wall, but there were men, with machine guns, guarding the wall…. And all the checkpoints were closed.”

I never tried to hang out with him again after that, waste of my stash, am I right?”

Well when I heard this, I was totally shocked. I mean, I didn’t know anyone else could see the border.

Artist's Statement: Body to Body

My work rests in the space between response to site and response to material. The elements explored in my work are therefore two-fold: How can the sensory experience of a site be transmuted into the sensory language of a painting? How do the material conditions of the painting—in the sparest sense, consisting of paint and surface—inform the nature of this transmutation?

Last year, I discussed the difference between perception of physical reality and perception of painterly reality. I wrote: While moving in the land, the body negotiates space through the senses, through sight and touch. A painting, on the other hand, operates within a reality that follows its own internally consistent rules. Since last spring, I have directly engaged with this concept of painterly reality through the use of mark-making gesture, the application and examination of paint in differing forms and conditions, and the increasingly specific and relevant choice of surface material.

Gesture is one of the key ways in which I mediate between site and painting. I begin work by visiting a site. I spend time there, and develop a relationship to that place, body to body. When I face a painting, I use gestures that mirror my actions at the site.

The physical condition of the paint and the manner in which it is added or erased from the surface has the power to both clarify and confuse a painting’s reading, often at the same time. I combine the practice of mark-making gesture discussed above with different paint processes in order to form each painting’s composition. Recently, I have begun working with a variety of surfaces, including birch panel, paint-grip metal sheeting, and polished stainless steel sheeting. The revelations, intrusions and reflections of these substrates into the painted surface serve to disrupt my own assumptions, such as the preeminence of image over object within a painting. Instead, I use the elements of gesture, paint condition, and surface to weave connections between site and painting, between the foot’s path and the more ambiguous sensorial path within the work.

Artist Statement Critique #2

My work expresses anxiety. I am an individual, who amongst many others, struggle with past experiences in the present. Verbalizing feelings of angst visually has been a way for me to communicate those emotions. Disfigured bodies, worm like entrails, and decayed forms are constantly repeated through out my work. Each motif convey a sense of being overwhelmed, vulnerable, and discomfort. These ideas are explored through a combination of drawing, painting, collaging and printmaking. 

I am currently creating what I refer to as an “altered book”. Alter books are abandoned books which I use to create images that depict the theme anxiety. These forgotten books are exploited by being ripped apart and expose the original lettering and illustrations underneath each page. Tracing paper, water color and gesso are added to hastily cover up the destructed pages. Alluded forms of the human figure or decayed body parts are drawn repetitiously on top of these pages. While xeroxed copied worm like entrails are carefully cut and collaged on to these forms as if it were a bandaid. Holistically, this alter book is symbolic of my being. It embodies my reaction or release to anxiety. 

Additionally, I am producing monotype prints. These prints are created spontaneously. I choose very bold colors of ink such as red to suggest bodily fluids. After the ink is rolled on to the plate I make indentations into the ink. These indentations are organic like forms that cover the plate. I use my hands, paper towels, and rubbing alcohol to create textures on to the plate to give the print ghostly like layers. Ultimately, I create a print that is once again based off my reaction to anxiety and its release.

To reiterate, the images are made to illustrate the physical and psychological “harms” of anxiety. An important aspect that have been emphasized is the process to creating these images. The process of the almost obsessive redrawn entities or the continuous layering paper or painted over figures references the difficult nature of dealing with anxiety. Coincidentally, it also exhibits a therapeutic method in how I deal with anxiety.

9/24: Race

In the article "Ferguson images evoke civil rights era...", Kennedy & Schuessler write, "In the civil rights era, the visual stamp of the movement was determined by newspapers and the nightly news. Today, the imagery one sees depends on the filters one uses." Although there is a much broader spectrum of images out there since anyone with a camera and a computer can publish theirs, filters are personal criteria that narrow it down almost to what one wants to see.

There is a connection between the idea of using filters and the idea of curation. Images can be filtered/curated in a narrow sense or used to incorporate a broader perspective. Jared Sexton's article uses the term "democratic possibility" in regards to aesthetic representation. The articles about the Yams Collective from the Whitney biennial further question how curators can best represent a broad range of artists and artistic styles as well as how to shift attitudes of white supremacy within long-standing institutions that perpetuate them. Curation is a way of filtering out images that are deemed acceptable within a certain context (museums/galleries/biennials) usally by a single person (curator) - which determines who has visibility within these systems.

I agree with The Yams Collective in their interview when they say what is needed in this process of filtering/curating images is "...more transparency. Also, the idea of looking at inclusion not from the perspective of,  “we need numbers,” but actually of having the knowledge to understand different aesthetics, about where different art comes from and what that means. Not just, “We need two black people. We need an Asian. We need some queer people.” We want to see people actually genuinely appreciate the aesthetic of the diversity that is America, and propel that into the art world."

Artists / Adjuncts: The one-two punch

In the article “No, Artists Aren’t the Winners of the New Gilded Age,” Ben Davis writes, “Teaching has long been one of the most significant sources of income for artists, but work conditions for academics have been eroding for some time, as adjunct labor has become the default within the academy — in effect, the professoriate is being proletarianized.”

Since artists have traditionally turned to teaching as a way to support themselves, the rise of adjunct positions in proportion to full-time positions in US universities is a real concern. In an article in Salon.com published September 21, 2014, Matt Saccaro investigates the dire working conditions of adjunct professors. Considering the actual number of hours worked, both in and out of the classroom, adjuncts make less than minimum wage, and have no benefits or job security. Many make less than a barista and depend on food stamps. The article reports that more than half of adjunct professors in the US have to seek a second job in order to support themselves. For an artist who is already teaching as a second job, this would be a third job required to make ends meet.

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/professors_on_food_stamps_the_shocking_true_story_of_academia_in_2014/

Race

Here is an interesting op-ed article from Nicholas Kristof, following the events in Ferguson, MO this past August. He points to several studies that show how racist stereotyping results in unequal treatment in terms of medical care, academic suspensions, police responses, and employment prospects. 

In one study, researchers demonstrated an “American = White effect,” meaning that we unconsciously ascribe American identity more readily to whites than to other ethnic and racial groups. This relates to the Whitney Biennial, which attempts to represent American identity through the curation of contemporary American art. The art world unfortunately reflects the same implicit racial biases that Kristof points to in this article. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html?_r=0

Professional Practice - Labor and Capital

All That Glitters Ain't Gold 

I had to refresh my mind as to what exactly constituted the Gilded Age after reading the Ben Davis quote “No, artists aren’t the winners of the new gilded age”, at Artnet News. For some reason I always associate fake gold plaited necklaces with the word gilded. There are not many context where I find my self contemplating the word gilded, however when I do it usually conjures a specific type of person or persons who would have dealings involving the handling of fake gold jewelry under false pretense and is most often a scenario where someone has been, is now, or will be slighted. The disappointment resulting from the failed fulfillment of false expectation. Albeit an expectation ripened by the lure of a shiny veneer. What I'm getting at here, is that artist need not approach the art world industry "thinking shit is sweet". It's no different than any other corporate capitalist entity and any involvement in which need not be under any false presumption of  equity; at least not under the basis of equity alone. Make no mistake there is always something to be gained. Put plainly, even the intangible, social capital and intellectual property are traded and sourced as commodities. The thing to consider here, and I think Bob was making this point in class is that these institutions serve to sustain social structures of inequality. Knowing that, artist shouldn't be surprised when the powers that be refuse to relinquish even a portion of their power if it at all undermines their authority.  An authority rooted in the bottom-line. Like everyones parents has said to them on one occasion or another prompted from the question why?, in regards to a demand or an order. The reply was often "because I said so". Even if in actuality the parent was wrong. The vary notion of questioning their authority was quickly squelched. Art provides a forum. A place where  alternatives can be activated, to borrow an adjective from Caroline Woolard. The activation promotes reflection and reflection to consideration and sometimes implementation with a potentiality of full on adaptation. Alas, this type of endeavor does not always pay the bills and why should it? Why is there an expectation that these programs would operate any differently? Artist who make it big are no different from superstars in other fields. They made it because they hit the lottery, had the resources or garnered the most recognition. Using art as a gesture toward social change is a nobel undertaking, but artist would be remised lest they forget the work is merely a gesture to begin with. To that I say, don’t quit your day job. 

VVORKING ON IT

I suggest the following excerpt from the recent writings of Isa/be//a Bur/den/ be taken into consideration as a commentary on Labor and Capital.

“When I am on my game, I even fucking work in my sleep.

Like, after I say the real and final goodnight to whoever might be next to me, before I fall asleep, I picture the project I am working on in excruciating detail.

I am not sure if this works for other people, making yourself dream about something specific, but it is how I do it.

I feel bad sometimes like, as I’m falling asleep and my heartbeat kind of accelerates, that I am not thinking about the person laying with their leg or arm or whatever on me, but this thing laying on the floor in a different room. But they don’t know that, and they are probably already asleep and I can think about whatever I want to. Right?

Oh, and it is not like a waking dream or whatever people talk about where they can control the things that happen consciously. No, I am just me in the studio in the dream … mostly feeling exasperated and just working on my project. Like in real life, Except sometimes I solve it.

When I solve it, I wake up and write it down. Then go back to sleep and have a critique or an opening, I don’t know, like to test the reception of the project.

If the reception seems good, or the dream-critic likes it, when I wake up (like am fully awake in the real world, after coffee, breakfast, and kissing goodbye), I go to the studio and try to finish the project using the solution I got from the dream.

Most nights the ideas are bad, the critics hate it, or it melts, or breaks, or I ruin it and can never remake it because I already used the entire supply of this blue-green rubber that ever existed. But sometimes I do get the right answer that way.

I have never charged for those dreams-hours on a commissioned piece or anything, except once, when my Jungian analyst bought a set of photographs of young attractive white men playing Ping-Pong.

When I say bought, what I mean is that I couldn’t pay her and traded the photographs, at an inflated dream-value, for the therapy for my dissociative disorder (which basically means that I can still move easily though the world when my brain has turned itself off… but sometimes it turns back on and I don’t know where I am or how I got there).

            So this situation changed whenever my environment changed, and I fell off my game. All the sudden I was busy solving these crazy dream-problems that had nothing to do with my work, but had to do with all these complicated intrapersonal dynamics with people (I didn’t like) who I had met in this new, changed environment. Except, I couldn’t solve the problems.”

- Isa/be//a/ Bur/den/, courtesy of Bruce LaBruce High Quality Foundation and reprinted here with the permission of Cutie Magazine (publishing house). Copyright 2014, IB, BLBHQF. 

            In this selection of less than 500 words, the narrator uses “work” 6 times for a total of 5 different meanings.  The first use vaguely introduces the concept of labor. The second use informs the first, flushing it out as existing within a boundary of time (schedule) and space (the physical world). The third use of the word acknowledges subjective opinions about what work is. The fourth use informs the reader that the narrator claims first hand experience of working. The fifth use of the word applies to and deeply re-informs the first 4 uses outlined, as it asserts that the state of ‘working’, that the narrator experiences first hand, is perpetual.

This last use makes richer many of the definitions of “work”, but discounts one previous claim: because being perpetual implies that it is without boundaries of time and space, which the author suggested as a boundary of “work” as used in the second sentence of the work. This causes in the reader a cognitive dissonance for which there are only two solutions:

1 The Narrator is unreliable and so might be, is probably, a liar.

2 The narrator is trustworthy and a vast re-contextualization and

    re-definition of the word “work” is needed in culture at large.

The other 9 uses of the word “work” are meant to sway the reader’s view of the narrator towards the second solution.