When we were in Paris last month, my wife and I climbed the towers of Notre Dame to get a good look at the gargoyles. It was really satisfying:
On the signage, they make a point to tell the intrepid climber that there are 382 stairs to reach the top. It apparently doesn’t dissuade [...]
After six weeks of traveling-about, it’s back to the studio for a month. Of all the benefits of putting work up in far-flung locales, one non-benefit is the lack of mental space for developing the tentative little philosophical scribbles that make their way onto this site. So now I can get back to [...]
There’s presently a construction site outside my apartment. It’s a miserable condition. They’re digging big holes, filling them in, digging them up again, filling them in again,…
But on the topic of digging stuff up, I was thinking about the objectives behind my photo work. When I was in school studying the Philosophy [...]
In response to charley’s comment under Buckshot, here’s another bit from my notes, trying to clarify for myself the meaning of the expanded “political”.
“The type of installation I want to argue for is one that brings a viewer’s awareness to the gap between the ostensive subject and the experiential subject, an awareness I [...]
I’ve been working on a piece for a magazine, so my scattershot speculation has been somewhat directed, Dick Cheney-like, towards an actual target. I will, of course, blame the target for getting in the way of my words. And like the VP, I have for no good reason been keeping all this material [...]
If the mechanisms of mediation are ever-present and insist on imposing a distance between an object and one’s experience of the object, what happens when the mechanisms themselves are the objects? Is there still an irreducible distance?
(If the glass is between the drawing and the viewer, but the viewer then focuses on the glass, [...]
Fascinating but curious conversation taking place amongst several outlets:
Winkleman comments here on this Jen Graves article.
Deborah Fisher provides her usual insight here.
Deborah and I were recently having a nice discussion (here and here). To borrow some language from the Graves piece, I think the ball is in my court but the net’s been taken [...]
Nascent thoughts: I’ve long thought that an artist’s choice of materials was fundamentally a political choice. As a starting point of the work’s reception and interpretation, the materials (or let’s say, the “media”) begin with a set of associations prior to what the artist has done with them. The artist can choose [...]
Nothing compels any artist towards a given form, despite his claims. The form is of one’s own choosing, invariably. Any seemingly inescapable subject could be escaped, if only in the name of escapism, a valid name to claim.
Nothing obligatory. Not a war. Politics. Social conditions. Trends, tastes, or…contemporaneity. [...]
A primary function of this blog is to hash out the relationship between my work and my rhetoric. The symbiosis between them is complicated and fraught for most artists, I’d venture, and certainly for me. I’m a visual and a verbal person (I choose not to choose!), but the balance of power pendulums [...]