I Called Them Mausoleums Last Week
So, having kinda insulted the whole gallery/museum art world in one of my last posts, I should probably take a moment to promote my upcoming museum show. Eh? I’m showing a bunch of my bird paintings in a group show at the DeCordova Musem (in Lincoln MA) from September 2, 2006 to January 7, 2007.

The show is called
Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art.
It used to be called “Bite Me: Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art” and I’m sorry that the title changed, but aparently either the biting or the colon was too controversial.


The show includes such artists-who-people-have-heard-of as the much-respected Walton Ford, who makes paintings that look like they were painted by old American Masters but for their portrayal of animals engaged in activities too surreal and disturbing (most often commentaries on human nature) to have been Mastered by anyone but him. . Below is "Falling Bough". Viciously birdful.

The show also features Amy Ross, who makes images of things like bird-headed mushrooms and goat-headed tree blossoms. I love every image of hers I've seen; they’re delicate and strange and diagramatic and fairy-tale-ish, and depict these faunafloras with enough casual familiarity to convince me that they’re real, or might as well be. Freakin’ mushroom birds, you know?



Amy says she likes the idea of "artist as mad scientist", and her drawings definitely bring to mind genetic engineering and the "farming" of animals among other issues. I would love to have a huge conversation about such things spurred on by her work, but I was also love it if goats grew on trees.


Anyway, the show also includes me, and I’ll be there at the opening, which is on
Thursday, September 7th from 6-9 pm.
If you know me and you live around here and wanna carpool, get in touch.

I am not entirely sure what it means for me to show at this museum. It ain't illegally appropriated public space, that's for sure, but the museum audience seems to be a little bit wider than your average gallery. We shall see.

Out.

UnTame vs. the Domesticati

So I have made some progress on the my gracefully ravenous, inverted friend


and I have written the words "long-time" on a board because sometimes things just go on and on and on.

Long-Time is hyphenated because sometimes hyphens seem to speak of the names of potions or products, or of ambiguous nicknames. Long-time is painted over some already-painted over pomegranates that I painted back when pomegranates seemed like a good metaphor for wanting something really badly and in a complicated manner.



And: I have cut an unfinished painting into pieces which will eventually bear fragments of more words or birds. This now-chopped painting was originally started in 1997 as a portrait of an old friend. In the painting she was balancing on a muddy log... it was an afternoon in 1993 and she had just finished writing a poem-kinda-thing for a class that started with the words "Dear God, please make the light funny". Then in 2002 I sanded her down because she had never been quite right. In 2005 I started painting a finch over her, but the finch's pose was too mundane and never really got going. So down it goes into halves and quarters, to be further sanded and written upon.



However! Instead of working on any paintings today, I spent the afternoon moving my bed out of the corner where we've been lying awake nights suffering from humid heat, from a special kind of insomnia unique to fighters and cyclists and, most pressingly, from Badly Placed Bed Syndrome. Upon moving the bed I had to move the other furniture, and upon moving the other furniture I found unopened mail to myself at an address three apartments previous to this one, and lots of dirt. Spent 3 hours cleaning, trashing and re-arranging and now I notice:

As much as I claim to doubt the importance of spending my time and energy on art, I sure as hell don't feel good about spending time on anything that's NOT art. I feel a sensation verging on shame after passing two hours mopping a decade's worth of ambiguous buildup off of a white-painted bedroom floor, while others might argue that that’s a somewhat important thing to do, at least once every year or score.

My old muddy-log friend from the erstwhile painting has been living quite a different life than mine for years. Big house, adoring husband, VW New Beetle, lovely 10-month old baby. All things domestic, fleecey and family. Though we were best friends for most of our teenage years, we haven’t spoken in an unmopped decade and I only know her every coming and going because, of course, she’s got a blog. Yesterday I found out (from said blog, natch) that her impressive world is all upside down, her husband having blown it in the worst possible way. This makes me realize (in addition to feeling a lot of empathy and sorrow for her) that I am still, in painting and in life, celebrating the wild, the un-tame, as a kind of defense. That I am terrified of my own nest-feathering instincts and efforts, because part of me still doesn’t believe that long-term peace, a specific kind of success, is possible.

There is something competetive in my birds. Sometimes they fly because if anyone is going to fly they’re sure as hell not going to be left land-bound and last. Sometimes they’re so moving because they know if they settle they might want to stay. They know that for a long time they’ve asked for the strange light of an interesting, rather than safe, life.

Anyway; wondering what the words on these new boards should be. Something about the domestic vs. the migratory. About the occasional idea of giving up on making a “home” and just trying to move into Firehouse 13 to make work instead. About mopping and not-mopping, and for whom we do and don’t do it. Might just write “un-tame”. Or “land”.

Anyone?
Are you landed or aloft, and what is the vocabulary of it?

P.S.: Having written this, about domestic fear and light, I went into the bathroom to brush the taste of my own rambling out of my mouth and pulled the light chain. Several times: it wouldn't turn on. Thinking that I might actually have a lightbulb in the house with which to replace the dead one, I took the glass cover off of the light and found that, upon burning out, the bulb had exploded, leaving a jagged half-bulb hanging by one of the filaments onto the raw, broken base which is still left behind in my fixture. Having pulled the chain a number of times trying to turn it on, I can't remember if there's power flowing into the thing right now or not. Dangerbulb.

Oh, all this light. Funny like electrocution.

Gettin' a handle on my inner vandal.

I am trying to figure out how I feel about public art. More to the point, I am trying to make a stencil, and to justifyusing it. And I should stop right there. What the frig is ‘public art’? I think that most often the term is used to describe large, commissioned hulks made of brushed steel or oiled marble and snuggled into the predictable earth on stolid bases in front of libraries and University art buildings. This stuff generally leaves me cold. And what else could it leave me, being steely and marbled?

What I mean by “public art” is art more of the stuff-suddenly-on-walls variety. Painting, postering, mural and stencil. Color where color once wasn't. The placing of things where they don't belong. Art of the kind that we can all undertake (without a foundry or a moving company), put either by request or by moonlight into the “public” arena. The kind that is either illegal or somewhat begrudgingly sanctioned by cities and property owners to celebrate an alleged community spirit.

The sanctioned often falls flat: There are the occasional murals painted by neighborhood kids. In them, inevitably, there will be a strangely billowing flag, and representations of several generations of people. Sometimes one of the people is so big you can only see his head and shoulders. Like, he’s wicked in the foreground.

These seem like a pretty good idea… big paintings by locals. I wish there were more of them (as well I should since I work on mural projects with kids as one of my JOBS), but they often feel pretty impotent to me. And not surprisingly. Almost everything about art feels pretty impotent to me. I’ve never been able to figure out how art “makes a difference”, empowers, or improves lives. I get paint on my face sometimes and it has heavy metals in it.

That is almost all I know. But I also know that I absolutely love sudden, unexpected art, the kind that pops up on the street or in our infrastructure and changes our whole experience of the environment. It seems to me that this could DO something. Change a day or an intention. Invert a perspective, alter a route. Give a kid something to think about. I am a sucker for the thick, bizarre rooftop graf of brooklyn, train markings and murals, well-done guerilla alterations to billboard advertisements. Wheatpasted figures posing on city walls. Stencil art.

Frankly, it doesn’t have to be illegal. It’s not the thrill of a conquered wall that affects me but the surprise… the transformation of the mundane into something inspiring. Back when more signage and advertising was hand-painted this kind of inspiring public stuff was more ubiquitous I’d guess, and I am thrilled beyond words whenever I come across an old advertising mural; these seem to have a real power in them, even more so as they decay. There are certain public art adventures that are just so spontaneously perfect that it feels to me as if the site has demanded them… that one person or team just had the balls and the ladders to create what we all, in some unspoken understanding, knew needed to be there. My friend Brian told me about an artist in Baltimore who re-arranged the gigantic, half-story tell letters in a sign atop an abandoned hotel to read “HE FORGOT ONE”. This blows my mind.

An aside on spontenaeity, or tacit agreement: When I work with my friends J and J at the design studio, we sing. This tradition has developed organically and we do not mention it, but when one of a very few, specific songs come on our iTunes shuffle while we’ve been sitting, silently mousing and clacking and rasterizing, we sing loud in trio. “… I hope the fences we’ve mended down beneath their own weight. I hope we hang on past the last exit- I hope it’s already too late..!”. We do not look at each other as we sing but we do belt it out … these specific songs we sing are particularly melodic and require heart and occasional harmonizing: this is no half-assed or ironic mumbling. There is a collective something that we three respond to in these few songs and we have decided to celebrate it. When a sung song ends, we return to work. It doesn’t happen every day or even every week and this has, I suppose, almost nothing at all to do with public art or stencil graffiti but it seems to me that if I were as talented or intelligent as I once fancied myself to be I could make a connection here. That if it is possible to intuitively know exactly when to sing out loud then it ought to be possible to know when to make one’s big, public art-mark.

(Anyone remember rTMark? They certainly engage in some damn ambitious public projects. Here is a pretty good and relevant one that's up right now, though the comments are pretty rough.)

Anyway. I often feel dismayed and irrellevant to be making “gallery” art. I’ve broken outside of the traditional gallery somewhat by organizing the Project Digs shows, but the fact remains that I’d like to be making work that is out in the world, startling passersby or changing how someone thinks of the world around them. I have purchased some acetate but this in itself does not a guerilla artist make.

And I always pause at this point because the fact of the matter is, despite my own love of “good” grafiti and interesting installations, I believe that laws against the same exist for a damn good reason. There are few things that bother me more than disrespect—of people, of nature, even of space—and I find the presumption of most vandals that their right to mark whatever they want supercedes the law really disrespectful. It engenders self-centeredness and a trampling of others’ centers, and that’s nothing I want to be a part of.

Banksy, who does utterly amazing stencil work in the UK that makes me want to punch myself in the eyeball, suggests we “imagine a world in which graffiti wasn’t illegal”, and in which each city wall and curb was fair game for someone’s self expression.

I imagine it, and I don’t like it a bit. It sounds like a mess.
I’m all for the democratizing of expression, yet if you wrote your name on the front of my house I’d probably try to get your ass arrested.

So if I decided to do some unsactioned work would I essentially be saying that because I’m an “artist” I am above even the laws that I support? Maybe. Maybe I should lobby for a tightening of graffiti laws even as I begin stencilling, making myself a gigantic, inevitable contradition and eventually landing myself in a pawn shop trying to trade my road bike for bail money.

I find myself coming up with a set of customized rules that I’m comfortable with. Suppose I only made work on abandoned space? Or tighter- only on the signage of abandoned space (that appeals to me aesthetically). Only on marketing space… only on billboards? But who’s to say that my arbitrary rules are more valid than someone elses? I suppose no one. I suppose the point is that each defines the rules for himself. So everyone has something to say and has to find his own way to say it. For me, I think I’ve settled on the idea of creating work in the studio (sheets of thin ply or scrap metal, like old signs) and then HANGING it on abandoned space or signage. So, like, maybe I’m only littering.

But I would like input from as many people as possible on this whole dillemma. Is there a way to make public, surprising, effective work without either encouraging senseless vandalism or drawing rules so tight that the work become innocuous and dull again?

There’s this quote that I love by Mayakovski (okay, if you went to the Digs site then you’ve already read this): “…We do not need a dead mausoleum of art where dead works are worshiped, but a living factory of the human spirit –in the streets, in the tramways, in the factories, workshops and workers’ homes.”

I would love to say that I am living and working in the spirit of this quote. But for now I return to working on a bird painting in the other room and looking forward to the time in the afternoon when I get to eat hummus and drink a Corona. Help.

A Statement.

So, I recently had to work up an artist's statement. I'm not necessarily good at this sort of thing. Which is not surprising when you consider that one of the main reasons I started this blog was to address my big doubts about the importance of art making. Had I been more candid with the statement it would have contained

"I wish I were a writer!"

"If I had any proverbial balls I'd probably be a grafitti artist!"

and "Speaking of balls... having finally convinced someone to rest his balls on my eyes just so that I could see what it would feel like, I am no longer sure what my main goal in life is!"

Nonetheless, here is my statement, if you'd like to get a better idea of what I'm driving at with all of these images...

........................................................................

Most of the visual art that inspires me is wearing away.

I have long been strongly drawn to old signage and advertising murals, the kind that have been painted in layers over layers and have broken down over the years, top layers thinning to show the older letters and brick beneath. I am also interested in graffiti and in other, more ambiguous markings; the codes on the sides of trains, the no-longer-legible promises of old business signs, the single, red number or name on the steel base of high tension powerlines.

To me the fragmented images and words of these murals and other signage are like snippets of overheard conversation. How we absorb and react to the seemingly arbitrary and jumbled stimuli that we encounter haphazardly in the course of our day says, I think, a lot about how we build and interpret our lives and communicate with one and other. These fragments are the stuff of idea and inspiration, and I have never figured out a way to make art that can do anything more important than a glimpse of the word "Quality" on a passing freight train can do.

This is all fine and good, and is reflected in the worn and wordy backgrounds of my paintings but might, I suppose, leave one wondering why Ive got these hyper-realistic birds as the central figures of my work. I began painting birds as a continuation of my figurative and portrait work. I had been extensively painting people in somewhat oblique, active poses, looking like partial details from larger narrative paintings. I turned to birds as a way to examine expression, movement, posture and gesture in what felt like a more pure and universal form: without the loaded associations with specific peoples identities.

As this series of painitngs develops I realize that birds are more compatible with the afforementioned public art and infrastructure than I'd realized. Birds are, by nature, both easily accessible and difficult to observe. They surround us, and are far more public creatures than almost any other wild animal, and yet by nature they are elusive they are often too high, fast or evasive for us to observe for very long. The birds that dominate my compositions function not unlike the pieces of dialog, signage or architecture that I draw such inspiration from. They pass through our lines of attention unexpectedly and inexplicably, briefly. They allow us glimpses of their activities which are often ambiguous but also universal: they carry and wait, they feed, they call and they fight. They are ubiquitous but transient, and it isnt hard to endow them with a sort of omnipotence.

All around, my paintings are my attempt to add something striking to the clipped, mysterious, difficult and beautiful narrative world that we all move through. I hope that, much as the tail end of a sentence overheard on a bus leads a listener to wonder what the rest of the conversation was about, the contents of my work might lead a viewer to imagine a larger context or a continued tale. My titles probably best betray this hope; they are lines from longer pieces of writing that relate, at least for me, to the bird, word or story of the paintings they label.

They may seem arbitrary but rest assured, even if you cant quite tell what the whole story is there is still, most certainly, a story.

....................................................

And then I wrote something about the owl painting that's displayed below. This was mainly in response to someone who said that my titles had nothing to do with the paintings (the owl is called "Wind like a clock, tell me it's just about time"). Here 'tis:


Wind Up. 7/19

Even while you have been waiting, you have been moving by night.
All the while you have been moving by night, you have been waiting.

Now you can roll out with more precision than a pre-dawn strike, collect things that would shine were they shone on. You target and salvage, you execute turns tight as knots and you revel, casting no shadow.

Your eyes are honed and your speed barely stirs the air but there has been this growing pause. A sneaking feeling: that maybe to wait, save and simmer so quietly has been terribly dangerous. A sin against potential and maybe you have been compromised, waited too long.

Now it is time to think about bravery. It was supposed to be brave to move through thick, dark night, solo moonlit, but was it? There are things that you have put off. You were going to mother the millions, or children, to minister or heal. Of you were going to go boldly into a clearer war with something altruistic in your pocket, a scrap of belief or the photo of something worth alighting for.

Around you they are winding up and they tell you it is just about time but you wonder: isnt it about something more?

Because there is something you meant. And something you are for.

Maybe today you will take wing whitely across the blatant sky, and proudly. Time weights the no-ones: you have waited, and will be known.

A few more things about me, primarily in photographic form...

1. This is my self, posing with a camera in my right hand, the verdant living room wall behind me and a bunch of framed Mike Brousseau drawings that fell off the wall stacked in the lower left. Also my glasses are on my head which means that I spent the afternoon making my once-perfect vision worse, forgetting that I've needed glasses ever since I turned 30. Below that is a word painting I recently didn't quite finish.




2. And one of my finished paintings. The owl and the word are separate pieces. They don't always go together. I have this idea that my paintings should be mixed and matched like whatever it is that people mix and match. That the components could theoretically be rearranged to create different installed effects. The pieces below are about 5 feet by 4 feet in real-ish life.


3. Today I ran into a sunflower with my head and arm while biking really fast near Blackstone Boulevard. It almost knocked me off my bike and didn't feel anything like a flower.

4.Here is my studio. It is in disarray, but the feeling of complete seasickness it inspires is due largely to the wonderful, overwhelming wall mural created by Josh Kretzmann.




5. Here's a large painting that I can't finish. It's 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall. I'm happy with the wing in the upper section (and with the fact that it's 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall), but the central bird is infuratingly stagnant and the bottom is a little on the disasterous side. This posting is a not-at-all-veiled cry for help... ideas? The words below the painting reflect my recently-conceived hunch that terms from quantum math and logic could, in addition to offering cool letterforms, have something to do with birds. If and only if. Set theory. So forth. I haven't prooved this hunch in any meaningful way but I have, hunching and impulsive, painted several mathematical terms precariously close to birds. Because I can.


6. And a blurry photo of another piece I'm working on. A 4'x6' of some sort of South American hummingbird. I've been looking for references of birds in interesting, agressive, dramatic or frenetic motion. Diving. Eating strange fruit messily. Carrying things. I'd like some input on this painting too... it's at risk of becoming static like the one above and no amount of quantum math, then, will be able to save it. In this photo you can also see my stool. It's covered in paint. It's not for sitting.


7. The name of my blog comes from an interview with Steven Millhauser, an author whose books I've never read, in Bomb magazine. This is the actual quote, which I think was about fiction but can happily be pulled out of context and applied to life, dinner or the kestral that's coming in for the kill from behind your left shoulder:

"...I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way..."


8. Here is something that happened once.


His says "I'm against it", and everyone knows I'm for it.
There is plenty of harm in the world (and even my mouth). Now, onwards, towards the fruit.

Hi. Here are three things about me:
1. I paint giant paintings of birds on surfaces that look like weathered billboards. I also paint words that are not entirely decipherable on surfaces that include suggestions of birds.
2. Having run out of anything more interesting to worry about, this morning I've been kind of concerned about my sodium intake, sodium mostly being taken in through the delightful, crunchy vehicle of Glenny's Soy Crisps.
3. I get carried away easily.

So, in a manner both sudden and rather unexpected even to me, I've recently established myself as Someone Concerned With And Dedicated To Helping Artists Share Their Ideas, Processes and Projects. In organizing a series of group shows in Providence (www.josiemorway.com/digs) I've apparently gotten all passionate about the cause of collectivizing and de-gallerizing art. Overcoming the isolation of the creative life! Figuring out how the hell art can actually mean a darned thing to the world at large!

I have no idea what I'm doing. I have never seen myself as much of an organizer nor any sort of curator but the last concern above is what preoccupies me damn-near constantly, at least until I start ruminating about salt in order to give myself a break.

I have never made peace with my own need to make pictures. To this day, I can't come up with an excuse for it, a reason why art-making is a valuable use of my time, a worthy expenditure of energy. I know... this doubt is probably pretty insulting to other artists but I can't help it: I want to know what all of these images are for.

So I'm initiating a blog-thing, inviting you all into my wanting-to-know and into my changing process of art making. I'm planning to post my work in progress, as well as other work that's going on around me and is either inspiring or disturbing to me. I'm hoping to get a lot of participation: I want your comments and to see your own work.

Come on.