A few updates on my own work...

as that's what I purportedly started this blog for. Here is the current condition of the South American hummingbird painting that I had just started when I first posted.


I'm about done painting, and have been letting the surface dry for a couple of weeks so that I can get up in there hardcore with some sandpaper.

The lower corner says "Heterological". A heterological word is one that is self-descriptive, in exactly the way that the word "monosyllabic" is not. In exactly the way that the word "polysyllabic" is. When one starts thinking about things as self-descriptive or non-self-descriptive terms one can run into such exciting problems such as whether or not the word "Non-heterological" is heterological. Because if it is then it isn't, and if it isn't then it is. And one can distract one's self for quite a while with this type of thinking, effectively avoiding the more obvious task at hand which is to draw a metaphor involving heterology and one's own sense of self and then, further, to figure out what the hell that has to do with a hummingbird.

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Next: New! I have started a crow.



The crow will be painted in about 720 shades of black, and on three pieces of wood that, when abutted, make a 4' x 7' painting but which could, I suppose, be seperated and displayed in several alternative configurations. You could just show one piece and it would be a CrowFragment or a WingPart and you wouldn't be able to tell what the crow was getting at. Or you could reverse a few of the boards and things would look nearly impossible.

While one of the boards was blank before today, when I started adding crowness, two of the boards feature paintings of certain buildings begun about a decade ago, when I thought more about certain buildings.

One of the buidlings is the library that was built as an addition onto Emile's father's house. When I started this painting, Emil was still smoking a pipe and not using the "e" on the end of his name. I don't know what he's doing now, with tobacco or vowels.

The other building is a massive, long-abandoned home in Beebee Woods, in Falmouth, which I have written about so many, many times that I've a hunch you can somehow pull the stories out of the air between my letters without my having to retype anything here now.

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


Then: I had an impulse.
And a desire to squelch a particularly wet brush up against my strange and not-quite-finished finch painting. So now oily red is now dripping from the mushrooms and words. It can't be helped: they're bloody.



To quote one of my design clients:
"Is it the right way to do it? Probably not. Is it the way we've done it? Absolutely!".

This may change a bit. Perhaps the drips from the mushrooms should be black, suggestive of something sanguinary and sticky without all the cliche of the bright red.

I painted most of this piece in the early summer, during a couple of weeks when I kept waking up and wanting nothing more than to submerge my head in an old steel washtub full of water, where I could just listen to my heartbeat in my ears and I wouldn't be able to hear the little text message alert beep on my cellphone or the sound of forks hitting plates, and I'd be unable to have any conversations because if I did I'd drown. And then it rained, nay, POURED, for about 7 weeks straight until the world was so wet and fertile that mushrooms seemed like the only possibility. And the musrooms that seemed possible seemed destined to be so oversaturated and super-fecund that they'd bleed into their chunks of clinging sod when plucked by unlikely predators.

Also I was thinking about conditionality, and I wrote the mathematical "if statement" on the painting and wrote "The truth of one is dependent on the truth of another. Relax into this like a rainstorm and prepare to be true..." on my laptop, and then wrote an email to someone about the time when I, as a child, saw a cormorant swallow an eel and then spend a good half hour with its head and neck reeling and writhing from side to side as the eel had got stuck, alive, halfway down.

I need to finish this piece soon. Before it snows and everything seems sparkly and irrelevant.

Wunderlust

Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the present
September 15, 2006 through January 7, 2007
At The RISD Museum, 224 Benefit Street, Providence.

A show featuring the approximately one gagillion silkscreened, drawn, painted, collaged and crazy posters created in providence over the past ten years, mostly made at or promoting events at underground venues such as Fort Thunder. Take serious note that by "posters" I don't so much mean "posters" as "rabidly unique pieces of art that just happen to be primarily 2-dimensional and could, conceivably, be adhered to a wall". Show also features sound/light/sculpture installations by a few of Providence's infamous underground artists.

I was going to say “now for a break from talk about things that happen in museums” but then I realized that, crap of all craps, the Wunderland show is happening at the RISD museum, which is not only a Museum but a University Museum which I suppose makes it all the more loaded a venue. But I’m not going to talk any more about museums right now because I would prefer to talk about Fort Thunder.

The printing studio at the erstwhile Fort Thunder. Gah. If you follow the link to the current Fort Thunder website be forewarned that when you click the mysterious links your computer will automatically start playing clips of incorrigably experimental noise music.

If you’re from Providence, you know what Fort Thunder was (and, in a way, still is) and if you’re not you will probably not be terrible enlightened by this wikipedia entry but it’s a start:

Fort Thunder was a warehouse on the second floor of a pre-Civil War former textile factory in the Olneyville district of Providence, Rhode Island. The space was used from 1995 through 2001 as a venue for underground music and events. It was known for its colorful posters promoting these shows posted on walls around Providence.

The Fort Thunder Bike Pile and a link to another article.

At various times they hosted costumed wrestling and halloween mazes. Several artists lived and worked there; this group of artists is also sometimes referred to as "Fort Thunder."

In 2001, the building was destroyed by Feldco developers to make way for the parking lot of a Shaw's grocery store.

Every small city thinks that its underground creative scene inhabits the deepest and most fertile cave, but Providence really does have a certain royal status here. Fort Thunder and several other artistic beehives like it [Dirt Palace et al. And don't forget that the Hive Archive is still around] have been the architectural-locational manifestations of a wild, raging DIY art and music scene in Providence for the last decade or so. The artists, writers, wrestlers and musicians that have bubbled and boiled and thrived in these strange spots have produced work that’s gained wide notoriety and, over time, created a supremely distinct “Providence Style”. (Or is it specifically an Olneyville Style? I don’t know if there’s an official consensus on this, but I think that official consensuses are pretty much verboten in the Providence/Olneyville Style, as is the idea that there’s really any one unifying “style” at all).

I really, forcefully suggest you go see this show.

If you didn’t go on opening night, perhaps it was because you are claustrophobic or for some reason didn’t want to remember a particularly traumatizing night when you got lost in Fort Thunder’s radon-and-mask-filled hallways and ran into Brian Chippendale hanging upside down in the dark making a scary noise. Because the opening drew such a huge crowd, filled with so many familiar yet somehow nameless faces, that despite the RISD museum’s white healthiness, it WAS uncannily like being at one of the performances at Fort Thunder (both in visual and olfactory impact).


The work itself is massively innovative (I literally just remembered the word “innovative” while I was writing my last post, and it’s going to be burning a hole in my lexicon if I don’t use it a lot right now). The poster artists work with strange subject matter, using odd materials, tons of texture, and colors that include metallic gold and something I can only describe as “trepidation teal”. A lot of these artists are prolific wheatpasters and their artwork has been seen in a lot of unexpected public places.

The show also features a whole room of installations utilizing sound, light, projection, spheres, wires, paper mache and something that looks like the gigantic root of some dreadfully huge raddish. You’ll need to see it for yourself, largely because you have to climb into most of the pieces yourself.

I’m not sure what else to say. This stuff is amazing and simultaneously creates and destroys vast new worlds. Of course there's the occasional boring piece. If anyone were reading this blog I’d be nervous to say this, but the underground music and art in Providence can, like anything genuinely experimental, sometimes get lost and cross the line from “exploratory” into “disaterous, flaming poo-bag”. But the fact that Providence’s most lasting art legacy is one made up of questionably appropriated spaces, outrageously non-traditional images and terrifyingly groundbreaking lifestyles is something that makes me proud. It’s inspiring as hell, and reminds me to continue with things like the Project Digs shows and my own nacent projects to help ensure that the Prov DIY scene doesn’t end.

If there’s one thing creepier than anything else in the Wunderland show it’s the way it seems to be presenting the Providence/Olneyville Underground Art Shebang as a finite project that can be viewed as a whole, finite phenomenon, thereby implying that it’s through and done with. Hope not.

I kind of thought we weren't supposed to see Brian Chippendale without a mask but here you have him.

I Done Been Panned

Hey check it out! The Boston Globe reviewed the DeCordova show on Friday, and none too flatteringly. The title of the review is "DeCordova's 'Ape' is an entertaining bestiary, little more", which tips you off about the tone of the piece. Something about "entertaining bestiary" sounds naughty this review does not make me feel sexy.

Here's a link to the review.

Luckily the sting of a bad review has been soothed by other activities. Today in the studio we dressed up the shop vac. Please, if you've one merciful bone in your body, click on the image to link to ZeFrank and get to know his video blog. He is genius. Also it was his idea to dress up vaccuums.

In general, the reviewer's criticism of the show is that it isn't challenging, doesn't push many boundaries. I can't say I disagree. This reviewer seems to have some similar concerns to mine about the nuetralizing effect of museum shows, and seems to also have a chicken up his pants about the way the majority of the work included in the show is representational... a very literal take on "Animals in Art". There is some art, and it has animals in it. But what of them, and why? The reviewer, in many more words, seems to primarily be asking if the DeCordova has told us anything we don't already know. He bemoans a lack of surprise.

For the most part this is an inherent risk of having any themed show. Part of the surprise in most of the DeCordova pieces lies in their using animal subjects where animal subjects would not be expected.The potential to be startled by a piece of art is vastly reduced when the very title of the show tells you what the content is gonna be.

Anyway, the reviewer goes on to say:
"Most of the show's works are made by relatively unadventurous representational means. Josie Morway's large oil paintings of birds copied from ornithology books ... are competently made but far from startlingly original."

This is just a picture of a chicken feeling slightly crowded in Shelburne Vermont.
I'm not by any means trying to say that the Globe's art critic is some sort of corn pecker.

Well, shit. I HATE unadventurous representational means.

I admit to a few barbs of resentment at the "copied from books" part.

I mean, I don’t just Copy from books, I also Copy from Flickr photos that I steal from the internaught, and I Copy from magazines, and last week I got really close to these wierdly aggressive, fast chickens and I dropped to my knees and took a bunch of digital photos intending to Copy from THOSE but the chickens were too wily and they veered around, and in the pics the bloomer-like parts of their legs-- their chickenpants-- look all blurry. Pppppbbbbbbbbtttt.

Simply another chicken. For what? Chickenbutt.

But seriously.
I feel a tad slighted and the word "copied" is awful dismissive, but I think that any time you hear yourself or your work summed up in a single sentence you're bound to feel that way. Whether or not this beantowner's specific criticism is important, it does seem to have some validity due, for one thing, to the fact that I agree with it.

Cock, Cock, Cock, Speed Hen.

I definitely often feel less than adventurous and less than satisfied with my work. The quest to change this is rapidly becoming my primary focus in life, and will perhaps soon even displace such endeavors as Reversing The Nutritional Holocaust Being Perpetrated Upon Today's Children and Sovling the Problem With Chafing. Please be forewarned that the next several messages with inevitably be about adventurousness, boldness, and bravery, startling originality and innovation.

While I write them I will be hanging upside down from the slimmest branch of a tall tree and trying to think like dynamite. Making plans to mix my mediums and run full speed into walls.

I don't know. Just trying to use criticism constructively here.

The DeCordova show was a really big show.

The musuem is on huge grounds, where before the show we ran around and saw a fantastic spherical sculpture made of brick and copper that reminded me of what would remain if all the mill architecture in Providence was boiled down into a soapy fluid and then blown into a single bubble. The interior of the joint is equally huge, and the crowd that turned out was huge to the point of roiling. I reacted predictably by becoming reticent about standing near my own work for fear of it being recognized as my own work, and surrounded myself with my usual contingient of friends.

All went well. Jamie found the beer for us, J Hogue repeatedly picked my stray hair off of my black sweater in a comfortingly familiar way, Brian became enraptured by the holographic fat woman in the museum’s permanent collection, and Jimmy was profoundly affected by the ape portraits.

You must read the text that accompanies them.

Partly because of the crowds and partly because of a problem inherent in large, themed art shows, I had a hard time really seeing, let alone reacting to, work through the lens of "museum" or the lens of "animal art". In the museum setting I sometimes suffer from a sensory overload from all the art and a contextual underload from all of the white walls and the lack of other signs of life. There was some really notable stuff, though.


Kitty Wales made life-sized, raggedy dogs out of black and white yarn, who prowled low and operated a mysterious and somewhat sinister machine that looked to me like some sort of archaic steam-powered weaving machine made of brass and old sea shanties. The machine was either being fed by the dogs with a heap of yarn that was then woven into more, identical dogs, or the machine was being used by the dogs to unravel other dogs into a heap of yarn. It wasn’t clear, but we sat on the floor across from it for a wonderfully long time.

There was also fantastic jellyfish made of a glass bulb, wires, filaments and whatnot and suspended in mineral oil that illuminated and floated eerily about when one pressed a foot pedal.

In both cases, as well as the cases of a slew of amazing photos including yet another jellyfish, I found myself desperately wishing to see the work by itself, or outside, or in a different setting. I wanted to encounter the photos on an apartment wall, stumble across the ape portraits slapped up on public billboards, or happen upon the dog sculptures in the raw space at Firehouse 13.

In other musts, We Must talk about this soon.

One of Haruki Murakami’s books opens with a couple meeting at a large jellyfish show in a small Japanese town’s aquarium. The idea of a jellyfish show completely bowls me over and I want to believe that such an eerie, bouyant thing actually happens, and even more than that I want to stumble across the filaments-n-glass jellyfish floating in an aquarium. Jellyfish are great. Murukami is great.

But then, where does the craze for natural settings end? If I ever went to a jellyfish show I’m sure I’d be disappointed and fairly disturbed. I would declare that I only want to see the jellyfish deep in their native seas. I would call the aquarium a prison (actually, I’ve done this, more than once). I would, I guess, only want to meet the filaments-n-glass jellyfish while rowing on the high tide of some dreamy, briny, mechanical ocean.

I have a hard time responding to art in museums and I continue to think that they have the effect of sterilizing the work. But I’m starting to understand a bit why they’re necessary. When I got to the opening, Nick Capasso, the curator who pushed to get my work into the museum, greeted me with a handshake and “welcome to the mausoleum!”. Apparently a person or two has read this here blog. Oops.

I can’t help but wish that Nick had written a comment on here, telling me just why I've been wrong to characterize museums the way I have. Maybe he could school me on the desperately crucial role that museums play in society.

Aren't you glad this is called "Broken Sleep"

I have a simple idea, anyway. I finally realized early today (I am terribly slow and have been busy doing things like goind to costume parties, buying 100 year old textbooks, and watching people put cupcakes down their pants) that a museum is not unlike a library. And of course I'd defend a library to the bitter end! Libraries are threatened and underfunded and I have gone to bat for them more than once on the merit of their being wonderful ARCHIVES of worlds and worlds of ideas, sparks, puns and revelations.

The destruction of libraries is terrible enough to have inspired futuristic horror stories and caused huge city protests and sit ins. Libraries are hugely crucial. But they’re also just containers. They're thankfully not too tied to the greedy and pit-fallible publishing world, but they also have nothing to do with the real life of a book. I wouldn’t even really recommend reading a book inside the library. Books and the ideas in them are meant to be dragged outside, stepped on and wrung out and decanted into our everydays. I can’t imagine that any author writes a mighty, writhing book while thinking about the interior of a library. It’s just an ARCHIVE, (For whatever reason, it’s this particular word that’s making me feel better about the big institutional buildings that hold the stuff we create so I’m capitalizing it), a cabinet in which to collect and preserve ideas.

And I s'pose that the big museums are likewise archives of art. As an artist, I can’t think of a museum as really having anything to do with the life of my work or anyone else’s work. By the time it’s on a museum wall you’re really just looking at a representation of the living work and can’t really feel its pulse any more than you can work up a sweat by watching a documentary about playing jai alai.

But if I had a kid I would, I think, bring It (saying "It" makes me feel safer about kids, not unlike Archives) to museums every day. I would be grateful for the collections like I'm grateful for jars of preserves and things visible through microscopes. And I would say “here are some images of wicked different art forms made by wicked different people for wicked different reasons” and we would look at every single one from far away and then from up close and then we would run outside and I would hope hard that my kid would carry the ideas from the art out of the Mausoleum and go looking for it in its natural habitat, alive, the same way that he’d want to go down to the shore and strip naked and get salt in his eyes and crab bites on his toes to find the real thing after we went to a jellyfish show at the Fish Prison.

**************

'Dance,' said the Sheep Man. 'Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou'retired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon'tletyourfeettop.' ... 'Dancingiseverything,' continued the Sheep Man. 'Danceintip-topform. Dancesoitallkeepsspinning...'" -- Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

A Labor Day Post, Interspersed With Images That Are Links To Establishments, Projects and People Whose Labor May Be Appropriately Inspiring.

On Labor Day three years ago Jimmy and I scaled some chain and link and briars and water and took a self-guided dangertour of the innards and corners of the then-abandoned Royal Mills—the site of the first textile worker strikes in 1922 which spread, from there, throughout New England and resulted in the formation of labor unions and a major shift in immigrants' and workers' roles in state politics.



This is a link to Art In Ruins and you must already know about Art In Ruins, for crying out loud. Gorgeous, crucial, crumbling and hopeful: the disappearing industrial architecture of RI! This site will keep stone and steel and the politics of space on your mind, as if you crept in through a mill basement and left some brain there and it's still, like, thinking, remotely. Remember that it's important to revisit the site often, as J and his collaborators are always adding new photos, news and coverage. I know because he is sitting at the same desk as me while I'm typing this, and just said "see, THIS is why I have to MODERATE the comments". Probably someone wrote something about dicks.

We skulked through the lower mill levels where the floors shuddered like a flan served on a table a tad too close to the mariachi band, and through the dye works where powdered colors coated the floor and ground up into sinister breathability from beneath our shoes. In the basement, where the river had powered the workings of all the works, we saw a broken main gushing unleshed H2O against stone and concrete. I don’t know how long ago the water’d broken free, but in its hydro-reckless spew it had already managed to wear a smooth hole, several feet deep and more than a yard wide, in what appeared to be a load-bearing conrete wall. The air quivered and we stared and then we left, each tiptoeing and testing out different water-wearing-away metaphors in our respective heads.


This is a link to the blog of a writer, living a writing life and writing thereof. Writing the good fight and so forth. I haven't really gotten to know her or her writing yet and am only linking to her on the merits of her having included the above photo in her page.

When we were leaving the building Jimmy looked back up at the black, empty windows of the mill and asked “If you were to look back and see something, anything, in one of the third-story windows of that place that’s supposed to be empty, what would the creepiest thing be to see?”.

I said a horse. I had really tried, too, because I wanted to impress him with some hauntingly irreverent answer, and horse was all I’d come up with.

“Sure” he said. “But no.

Way creepier would be if we were to look back and see Jimmy and Josie, watching us walk away”.

I feel sure that he was right and I've sensed myself just behind my left shoulder ever since.

A link to someone who takes photos of the mundane in such a way as to make them anything but mundane. They are eerie and vibratory and strangely silent and they are totally looking back at you as you walk away.

Anyway, Labor Day seems like a good time to make a posting here, in this place where I almost exclusively ruminate on What Relevance Art Has to Things. In the wide world of labor and revolution and struggle and invention, what can an artist offer? The question is old and getting older, but it’s something that frustrates me and I have this hunch that there are people who have an answer to it. I mean, maybe some of them are simply the kind of people who have Answers to Things and that can be wicked annoying. But others have inklings and are living them. I would like to soak up and share some blots of their inklings.


This is a link to a site that, as far as I can tell with my two Mac browsers, doesn't work at all. I can't get any of the gallery to load and keep getting stranded somewhere between index page and the promised arty payoff. Nonetheless, they have a "mission statement" that states in part that their project is "a visual reminder to not forget our place and our duty as individuals..." and that "we are not limited to a mundane existence. There is no limit placed on our individual potential, except those placed by our own selves..." It sounds to me like they have something to show and tell. Someone let me know if you can get the site to work and if it's any damn good.

An anecdote:
This is part of a comment to one of my painting shows. It was written by someone from the poli-sci department of a local ivy league.
“these painting… take a truly revolutionary stance by inserting beautiful, natural forms into such politically charged and challenging settings. These are political works that refuse to be ignored.”

This is an exchange from a recent interview I agreed to, done over the phone…
Interviewer lady: Are there certain issues or ideas, political or personal, that you’re trying to address in your paintings?
Me: Ummm. Heh heh. I… Well! Yes. I, ummm. That’s a REALLY good question. I, ah… I need to think about this. Maybe I could, like, email you sometime?



A link to some people making a valiant foray into the world of DIY gallery ownership, showing work on their own terms in an accessible space. Also they mention cake on the site.

Just sayin’. I suppose the message is in the brain of the beholder, often, and maybe that’s best. It may be that art-making as a lifestyle is a reminder of human potential and innovative capacity, and by being lived that lifestyle may: insert water-on-concrete metaphor here. Like maybe the lifestyle of artistic exploration wears away at the institutional architecture of the mundane. Or maybe something about how while a union might affect certain changes for the workers within a building, art can, like a broken water main, bring the whole damn thing down. The latter, of course, makes art look pretty bad. Also if you’re a local you know that this whole metaphor is altered by the fact that the Royal Mills were recently renovated by Struever Brothers and are available for sale as luxury condos now.

Or you could build a house.

Now, just one last quote for your day:
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough. –Jeannette Winterson

And one last link:


Last but not least: It cruises the country in silver, anachronistic and aerodynamic style, and it is filled to the gills (I don't think it has fenders, but everything needs gills to breathe, right?) with an amazing archive of self-published words and artwork. A camper of communication! A make-out van of literacy! Roll on.

Happy day to you and also... someone I've never met named Brett Cortesi once wrote to me "Never Stop Working. Ever". That's once of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten, I'd imagine. So onward with the labor and gladly.