"And Then
One day you find that nothing fits anymore.
Your passive agressive prose and your riteous, indignant itunes playlists, your vague blog posts and your general feeling of mystery and strife...."
That's from a few months ago.
Jeez.
Mystery and strife indeed.
I abandoned thing thang some time back, but I intend to say a thing or two about a thing or two some day soon.
Please check out my new webbie, at www.josiemorway.com.
I intend to transfer the art bloggin' there soon.
Thankye
gingerly.
Have I Mentioned
that I have a show up at the Audubon Society headquarters in Bristol right now?
No, of course I haven't. It's been a month without mentionings. An unmentioning, though thankfully not unmentionable, month.
Nonetheless, I have a show of six big 'uns up at the "education center" of the Audubon Society, and they'll be up through the end of June. I was invited to show here after the coordinator of the center saw my work in another show and saw the... uh... connection. I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I'd never thought of it myself, nor had I been to the center until I hung my show.
But it's delightful and waterside and trail-filled and ornithologically responsible and if you have a free spring day and a penchant for wandering and looking upwards, you should make a visit. Also, if you're going to go all that way to Bristol, you may as well make a detour to Eskimo King in Swansea for soft serve. This year, someone has concientiously and carefully used a black marker to change the flavor "Rum" to "Bum".
***************
Also
I will be showing an entirely different sort of piece in the Sight Of Sound group show at the fantasticfantabulous Machines With Magnets gallery for the next two weeks. Other artists in the show include Huckleberry DelSignore and Natalie Wright, among a hefty slew of others.
Machines With Magnets Gallery is quite possible the best gallery space in the state (or in the whole northeast), located in the same building as the Machines With Magnets Studio, which is quite possibly the best recording studio in the state (or in the whole northeast). The whole MWM establishment is run by a small group of people (my favorites in the whole northeast) who deserve all of the success and admiration that they're starting to receive.
Guess which one of us is really Keith.
This piece is different from my others in that it is miniscule. Three panels, each only 1 foot by 2 feet. Also it features flat, simple outlines. Hmm.
Other things, too. I'm sure I'll post like a madwoman soon enough.
Good night!
What the...?
Thanks for asking.
An Anonymous Someone commented on my last post:
" Personally, I think the word for that is 'rapacious'.
It is the basest of base behaviour in animal life. There is some artistic value, perhaps, in depicting it in avian subjects' dining habits, but I would seriously ask myself "Why am I showing this to people?" if I were you."
And I’m so grateful, not just because it means that people are reading this and willing to jump in and discuss, but also because it allowed me to spend all of yesterday thinking about food.
I agree with Mr./Ms. Un-Named, insomuch as I think that I should ask “why am I showing this to people” more vigorously of everything I make. And I agree that feeding is the most basic of activities; but I draw that distinction between “basic” (read: natural and necessary and central) and “base” (definition: vulgar or ignoble). Ain’t nothing ignoble about fueling the living engine.
And I guess that’s just what I want to address by painting these feeding, feathered engines, and I’m grateful that this question led me to realize that there IS something I want to address. There is, there is.
Because what could be more essential, flawless and natural than To Eat? And yet, what could we modern humans be more divorced from than our food, our apetites? This is something that I think about even more constantly than I eat or paint; our relationship to food, our relationship to food sources, comsumption, nutritional politics, food production politics, food packaging, food transport, genetic modifications and eating disorders and rooftop gardens and pesticides and fad diets and multicultural food-tourism and fear and hunger and also how much I adore anything with tomatoes in it, and garlic.
I’m as confused as anyone else when it comes to how to fix our fiasco of a modern feeding/eating culture; I only know enough to break into a cold sweat after watching Supersize Me (especially the segment about the diets of kids in public schools) or reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma or considering the simultaneous explosions of malnutrition and obesity. But while I sweat, people more trained and visionary than me are doing all sorts of things to bring us back in touch with the production of our food, to put us back in touch with our bodies and what their twinges and mumbles mean, and to bring back the native and sustainable.
I can't pick between all of the links about malnutrition and world hunger and the terrible divisions between the underfed and overfed. But for those of us lucky enough to choose amongst food options, here are some concientious folks:
Slow Food is a fantastic movement fighting for connection and intention and wholism, but what about the "slow movement" as a whole? I get all tingly in a good way when I read what they have to say, but I also get a little nervous and then I get on my bike and go do something else. I hope that when I grow up I grow wise enough to truly understand the difference between slow, intentional, quality living and laziness or inertia. There is a big difference, I'm sure.
The Sustainable Table is obviously on the right track. And here's a Providence group called Urban Greens offering local options and smart shopping and all that.
And don't forget the risks that go along with all of our foody options, like packaging and the to-go culture.
And then there are people dealing with the history of food itself, the archiving and preservation of local plant varieties and the foods and cultures and even stories that go along with them:
Plant Cultures is a pretty awesome browse, tying families and stories to the botanical particularities of their
Places...
And the Traditional Seeds project is looking at keeping things on the up and up in agriculture.
But I’m getting over my head and ahead of myself by going so quickly into gastro-political hoopla. Painting a starling eating a fig can’t really be considered an activist cry for a reduction in food packaging.
On a more basic (base?) level I am just thinking of the simple relationship of an individual to his or her apetite. Our consumption and how it relates to need.
How are you going to live, and what will sustain you?
Do you eat when no one’s looking, and can you taste anything?
Do you know what fuel truly suits you, and can you get what you need?
Can you feed someone else, while you’re at it?
Why does the fulfillment of healthy apetite look like greed, and why are we chowing down figuratively and physically on That Which Won’t Ever Satisfy?
Oh gosh, that’s not just about food is it?
Much as I said in a previous post that Psychogeography seems like the study of just about Everything on Earth, the idea of food and apetite seems to relate to just about Everything on Earth.
What’s not about hunger or fulfillment?
Psychogeography?
Anonymity?
A ham sandwich?
It seems to me that nothing could be more pure, and more illustrative of a system that’s NOT broken, than the image of something that lives in the air eating something that grows on a tree. The bird’s apetite not warped to either extreme by gluttony or by shame, nor detached from the natural by food processing or an imported diet.
Ahem. No way am I going to go into the fact that Starlings are this imported species that aren’t supposed to be in the US at all, and who may be diminishing the food supply for other native species, because then we’d have to talk about Bush’s “guest worker” plan and that immigration raid that just happened in New Bedford… plus it was human collectors who brought the Starlings here, not their own decision… so let’s just say that my Starling appears in a European tree, very much at home.
I would, however, like to go further with the food/hunger/apetite conversation using the bird as vehicle by thinking about bird feeders, human handouts, geese who eat french fries, etc. How even those species who didn’t invent fat free mayonaise can still find their diets and expectations altered. As an aside, when I was in Aruba I went out on a boat and saw great frigate birds and fish of many and improbable colors. The crusty Dutch gent who owned the boat gave us these sandwiches of thick cheese on buttered Italian bread, and as the sun softened them and made the butter both delicious and probably dangerous, we ripped off chunks and threw them into the water. The frigate birds swooped down, competing with gulls and the occasional full-throttle albatross to snatch the chunks just as they hit the surface of the water. At the same time, these uncanny fish with green, triangular bodies and what looked like HORNS above their eyes started whirling up with pirhana-like zeal and pulling chunks down, devouring them. So soon there was this salty tumult, fish coming up and birds coming down and chunks of American cheese being swallowed into both sea and sky and I was completely shocked and taken aback by this thought:
Those Fish Are Eating CHEESE.
Like, we’re out in the midst of the balmy southern Atlantic, and here these creatures of the deep who would never, in any of nature’s wildest plans, have met a cow on their own accord, are consuming dairy products. I mean, that’s just crazy to think about, the kind of thing that suddenly seems likely to change the very rotation of the earth. Is nothing beholden to nature anymore in our reckless, seafaring and melty-on-top world? I think it’s worth saying again: those fish were eating cheese. Someone should paint a picture of THAT shit.
On a different note, when I was a kid I saw a Cormorant swallow an eel. This is most likely something that happens from time to time. Cormorants are these fascinating, tar-black diving birds who can go underwater for upwards of a minute, surfacing somewhere entirely new with a facefull of fish. Sand eels live in the shallows of the Cape waters, and probably seem like a good catch to a fast bird. But in this particular case it didn’t go well… the cormorant took the eel down gradually in three or four exaggerated, gulping motions and then it seemd to get stuck. It was too long, or too alive. The cormorant's head and neck began to sway and swivel at the whim of the writhing eel inside. I don’t know how it worked out but the cormorant paddled away like that, appearing distinctly more like it was dancing than choking.
I’m not sure what that opens up a discussion of. Perhaps of what you take in, and what it may in turn take out of you. That you are what you eat, or at least move like it.
Anyway.
Thank you Anonymous. I’m having a grand old time thinking about all of this, and it turns out that I do see a great value in portraying feeding habits in art, so much so that I might actually bust out a bunch of paintings of JUST food.
But that’s totally just me.
Does any of that strike a chord with anyone else?
And now for someone completely different
My new friend Natalie Wright does good works of all sorts. Here's to her. And here's a link to her Pancake Dinner site:
Her work spans a lot of media and styles, including textile design and painting, but all seems characterized by intentional, unusual color and a feeling of DIRECTNESS, both in the mark making and in the content. There's lightheartedness here, as well as plenty of concerns and wonderings. Natalie's work is Trying, as is she. If you visit her site you'll not only find good work but also a load of great links to environmental and humanitarian groups working in fields from green housing to food activism to plant culture archiving. Fantastic browsing, hopeful and big.
The images below are links to her flickr set of drawings, paintings and prints.
Another of her flickr sets features her crafts and handmade pillows. Her pillows are great and tend to portray, in felt, specific cuts of meat, or eggs on toast and the like. Which is great because nobody doesn't like a meat pillow, and all the more intriguing when you consider that Natalie is a dedicated vegan. I don't get the feeling that they're protest pillows, but perhaps they're pillows with questions.
Yet another set on her Flickr site is called "Life is good" and features very simple photos that are startlingly convincing.
You know. Life good, Natalie Wright good.
Good day, then.
Um.
Took a bit of a break. Got a little reluctant.
But then the daylight got saved and the thaw came down, and I remembered my apetite for showing and telling and I wanna show and tell a few things.
First, MY things.
I took some shots of what I've been up to within my stripe-wild room, as well as outside of it. Yesterday was the first day in a while that felt warm enough to run extension cords and withstand splinters in bare skin, so I hauled my haul outside for a some long, loud hours of sanding. Hand sanding, block sanding, orbital plug-in sanding. The orbital sander is a crucial part of my makin' and breakin' process- it gives me great powers of subtraction, invents texture and time, and shoots me forward into the next phase of painting: putting back details that I shouldn't have taken out after I get carried away and let it veer out of control all over the surface.
Here are some of my fragments and sentences outside, next to the rake and the hose and the recycling (not pictured).
And here's half of a divided woodpecker, finally maturing and showing his grain but still in need of lotsa adding and subtracting.
And some nature, getting all up on my stuff.
Back inside, I'm excited about a starling that's excited about a ripe, spilled-open fig.
This is another piece I'm constructing out of two halfs: bird dropping in for fruit on the bottom half, and the extended wing in mid-flap on the top half.
And what if the top wasn't the top nor the bottom the bottom, but rather they were reversed, or shown side-by-side? It's possible.
I've just barely gotten going on this piece; it's loose.
The real action for me, here, is the addition of food. I have wanted for a long time to paint birds feeding... diving in for rind, flesh, and zest, pecking, peeling and devouring. I pictured over-ripe fruit of all sorts, an embarassment of seeds and goods, sharp beaks and beating wings and tearing and stripping. Leaving cores and stones and a mess, fructose-drunk. It proved amazingly hard to find references of birds feeding really exuberantly. Starlings, at last, have turned up in a number of photos. Apparently they are the hungriest, and the fondest of fruits like quince and plums that get real red and hot and gory.
I'm not sure why, but this is precisely what I want-- images of things that swoop down and pull the pulp out of other things, get their beaks shiny with juice and keep their eyes wide open.
I don't mean for it to be violent, though it's hungry.
I'm not interested in painting the owls with their mice, let's not even talk about it. I just want to tear fruit to shreds.
I have several sketches going and this one painting started, and it seems like there's a good chance they'll come out like I mean them to.
I guess it all depends on how you look at eating, especially the eating of things portrayed at about 5,000 times their actual size.
I guess it's possible that watching the big, vivid and vigorous Eating Of Things might at first seem gluttonous, or might seem like too much, over-large, again like watching those men who pull trucks with their teeth. Or women who pull schoolbuses with their teeth. But then you watch for a little longer and realize that it's perfect and that maybe it's really all there is in life, filling your belly and picking things up and putting them back down in other places and then filling your belly with something new that you found in that other place after you put the first thing down and before you pick up the next thing, which might be an airplane because once you've picked up a schoolbus you can probably do whatever you want. And eat whatever you want.
I think I could paint birds feeding on colorful and pierced things and the images wouldn't wouldn't be vicious or greedy, they would just be about getting what you need.
Whatchoo think?
Have I Dropped
Off of the face of the earth?
Maybe a bit. You know. Happens. Busy. No sleep. At about 3 this morning I was working and I started hearing this really strange noise coming from my nose, but then the noise turned out to be a song by the Pixies and it was coming from my computer speakers, not my nose.
I promise some art related news soon. It's brewing.
There are big decisions currently being made, regarding my potential move into a live/work space in a new arts community type place. I'm not telling you anything else until it gets figured out. I'm also not well rested enough right now to use any creative or particularly wry language. And I'll proce it.
But for the hell of it, I'd like to share a few things that are strange, appealing and simultaneously distressing about Pawtucket, the town in which my office resides (and I'm using both "office" and "resides" loosely, as this joint is still more of a desk island amidst a sea of space heaters, plumbing parts, and indoor squirrels).
The first bizarrity is in the basement of our building, The Grant. I mean, the basement here is both eerie and wretched, and opens into dreadful dark Other Parts that should never be approached.
However, if you're unwise, intrepid, bored or dreadful yourself and you do approach the dark Other Parts, they eventually lead you to a heavy old metal door, and that old metal door leads to a cavernous, tunnelly space UNDER the city of Pawtucket itself.
Wherein, we can only assume, things lurk and loom.
And as if that were not creepy enough in and of itself, this is what it says on the door deep within the dark Other Parts and leading to the Terrifying Underneath:
As far as I'm concerned, there could be no more inappropriate (and therefore appropriate I suppose, in the world of the creepy) thing to see in such a place.
Especially as someone who has consistently been up all night recently, remembering the REM song "Daysleepeer",
I'm the screen, the blinding light
I'm the screen, I work at night
I'm sure that if I went online and Googled "day sleeper" I'd learn something about the etymology of the term that would deny it its power to terrify me. So that's exactly what I'm not going to do.
Also, across the street there is a mammoth old brick and stone building. It's an erstwhile furniture store and boasts some of the finest old advertising murals I've seen.
The building's been empty for who knows how long. The neon signs are long since burned out, and the loading dock is scabbing over. And on the far side of the building, built right into the original structure in terracotta, is this:
...And that is all I have to say.
We used to have this game.
I think it started as a reaction to one too many exaggerated declarations of some tired generational diatribe like “Well, what’s NOT controlled by a media mega-conglomerate now?”
In the game, an object would come up in conversation—a ham sandwich, say—and you’d say “What’s NOT a ham sandwich?” and I’d have a split second to answer with something that was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, not a ham sandwich.
“Bus Fare” might be a good answer. Or “Ennui”. Though the latter leaves room for debate.
Over the past few days, during which I’ve been sucked willingly into the never-ending food chain of internet research, where one project links to and is quickly devoured by another, I seem to have beat myself at a solitaire version of The Game.
“What’s NOT psychogeography?” I ask.
I have yet to find a suitable answer.
It’s not that Psychogeography is new to me. I’ve long enough been fascinated by the power of place and with sparky thinkers' struggles and experiments to harness this power and use it to run a generator of human and natural innovation, health, creativity.
I have done that thing; where you walk through one city “guided” by the map of an entirely different city.
I have followed with awe the ingenious sound mapping done by people who measure and record the chords made by the multiple ambient notes (busses, computer fans, tinitis) humming in our day-to-day environments.
I have been in tunnels, I have documented the things that are revealed by the peeling of other things.
I have sat through the long and contentious design charettes of the New Urbanists and learned to sigh in dismay, like my urban-planner friends, at their lack of newness or urbanity, all the while looking distractedly out the window and thinking that someone ought to do a photo essay cataloguing nothing but the pallettes-- stacked or cast off or farmed in some other splintery permutation— throughout our entire city. There could be a map. A map of things wooden and utilitarian.
I think I first heard about psychogeography when I saw the announcement of a Psychogeographers Vs. New Urbanists kickball game. I thought that that “vs.” probably spoke well for the Psychogeographers.
So they are not new to me, but the deeper I go (okay… only cyber-deep) into the worlds of their research, the more they appeal to me, and the more I hope they beat the Andres Duany likin' peoples in the afforementioned game.
As an aside, though… there is a profoundly silly side to psychogeographic projects. One website lists a group's research activities on the street as including “hugging people, carrying people, defining performance art, walking with heads in buckets of Coke, crossing the street backwards, searching for frozen peas, asking for directions, turning our clothing inside-out, dropping eggs from a government building and more”. This kind of thing might support the argument I read elsewhere that psychogeography is a primarily an entertainment for middle-class, gadget-oriented people with a lot of time on their hands.
I think that my current enthusiasm for psychogeography is primarily due to the looseness of the term, and the heartening way that it seems willing to embrace nearly all that has obsessed and motivated me for the past 31 years. These interests have manifested themselves in so many ways, from weird research into electrical infrastructure to my paintings of birds and old signs… I have been trying to investigate the way we move through, interact with, and primarily are affected by, our environment. How lovely to learn more about how this fits in with what psychogeographers (and their variously named associates) Do. It’s like being told there’s a college major called “Eating Soy Crisps and Listening to Old Episodes of This American Life while Painting Excessively Minute Details”. I feel relevant. I mean, somewhat. Compulsions love company.
You, reader, are bound to suffer a little for all of the reading that I’ve done this weekend. And it embarasses me to see how “I” based all of this writing is. But there’s something to continue digging and poking at, here. I (who else?) realize now that my longest entry herein, the one about graffiti and public property and my ambivelant love for guerilla art in the public sphere, was just a drop in the bucket of potential conversation surrounding the desperate need for a built, human environment that accepts/demands our engagement and interaction and that has the space and potential to offer surprises and discoveries. So let’s keep going with it, right?
Because, on the topic of our strange, built world; I’ve just seen the most amazing thing...
I have always felt that there was a profound contradiction between my and my friends' intense attraction to industrial infrastructure (and the ruins thereof) and our dismay with the dismal impact of humans on the natural environment. We react with a visceral thrill to power lines and their sublime, towering pylons. To the boundless industrial pipe-land of north Jersey, where ambiguous machineries seem to be engaged only in the production of blinking and smoke, and to all manner of defunct bridges, railroad technology. Show us something where iron crosses iron in a supportive grid, or the mammoth obelisk of a smokestack, and we swoon. And this swooning has always felt highly inappropriate and irresponsible to me: we decry the rabid industrialization of our earth, consumerism, waste! We shouldn’t think the power grid is sexy when we're championing the merits of living off of it!
But I’m coming to realize that there is something simple and valuable at the root of this attraction. There is something irresistible about archetectural or infrastructural forms that reveal, immediately and unabashedly, their function. These forms are like bone and muscle, and there’s honesty within them; they are direct, and are built only as tall as they need to be built. They’re without pretense, and in a way the attraction to them is similar to the attraction one might feel to watching an athlete’s legs move or a bird’s (come on, I gotta) wings create lift.
I have also had trouble reconciling my love of ruin and decrepitude with my desire for… you know… people and the earth itself not to suffer from squalor and putrification and squelch and junk. Somehow there is nothing that squeezes my heart and pumps my blood more hotly than the spectacle of a collapsing mill or the simple curl of a rotting shingle on a beckoning, vacant building. I weep for the water supply and scowl for the superfund site but still, I swoon for the rust. I will sit and watch until the crumbling smokestack falls, like waiting for a sunset or a fireworks show.
There is some contradiction, indeed. But here in decay, again, I am realizing that there is a kind of honesty. In rust and lean we see time and usage, history, and the proof that Something Has Indeed Happened and that Time Has Since Passed. It seems like there might be some value in figuring out how to reconcile these contradictions and honor the aesthetic, historical and infatuational value of utilitarian forms and the decay thereof. Anything but sterility.
That in mind CHECK THIS OUT!
Landschaftspark is “a former industrial wasteland that the Germans transformed into a wildly popular park and tourist destination. Duisburg is in the Ruhr near Dusseldorf. It features acres of natural greenery. The old factory buildings house musical performances and art exhibits. Former ore silos have rock climbing walls. There's an old blast furnace that's been turned into an observation deck and more. At night, the old industrial structures are bathed in colored light….”
Yes. And there are live theater events and movies. And a nightclub. And all of this was created without the destruction, or even the altering, frankly, of the obsolute industrial beheomoth that the place had been for years before parkification.
Check out their official website at http://www.landschaftspark.de/de/home/index.php (And yes that’s right, the homepage does indeed declare the place “Der Mega-Multi-Maxi-Park!”). Fantastic. This is by far the most amazing example I’ve seen of constructive re-use that really cops to the history of a site, preserving and even accentuating its character and past.
Also see many more photos here. http://www.hochofenwerk.de/galerie
And then visit this link to see a Red Hook site that’s a prime, if unlikely, candidate for similar treatment http://gowanuslounge.blogspot.com/2006/11/red-hooks-revere-sugar-as-brooklyns.html
Anyway. That, THAT, is something about place.
It might not be psychogeography.
It’s wicked not a ham sandwich.
But it’s definitely something.
***************
Also, a request or a challenge, however you'd rather look at it.
Dear Anonymous Comment to my Recent Post:
You are generous and unflagging, offering subtle and francofilic fragments to someone like this girl, someone who actually, in writing about change and The Unsaid, used a metaphor that ended with “the onion dip of history”. I am mildly ashamed; you are wildly astute.
But your quote, about those perfect things that rise to mind even as we decend the stairs, implies that there is the possibility of that one, perfect thing. The just-the-thing that might have been said. The just-one-thing that would finally have seemed adequate.
And unlike the countless people who report having come up with a retort or punchline 25 minutes too late, I have never, not in retrospect or internal monologue or rambling blog, hit upon just-the-thing to say.
So, in the spirit of stairwells and in the face of farewells, tell me: If there was one thing to be said… if you could say just one thing-- in french, in whisper, in jest or otherwise-- at the bottom of any stairs and before you opened one of those many doors to gone:
What Would It Be?
Come back at me.
***************
J over, J out.
Dig It
There’s going to be another Project Digs.
Digs The Third, as it were.
Triply Dug.
Tentatively Saturday January 20th and Saturday January 27th. These dates will be confirmed soon and then you’ll be reminded of them with confounding regularity.
If you’re not familiar with Project Digs you can check out my little web page from the last Digs at http://josiemorway.com/digs/
To sum up briefly (because you can read the whole dang mission statement at the address above) Project Digs is the large group show that I have been organizing, with the help of a lot of energetic friends, in Providence since April of this year. It's a show of artwork, projects, plans and undertakings of various sorts. Really various; from sculpture and painting to floorplans and installations and performances. The conception of Digs (and the implication of the name) springs from an interest in the living/working space in which most projects are hatched and executed and loved and battled. Our aim is to close the gap between making work and showing work by bringing art and dialog into a variety of these living and working spaces-- be they apartments or cubicle farms-- and away from the traditional and sterile world of galleries and museums. We hope to open up wide discussions about how we live and work, how we seperate and segregate the spaces in our lives and their purposes, and how we might reclaim public space and shared environment for more creative, productive purposes.
Even more importantly, we seek simply to bring artists of all sorts together; to talk, share ideas, and start new collaborations.
While we've shown lots of completed projects and fantastically finished works of art, I'm always interested in showing "in progress" projects, leaving room for discussions of process and potential.
Project Digs 1 took place in my house, a three story Victorian split into apartments of different sorts on Providence's West Side. Digs 2 took place in a rehabbed house further south, which was completely empty, restored, and for sale. Half way through planning the show we learned that the house was being sold as condos and that while initially described as "affordable", they were actually not. This led us into a small whirl of controversy and good conversation about gentrification and so forth. Also it was so hot and humid during Digs 2 that I died twice during the hanging (I guess someone always dies when there's a hanging) and a third time on opening night.
So now, for contrast:
Digs 3 will take place in a recently rehabbed, big, beautiful, January-cool home for sale by the Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Association in South Providence. If you’re not familiar with GENS, you can check out their website at www.greaterelmwood.org (Also I made their website. Score.)
GENS mission is to “revitalize neighborhoods by transforming under-served urban places through rebuilding livable neighborhoods, community assets and resident opportunity.” Essentially they’re a major local player in the fight for neighborhood improvement without gentrification, safety without sterility, evolution without moving towards anonymity. Also they make honest-to-goodness affordable housing (which they sell through an ingenious lottery system, with restrictions that guarantee any apartments rented in said houses remain affordable). I have also heard an insider rumor that they might be working on a bike advocacy program that would make bikes part and parcel of affordable housing, which would be fab if it were to come to fruition.
The GENS house will offer us more space than ever to show our work, as well as a great opportunity to meet with people who are keeping our neighborhoods livable for everyone, including... like... us.
There will be a theme, albeit loose and bendable to your whim, for this Digs. The theme is "Place".
Make of this what you want.
The theme of place comes up, rather obviously, because Digs has always been about place, and because we've never defined a theme before and I think it'll help the cohesion (or accentuate the divisions) within the show. Consider however you wish: Place and space, home, work, neighborhood, mental space, urban place, public square, breathing room, cell reception, source, bedtime, punctuation, gaps, gasps, blinds and finds.
I do not want this to automatically be a conversation about gentrification or environmental politics (though if that's what you want to talk about so be it). "Place" is an integral component in artwork in many more subtle and fascinating ways, and it's being examined and toyed with by infinite, ingenius troublemakers worldwide ("worldwide" is also a good word about places that should go in my list above. Like between source and bedtime.) The idea of place and space is of contant concern to so many artists who want to examine and redefine either our entire relationship to our physical environment, or simply the place of art and artmaking within that environment. See some sweet links below.
Bring it on.
Consider this a call for artists. If you are in the Providence area, or would like to get yourself and your work into the Providence area, contact me and show me what you've got. We will offer a generous amount of space to each artist who shows... we don't want to see isolated singular pieces of finished art, we want to see bodies of work, ongoing projects, obsessions and innovations. Show me show me show me.
I also welcome (demand and whine for) feedback about the show planning as well as the theme.
.............................
Here are some links to get you started thinking about place in a loopy and penetrating way:
GlowLab
Especially this Glowlab article
Also maybe you should read something about Psychogeography
Dig some strange maps
Or if you're into Brooklyn
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"Place for me is the locus of desire. Places have influenced my life as much as, perhaps more than, people. I fall for (or into) places faster and less conditionally than I do for people. I can drive through a landscape and vividly picture myself in that disintegrating mining cabin, that saltwater farm, that little porched house in the barrio. (My taste runs to humble dwellings nestled in cozy spaces or vulnerable in vast spaces.) I can walk through a neighborhood and picture interiors, unseen back yards. I can feel kinesthetically how it would be to hike for hours through a vast “empty” landscape that I’m dashing through in a car - the underfoot textures, the rising dust, the way muscles tighten on a hill, the rhythms of walking, the feeling of sun or mist on the back of my neck. " -Lucy Lippard, from The Lure of the Local
Muttering about mattering and charged with change.
So, have you looked at these quotes that were left as comments after my last posting? Major props to the reader (who I don’t know, which is awesome) who laid these sweet selections on me.
Standout line from therein, for me, is the wickid simple following:
"The challenge for the artist is to search for the good and make it matter..."
It’s not even the “good” that is operative for me in that quote (though good is good and I’ve always wished to find a way to do it), it’s the “matter”. To Make Things Matter seems a worthy charge for anyone… maybe the only really worthy charge I can think of. This idea could share a room peacefully enough with my recently discovered idea that artwork could be justified as, at the least, a plea for increased attention. To small things and large, innanimate and warm, geological and intangible. I’d like to be part of the brigade that marches for mattering.
Further: Wim Wenders, whose name and films are also coming up a lot in my recent conversations (and therefore whose stills are littering this entry), has been quoted as saying that a film that makes people believe that change is possible is a film that is worth making. Dig it, Wenders. Hope someday I'm bold enough to say: an artwork that makes people believe that mattering is possible is worth arting. Gah.
This idea, that art might give a viewer the idea that things can change and that it matters (or that things matter, and will change) brings me a long way from where I was when I started this blog and felt entirely devoid of justification for art. Not to imply that I’m all edified and illuminated and now wake up clear of head and mission and have no doubts. But we’re getting somewhere, yes? Maybe someone viewing my work-- or any work for that matter-- will get a tiny, important inkling about transformation by viewing the evolution of a surface, or suss out something about scale and stamina and about who or what is watching them and the relevance of a few words that have been stuck in their heads.
Still…
Speaking of change, does anything ever?
Our directorial friend of the unusually pronounced, alliterative name is probably talking, in the quote I mentioned above, about the kind of change that involves regimes and rights, hunger and honor and horrors. Being just a small nub of a thinking person, and having just spent the long thanksgiving weekend revisiting several very, very long-gone, crucial characters and places from my past, I guess I’m thinking about change in the lifeliving, personal sense. Change and un-change in personality and instinct and strength and dynamics and my own persistent, undeniable retardation. Being visited by the past makes me aware of how much my life and the world has changed, if precisely by illuminating the ways in which I, and that same world, have not.
The morning after one such visit, this weekend, I woke and went on a bike ride. I’d been rocketed for a night back to the time when I first came to this city—and now in daylight Providence looked different. Or, I should say, the city looked profoundly like itself to me in a way that it hadn't in quite some time. The port's ships were such tankers, so steaming, saltside and iron. The stacks were smokey and the architectural variations had names and sat on hills, and out of the blue I truly knew where I was in a way that I hadn’t in quite some time. I was looking at things in the way that you look at things when you are into making art and you think “I must make it so that everyone can look at things in this way: like they matter intensely”.
And I was so grateful to my visitor for reminding me of this way of looking and also I looked familiar in my pants and also my books looked like they were supposed to on the shelves. Like someone had wiped a glaze of hustle and bustle from their spines and I could savvy why I’d put them there in the first place.
There is a Same that things must Stay to if they’re to be - and have ever been - what they’re meant to be. There is durability, and there are things you’ve always known and are perhaps sometimes in danger of forgetting. I am not sure, in the end, that I want to assure a viewer or reader That Things Can Change, or That Some Things Are Immutable.
On the other hand of the defying-time's-erosion clock: There are other things that, despite the really shocking evolution of my life in the past decade, I am not so glad to find the same.
I just spent an evening sitting next to someone I’d been missing for over five years— and so quickly during that evening I fell back into a kind of silent understanding and subtle hinting and flailing hoping and enough unspokens and unspeakables to sink an invisible ghost ship. Our cups runneth over with quiet. Everything was as loaded as a tortilla chip about to break off into the onion dip of history.
And I do not like being unspoken, unspeakable, dipped. Unspeaking and broken-spoked. I have changed much and I have been away but here was this person, and with him here was this familiar feeling of choking warmth and lonely wonder. Jeez. But I thought… But it’s not… It’s still just like it ever was. I can still be, in a word (two), hopelessly young.
I now have no idea whether anything changes. Except for muscle mass, area codes and the delivery systems that candy manufacturers use to gimmick up the old standbys. You can get butterfingers in the shape of potato chips now and my thighs are strong but maybe this does not signify anything.
I am thinking about what I should have said as I sat next to the old friend who I was so glad and disturbed to see (so glad and disturbed, in fact, that I opted to use champagne in order to see THREE of him because if there is one thing that stays the same it is this defective—undeniably retarded— decision making mechanism in my drinking head).
It would probably simply be "Welcome Back".
And I’d whisper it to you from this close range,
where everything’s altered, but nothing is changed.
