Memory misinformed me that “Moses puts on pantyhose to begin 40 years in the wilderness” was something I included near the end of James Earl Scones. Searching my local drive, I can find no trace of the phrase. I assume it couldn’t have been written any later than 2005.

The story I’d been telling myself was: after JES inclusion, I’d registered my illegal copy of MSOffice to Moses Hosiery [later my company name (and Instagram handle)] and that was that. But perhaps Moses Hosiery [which would have been summer 2004 when PSM gave me the MSOffice copy] was genesis and the “Mpoptb40yitw” was “Exodus”.

Point being: if “40 years” was figment of fumbling neurology, why is this “20 year” s.o.a.p “stunt” any less frail/fragile/fragmentary? Can Moses [not me, the other guy] take off the hose mid-journey and renege on commitments to lands of divine promise? Folden Gaffe is likely less embarrassing than its inverse.

And so this journ(al)ey comes to a close — we turn south and head down to peninsula’s-end, booking passage to one of these small islands Google Maps only shows me in Arabic script [I can’t transliterate]. There an artworld will be established, one where one’s head in the sand brings about powerful images and text. Etc.

Final words: A concocted conclusion (like we all bear illusion) / I’ll simply confide (in a way undenied and ungiven) / What’s riven — though love-rich — is time

PS. Happy bday to 4 friends

Penultimate post:

Navel gaze about to end. This journal was so good for me (it’s not easy having 2 small kids in a costly city with an art market that doesn’t much care about sculpture (or mid-career for that matter (which is something I was never forewarned of)). I hope I didn’t try your patience tootoo(too(too)) much. Thank you to you who (have) read. I’ll keep editing things down until…

To my knowledge, no sale-of-practice has transpired. Triple Canopy is seeing through the final pieces of the project in September… Maybe the legal contract itself will become a work? I don’t know — I need to better understand what that aesthetically implies (which is always treacherous as you know). Here’s CCC link for up-to-date-etc.

The show(s)/presentation intended to be in conjunction with S.o.a.p. project may not happen. The book may yet come to be, but will require more ingenuity than I’d imagined necessary — I think I’m up to the task, but as I live/move through the days, I come to better understand what making art for a (professional) art audience may or may not amount to.

All in all, this [personal] drive to create is a [basic] drive/neurosis, whether promoting health or not (and wealth or not). To suspend the desire to find an “exquisite” elsewhere, in deference to putative health, is a proposition that seems to always leave me in suspense. How will the line I’ve asked myself to draw in the sand function?*

Thanks to Alex Provan, A. Dave Steiner, Alisa Post, Sadie Coles, Jeff Poe, Alice Conconi, John O’Doherty, Alix Frey, Daniel Wichelhaus, Franco Noero, Erica Ohmi, Chuck Yatsuk, Brian Boucher, David Colman, David Lewis, Eleanor Cayre, Kelly Taxter, Jesse Willenbring, Marco Rovacchi, Adam Cohen, Timo Kappeller, Urs Fischer, Paul Myers, Forrest Nash, Nora Mapp, Pacho Velez, Davide, David, David,  Dave, David, David, Dena Yago, Anicka Yi, Margaret Lee, Uri Aran, Kris Latocha, a few names I’m likely forgetting, and of course any readership I (may) have here [big thanks to you].

A few quick things off the top of my head (likely thoughts/experiences of the past few days) as I wrap up:

1. Umbrella View still makes the most sense to me
2. “All cats are purple. Pee Wee Herman is a cat. Therefore, Pee Wee Herman is purple. Valid argument.”
3. I don’t think I got to mention Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, or Kurt Vonnegut in previous pomo glossing. They may not be as pyrotechnically gifted as Pynchon (still can’t bring myself to finish M&D), but each is at times the best of the bunch.
4. Maybe I should have mentioned Fischli/Weiss,  though not quite sure what I could say.
5. (Andrei Rublev is always worth a mention.)
6. Never did make it to the Josh Kline show. I did want to see how much more compelling the work may be outside the previous contexts I’d seen it in. (Someone Tweeted/X’d comparing JK’s work to Banksy’s and I couldn’t disagree (not a bad thing per se).)
7. Maybe I can just be quiet (though it’s already a crushing silence).
8. I confess I have made an idol of my mind, but I found none other. I dealt with it through gifts and insults. Not like something of mine. – Paul Valéry
9. I saw Elizabeth Banks last night. She wasn’t wearing much make-up so it took me a minute (she looks very nice without). I like her; she’s a quality Hollywooder. I was lying in bed this morning and thought it would be ideal if she were to buy my practice. If she offered anything $399,000 or above, I think I’d accept.
10. Sending my best to Jeff Poe who announced the next chapter today. Jeff has been so/too good to me.

*And will it — in keeping with the idiomatic misuse I’m generally prone to — end up being (dys)functional (mis)use of the “draw a line in the sand” idiom? (On the pun front, I will avoid “sleight of sand”.)

With art, one must choose a formal medium. I think this may be truer than I’d anticipated, truer than I’d hoped for. Thinking on possibility, on the varieties of space, I was taken by potential “theater” of it all — and yet continually faced with the refractory “nature” of what is made, the elisions (intended or not) one must come to accept. Wish as one might to know/draw the world, one must merely be in it (which is the best word for it [“it” for it]).

Brice Marden, Adieu. Seeing the early work for the first time in 2004 was truly exhilarating. Seeing the mid-career stunners @ MoMA was very lovely. The recent paintings and w.o.p. are gorgeous. And of course Mirabelle gave me my first 3 shows (2 of which may have been 2 of the very best). The arts and the generations. Thank you thank you thank you.

Breaking down Amazon boxes last night, my memory was jogged [no pun intended] to this. And this morning I went in search of the website. How very good the full project nearly is. If only they’d not succumbed to the captions — totally unnecessary in some ways. The images generally do a great service to themselves.

I’d drafted the rest of this post back in May post watching “Post-Internet Report”… It was a good experience, made me wish I was a 20 year-old art-kid digesting Brad’s magnetic spiel for the first time. Perhaps more saliently, I was taken through a historical portal I barely knew — some fomo for sure, but also notable how contemporary thought can be so oblivious of contemporary thought. Some bulletpoints:

• Ryan Trecartin’s extreme timeliness (which I was (surprisingly) able to catch on to when it happened).
• An unusually distinct memory of finding Dispersion unremarkably obvious (and well written (this must have been 2005/6)).
• I busied myself copy-pasting a novel 2007 SPAM trend that seems to have preceded Horse ebooks, but whatever — I clearly didn’t really get it. Though things Willenbring and I were working on weren’t so far off.
• I became too stuck in gallery-think to have really caught on to Artie and Brad’s precocity and lucidity (true contemporary-art-schoolers).
• The Jogging has little to do with puerility after all; I’m just not a native/willing speaker.
• Amalia Ulman’s (past?) genius (and the enormous crush I had on her/it).
• I missed out on Jayson Musson’s marquee moment (even though I knew about it at the time).
• Reminder of HUO’s incorrigibility.

Ultimately reminded of how little the online world (outside of good ol’ images and traditional text) meant/means to me, how tired I’ve always been of smartphones (even though their slave), disinterested in Twitter, eBooks, etc.  I understand why YouTube and TikTok are so meaningful for so many, but I still don’t care. (Ok, I was hot on NFTs as a sculptural solution, but more or less loathed the general culture.)

And yet I arrived at several of the same aesthetic solutions, from a semi-diametrically opposed point of view: [R]omantic melancholic embrace (generally short-circuited by a fuck-it-all “pragmatism”). But I do understand the meaning at my [e-]fingertips; I just don’t care like Cory Arcangel tenderly does or Seth Price invests his legacy in; I do understand why Jordan Wolfson is no poser (though ostensibly insatiable for clout). I do believe in marginally-better life offline even though I struggle to find happiness (t)here.

In any case: cheers to “bad boy” Brad, and to now-post-art Artie, and to winsome Amalia, and to DIS, Josh Citarella, Petra, Jared (and to Ben Schumacher (who got eaten alive???))… and Rafman being so ahead of the curve for a while (e.g. I remember being wowed encountering an image of the Kool-Aid guy in Second Life back when I was still thinking about Second Life). 10-15 years have passed since they started showing up and I feel it was no more than 5-7(/8) years ago. Meanwhile someone like Martine Syms seems to have come about effortlessly, never seeing a need to comment on the media she uses.

This was all a real epistemic/artful break that my [“Greenpoint”/”Echo Park”] generation didn’t have. (Now I’m a two-decade fool, still wondering why wondering-itself doesn’t quite pass muster (post-everything lustre?).) And the current elephant in the room — as Brad only begins to point out — is a runaway regnum of painting.

PS. Is this post necessary, i.e. is it an unnecessary autobackpat? I do think several of the names mentioned need to be mentioned, so I will keep post (for now)

Postscript to some previous posts

Additional eulogy for PWH/PR, brilliant metaphysician: 
Chairry
Floory
Globey
Clockey
Mr. Window

Perhaps wise Mr. Window co-wrote this with Mr. Randy Meisner (RIP): And when you’re looking for your freedom (nobody seems to care) / And you can’t find the door (can’t find it anywhere).

In any case:

• Mr. Melville re Pee-wee’s Playhouse: For as th[e] appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle.
• Skywriting quotes Camus (presumably riffing on Voltaire): One must choose a master, God being out of style.
• Meisner as Leviathan: Take it to the limit one more time
• (An [I]sland echo: Never Stop Never Stopping)
• Bob Dylan tends the sand: Oh the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
• Ross Douthat somehow butts in: The sublime justifies itself
• Op-ed:  How about Peter Greenaway’s Pee-wee’s Playhouse? Wes Anderson directs + self-immolates on camera. Working title: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul. Peter Paul Rubens renditions commissioned by Jeffrey Deitch.
• Obit: You know I’ve always been a dreamer (spent my life running round) / And it’s so hard to change (can’t seem to settle down)
  

PS. At long last something valuable for my limited mind. Do I want to agree with Yudkowsky? Not really! Can I find any good reason not to? Not really! Mathematicians as mystics and philosophers is nothing new, but human experience is largely apart from that — it simply must be.

PPS. Catching up on my Horning articles (can be bit a heavy-handed, but of course I adore such things):

• some subset of generated content as “objectionable” allows one to overlook that the whole premise of treating any LLM output as knowledge or information is morally irresponsible. The models themselves are the socially objectionable content.
• it is serving as a means for every available communication channel to be filled with content that has no other purpose than to discredit the idea that anything could ever be anything other than content. “The metaphysics of the code,” as Baudrillard called it.
• Just tech companies’ megalomaniacal ambition to replace human experience with the synthetic products of their appropriated and now proprietary data hoards.
• Generative Al is predicated on recursiveness… on the premise that words and images are ultimately just commensurate forms of data… it has the eyes of the stereotypical tourist; it sees the world as a big long checklist of material to systematically absorb.
• This is the “garbage in, garbage out” problem, and at a certain point in the pursuit of total information awareness, all data is garbage.
• It’s a reminder that no matter what a chatbot says… you aren’t “chatting” with it.

Winding the journal down… Here’s a post one that can’t but be a work-in-progress/regress:

“AI as collapse of archive”: this was one of those sudden, ostensibly lucid thoughts that could very easily wither under analysis. (I have no gifts for analysis (as is likely to be proven by this post), but have a fair amount of intuitive confidence in “AI as collapse of archive,” i.e. “Society of the Spectacle” to the 10th or nth.)

Somewhat analagously(?)… In considering the category of Art, we always need a referent; if communication becomes stripped of referents, a (hi)story — no matter its accuracy — is lost. “AI as collapse of archive” is a caveat and a premature lament, a means of telling a story of something that is presumed to be hostile/indifferent to conservation of story. Art is nothing if not a story — we may recognize an image as something resembling something with various degrees of verisimilitude, but an image is not Art — Art is Art and that is a tough thing to grasp, much like I imagine microbiology “in action” is quite different than the verbiage used to explain it — rather a symbolic tool. Art is a reality; it isn’t a given.

Apparently these 3 passages were written by an AI (I assume trained rather narrowly?):

• We have lost ourselves in the act of making, and now we’re in the process of finding ourselves again. At the end of the day, what matters is that we’re alive, and if we’re alive then we must be making things. This is the only way we have of knowing who we are. We’re not sure if we’re human or not, but we’re making something that can only be called art, and this something is always evolving. This is what being alive means.
• In other words, to what extent can a human artist train themselves to become an auto-affective remix engine–one that operates in real time as an unconscious neural mechanism that automatically triggers an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility, which instantaneously manifests itself in the creative act?
  
• We, humans and AI, are radically being influenced by each other. This means we can’t help but create new forms of agency that reflect the unique characteristics of our hybridized creative outputs.

Right after reading (+ screenshot-ing), these 3 passages written by a human (me):

• The point of a painting is to be that which cannot be photographically reproduced and/or digitally replicated. (A successful forgery is of course the same as the original.)
• An artwork is indivisible from its status of having an author. Art cannot be an anonymous encounter except in the case of the encounterer[/encounteree] deeming the/an anonymity “authorship” — either as valorized Anonym (proxy) or assuming authorship by creating a (revised) context for the thing encountered.
• The obvious issue with intelligent machines is that they run the risk of never being human. Potentially no great loss for the planet, but humans being designed to loathe their own demise, they’d be wise to not pursue a Narcissus project beyond their definitional one of sexual reproduction (synthesized or coital). (Unless of course uploading human consciousness (and sufficient environmental interactions consciousness presumably requires) proves a reality sustainable and enjoyable enough for future-“human”.)
  

To quote Justin Beal’s Sandfuture [a very good read]: Electricity and electrocution are not independent phenomena, but two inextricably attached parts of a whole.

To quote Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death [a very good read]: What is the nature of the obsessive denials of reality that a utopian society will provide to keep men from going mad? Another quote: The quality of cultural play, of creative illusion, varies with each society and historical period. In other words, the individual can more easily cross the line into clinical neurosis precisely where he is thrown back on himself and his own resources in order to justify his life [in the face of new, pervasive cultural play].

And on and on and on…

None of this unrelated to ideas around Freedom of Speech[/Expression], where theory/drive for “freedom” can’t but encounter limits of practice/reality. Infinity may exist and thrive mathematically/intellectually/spiritually, but it seems to fail us as a species when we think it comprehensible and utilitarian [in both major senses of the word]. I think this pertains to “fair use” and “Art” license as well (as alluded to in a May post): open door policy is crucial but not quite correct; freedom is glorious but not autonomous. (Perhaps these paradoxes are what spook my gut/”selfhood” vis-a-vis AI-[A]rt.)

Pee-wee’s biggest adventure yet. A sad passing. Who was “he”: something consummate. Truth is packed in all sorts of presentation. “God’s Grace” and all that for a deserving poet of the we-surely-know-it.

Related and unrelated to the previous post:

It becomes more-or-less impossible to discern whether I’m too distressed by the failures of the art system to uphold principles* of art I mistook it to have or whether I’m just laden with the exigencies of parenthood-cum-age-cum-city.job.lack. How embarrassing it would be to confuse one for the other. (But why? Because [of] the big WHY I can’t bring myself to deny.)

Also this is of note: https://www.thedriftmag.com/senseless-babble/
And yet one should fight for the persistence of [A]rt
Especially against tech powers-that-be, for though they are analogs in some art historical ways, they are surely unsympathetic adversaries
Which isn’t to suggest that [A]rt is enlightened in a (morally) superior way
Rather it has its remarkable ipseity, though impossible to define, yet still serving its remarkable purpose
Which is to…

*I failed those principles in a some instances, succumbing to the allure/pressure of purported precedent (i.e., didn’t want to displease (and/)or preferred a dose of glamour over a dose of guts).

A text I quickly cooked up for a purpose I may not pursue:

The floor is a place. The wall is a place. But what of the no-place that mutually condemns them to marginal disuse? To be less cryptic: what is sculpture that comes to form through the partial denial of form, or rather the faith in the high-formalism of informal expansion. To be less oblique: How to find a material site for multiple languages, a material site that aspires to be an unapologetic consonance rather than a chance coalescence—or perhaps vice versa. To be less ambiguous: The way things come to become stations of formalism and how sculpture’s endless search for proto-formed space becomes monument or artifaction. To be less florid: sculpture’s claims are myriad, but strangely underappreciated.

I cook little of late; I’m not asleep, but something is slumbrous…

Art is always ever-present and necessary elsewhere. The continual crutch/miracle of painting gets the conversation utterly nowhere. And if the recent Painter’s Paradise can connote anything approaching general meaning, perhaps it’s that Art cannot “ontologically” give up the corporal linchpin that painting is. It’s easy for me to reflexively castigate with some cliche like: Art isn’t ready to leave the nest that Painting provides/pampers; but I also know a linchpin is not to be dogmatically/capriciously disavowed. 20 years now of my attempting to ask Art what it is. And recent answers [not my own] return the conversation to Painting. How utterly strange[!!!] The expanded fields have contracted so much, even as fields expand and expand. Contractually speaking, I have obligations to something I’m uncertain how to identify, propitiate, promulgate (though partially averse to such a thing), instantiate (the hardest thing). Such vague obedience; purely kindred, dogged, stupid(-pursuit-of-winged (to be certain of being a fool is a perhaps a proud moment (sadly never more than that)).

PS. Note 4 Yes ‘video art’ is a more-or-less necessary category, but its lock-and-key circulation is beyond parochial, and straight up bizarre. We watch things on our devices. . . . . how many people can find the time to sit in an off-gassing-carpet-of-an-acoustical-nightmare and soak up the potential beauty of an artist’s video (or what-has-been-transferred-to-video)? YouTube vs. Hamburger Bahnhof? Hello NFTs! Skeptics are concerned about storage hazards… How is an external drive in a file cabinet in a building in a municipality exposed to physical and chemical reality that much better an option? 

The last journal post reminded me (though it may not be clear to you why) that I’ve barely made mention of NFTs. I must have minted some 200* of them back in the wilds of 2021-2022. Though always very imperfect, I found the medium compelling. Below are some edited-down points/notes I’d written over that period. (NB. Web3, blockchain, decentralization are all fine by me, but I’m not a cultist in the least.)

Note 1
I mean we’re 100+ years beyond the fabled/heralded/hostile Readymade, treating a new file type as if it were content per se. And perhaps that’s the thing (in itself?)… content and item/atom are properly indistinguishable (now). We’re more or less exchanging pebbles or blades of grass, asking ourselves which one(s) renew our investment in our own sense of meaning. Individual rites. It’s basically a license to drive, art being its own mere artifice. We’re essentially…
Note 2
NFTs can be considered the most basic of objects—they simply are (as long as they are). A lot of art I’ve done/attempted over the years has made use/mention/notion of objecthood — not as “anti-art” readymade-ism, but as what-an-item-can-be as vessel of meaning (meaning sometimes employed as metonym for beauty/hacceity) . . . what is the power (inhering) in thingness? NFTs, if identified as ownable/portable/haveable “goods,” are easily such objectness, such potency-in-latency.
Note 3
I’m not a skeptic. I think circulation-of-immateriality is contemporary content (warts and all) at its finest. Why not have ownership of some orderly electricity? 

*this is some sort of summary (if you’re terribly bored).

For cursory re-discussion… Twitter is mostly blech. But it’s also the closest thing we may have to carving out compact groupings of words in “space.” A tweet falls short of a sculpture, but like a pithy line in e.g. “The Waste Books” or Cioran, its compactness can’t but be visually measurable in a way any text exceeding the surface of a single plane cannot (so certain e.g. Lydia Davis stories fit the “Tweet-test” (even if exceeding character limit)).

When I say “closest thing…” above, I refer to Twitter UI + Twitter scope/reach. Of course graffiti on a wall may do the trick, but will a photo-document of it circulate widely enough and/or will enough people note the writing-on-the-wall and feel it speaks as spatial, rather than superficial?

I’m seeking some sort of “holy grail,” sure, but I can’t shake my faith in it. Words do have indelible spatial abilities. How to harness them in a meaningfully “sculptural” way is ridiculous pursuit (at least in my experience).

Getting [for instance] Shaquille O’Neal to following me on Instagram. Shouldn’t this be some sort of paradigm for and/or quintessence of contemporary sculpture?  Getting [for instance] Larry Summers or [for instance] Peggy Noonan to follow me on Twitter before the other does. Etc.

Of course contemporary sculpture could just as well be Biennials installed [for instance]: in the middle of a raging Canadian wildfire; in the luggage of various migrants paid a salary to keep an artwork in a bag until Biennial’s end; in/on/under the turbines of an offshore wind farm; in every CVS within a 100 mile radius. Etc.

Torching the Pistoletto in Naples is also of note.

PS. Later recalled this contemporary sculpture candidate I thought up 18 months back (not a huge fan of it, but I think it’s worth adding to the possible types/genres):
2019: get some of Zuck’s DNA; start the cloning process
2035: shave pubes off clone; send back in time
2011: pubes placed on basic white pedestal as sole work in Maurizio Cattelan solo show

This morning my ideas returned to trash/waste storage.  It’s cool to make sculpture out of discarded this and that — lots of good sculpture has been made doing just that. But that requires/implies storage of sculpture, so in a way that’s just taking up more space and runs the risk of becoming future-waste (you can imagine a number of scenarios I’m sure). So why not just fill empty real estate with various waste products and leave them there in perpetuity, landfill style — a monument in the way the Neoclassical urban, public bronze functioned (and still does to a lesser extent). Of course once you leave any space to the elements, the elements come into play, so it’s just another unintentional exercise in decay and potential toxicity/disease. What if we were to fill a museum to the brim (say the Breuer building Sotheby’s will now occupy, or the Grand Palais, Prado, etc) with discarded man-made products; would that be more artful — do we need an edifice that’s already landmarked/admired — no mere depot would do, right? I don’t know. The issue is always temporal, and of course the ways of atoms/molecules/etc.

An hour later, I came across Walter Robinson unflattering [v.] Josh Kline’s Whitney show. I haven’t seen the show, but often find the work artless/facile/glib [I’ve always struggled to find the right word] and heavy-handed — our world is so dumb it says; and by saying so, the work stands to be even stupider, which may be the artist’s gambit [more on that below*]. To get back to my point, in Robinson’s words: Can we really make any useful “comment on technological innovation and its discontents” with elaborate and costly fabrications presenting familiar consumer items? My overriding impression was So.Much.Crap…. Aren’t they instead exemplary of the very capitalist culture they strive to critique? As for the sublime, well, they do anticipate a fearsome future. Human waste, pity us all for our unbearable humanity.

*To Kline’s credit, this could all be considered akin to latter-day history painting (which arguably became Hollywood content) — something so little Contemporary Art thinks about. (It never dawned on me that Courbet, Daumier, Manet, Degas are comfortably making major work throughout the Second Empire; Baudelaire and Rimbaud as well.) Kline-theater is an odd mix of ex-satire, horrorism (sans Cronenbergian post-genitals and Baudelairean narcosis), and post-grotesque (which is probably more grotesque than the neo-grotesque which runs rampant in recent painting). What genre is this? Robinson: the[ works] allow no free play between imagination and understanding. Watching Kline speak about the show, the earnestness is somewhat shocking — World War Z directed by Ron Howard (as Robinson puts it: an evergreen for pundit thumbsuckers)? I want to keep an open mind, but feel the zits on my behind. (Where’s Paul Klee to post-think the day (or Herman Hesse to romance our mess?)?) Our times are meant for mortals (comedy has (dis)abused us long enough?) The return of repressed: (advanced) melodrama.

Additional art ideas (two remembered, one 9 hours new):

Install a 2.5 x 2 x 2 inch-ish washing machine in the side of someone’s head (no brain tissue/function will be affected). This isn’t a fully-working washing machine, so no hoses required, but the door can be opened/closed and the drum does spin. If the someone enjoys living like this, a non-working dryer unit can be installed next to the washing machine or anywhere on the opposite side of the head.

Fill a mold of a full size mattress with all ingredients used for brie cheese. Caseifaction begins and at some point ends… Behold, the brie mattress (it can be slept on if adventurous).

Invisible cast iron shrimp (prawn size) that fill up a large, clear glass vase in which they can be seen. To eat invisible cast iron shrimp, stick hand in vase and take one; then dip in condiment option(s) near vase.

3 latest art ideas:

stapling at least 8 Instagram [S]tories together*

women’s swimwear for gummy bears**

1:37 vs 11:25***

*single, IRL staple [zinc-plated steel or aluminum or whatever other metal you might commonly find]
**textiles can vary as long as mini-swimwear is made from textile(s) commonly used for women’s swimwear
***No further information needed (unless perhaps the 4 words immediately preceding this parenthetical)

Also, a chance quote screenshot [v.] between art ideas 1 and 3 [above]: The merging of the synthetic and the artificial reveals the ultimate goal of the image. What does the image want but to no longer be questioned- to finally break the screen and be reality itself? Images, like information, want to be free. The image wants to emancipate itself from its author. The image wants to be the author. Who am I to disagree?

Are not the toil/incumbency/[                 ]*/ utility/function of words terribly more artful than the optico-spatiality of image?

*What there is no word [I know of] for is the quality of words where word-as-meaning is itself-only: a lexeme with/as “immanence” (why the need for ” “? because immanence can’t but be an approximation, thus imprecise its definition within “lexeme with-as immanence”).

Are images immanent? Obviously. And can’t but foster degrees of obliviousness, which begs the idea: what of verbal language as remedy, as proof of [diachronic] presence? This post posits answers of some sort. Solomon presented with a single child recommends relegating the child to the realm of images, while relegating the very same child [in duplicate of course] to the world(s) of words.

Shouldn’t AI image-generating models be coded to have inter-image rivalry (and/or inter-systems rivalry) where images attempt to code each other into oblivion? Winner takes all would be interesting to see-know.

Also, wouldn’t it be fun to have a market-dominant AI image-generator have extreme biases towards [i.e. favor] Robert Ryman paintings (for example)?

All the while, the fine arts are plotting their next epochal coup, very very slowly — the Hortus and Tear.

And might I remark how remarkably silly it seems using prompt-AI to facilitate/generate “new” content under the rubrics of traditional media like poetry/prose/painting /film/etc.? Insist/pretend it’s something new (not that I endorse this, but it’s the obvious move)!

meanwhile in astrophysics…

I think what I was trying to say toward the end of the previous post is that sculpture should be presence. And of course the frequent absence of presence in a person’s quotidian lends itself to the function/appeal of the conspicuous mechanism that art arguably is. I used the word “suspension” several months back and I’ll again adduce it as a way to make art possible. Art becomes-is presence in/bymeansof/as the suspension of routine(ly elusive) presence. So in giving definition to sculpture while divesting it of any traditional, albeit venerable, trappings, it’s the recognition of sculpture as isolated presence (as distinct from readily legible image or syntax) that is of crucial value/quality to me. I now see how it’s in some ways very much like the static/slow-track longshot in a film, where time clearly lapses but you are forced to remain; this is also what the icon asks of its percipient: moving stasis. So perhaps I’ve always “simply” wanted to be a static-movemest (although also a movenest-staticist (which is my peculiar/desperate/ridiculous way of attempting stoicisms?))

Perambulations II.

1. Had an 8-hours-ago idea for a sculpture where there’s a kid who eats plastic, i.e. their alimentary canal has evolved to eat-digest plastics. Remembered a minute later I’d somewhat recently seen a movie or TV show that that very idea was in. Googled and was reminded it was Crimes of the Future. Didn’t think the film was very good (Cronenberg’s semi-geriatric retread), but many of its themes/conceits are quite good/contemporary…
2. …So I thought about how isolating things as sculpture rather than finding a narrative/game habitat/context to ensconce these isolates in is part of what I think contemporary sculpture demands. But it’s not frequently understood as such, i.e. sculpture rather than other genres (performance for instance) in real space(s)…
3. …Which reminded me of a work I was really keen on doing back during the James Earl Scones days which would have a working iPod embedded in a recently deceased dog with art-goer listening to the music while the dog decays and such (I don’t recall considering the sanitary concerns and the olfactory qualities of it all)…
4. …I then started thinking about the “trash sculptures” I made and/or pursued over the past 8 years and how there could be a new/final one I could pursue, but then thought about Charles Ray’s semi-recent steel figures/portraits and how those could be copied, then filled with waste of various sorts, then concatenated and hung from a tall building to become a “parade” of “trash sculpture”…
5. …In any case, what I realized is: the sculpture I pursued 20 years ago — even if I don’t care to pursue it now — is the right kind of sculpture to pursue. What do I mean? Find a way to [temporarily] isolate existing things in the world without resorting to assemblage or (traditional) fabrication methods. “Living sculpture” is not to be confused with the body or conflated with the passing of time; it is the way of seeing the thing in its context/place and then accepting its unlikely-to-remain-the-same-ness (how is this distinct from the temporal? It is)…
6. …Looking at a book of early Serra work is similar but definitely different. Document as proof of sculpture is not the same as sculpture. Whatever Serra’s motivations (or someone like a Robert Morris I would think), it was a different era (whatever that may signify)…
7. …Suddenly, Erwin Wurm’s “One Minute Sculptures” came to mind. They are not what I had in mind, but they do have an undeniable quality to them…
8. …This journal is satisfying some sculptural cravings, but I feel I owe it to myself to maybe (just maybe) pursue something more properly “contemporary sculpture”. The previous post, for one, hints at this, though I’m not particularly keen on focusing on anything that resembles “Institutional Critique.”
9. 9

Perambulations I.

1. Host one of the big art fairs in the email inbox of one of the 28 richest people in the world — person changes per fair iteration. DO NOT SEND PDFs, rather have each artist [asked to show [by their galleries accepted to exhibit in the fair]] send image/media files directly to inbox with “Booth” info in email subject line.
2. “Riace Warrior 3.0”: All sea-freight art shipments bound for an art fair are dumped crate by crate into ocean/sea. No nautical positions documented when dropping a crate. No crate should be dropped within 3 nautical miles of previous crate drop.
3. Third fair idea: using Amazon (for instance) returns, package artworks in the return boxes rather than item originally purchased. All art lives on from there (how is unclear — hopefully someone wise and powerful decides (perhaps makes some sort of museum (you know what I mean?) for all-art-received))).
4. Most realistically, sell unmarked/unlabeled crated art in fair booths. Collector then chooses whether to display crated-art as art or unpack to see what they’ve paid to live with.

To arrive at no answer[s], i.e. to (aesthetically) point out some points [i.e. word unto word [(qua) image]:

Did the podcast. Title they chose is perfect in/in some/some ways/ways.

Tweeted this.

Mason & Dixon is not what I hoped it would be — I doubt I can endure. I’m a Virgo is not what it could be (but I will perhaps persist to see if that changes at all?). Meanwhile Midnight’s Children has its dynamically dexterous dazzle and My Beautiful Laundrette was a minor revelation. A return to Henry James likely to be next (though unable to decide which) — what if Henry James and Kool Keith (Hanif Kureishi doing a rewrite?) teamed up — would that be my preferred Mason & Dixon?

Everything else a blur [besides the deadening effect of zombie paintingsism that rules the land of commerce I more-or-less depend on].

PS. The thing I tweeted the day after isn’t totally “off topic”.

I’ve been invited to discuss S.o.a.p. on a podcast. Nervous to speak instead of write. Perhaps it will be fun (as [some] art can sometimes be).

If the solstice were the perfect day to end the Journal (which is more likely to end near the July/August frontier), perhaps I’d end it like so:

…because for art, Utopia, the yet-to-exist is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not – and may not ever – come to pass.

Google-ing this: it’s apparently Adorno (how apt); I must have screenshot from Rob Horning (who[m] I didn’t realize I was reading at the time). Adorno has his superbly sullen shtick, whereas I’d ditch the “draped in black” and use “the world” instead of “world history”. Obviously art can be the [putatively] “actual” rather than (only) the [spiritual/Romantic] possible, but I obviously prefer being hobbled in the highs-and-lows of did not – and may not ever – come to pass.

“Imaginary reparation”s (in desperation). Yours Truly, Darren Bader

An idea that I’ve liked for a few months now (but only as [formal] idea — words being in mere service of the idea, or perhaps the idea itself):

Two good Horning bits from his latest brief:

Debate boils down to whether you believe innovation truly is like a natural force – a “perennial gale” that blows down more or less from heaven or more a matter of capitalist interests whipping up a wind to keep themselves afloat. Is entrepreneurial “disruption” just an attempt at trying to fix what isn’t broken, breaking society in order to rescue it?

The internet appears not as a place to work together on common goods but as a place to build personal brands and guard against being taken advantage of. As a result, it will no longer work as an open and reliable information source… LLMs are an innovation that reprivatizes
public space.

Took baby in front-pack to see Chelsea shows. Was reminded yet again (and this time with less “spiritual” resistance) that anything-goes is the medium of Contemporary Art.

Rereading my June 10th tangent on painting-now, I appreciate what I was hinting at… The return of painting can’t only be about cutting storage costs and winning the resale lotto; it also has to be a subconscious cultural need to be reminded of things that don’t frighten us (I’d guess faceless tech is fundamentally frightening to the vast majority of software and hardware users (maybe people just need to mindlessly preserve and/or mindlessly destroy)) — Painting is known and that is enough. Not enough for (aspiring) artists like me, but undeniably autonomous and “economous”. Sculpture of complexity asks for sculpture(-)of(-)complexity and that is what I believe I need to feel alive. Painting can indeed be tremendously “spiritual” but it impoverishes the z axis (as well as others (those confusing lines and frequencies that our optics consume but can’t discern)).

Joan Brown show = good art because it’s intelligent by the standards of Contemporary art right now, which is to say, it can be seen for what it is: clear intelligence as demonstrated with wit and variety in a medium consistent with historical convictions/biases; clear intelligence concomitantly provided by hindsight — 50 years feeling like yesterday (yet that can’t be empirical, can it?). Trisha Donnelly show is neither-nor (enigmacore (borderline enigma-snore) on-brand Donnelly). David Platzker curated a show about [historical] chimpanzees who paint — it should have been 4x as large and in a museum of some note (not that it was a “good show,” rather a show that began to speak of important things)). Rauschenberg had too much talent (and seemingly endless influence (in NY art that followed at least)) — again, the ultimate/quintessential (thus lamentably lamentable) Contemporary Artist in some ways. Next door, Rauschenberg’s contemporary, Avedon: a different (semi-seemingly-)[C]ontemporary: one where little but history/archive can be felt, yet utterly legible/immediate in some of the best ways art can be.

At least two contemporaries: the vertigo of the unmanageable; the thrill of the temporarily legible.

My 2-year-old [as] alarm clock decided to sleep in this morning… Wow did I come up with some good stuff:

1. 160th day of room-temp snowman
2. deep fried frames

Re 1. you have a snowman indoors at a steady 68ºF and on the 160th day you document what’s left. Re 2. after construction of wood/metal/other frames for paintings/drawings/prints/etc you own, the frame gets put in a deep frier (large enough to accommodate most frames (say 90″ x 75″ max?) for at least 9 seconds. Within a week you put the artwork in the frame and you have your framed work.

Two little notes (of little note?):

1. I Tweeted about S.o.a.p./SOPP for the first time just a few dozen hours over 1 year ago.
2. If Eleanor Antin happens to be reading, my two-year-old is now a fan of your 100 Boots book.

A note on note 1: A year does (less surprising) and doesn’t (more surprising) make a difference.

And a note on that note: “make a difference” as intellectual instruction rather than social mantra is of note, although it also, arguably, just the Avant-garde creed in a nutshell. “To make” connotes/conjures use of the hands; “a difference” is a more abstract noun (dry Oxbridge philosophy style?); so imagine using your hands to form an abstraction (which might be the very mantra of the Avant-garde (which I read an odd take on yesterday…))

Yeah, not very interesting notes, but I’m not very interesting either.

Rob Horning writes:

Wanting to “expand the frame” or extend narratives with fan fiction and so on is really a way to shrink and nullify the existing work and its irresolvable mysteries. The expanded universe is always [not sure if I’d always agree] a diminished one. 

Which immediately made me think on how painting and types of sculpture (and many other (if not all) recognized media) might be considered fan fiction/culture. The recent RETURN of appealing/competent but quite digestible painting, as well as various assemblage-isms that harken back to the 50s and 60s neoDada-Fluxus-and-spawn suggests that rather than anti-generically attenuating itself to a vanishing point (which Conceptualism of many ilks deliberately sought and/or accidentally formalized) contemporary art now very much wants to be much like it has already been: formally dependable/relatable.

Tangentially, it’s also clearer and clearer that the power of paintings has generally become less about the (re)construction of the visual and more about paint-itself — not mark-making, per se, but the painter’s presumed prowess at mark-making — they paint so they must be painters (strange tautology). (Seth Price and Wade Guyton both mess around with these expectations but do little to distance themselves from perpetuating the precedent/presiding prowess.) I can’t but sympathize with the otherwise abominable[?] advent of AI imaging insofar as it does just what most painting can do sans paint — it can produce (art) image[s] of prowess — it stakes a claim to do just this, no need to quaintly mimic NetArt(-esque) UIaesthetics — strong images are strong. Painting may largely thrive right now by dint of being the easiest (least-time consuming(?)) means of maintaining the fragile church of the Romantic/Modernist “genius” in the gale of reproductional forces — it’s no longer religious in the sense that mid-Century painting (including Pop) often was; it’s way past being a gonzo-rearguard product of the painted-80s; never mind the dubious claims of painting’s ultra-late avant-gardisms; painting seems to have merely become a way to prove you make/own “art” (which wasn’t ever absent in the practice of painting, just unbecoming to certain minds with certain axes to grind). But can I respectfully ask: How can it possibly be that painting is important right now? Seurat should have sent the medium packing. Is it seen as part-and-parcel to [classical (bourgeois)] liberalism? (If so, perhaps this would account for the recent exponential increase in scripted moving-image content and (semi-)fat book authors?) Maybe there’s a subconscious cultural need to defeat the machines by proving our human(istic) chops — I’m utterly sympathetic to that of course — thought being our greatest tool and why not continue to mess around with it on its own terms; it’s like a holy book — if you believe it to be a plenary reservoir (even if more an exegete than a “passive” believer), well then there you have it. (And so perhaps painting should be as routinely taught as the alphabet is? (But then you lose the Icons on the wall (and what to replace them with?))

Eva Longoria directs a movie about the guy who made Flamin’ Hot® Cheetos®. Clearly something to write an awe-ful/jealous sentence about, though probably not the art I wish it were.

To semi-retread some ground I’m semi-confident I tread 5-8 weeks ago… I’m increasingly sure I’m mourning an inability to art-ly comment on things that flirt with the (semi-)universal. Sure I can still make work about cats, pasta, or orange soda. But to do an endless revue of “the (wacky) readymade” is a poor excuse for the artist I prefer to be (even if a lot of people think it’s my most significant output). I’ve more recently retapped my umpteenth-gen Surrealism, but I’m not sure it’s the art I want to make as this art-I-want-to-make-ist. What things/topics can engage the broadest swath[s] of people; where is our common[s]? I can’t consign/confine myself to the local — I have such a hard time with that, even as I may have biases favoring numerous local[s] of mine. I’m (shamefully) aware the (quixotic) quest for immediacy is deep-seated in the me; I suppose I’ll have to discover how deep-seated the results may be. To believe in the thing that is the thing that is the thing — this is not to be confused with immanence.

PS. Thinking a tiny tiny bit more about Hans Peter Feldmann, it struck me that so much Conceptualism from the 1990s moving forward (and certainly some moving backward) could be considered Power Pop. (I <3 Cheap Trick.)

Hearing of Hans Peter Feldmann’s death, I immediately thought of the awful paintings he’d been making recently. It’s a shame when it’s hard to remember the more dignified output of a creator. I’m sorry HPF, you were an apt, light-footed contributor to the Conceptual world. I would have liked to see a sprawling monographic presentation at some point (and maybe someday will). Sail well, old man of the sea.

Since the NYT article came out, I’ve received a handful of offers. One was art-practice in exchange for private jet. Another was very involved and very intelligent and I bet I’ll comment on it in greater depth at some point. A third offered $1000 CDN (email address was an immigration lawyer’s, though the signature didn’t match (perhaps one of lawyer’s clients?)). A fourth offered to swap practices (hers is painting (she’d offer me lessons if I don’t know how to paint (I don’t))).

I’m interested in the second and fourth offers, though I’m not sure to what extent yet. There was another interesting proposal sent to me but it’s different and I won’t comment on it here. I hope more proposals come in. I like having something to think about that isn’t “how many minutes can I have before one of my kids needs me?” or “when will I finish any of the books I’m in the middle of reading?”

I had about 1 minute of idea time this week. I came up with the boring idea of hanging a variety of wall art across a sturdy cable/rope connecting 432 Park Ave. and Steinway Tower at least 64 floors up. I also remembered some somewhat older ideas about dental floss (which seems to be a leitmotif of mine) and giant soda cans meant to resemble Greek vase painting + be portals to various worlds (unified by I’m-sworn-to-secrecy).

2 unpremeditated[ly] semi-related typed-out[s from] this weekend:

2. Those moments when you see it: the presence, the oddness, the uncanny, the composition. The ephemeral/tenuous clarity. What gall to pronounce it art/form. I may need to believe (and delight in the notion) that sculpture is everywhere but there remain limits to what can matter. (Much as there are limits to how many paintings can be considered art? There have to be too many paintings unless painting IS art (which it is, but which also can’t not be untenable)). The motor of aesthetics is nameless and endless and effortless yet and yet and yet [and yet]: behold the passing form. To thirst for permanence in beauty/meaning is the primary error, and yet (and yet (and yet)) who wouldn’t harbor the notion that it can all be gathered/presented. Behold the impossible moment — note the magnitude, the plenum, the sanctuary/residence. Here we are (and yet and yet (and yet and yet) and yet). Yet becoming; fully being until. And yet there are things I see in these common toys my child plays with (or ignores) that are orderly and rich in chance and form and not-really-norm; and yet what can(‘t) pass as art? How impoverished a category it can be when presented with unlike/alien comparison.

1. Magritte. One of the best marriages of word and image I can think of.  Yet still not the answer I seek. Conceptual Art is often at its best when as seemingly effortless as Magritte, yet there’s generally something missing in both and what that thing is is the answer — though likely not. Slightly imperfect enigmas: epigrammatically precise yet the paint itself… Magritte, a great near-greatness. To find yourself in the feeling of great art, that para-sublime — therein the lyric lies, the depths of the great highs (repealed by sighs and sloughs and chance redos.)

And one more:

3. The flight of the floor

Brian Boucher @ NYT covered S.o.a.p. I like what he did. And I’m happy to see things now truly subject to the elements (i.e. let’s see what the whether will bring).

Glad to be provided a link to the full Gladstone quote I quoted (which ArtNews sort of cherry-picked out of context); it puts things into better context, proving me even more a naïf than previously thought — though I do think this naivety is increasingly endemic to [fine] art production in general — the post-novelty novelty wheel.

One more thing: I wish NYT didn’t require portraits of their subjects but they do, so that’s now me having to deal with more thesis management — conceptual butterfingers is my speciality/metier I’m sure. (Robert Barry releases Xenon into the world, I release other gases (inert though they may be)).

Until recently, NYC always felt like a habitat to me — I but one small organism assiduously, at times aimlessly, obliviously going about my life within it. Though (seemingly). ever more that organism, I’m becoming more like one trying to find exit signage in the local Plato’s Cave™ — to be blinded by deer-tick-infested billboards and rioting algae. Unnecessary preamble.

Public Art Proposals for NYC, May 23 2023 edition:

1. Commission hundreds thousands of local artists (can include anyone, school children for sure) to each be assigned a pothole and decide what to fill it with. Let the city accept all proposals and suffer the consequences.

2. Each of the 51 NYC Councilpersons organize their district’s to-go coffee-cup gathering initiative. This entails gathering all in-district to-go coffee-cups disposed of on a designated day (let’s say the second Monday in March?) and bringing them to a single in-district outdoor location where they’ll be stacked upside-down to see how tall the “tower” they become is. Heights will be compiled, compared, and a winning (i.e. tallest d.t.g.c.c. tower) district will be announced by Wednesday AM. The winning tower gets strapped to a flat bed and driven to the Texican border where it’s installed to greet whomever encounters it. What does the district receive? Local clout/ridicule.

3. While we’re at it, street “sweeping” trucks — send every last one of them to an imaginary island in Battery Park where they’ll be consigned to utter oblivion.

What we talk about when we talk about “fair use”: liberty, affordances, ingenuity, chance, etc. We can honestly speak of abuses as well. And though the Warhol-does-Prince case in some way warrants Justice Kagan’s thrilling dissent (hats off to JR as well), Warhol’s production of that many Prince canvases could be attributed to a sort of studio/success complacency — I know this isn’t what the court ultimately ruled on, but it’s the point I want to discuss. Should I question Sherrie Levine’s new After Stieglitz work? I feel I should (and I hope SL doesn’t take it personally). What’s the point besides filling a commercial gallery in this instance? Best to defer to the artist’s standards/prudence, but only up to a point. If I’d continued to show unaltered full feature films (all commercially released with distribution deals) in art spaces for years, what would be the clear cultural benefit? I suppose it would remind viewers a and n about notions of context that persons f and q considered too recently (or never endeavored to consider) — not at all unlike what verses from a prayer book are meant to do for someone of the faith. But if the appropriating artist stands to make a profit from the act of appropriation, and as a human habitually/complacently leans into routine with little regard for the fortune of the humans one is routinely and deliberately pilfering from, well that’s worthy of ethical (and thus legal) discussion (as are the current SCOTUS ethics code discussions). Did Warhol produce the Prince portraits in a mechanical haze of habit? Were 12 canvases and 4 prints needed (what bills needed to be paid, which vacations taken, etc?)? Was Prince, Richard preparing himself for lawsuits when he made the works he’s been/being sued for; or was he just too much in the habit of saying fuck-it, I’m an artist (of some renown)? Richard Pettibone building a full career on redos, however clever? Sturtevant at least had a fiery sword (and little financial success) at her side. (If Koons making multi-millions for deciding the Western canon was his isn’t alarming (public domain and all), I don’t know what is.) This may all be self-evident to those educated in contemporary art and appropriationism, but I do think it needs occasional consideration/discussion. Artists shouldn’t be holy cows (thank goodness we’ve been spared a Constitutional Amendment) just as jurists and leaders shouldn’t. Fair use should always emphasize the fair. Abuse of power/desire comes as no surprise. Ethics, always ruining the party…

PS. I was a signatory on an amicus brief to SCOTUS that also (and prominently) included Kruger.
PPS. 10 years ago, I received a significant cease-and-desist. I would have loved to have taken it to court at the time, but knew then as I do now: art goes on no matter its restrictions (shudder to think of some though I may). (E)Valuations are invariably biased.

OCEAN COUCH
A colossal couch (or loveseat) that floats upon the ocean. It’s at least 20m wide and proportionate to most couches found in human homes. All frame, filling, and upholstery material should be relatively well-suited to withstanding the elements (including avian feces), but shouldn’t feel too synthetic to the touch (of humans (colossal or not)). The couch shouldn’t be anchored, but can be weighted in such a way as to keep it afloat in the upright position. The couch should stay at sea for 19 years or more.

Rogaine® experiment: third rail
I was never able to realize my 4th Rogaine® sculpture, which would have Rogaine® (or Regaine®) somewhat generously applied to a live third rail. The area of application should be no less than 1m in length.

tbt historical-figure dating show
All contestants hail from the annals of world history and go out on 21st-century-style dates to see who can find love (so to speak). Matchmaking provided by the whims/designs of the show’s producers. For instance Dakudonu has (boozy) brunch with Boudica, Ptolemy [the astronomer] plays mini-golf with Murasaki Shikibu, Rigoberta Menchú and Arnouphis have a double date with Bronzino and Florence Nightingale (let’s see what happens there). At least 2 12-episode seasons with at least 18 contestants per season. True love is immortal and good sex worth pursuing.

Pointing at the toaster that would soon cough up a waffle, I asked my kid if he was “ready to wait.” I don’t know why I think this of any exceptional note. I mean, ready-to-wait is as basic as religion/spirituality can be (though unlikely to be so in breakfast form). Perhaps purposefully waiting on art is something of a [spiritual] travesty, but no matter that: travesties can be more profound than their paragons (or the better word that eludes me). I’m not thriving while waiting for whatever it is I’m waiting for (Waffle by Anish Kapoor, Charles Ray?), which is likely some animal (spiritual creature though it can’t but be) itch to find immediate direction/purpose/ structure/commitment. The task at hand…

This is well put. Been craving this take.

Last night: went to an art event for the first time in some time. Lots of people who are friends, some close friends. Was a good feeling (I’ve felt lonely here on parent planet). Very nice show by Uri Aran!

Though interpersonally it was a much needed draught of water (from one of those biblical wells I assume), I’m this morning most struck by feeling the continued personal relevance of SOPP/S.o.a.p. It’s such a minor gesture and one which may well be ignored beyond the few eyes that spend a few moments with this website. But it’s such a thorough project at the same time: not its vicissitudes (though thorough they in some ways can’t but be), rather its simplicity/simplism. It’s just this is-ness, a quick, clear thought and nothing else. And of course clear thought is also like some refreshing well-water (though microbes will always have their own dealings (much like life has its endless detail)).

I’m not a studio artist (though I could be). I’m not an “emerging artist” (though I could be?). I’m not an artist who has felt marginalized in any way other than debt-ridden, middle-class woe and “being [conceptually] misunderstood.” 20 years is just a marker, though marking we tend to crave. What do I crave? A palpable transition — and that’s really the feeling I sensed this morning. Aging lifeform in transit, hoping for a sip or two of delicious water, those brief bits of mental limpidity.

Art-as-limpidity (if questionable quiddity) and/or art as delectable riddle — I’d still love to play second fiddle.

Re: Auction Week

At the very cusp of the pandemic, Sadie Coles HQ generously posted something I thought would be a meaningful artwork, an art work that had nothing to do with the health crisis I was still in denial of. It’s one of those things that may have made sense to me then, but there’s no longer a trace of how. (As always, Erica Ohmi did a swell job with the graphic design.)

I recently arrived at a kindred (and to my mind superior) idea to this work (a bit more in keeping with some salient-ish aspects of my work): during an art auction (of note) someone should aim to win at least 3 lots in a row and then combine the 3+ works to create a single sculpture. The buyer would then claim authorship of the new work (or assign it to an artist not one-of-the-3+). I suggest at least 2 people do this (same or different auction both fine). I wonder if the auction house contract would be a legal deterrent to this (I have no interest in reading an auction house bidder/buyer contract). Point being — if I hadn’t made point clear enough in the past — artworks themselves are quite as material[s]/readymade as any other thing.

With Matthew Barney about to premiere a new moving-image “beast,” I’m reminded of how impressed I was 20 years ago seeing Cremaster 3. I’d already seen the other 4, each time feeling I was watching little more than high-production video art (short of the lush nature-scapes in Cremaster 2). But Cremaster 3 felt like proper cinema, still weird-as-can-be, but more technically confident/competent and evenly mannered (high production value inside the Chrysler and Guggenheim certainly didn’t impoverish the experience). Point being, though thoroughly ensconced in the cultural margins, to me Barney’s Cremaster journey was one of the quintessential products of the 90s “pomo apogee” I mentioned in a recent post. One could consider this a dedicated aesthetics of excess (much like some of the most compelling installation art (and even Sara Sze (and Rachel Harrison?) as next-gens of that ilk/”temperament”)).

If Barney had, post-Cremaster, been given $15-20M to make a para-Hollywood film (think Gondry/Kaufman (or perhaps Jonathan Glazer) of the same period), it would have been a fitting “synthesis” (at least to my mind!).

Regardless, there once was a time when I (naively) thought art and “mass” moving-image media might be better tuned to such synthesis. That’s now of the past. But soon thereafter I discovered some of the more complex works of Anime and found them a satisfactory substitute (although I surely failed to understand much of the Japanese-ness I blissfully took as brilliantly bizarre). Etc. I still think animation is the best world to weird-world in. (Along those lines I expect game engines will become increasingly invaluable (as long as the hardware continues to size down and the bandwidth scale up) — Matthew Barney’s “late work” all happening in virtual space (does he dream of such opera?).)

I just had (or kind of had) to read over published interviews [with me] from the past 12 years. Gosh I don’t know what to say — much like I don’t know what to say in this Journal beyond the impetus to type/say it. The act of writing and the perennial question of: Why[?] (or the desire/perplexity of the first-person).

The other day I remembered a line from Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rabassa trans.) that really made an impression on me back when I read it (2006?): “I can make a dialectical operation even out of soup.” I can make a poor version of this dish, failing to recall any substantial participation in dialectics, but to desire to hold onto the idea itself — vital consommé that.

In an interview from 11 years ago, I still had Proust as the pinnacle of something consummately spiritual. I now have serious doubts I’d be able to find that Proust again. This comes as both sadness/dread and relief. I recently enjoyed reading René Girard’s take on Proust.

PS. According to NPR, May is national Mental Health Awareness Month. A real May bouquet. So pick up your Proust, grant Girard to his Christ, and leave me to my plunder of plum paradise.

Ok so this Hinton guy left Google: It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things. Plus: This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own.

Meanwhile Sam Altman sounds like he’s a trying to wow the grown-ups at his Bar Mitzvah: I mean, we can take any sort of trope that we want here. What if we’re able to cure every disease? That would be a huge victory on its own [seems unlikely or do I just not understand ribonucleic this-and-that?]. What if every person on Earth can have a better education than any person on Earth gets today? [this makes no sense]. That would be pretty good. What if every person a hundred years from now is a hundred times richer in the subjective sense [Has he been watching The Midnight Gospel thinking it was Montaigne, er Ecclesiastes?]? Maybe they’re happier, healthier, have more material possessions [awesome] more ability to live the good life [amen] in the way it’s assigned to them than people are today. I think all of these things are realistically possible [the benighted race will finally become children of the spheres].

[To quote someone a couple months later: A.G.I. will dull the pain of our thorniest problems without fixing them.]

Mind you, I too evince the intellectual capacity of a 13-year-old and all I can contend is: knowledge isn’t a virtue; science ≠ progress and vice versa (and perhaps progress is too often confused with progress). I could add: fear-of-death isn’t to be conflated with quality-of-life — transhumanism isn’t humanism, is it? I’m of the (“deep”) mind it’s not Stalinist paranoia to disinvite the machines to (cook) dinner — sympathetic machines certainly, just a matter of…  Also, can I just say Altman’s habit of citing nuclear deterrence as analogy/guru for A(G)I management is troubling?

I’ll soon sit through the new New Models podcast re-guesting Hernhurst-Drydon — but they always tell me nothing short of: we are well-meaning, research-responsible, gearheads/experimentalists. Maybe they’ll open my mind this time? [They did good, but my mind wasn’t that opened.]

What does all this A(G)I animus have to do with art (or at least the definition(s) of art I think of primary value)? More or less everything — transhumanism isn’t humanism, is it?

PS. Shalom to the Shelleys, who were last seen eating manna at the Met Gala.

To have missed this (posthumously) great sculpture: Jeffrey Epstein and/with Noam Chomsky ![![![![!]]]

Maybe a monumental sculpture at some point in the future: “Next Year in Jerusalem!” We Jewish Americans are awfully proud.

When corresponding with Lawyer Dave yesterday, I realized “sale of art practice” is SOAP. Moving forward I’ll refer to it as SOAP(P) and not SOPP.

Shockingly have some me-time and a couple hare-brained ideas to share:

Public Art Project #1

A municipality collects as many orphaned socks (dryer disappearance, irremediable decay of sock twin, loss in transit, etc.) as possible — preferably just one sock per person (if person wants to contribute). Each of these socks becomes a musical note in a transcription of a Schubert Concerto or Mahler Symphony or Bartok quartet, etc. How to display this — there must be some good walls the municipality has access to? Socks can be used to represent multiple musical compositions as well. Or all socks can be made available to a commissioned composer who then uses all socks to aid in writing a new composition.

Public Art Project #3

There’s a volcano, specifically one whose magma reservoir is plenty obscured by layers of the Earth’s crust. Once (or twice (or three or four or eight times)) a year, a new cast sculpture is dropped into the volcano. Casting has to be done in a metal/alloy strong enough to withstand the heat of the magma — tungsten for instance. No sculpture should be smaller than 1m at its narrowest and 80m at its widest. Ideally the cavity of each sculpture will be filled with some sort of human-produced waste product. Keep this project going for as long as funds exist.

With spring allergies + kids refusing to let me think (not that I was ever particularly skilled at the activity) + not being asked to do an Artforum “Top Ten” or the like… I want to note how uncommonly thrilling (semi-sublime) seeing the sculpture of Jessi Reaves [@Bridget Donahue] and Frank Stella maquettes(?) [@The Ranch] was for me last year. Sculpture is not easy. These 2 excel at making it even less easy.

As things go as they go, stuck here at home (changing diapers @ gloam; no time to bend poems). At-times-typing these posts for post-hibernal journal; there’s but brief time for reading; how I’d love a pitch meeting. My occupational eye is prone to dry, asking me how is it I water the proverbial garden? I haven’t a clue (oldest kid’s nearly 2)  — “Say, really, what do I do?” I never can tell — is a sight just a smell? — seems uh-sorta-plangent “aura management”… The Artist is a relatively experienced Aura Manager. To purchase the Artist’s Aura Management Practice, wire plenty of money — the sheer act can be funny + leaning towards meaning (will I welcome the weaning?).

Over the years I’ve intermittently + fleetingly considered the possibility of considering myself an Impressionist. Surely not revolutionizing painting, surely not an enpleinairman. Rather rather limited faculties: the writer who can’t tell a story (the writer who can’t write without recourse to excessive punctuation); the visualist who can’t locate a medium. Most of what I do is/may-be based on impressions: intuition, trivial epiphanies, superficially stupid/slapdash. Certainly not puerile, but perhaps incongruously confident given the (often exceptionally) limited means. “Just following some feeling folks”; a melding of the sensorium and the something-gland.

John Ashbery’s a poet whose work I(‘ve) take(n) great comfort in. He strikes me as an Impressionist, a truly gifted one (I’m now wondering if Rauschenberg is an Impressionist).

Useless to write all this, but we are beings of so-called soul (eternally a wondrous hole). My mixed sense of humility, honesty, and guilt — imposter syndrome + self-understandingish + (retro)perspective. I love art/poetics; I know it and I feel it and it’s been with me in this palpable way since I was 19. That’s really all I know except for the factoids/words that cleave to my grey mush and the standard sun-sky-sea-tree-friend-me-you-love-that-this-the-uh-us-pleasure-contentment-malaise-pain-touch-rest-sleep-can’tkeep. And image — cold as an isolated word might be — a great and fickle furnace.

Another species of impression: fathoms falling, become a murmur, an anxiety-flanked blank, a raw Ryman canvas waiting to be painted on (by Steve Harvey + Jessica Simpson + Naomi Osaka + Ben Shapiro ‘s grandkid). Over(w)rote.

Is there anything I should write about Jimmie Durham? I remember enjoying his writing very much. His art output all seems quite effortless: a natural poet and humorist, with a sympathetic intelligence. I met him once; these sort of meetings make me uncomfortable.

David Hammons is Durham’s contemporary. Durhammons are 35 and 38 years my seniors. (Dylan Zimmer is 37 years my senior (his second son is Sam Kriss, Jesse Stecklow his third, Jake Gyllenhaal-Green his seventh).) Gaddis was already writing The Recognitions when Durhammons(zimm) were under 10 years of age (Nietzsche stopped writing 33 years before Gaddis was born (and just around the time Duchamp was (presumably) saying his first words (“le gai savoir”))).

I’m 5 months older than Ron DeSantis, 5 years + 5 months older than Donald Glover, 500 months older than some kid I saw today. Sperm + eggs = hair + legs (stained in sympathetic dregs). The Russian poets and the French poets and the Taiwanese auteurs. Samy Rosenstock.

Rob Horning and Frank Lantz both mentioned an article by Peli Grietzer, so I read it. Then I read the Horning article (and Lantz blurb). Quotes that resonate (kind-of-ish wish I had one or two them on hand back during my winter “art-itself” posts):

Poetry, I am arguing, is not ours to define. There’s something irrevocably empirical about the fact that poems and novels and paintings and music and films stir cognitive-affective goings-on that have the bearings of sense. And there is something irrevocably empirical, too, in the pressure to admit these goings-on as ‘thoughts’ or ‘meaning’.

Poetry, Kant says, is an ever-expanding panorama of a concept’s ‘implications and affinities with other concepts’. It ‘opens the mind’ to an ‘immeasurable field of interrelated thoughts’, each one concrete and worldly, held together by the grace of an unnameable pattern.

[A] souffle isn’t a souffle until the oven’s had its say.

PS. The more I see of the work, the more I think Thornton Dial is pretty major.
PPS. Had a luxurious 5 minutes to think of new ideas this morning (more time than I’ve had in weeks): what do glass baby bottles, chapstick tubes, standard “format” Sharpie®s, the Hudson River, some sort of box, and a poorly cut carpet have in common? I proudly stand with all unions + am proud owner of artificially intelligent teeth, each its own intelligence (behold the coruscating circuitry within).
PPPS. From circuitry to marquetry, digital injury is the eye’s bride/groom — Paul Valéry

Tax Day

I = 261
me = 49
my = 91
mine = 3
myself = 8

So-and-so’s pants pocket to be designated a National Park

This can’t be the best quote on the (heart of the) matter, but any encounter can be fortuitous, so:

Try to define them too carefully, and they disappear. Change your position only a fraction of a degree, and they seem clearly present once more. From this new angle we begin to define them again — and the process repeats. 

A related note: even though sometimes embarrassing to only know some things, perhaps more embarrassing to remember you’ll forget that embarrassment any moment now.

synthetics (via syncretics) and the failure(?) of synthesis; a quickie

“Plastics” was (purported) punchline for many, but Pynchon knew better (knowing no better how-to). There’s little less amusing than plastics — much like consideration of electric currents or cellular properties of hair. Jasper Johns’s Flags (encaustic (inherently caustic?)) are ruthless, refusing humor and seriousness both — unamusement bemusement(ality). Warhol’s films are humanist documents, whereas Warhols 60s silkscreens are largely leaps into the synthetic unknown. (Silkscreens from the shooting on seem to be humanist.) Is Jay DeFeo vs. Lee Bontecou a battle for sci-fi supremacy? Sturtevant is surely the plastic arts, but so might have been Duchamp (Picabia has to have been). Is Fluxus just post-Heisenberg Poe/Verne/Wells (is Beuys just Pythagoras in/from a far-flung lunar land?)? Why do I like Rachel Harrison so much; perhaps it’s not unlike other people liking David Foster Wallace so much. Franz West is blessed with holy (Roman) insolence and/or did Eva Hesse inspired H.R. Giger to write Westworld [for HBO in 1972]? etc. Psychosis. Queneau-sis. Rhizomatic Thrombosis. Extemporaneous explication in desperation, spring-spored pollen-clogged pores (June soon mends these mottled mental molds).

Bricologics broken under their own unbridled breakage. Weight gain light as halogen-heaven. It has been prophesied — just another mystic fit, fitted with almost-nearly-everything. Prometheus bound to forget nearly everything.

POST WRITTEN/EDITED OVER 3 DAYS MINUS 1

Read a useful essay by New Models. They mention the potential hegemony of the “Mid” opposite the logic/wisdom/sensibility of “dark forest”community-ism:

… forging a social protocol where the community signal is stronger than the pull of any individual platform. We might even say that the community itself becomes a form of media, a holographic filter through which every platform is accessed and where individuals with strong connections across multiple communities become literal interfaces for information.

Dominion of “Mid” likely sits miserably in anyone’s craw. Beat back the delusional/bad-actor techlords please, but what is community (and what isn’t vulnerable to opportunism and factionalism?)? Community’s a fundamental part of all of us, but we’re always faced with the discomfort of determining if we are a part of it/them (just as I’m wary of the Berlin and art-cool cliquishness that surrounds/permeates New Models).
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The other day, a journalist interested in writing on SOPP sat down with me for a preliminary chat. The discussion ended with my professing bleeding-heart faith for “the universal,” quickly qualifying this by invoking Voltaire’s ever-relevant God maxim. I also suggested the 90s were the apogee of good-Pomo (how nostalgic of me?) and later said I always wish to collage as a Pomo-er does — this is my (would-be) thrill of the universal, endless (blissful) flirtation with the absurd, mystic and instantly-defunct.
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The limits/utility/truth of the universal and the circumscribed community — both serve humanity’s needs and desires — both fail us as we effortlessly fail ourselves.

NM finishes their piece like so: To gain agency in today’s media space, you need to overcome the physics of its software. By thinking meta, you can build new protocols, structures that allow truth and trust to emerge. Whether through blockchain tools, new nested internets, or meta-assemblages of various platforms and apps, the future of media will come from experiments taking place at the level of protocol. And through these new protocols, new complexities will emerge through new relationships-complexities that we should embrace. Worldbuilding together, we can keep True Names secret, protected from the homogenizing force of the Mid, allowing for a return of productive incoherence, uncertainty, deep wisdom, and magic.

I’m nothing but sympathetic to the final clause, but everything that precedes it seems like Utopia, which is what Silicon Valley oracles speak of/through as well. Every instant carries a gene of Utopia — happy thoughts.
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Immediately after the pre-interview, the word “quintessence” came to mind. Gorgeous word describing no person.
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1.5 days later, finishing up SD’s Trouble on Triton, I came across this impressive Foucault quote:

Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing. probably because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental fabula; heterotopias . .. desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.

PS. Good NM podcast today 4/17. Can better understand what they’re after.

Can’t seem to get the word puerile out of my head. A nascent fascination with the (putative) puerility in my work. I’m going to do a deep dive into The Jogging for the next few days for at least 2.5 reasons. For .8 or .9, I never gave it regular attention back when it was lush.

PS. 2 days later: I don’t think I can keep going. Too many posts (too little time (I hope I’m now older than the chip on my shoulder)). Too many posts too painful / did scrolling just crash my laptop? I hope my work’s not this painful. (As for so-called memes, I don’t really care and never really have.)
PPS. Puerility though, I will have to start thinking about how to write on this. I feel it’s somehow essential that I do.
PPS. Speaking of puerile: these kids I’m now raising.
PPPS. I trust there are several The Jogging posts deep(er) in the scroll that I’d appreciate; there were even some in the mere year I was able to scroll through.
PPPPS. I dnd’d one work/post titled 3 V-necks and Great Wall of China. It’s growing on me more and more with each [desktop] encounter (today is 4/18).
PPPPPS. Watched Brad’s “Post Internet Report.” He did a good job I’d say (not that I’m qualified, but he seemed to put a lot of effort into shoring up his points). The Jogging has so little to do with what I did/do. All puerility would be mine. (5/1)

This humorless era we live in smothered by humor.

Read a brief piece on Stanley Brouwn (whose work sadly bores me (though I’d really like to be unbored-ed/onboarded (and hope to somehow see the current traveling show (traveling there by foot of course)))) and was reminded(?) of this:

an artist who once claimed all the shoe stores in Amsterdam as his exhibition

Taken out of context (i.e. pushing Brouwn’s pedal/pedestrian interests/aesthetics to the periphery), I think it’s a great work, halfway between Ruscha and Broodthaers — the latter perhaps by proximity more than kinship.

Too bad Sturtevant didn’t take over all of Amsterdam’s shoe stores; too bad she didn’t do her own Roden Crater. Lots of too bad. Too bad I don’t have the time to really think about this post (I really do lament this, though childcare has its rewards).

Just realizing that the “taken out of context” aspect is what really requires my written attention. This aspect is the farce of authorship and the champion of anonymity. The person who chance elects to be recognized for their assertions of value and/or the person who chance finds present when the “elected” seeker/recorder is desperate to find value/symbol/meaning.

I suppose the question is — once again for me (and me) — why in/as art do we seek the name of the artist to justify the experience of the work? I trust not everyone does, rather the temple guards and acolytes do. Behold this monographic show of Person H43 — behold proof of talent/value/meaning/reward/beauty/etc. Does monographic Warhol or Basquiat (nevermind their collaborations) do a greater service to the legacy of Warhol or Basquiat than the common (mis)understanding of what their work denotes in the broader cultural milieu (popular culture, let’s call it)? I doubt it. Duchamp’s urinal should be of lesser import than his large glass (shattered or not) or his Paris air. Will Louise Bourgeois become the spider to Pollock’s splatter? And other cursory comparisons I won’t cough up here.

Why is it that I can admire Sturtevant’s take on Rainer while knowing it couldn’t retain value if it wasn’t framed by her historians; knowing I would have likely(?) found it as puerile in person as I did Merlin Carpenter’s 2007 Reena Spaulings show (which still has an emetic quality for me)? How can I admire her double take (premeditated or not) on Raysse, while finding her Duchamp unuseful, her Johnsing soporific, and her Warhol flowers glorious, etc.? Why all this and a name? I don’t much care for Van Gogh but I trust there’s a high chance any given painting from 1888 as an anonymous stand-alone would catch my eye more than seeing 10 works of his from that year (ditto any (and there are many) [over]saturated room of Impressionist standards).

I hope to come to horrible answers. Till then:

an artist who once claimed all the shoe stores in Amsterdam as his exhibition

I’m live now. Had to bait a prospective audience with a birthday post — not something I’d generally post about, but guessed it would get likes and thus momentum. Of course, getting some birthday love is nice—warm thanks to those who gave it.

Earlier today I had an idea about hanging a show in an ice cube. Inside the Ice Cube likely the muse. I like the idea. How to do it? Will work on my advanced physics and chemistry.

I think I’ll go public tomorrow. Never ready I guess. Good.

Noticed a screenshot on my desktop, taken in the past week or so. Emily Fisher Landau died at 101.

“She was not just buying because it would go up in value,” dealer Barbara Gladstone told the Times. “That’s a wonderfully old-fashioned tradition.”

I’m still shocked/nauseated this is considered old-fashioned by someone of Gladstone’s experience. What world have I been a part of for two decades?

I watched about 30% of The Last Temptation of Christ last night (I’d watched about 35% earlier in the week; Golgotha and Temptation Island will (likely) be visited tonight). Then I watched the second half of Four Weddings and a Funeral. My second time watching each movie. After that, lights out, head on the pillow, I picked up my phone, and jotted this down: The Last Temptation of Christ was to rewatch 4 Weddings and a Funeral. A moment later I remembered the morning would bring Holy Week.

Morning came and the jot-down isn’t as interesting to me as it was when jotted. Desert highs, desert lows. On Temptation Island, Satan asks me if I’d like to look better in a thong than Robert Barry did in 1968. I say “Sure, Satan. I wanna make good art.” Satan says, “Ok god-fearing-esque, idolatrous Jew. There’s a charismatic coming to town later today; he’ll be riding a donkey and people might greet him with palms.” I think of what a hand would look like without palms, then say, “Ok.” Later this week, while Peter’s busy denying some stuff, I’ll steal his keys and post them (via Herb Vogel) to Printed Matter. Good news indeed.

I suppose being Jewish, I’m allowed to make Holy Week jokes. This isn’t very compassionate of me, but Christ also has his sword (and I have my toothpick or Q-tip or something like that). Anyhow, it wasn’t kind of Martin Scorsese to cast Willem Dafoe as the Nazarene (apparently Aidan Quinn was Plan A — not kind either); Harry Dean Stanton as Saul/Paul is a weird, ultimately not ba(l)d, choice; Keitel should have demanded Walken (with perm and dye-job) be brought in to do every other/third Judas scene. Too bad Pasolini didn’t cast Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Seth Siegelaub, Lee Lozano, Richard Serra/Richard Artschwager, Allan Kaprow, Judy Chicago, Michael Asher, Steve Reich/Philip Glass, and Dan Graham as the disciples; Arne Glimcher as the Baptist; Barnett Newman as [mother] Mary; Peter O’Toole as David Bowie; shoot the Gospel closer to 1969 than 1964. Too bad Scorsese didn’t hand over the reins to De Palma (Body Double 2).

PS. Why this post?

Abundant IG-poster Matthew Higgs IG-posted his abundant collection of Richard Prince books. He says there are more than 100 RP books (some of which he doesn’t have). How apropos — Richard Prince embodies sheer abundance/mediocrity. Which is my tendency as well. Abundance ultimately contaminates, assuming mediocrity no matter its qualities to the contrary — or at least that’s my sophistical surmise while not pausing to ponder.

A handful of posts ago, I mentioned Dada being insidious. Prince is the perfect example of this. Stripped of its original context, Dada becomes cheap, insouciantly baleful, often derivative Avant-garde-isms. I’ve at least once alluded to Rauschenberg (whose work I often find of high quality), and more often Polke-and-scions Cologne, being harbingers of this semi-dominant species of  “Contemporary Art”. This is certainly a cursory assessment. Picabia is perhaps more apt. What I mean is the apparent cultural depletion of convictions distinct from the disposable, the arch, the ersatz, the pseudo-/quasi-nihilistic absurd. Of course I’m an absurdist and much of what I’ve cursorily commented on as Pomo [miserable shorthand for unsatisfying noun/adjective unless when non-critical Jameson-ian] has to do with a pervasive cultural embrace of this absurdism, letting it abound, letting it spore and spoor and enrich as enpoor. Abundance is clearly an attribute of our/this ethos. It will pollute/destroy as it feeds — perhaps it aims to be a successful lifeform in and of itself (AI for instance).

One could wonder if Prince’s corpus as a whole (however unfair that may be to a number of works within it) embodies contempt, a quality neither Rauschenberg nor Polke seem to understand. Obviously I’m asking the same about qualities within my self/work. Contempt is rarely compostable.

In some ways Prince is the Facebook-spawned “like” avant la lettre. Though he does (cynically?) continue to mine the already stripped strip mines of moribund meaning. Who knows — I have every and no right to avenge “sacred” aesthetics from the abuse(s) of democratics.

There’s an inkjet-on-stretched-canvas wall-work leaned against the facade of my apt. building. The image seems to be a vista of those “pre-Modern” property walls (the sheep-keep kind) you’d see in the British Isles. The composite object seems to be about 40″ x 24″ x 2″. My impulse was to consider it a sculptural artwork for a gallery wall. The occasion reminded me of Prince + Higgs’s post + Dada-esque decadence. To unhappily consider oneself a (pathetic) decadent is perhaps less sad than considering oneself persistently unhappy.

This evening’s* Final Jeopardy question: Is Richard Prince happy?

*Monday’s more likely.

When I wrote Life As a Readymade, I hyperbolically claimed there were “scores” of Tumblrs devoted to various sculptural/artful street finds/stuff/refuse (‘I spy an exquisite sort-of-halved melon alongside a troika of dowels’ — that sort of “painterly” magic). There were probably no more than dozen accounts (not sure how I’d know though). Point being, phone-photoing chance sculpture on/of the street is something I think quite germane (I’m an avid practitioner). But I’m really writing this post to rave about @macraesemans and @gangculture on Instagram — different eyes, both delightful to mine.

Just saw that someone had AI review their art show. That’s good AI art.

To be in art. I wonder how many artists* want to be in art. And what do I mean? Perhaps the person reading this understands. It’s not a matter of place/stasis, it’s the haunt of impossible metamorphosis…

*I mean persons who have given a significant part of themselves to the pursuit of an art form. Pursuit is the perfect word in this context.

You can always improve on the language, knowing full well the language will never keep as you intend. That remarkable observation now put down on “paper,” let me continue with:

Happen to be reading Valéry [notebook excerpts mostly] for the first legitimate time. Human thought is wondrous, best consumed when staring along the proverbial abyss. Melancholic poetics of Pessoa, Shelley, Valéry, etc — they make my heart melt/blurf — melancholy(‘s) mellifluousness. Lifts the spirits proto-ecstatically high by acknowledging the spirit’s bracing, bewildering, somehow becoming [as in attractive] bouts of dismay. An idea is the most beautiful thing (though a visage, a touch, and good sleep can be too), enhanced when words are found for it — fleeting understanding of course, all of it. Ok thanks (in translation).

Just realizing it’s 100 years or so of Dada & Surrealism® now and wow it’s humbling to recognize how lucky I’ve been to live in an age when these languages are in many ways linguae francae. I’m right at home — an inconspicuous, ultimately anonymous, citizen, just following penchants I’ve had since I was a kid. Yet I can make work that seems to be received as somewhat “new”? Something must be amiss.

Point is, being of one’s time… Donald Glover for instance — Atlanta is in many ways a remarkable achievement. It’s as if Donald Glover were a painter/sculptor/writer “employed” by a duke/queen and given a studio on the ducal/palatial premises; given a very generous stipend/retainer and “limitless” license to consider the world. Hiro Murai is no minor player in the Atlanta aesthetic, much like BTH and LaKeith Stanfield are indispensable, not to mention several writers of note. But they’re all studio hands, with Glover the “genius” chosen for patronage.

The show has the flexibility of some of the great cultural products of the 90s: Simpsons, Seinfeld, South Park, peak music-video, etc. And yet it does something else/more: It is a late (Post-)Modern document that (un)intentionally functions as a loose survey of antecedent moving-image artistry, but almost never becomes pastiche (or montagist “sampling”). Obviously it indulges in Surrealism with regularity, but it also gets to do [non-Surrealist] “arthouse” cinema regularly. It’s really quite a coup given how much money (even if modest by industry standards) this all costs.

I trust someone else has already written on this and written well on it. As for Dada, it’s had a more insidious effect (in my estimation). Thank you for reading.

I was included in the new money-themed issue of a Berlin art publication. The writer called my work “Capitalist Realism” — I really appreciate that. I liked the article as a whole; I like being called a”nominalist”; they suggested my work is about speculation, but I’m not convinced.

There’s this potential banking crisis just around the corner. I’ve never had more negative money than I do now — that’s capitalist realism too. I’m owed a good amount that I may never see — collectors not being legally beholden to pay for works they verbally commit to.

Verbal commitment, lol. I have asked for the whole world, all the while lapsing into impertinence, impatience, impetuousness — art me an art-art (“I’m searching for a real love…”)… Trying so very hard (alienating/annoying along the way) to find the words to find the way to the world, the art, and the art world (where else to find the audience that would most likely understand what I was meaning after (where else to find such an audience that might give me a chance at a career)?).

A career. I suppose I’m trying to sell mine. Selling oneself selling oneself. For some reason I had U2’s The Fly stuck in my head (I was an MTV kid) and decided to look up the lyrics. Most of them aren’t any good, but I found these appealing, even if clumsy (could I be anything but?):

It’s no secret ambition bites the nails of success
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration and sing about the grief

A lot of Ruscha Conceptual® work was prescient or avant la lettre or a better word/term than those two
First encountering the title, 654 Things from The United States made me feel (happily) late to the party
My mind was kind of blown
I took a screenshot of the encounter
Then forgot about the screenshot
Then encountered the screenshot and shot it again
Then remembered to further look into the project as I began this post
I find I like the title more than I like the project
Which is both a bit sad and a bit relieving
.
A happy encounter of a few days ago was learning about this
The PR is nice but the project is good like a good Broodthaers project is good
I think it’s one of the best things I’ve “seen” in a good while
.
A good while is nice thing in and of itself —
To be packaged for sale by an artist perhaps

The show would be car keys, preferably ones that don’t look obsolete. Each key would have its own shelf on the wall and be around 50 in. from the ground. The show might also have a numbers of plinths in the middle of the floor (i.e. not particularly close to the walls) — on each of these plinths would be one or more slices of pineapple. Each car key would be a single work. The pineapple slices would be a single work titled “notable slices of pineapple.” Alternatively, the car keys could all just be in a single, preferably transparent bag, each key still a single work.

Mankind is vicious for sure. I wonder if my predilections for the absurd and “Postmodern” “quilting” are vicious per se or if they speak to/with the human spirit in a way that… ugh I’ve tried all sorts of language options and deleted them all — that’s the thing: the human is the human is the human is the human (and OOO (out of office ontology?) is nothing but a [human] thought experiment). To be kind to the world while being kind to your species [while metaphysics gnaws]. Art can be an intraspecies balm, but what (and what (though no ifs)).(..)

One day later I encounter a quote I photo-ed about 6 years ago: The world is not what we see nor what we think: it is an equilibrium, a moment of convergence. A pact and a pause.

***This post was precipitated by my beginning to read Ross Simonini’s Wolfgang Laib interview. Laib is an artist who is an artist who is good. The quote added a day later was [and is since I’m reading it from a photo] attributed to Octavio Paz.***

Had a good idea

A few years back an art writer called me/my-work “hamfisted”. I’m now able to regard this as something like praise, though ham (in particular, the pink, round USA style stuff) has always made me a bit uncomfortable.

Speaking of praise, my equilibrium “praised” me for at least beginning to go public with SOPP today. It was a real relief. I guess teasing it out in stages is the way to go. Less immediate damage control (that I’d have no time to attend to with the parenting situation I’m in).

Let’s see if there’s another post before kid #2 arrives…

I used to dislike looking at museum artworks that feel pitifully dated, the once-novel materials in slow and steady (discoloring) decay — often sculptural works from the 60s. Being at MoMA (yet another visit (with Mom)) today, I realized I’d love to be one of those artists whose work looks like shit. Maybe this is a sign of maturity. 

For awhile now I’ve wanted to make lip balm “paintings” directly on the a wall (a gallery wall a good place to start). You project the image you want to “paint” onto the wall and then use the lip balm stick [classic plastic cylinder thingy] as brush/pen/etc. I guess that’s all I have to say, except large “paintings” are what I had in mind. Why haven’t I turned mind into matter? Guess it’s just one of those things. Speaking of just-one-of-those-things, I’ve wanted to purchase the very same (I hope you know what I mean) single object from 100 different vendors, then place all 100 on the floor in a loose grid. An idea like the Amazon.com/eBay sculptures from Société shows. No need to do that now that I’ve written it down.

Never thought of this one though [quoted from BBC]: Inside his cooler bag was an ancient mummy.

Department of Eagles is one of the very greatest works of Contemporary Art (at the very least Rosalind Krauss makes it one). It came to mind when I was thinking about animals that make repeat appearance upon appearance in my kid’s board books and toys. There are so many visual variations on: lion (almost always male), monkey, pig, rabbit, octopus, etc. Why not make (semi-)comprehensive collections of each of these animals-represented? Perhaps each having its own room: the frog room; the giraffe room; the mouse room; etc. Of course this wouldn’t be an anthropological or museological project — it’s an art project, an artwork (quality unknown till achieved). How (semi-)comprehensive would the menagerie be?

Well, looky here, a balanced funny-serious mix. (Middlemarch is always serious though (even when G.E. has a sense of humor).) March is going to be comedy month, with Mary Anne Evans taking the wheel from the 10th to the 20th.

Had lunch with E & T. We discussed some things which made some sense and I felt somewhat relieved. I then crafted a text where I somewhat forswear SOPP, recognizing the relentless self-indulgence of it all — which I do. Navel-gazing is genuinely getting nauseating. It would also be nice to contend with fewer variables+unknowns (especially given my home life with small children in a relatively ruthless city). Yet I do think there’s something very key about SOPP — I just don’t know if I(‘ll ever) have the right words for it. To import a perhaps inadequate trope: it’s as if I’m struggling to write a novel, but I’m much better suited to writing belles-lettres (though this is simple truth, requiring no tropes).

What just happened in that previous post: I’ve wanted to keep posts somewhat light on their feet, but that’s been hard to land with any regularity.

Now that I think about it, when James Earl Scones was published, I was kind of confused to find people appreciating it for its humor above all else; an odd dose of imposter syndrome. And I still feel a bit misunderstood as an artist (might a comedian feel the same way?). Absurd(ist)/bizarre aesthetic “solutions” can easily be comical, but I’m infrequently chasing a punchline (lasagna on heroin one of the notable exceptions). The show I have up @ Société Berlin is a perfect case in point: a smattering of humor was intended, but not as medium.

Hey guys: I’m borderline morose and prone to age-old existential queries/cliches! I’m also haplessly after concise aesthetic, in most cases formal, resolution. Are you not entertained?

disc-shaped candy, key command, pore strips, knee brace, new-album download, tamarind, 24-year-old money order, 2-second idea of how US Naval radar works

I’d at one time have wanted to unite (as well as physically possible) these 8 components in a single space to understand what the joint sculptural and literary/verbal value was — an ungainly (even unattractive), but apropos, medium. This would have been a candidate for a work, even if only for a short while.

I’m no longer compelled, let alone interested, in testing such union[ing]. Are words enough? Sometimes for a moment. Objects too last for moments [plural of moment as well as singular noun]. Wrestling with time is an awfully unoriginal medium. Banalities are terrifyingly ubiquitous. Art is a fabric often unavailable. Here in the unenchanted realm we flirt with attractions, curiosity, affect(at)ion, and communication — which is all art can be, except for magic.

There’s nothing particularly novel in the think-piece I just read (author Drew Austin; good piece), but I found myself eagerly copy-pasting:

We increasingly bring our “whole selves” online, and must compress ourselves in various ways to do so. In the internet’s borderless world society, moreover, we are in theoretical contact with billions of similarly compressed personas… It’s fine that none of us are very unique when grouped together with billions of other people. The historical conditions that made each of us special, in fact, were fairly arbitrary… A lot of the time, what makes you special is simply that you’re here and therefore not somewhere else. 

We all know/sense there’s something epochal happening. I wouldn’t have undertaken SOPP if I didn’t intuit the project’s timeliness (even if belated, as most “fine” art mediation tends to be).

Is it best to doubt “epochal intuition”? To be one in 8 billion isn’t so difficult until you’re reminded you’re expected to do something, relate/participate, compete — (salutary) panic sets in. It’s this imperiled/adaptable “I” that yearns for so much but learns so little. Age old philosophical/religious conundrum: pesky (pestilential?) presence probing itself purposefully/prosaically/prolifically/profligately/perniciously.  Self both edifice and ruin — what’s to be gained by its steadfast, arguably moral, pursuit?

I think the point of this journal entry is to confess: I know how feckless SOPP is. But daily consideration of (indeed affection for) its form/aesthetic/companionship provides meaning. Though insipidly uninteresting in several ways, I feel it also has a nimble poetic quality.

Is this aesthetic I feel being limpidly conveyed, even as I muddy the project’s immediacy/simplicity with a legal contract and this journal? It’s as if I’m positing “[the color] orange” or “10 o’clock” or “like” — flatness — as distinct from the more suggestive “blue” or “legs” or “carry”). Do you get me [as the idiom goes]? Impossible to be alone.

While at MoMA, I realized a significant segment of recent Contemporary Art assumes the roll of not just research, but investigative journalism. There should be a medium-name for this, RIJ-Con or something less lame than that. I’m sure there already is/are, just as I’m confident there’s plenty of art writing about the increasingly prevalent medium. To be a part of one’s times, how demanding.

It’s hilarious that someone [me] who can’t come up with an image without a correlate text gets annoyed by art that requires image-text binary. It’s like I’m arguing over the Nicene creed (homoousios vs homoiousios). I like to write poetry more than read it. I like to read fiction way more than I like to write it. I want to be eaten by an image — that must be ecstasy.

First visit to MoMA in 2 years (unless I’m wrong, but I don’t think so).

I took 3 photos, all to capture text — the first 2 to record these complementary quotes:

Too often ideas are left unnurtured as they rest upon minds and tongues, unattended, until they are soon covered by day to day routines and accepted patterns.

When art is good it can be huge and important or very little, but living.

I couldn’t have put things better myself. Linda Goode Bryant and Meret Oppenheim are the things-putters.

The 3rd photo was to remind myself to look up Victor Grippo (whose name I recognize but can’t place). MoMA had a sculpture triptych of his on display. Reminded me of my own work but avant la lettre so to speak. Another good reason to sell the art practice. Sure I know, I know, but let’s not forget:

Art may be infinite in iteration and appearance, but its finite qualities (the power politics of display) are of no minor importance. Value must be notarized. 

Having just done an image search for Grippo, I see he was quite good with potatoes.

Ideas are starting to trickle in:

animal-free pelts+fat

Sprained shoe

my dog gave birth to baby carrots

Two quotes read this afternoon:

We, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenseless.

[O]nly dumb species purposefully create potential rivals to get a financial return on investment. Only dumb species create rivals because they think it’s a cool career, or because it’s fun to play around with in a chat window…

3 works I’ll probably never produce. (Works which others may have already produced (if not identically, at least close-enoughly).) Why am I sharing these? Because I just encountered 2 as screenshots in a folder I happened to be going through + I’d really like to share ideas rather than thoughts.

1. files* on an obsolescing/obsolescent** machine aka “future proofing” is careless

The work is 8 files* on the exact machine seen in the photo above.***

*the artist considers these files sculptures.****
**it isn’t recommended these files be transferred from the machine.
***the original owner of this work received this machine from the artist.
****i.e. sculptures nominally created/defined by the artist

2. meter stick (for RZ)

The work is a meter stick that naturally floats in the air. It can be made from wood or metal (numbers and hatches can be colored in with preferred materials) It should be no less than 17 km and no more than 4600 km in length. Width and depth/height should be proportionately calculated following the design/template of a common meter stick. All measurement markings and spacing should follow this design/template as well.

The meter stick should float at a height greater than the highest geological formation* or terrestrial human construction it floats above, but no higher than 12 km from the earth’s surface.**

*or plant or animal resident/residence thereon.
**if meter stick floats solely above a body of water and has no islands beneath it, the earth’s surface would be the highest point of the ocean/sea/lake(?) floor beneath it.

3. watching x while reading y while listening to z (with a on the wall) while having b in your mouth with c the most salient olfactory “object”.

• Discourse on beauty is itself a smokescreen for magic. It’s a way to discuss the occult in plain sight.
• It’s this hard, gemlike flame.
• Beauty lives in a context, it is easily unbalanced.  A beautiful car next to a desperate human being is ugly. Beauty cannot stand up to inequity, it always fails.
• Value’s troubling deficiency, its absence at exactly a site in which it is claimed.
• We recall that, in Kant’s analytic of the beautiful, aesthetic judgment is by its nature a judgment of that which doesn’t give us anything; in other words, it is free, not least of debt. It is disinterested. Freedom from guilt is a synonym for disinterest, because that which doesn’t give us (or yield) interest cannot indebt us. Kant is not being pedantic here; he is simply observing that we are no longer talking about art the moment we seek to gain anything from a work of art.
• This instability is what drives us crazy, because beauty “removes itself from the everyday context of effects into a form of taboo area.” Come to think of it, we probably shouldn’t discuss this any further.

further navel gazing

“Diminishing points of reference and hypothetical agency.” I suppose this applies to anyone’s (sudden) experience of their contemporary. Ethics lessons either way, though unclear which ones.

As I was drifting off last night, the word Platonic came to mind. This “art-itself” I keep mentioning verges on Platonic forms in ways, though perhaps it’s more Heideggerian (or at least some species of phenomenology). In either case, I’ve read too little to delve into the matter in any cogent way.

Speaking of incogency, what can I possibly say about AI (yes, I’m using the term far too generically), even though it feels as if I had twenty tongues to speak of it with. Yeah, it scares the shit out of me (and I don’t think I need to qualify this in any way).

The sacred/profane binary seems archaic at times, but I think it’s still an invaluable means of speaking to certain aspects of human need/desire. Which brings me to Conceptual Art as false/true means, and ludic deception as profane/neo-sacred.

Brian Droitcour has done a very good job at the helm of Outland. His latest piece couldn’t but remind me of personal motives past and present, how difficult it is for me to know which creative activity of mine is deferential/covetous of/to the sacred and which is profane expedient. (Sure… dialectic, binary [again], spectrum, oscillation, stupidity, metaphysics… come to mind.) And at the core of this 20yrs/SOP project is my frustration around what I could call my “infidelities” (profanations) between 2003 and now. “Art-itself” as I called it couple weeks back — how have I been untrue/unfaithful to it? I know how bizarre/mentally-unwell this can sound, but it’s sustained itself as inner compass — it must be moral in nature, no matter the impossibilities innate to morality (nor the trespasses I’ve committed in the pursuit of (potential) public success).

The old conceptual art could be aloof because it operated in the dignified realm of exhibitions and magazines, but Pikelny’s work exists in online networks, Discord and Twitter, where the connection to the audience is immediate, and it manifests as tokens, ERC-20 or ERC-721, to be collected by many. The social shapes and effects of the scam were a means to an end for the old conceptual art, ways of generating hype and awareness. But for Pikelny these are mediums to be explored; they’re where the art happens.

I hate Discord. I dislike most NFT culture (though I’m a believer in the promise of the NFT as art-medium/host, whether it ultimately ends up onchain or some future elsewhere). It’s madness/Babel (I’m Gutenberg Galaxy in many ways). Droitcour says “dignified realm” (magazines dignified, imagine!) and it’s obvious that both he and I are sympathetic to a now-aestheticized past. It’s doubtful anything about Conceptual Art in the arts crucibles of the 60s/70s was dignified, but looking back it has a beauty to it. And it’s this beauty I lament being unable to live in/as. If not obvious to those who know my work, 2003-now has been a sub-disciplined attempt to (foolhardily) find this immaterial beauty in semi-quotidian practice.

But there’s an organ within (me at least) that needs the sacred.

“Modern and contemporary art rely as much on hype and celebrity as they do on creativity and innovation,” writes art historian Christopher Howard in The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist, a 2018 book about an artist who placed real ads for shows at a fictional gallery in art magazines in the late 1960s and early 7Os. Now that conceptual art holds a stable position in art history, it’s easy to overlook the promotional efforts artists undertook to cultivate faith in the value of their slight, cerebral gestures. I cite these precedents not to confer some sort of art historical legitimacy on Pikelny’s work, but rather to demonstrate what they have in common: artists fascinated by the possibilities of what can happen within the magic circle of art, and by the work of persuasion it takes to establish that circle. 

Droitcour uses the word “slight,” which is pretty honest/fair. And Pikelny’s onchain art is a good example of this Duchampian “sl(e?)ight”ness, where the aesthetics of the game assume (ostensible) spiritual primacy. I do not like this and yet I will indulge in it for reasons obscure even to myself. Why do I writhe in discomfort if being considered like Martin Creed or [ignorantly] to the Magus himself — they’re not unapt comparisons.

I’m so thirsty for this impalpable, quasi-evanescent “sacred,” which is probably the sacred tout court. Is this madness sustainable? Is it in fact salutary? How many priests of all stripes and epochs faced episodic droughts of faith and took refuge in expedient indulgence? Why is my minor cleric’s mission so fucking silly but so indefatigably true?

Comedy though… its transcendent, allaying, and sacral qualities…  has become a religion of the Postmodern ethos. Desperation requires fun (and some cruelty). It’s all a matter of when perversity is confused with intelligence — I think that’s what our times are wrestling with. I’m personally likely to be as well. (Moderate?) Heterodoxy is still more appealing to me than its opposite, no matter my internal dissonances. Chance. I too often forget to pay Chance its due.

Since I have no thoughts of my own, here are other-people’s-thoughts that resonated with me in the past 18 hours (the first in one way, the second in another):

We should expect that AI’s impact on the world will be more like a step change that transforms the role of content itself, not just the ease of its production. That is, content will become more like wallpaper. Indeed, it already has: more ambient, less information-dense, and easier to passively absorb or largely ignore… Viewed another way, the average unit of content also grows more isolated. 

Delany originally defined subjunctivity in a… lecture as “the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between word and object”.

Somehow ended up on Ropac website last night. They redid it — it’s a nice site. But it’s yet another site where artists are first seen as a “dust jacket portrait” rather than represented by one of their works. Meretricious is a word that comes to mind. And note how it’s largely baller galleries that are doing this: H&W, Ropac, Pace, Gagosian, Lehmann Maupin (I think they might have been the first of the “legit” art world). What does this mean about collectors and what they care about and the type of art education they’re receiving? Everyone loves a face, I get it! But, let’s be frank, we’re each drawn to some faces and turned off by others — faces are influential. Why subject the art to this?

Thinking (cursorily) on it, I think what’s been bugging me about the way the art business works is an artist’s “mark” is expected to be recognizable, even if the artist manages to leap styles in a short period of time. Why should I (want to) be the _____ guy or the _____ artist? I recognize the individual limitations of most everyone and how it would be extremely unlikely to be Tolstoy/Tony/Leone one day and Dostoyevsky/Kiki/Lean the next. But why did it take Guston a decade to transition from canonized-before to canonized-after; why did Ellsworth Kelly remain steeped in Kellyisms? Jo Baer definitely changed horses midstream — not Picasso-style shifts: weirder, less “convincing.” I’m not sure if any of this warrants a serious conversation (the art business barely warrants one), but it’s all about the name and the author and the why-how-who maintaining preternatural significance. Is the artist’s purpose/service to be easily recognizable (shape-shifters are charlatans?) in order to provide the biographical-narrative we all need as reference in our mortal realities? The species definitely requires some mythos, but I’m not convinced.

The zero’s journey we all undertake. Transit studies.

Ran into Patty Chang’s name in Kenneth Tam NYT profile. Remember seeing — at lest 20 years ago — her video of her and her parents kissing and passing an egg between their mouths. At the time I thought it was the best work of Contemporary Art I’d seen. Also around that time, discovering the beauty of Gabriel Orozco’s [early] work (the yogurt container tops show blowing my mind, for one). As my mind wanders, I remember going to Patrick Painter gallery and being blown away by the Won Ju Lim sculpture. A couple years later my friend Anca Munteanu Rimnic was with Won Ju and they saw a woman get shot in a parking lot in Highland Park. They were extremely disturbed by the incident (of course!) and Mike Kelley came by to help them. I imagine only a few weeks earlier I’d seen the Lee Bontecou retrospective and someone was being an annoying, high-volume museum goer/impresser. I was horrified to see it was Mike Kelley, whose work I had liked — if not totally gotten — at that point. Somehow that left a bad taste in my mouth and it took me until his posthumous PS1 retrospective to appreciate — and then more or less get — his work. When I worked for Donald Baechler in the late ’90s, I mentioned Mike Kelley and Donald said he’d met Mike once at the Whitney and Mike had come out of the bathroom and Donald thought maybe Mike had just jerked off. Now Jeff Koons comes to mind and who needs more thoughts on Jeff Koons. But when I started working for Urs Fischer in 2008, Urs had a great idea for a show [for 2008-09] titled Late Koons. Urs took me to an Interview party one night and we got photoed with Tony Shafrazi and Adam McEwen and Donald Baechler. This is probably the only photo of me and Donald. Donald stories are something else; I’m always sad to think he’s no longer with us. Edit deAk too (but that made sense). I don’t know Walter Robinson but I like that he’s around. For some reason I’m conflating him with Thomas Lawson right now. I’m not sure if Patrick Painter is alive or not — apparently he is. When I tried to apply for a job at his gallery, Mayo Thompson was the director (Richard Horowitz, my best friend Tamara Badgley Horowitz’s dad (also known as a composer) introduced us) and I kept calling him to see if I could work at the gallery. Not too long thereafter my friend Therese Suarez took me to some late night hang in Echo Park and Ariel Pink — not yet famous — said Mayo was his professor. I didn’t realize Mayo Thompson was an important musician, not just the director of the gallery I thought it would be so great to work at. I ended up working at the MoCA store. There I became good friends with Kathryn Garcia (I miss being friends with Kathy). I met Mateo Tannatt (still friends) who worked in visitor services. In 2005 Mateo’s show at Guild & Greyshkul blew my mind — I thought it was the best. I didn’t realize American Fine Arts meant anything. I still don’t really vibe with that social aesthetic of art world. Brian Belott’s aesthetic though (it’s great that Canada Gallery is still rolling). Brian and I worked at Donald’s together [2004-07]. I first met him at Donald’s when I was visiting NY in 2003. David Greenberg was there too I think. I met Donald through David. David wrote a memoir that hasn’t been published. This post reminds me of Duncan Hannah’s journal. Duncan lived below me with Megan Wilson for a couple years. Adrian Dannatt was our landlord. Duncan died last year (too soon + he definitely didn’t look his age). Adrian writes obituaries amongst other things. He doesn’t own a cell phone. I met him through the real estate agent he used to rent his apartment I ended up leasing. Adrian is friends with Miguel Abreu who shows Raha Raissnia who is friends with Anne Marlowe (who is probably friends/acquaintances with Adrian and Miguel too). Anne Marlowe is David Lewis’s old friend and neighbor. David and I met in Prague (I was studying abroad; he was living abroad) in winter 1999. My grandmother told me he was living there. He’s my second cousin but I don’t think we’d ever met before. We ended up meeting by chance at a popular tourist/expat bar. His friend hit on my girlfriend, Lissi Sanchez. She told him her mom had done peyote in Peru [this was lie]. The friend ended up dancing on bartop naked [different bar] later in the night. That same friend ended up being on the first season of Survivor (Wikipedia reminds me his name is Greg).

Worked on first revision of SOP contract with lawyer and associate. Language rarely fails to be as divinely puzzling as anything, although (and somewhat incredibly) trying to legally define art and artworld may be less difficult than trying to define art at large. “What is this, you ask?” Wonders.

2-days-ago’s post was illuminating for me, though I’m not yet sure where it could lead me. 

“Imagery takes its own ways” –a Walter Burkert sentence I happened upon yesterday.

[Art as] suspension of appetites (and (my) subsequently developing an appetite for this suspension) / The high is aesthetic of course, so aesthetics bear aesthetics; and then the after comes about (and varied appetites present themselves in due time).  

I take the Hafiz poem “Stop Being So Religious” to heart sometimes. / But “it’s all” so maddeningly-saddeningly inconclusive. / Spiritual matters ever roiling and outreasoning reason. / transcendtendential(ism)

Regarding my relative disinterest in [I don’t have a term for it, so I’ll call it:] activist-adjacent art (social practice, exposé-esque, systems critique, etc.), I can see how its purposefully political(esque) aspects — (ostensible) faith/commitment in/to the here and now, rather than in some vague/tentative eternity — terrify me (I’d rather be haunted, you see?). I bristle/bore from it, unless seeing it in retrospective FORM (like I semi-recently did with Piper and Haacke). And while I do recognize how Formalism can (justifiably) be considered reactionary, I also find it perennially difficult to argue against the perennial argument for art being definitionally apart from “life”. Again, suspension is (a) crucial (term) for what I believe makes art art (though the charms of novelty have certainly had their way with me). Would my friend [whom I spoke to last week] who turns to art not for transcendtendential highs but to be perplexed/challenged [no right word here] feel the same as I do? I suspect we’d both agree art requires a significant degree of pause, apartness from reality’s (overt(ly hidden)) tableau. Contemplation isn’t the right word for it all. Again: “Imagery takes its own ways.”

I have (too) many Contemporary [A/a]rtwork ideas, but some people have more.

As the month labors on, I’ve come to be reminded of the quotidian aspects (uninteresting in words) of having a so-called art practice. I’m beginning to bore of the idea of selling my practice (though the semi-daily SOPP activities are less boring, especially this journal and working with the lawyer to refine legal terms). I have a few-day-old idea of asking a mega-gallery to be their “artist in residence” for a 15-24 month period (I’d get a salary/stipend). Another option would be to sign a contract with a mega-gallery, as might an athlete (contract negotiations could be made public (though who would care but a very few)); it would be interesting to get traded. Having opened a small show last week, I’m reminded that making+opening shows is fun + then so-called postpartum sets in + then you have to wait for whatever things come next. I’d really like something tangible to come next (natural feeling that occurs to lots of humans I’d guess). In any case, SOPP asks me to endure some quotidian boredom (at least for a time).

I spoke with a fellow artist about what drives art-making. Fellow artist appeared shocked (even scandalized?) to hear me announce my muse: Boredom. Fellow artist championed Curiosity. I don’t really discern a great distinction, short of habits, unless of course fellow artist is somehow never bored.

I digressed with purpose. Un-digressing now, I’m SOPPing to question the purpose of an art career. Art historically speaking, there’s reason for career — narrative thirst (i.e. biological cravings for legacy(?)). Functionally speaking, Contemporary Art is thankfully not always merely-diverting, but there are recent shifts that I worry bode ill for art-itself. And herein lies my thing/crux/monomaniad: belief in art-itself. I never really caught on to that before. Why this choice of faith?

It’s for the faith I’m SOPPing. Anchoritic resolve isn’t an option; action is more or less required. But spirit remains the matter. I trust the Germans discussed it all thoroughly 200(+) years ago, but it persists, it pangs, it revels, it sees/knows. It wants proof of substance. Art[-itself] is equal to this. Yet I’m too often without it. I now better see SOPP as a way to pseudo-force a means of accepting undesired quotidian requirements. It’s of course more nuanced than this. In any case, a belief in a door that opens and closes simultaneously isn’t a reasonable one.

In the event of a sale, the SOP pricetag would be high enough to finance the consequent discomforts for awhile. But ultimately it’s not much more than a ruse, just another erased drawing, white canvas, readymade, etc. Several years back, some Troemel-Troll lampooned me for being like Martin Creed — that didn’t feel good (though “the lights going on and off” has stand-alone strengths). And though SOPP isn’t Creedian to my eye, my credo could surely use more than mere design/intention — I would have to live in it and I suppose that’s purpose I don’t aesthetically wish to embrace. I mean Tehching Hsieh deserves huge respect and Lee Lozano is [the inimitable] Lee Lozano, but I have no interest “being” like that now-aestheticized period. I just crave a change as the artworld seems increasingly divergent from my (absurd?) art-itself creed. Perhaps it’s just the feathers of age weighing me down, the recognition of honesty’s metamorphics, the hapless quest for more than the ephemeral pregnant moment. The moment is everything + everything but the very opposite.

Returning to this Groys bite:

Indeed, the avant-garde opens a way for an average person to understand himself or herself as an artist — to enter the field of art as a producer of weak, poor, only partially visible images… Popular art is made for a population consisting of spectators. Avant-garde art is made for a population consisting of artists.

Returning to the bite because: right now I have this feeling inside which is a mix of undefined potential and ostensibly benevolent energy. I might call this [plain ol’] creative, but my creative-ness can come from anger and/or competitiveness too. So what is creative and what is art? I just attempted to break this down but deleted the attempt as it can’t discursively resolve itself. Contemporary Art as medium, as “genre” as I recently read it qualified in an article. It’s not just Avant-garde, it’s a reef of weaker voices, a web of hamlets and compounds, a place where creative energy of most-any-sort stands a chance to find a name.

Even so, many painters and certain types of sculptors aren’t weak in the least — they are painters and sculptors, and known by a broader (if not properly broad) public. And though the public[s] may not understand what style the painters/sculptors practice or what school they emulate/resemble, they will recognize the cultural constant in these categories/means-ends. Any concomitant distaste for the contemptibly arcane “Modern” will not depreciate the public’s basic acknowledgement of painting and sculpture’s legitimacy — both are strong.

Whereas I, and my sundry ilk, are chimeras who have post-nascently crossed into the realm of the real. We are the tentative inheritors of the kingdom of art (of course a certain someone was reputed to favor the weak). Art is the anything-goes as long as you sign up with the right cleric/charismatic. The strength of Contemporary Art is its limited permissiveness. (Of course it’s a cesspool of cynicism too.)

Any reverence due to any creative task requires faith in the reason [sic] inherent to creative needs. Even if these are just another animal drive, they captivate to no small degree. And so I am rapt, repeatedly. And so I pursue fulfillment — for instance in writing this entry among many others — only occasionally reminding myself of fulfillment’s swift expiry. And so art is just a fix. But nothing isn’t. Nothing. Aught is a nice word (that’s now archaic).

If I’m blasé about finishing 3 movies on various streaming services, can I ask a [limited] public to choose which one I finish and call the process (or result) an artwork (potentially monetizing the action by doing so)? Obviously.

Read a Baruchello obit yesterday. I’d attempted to read some Baruchello 5(?) years back but wasn’t particularly stimulated. Duchamp may have been right to dub Baruchello his heir — there seems to be a certain arid levity the two share, a surgical quaintness that alarms me. Amid a sudden onset of such alarm, I copy-pasted two obit bits:

1. In 1968 he founded… a fictitious company whose tagline was to “commodify everything”
2. [He] bypassed the gallery system, mailing artworks directly from his studio to the homes of buyers.

I think my alarm sounds from (mis)perceiving Duchampian (and Baruchellian?) acts as deliberately anti-poetic (though “3 Standard Stoppages” sings poetry to me). Obviously such qualities are impossible to prove (in this context at least); it’s all a matter of sensibilities (I fiercely protecting mine with primordial instinct) — poetic is poetic is poetic . . .

Re 1 above, “commodify everything” is a mordant/wry(/impassioned?) critique of consumer capitalism. Though capitalism has its congenitally rapacious/repugnant qualities, I remain more or less endeared to its panoplic promises/possibility, the bloom of its consumerismable output. Not unlike the incomplete, but dutiful, cataloging of flora and interiors in many (older) novels, I find it only right to represent products/visuals/ideas of the mediaversal marketplace and its industrial precedents. A rose may not be a rose if I think it’s a peony, but nevertheless it’s the thing perceived (commonly named though it may be) that has (inherent) potential. Objects/things bring joys revelations and fatigue. Perhaps I mistake my object-gardening for art/poetics (even if I find myself enacting the arid levity that would otherwise repel my sensibilities), but I feel that commodifying everything isn’t the same as courting the possibility to appreciate every(-)thing, at risk of inevitable satiety. So I abide by these latter means, trusting there’s a substantial good in them, a good that [temporarily] foils the redundant, saturated, prosaic, practical, and dismissed. Abundance is a service, best used in moderation.

Re 2, why not just send directly to collectors unsolicited? And why haven’t I thought about this before? And who has done this — I hope several, if not many?

Leading me to Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots project, which I adore. My partner pulled the book off our shelf yesterday to entertain our son (who wasn’t really entertained). I hadn’t looked at the book before (or have no memory of doing so) — only knew the series from online and a show at Alden Projects some years back. Flipping through the book, I saw the boots in front of a herd of cows, which suddenly reminded me of a superficially similar work I’d done in 2012. I know I conceived and executed the work in advance of knowing Antin’s series. But she took the photo 40 years before me. And in the arts (rather, scholarly arts) we confuse the historical qualities of anteriority/precedence/primacy as something with aesthetic quality in/of itself, whereas yes there’s a smattering of that, but the aesthetic quality — quantity really — has to remain partially in the present — not the present as past’s inheritance, but the present as pseudo-identical to the future. 

Full circle… why feel at all concerned about, even threatened by, Baruchello and Duchamp? Life is for the living and youth for the young and all the rest is chance record, right? What me worry?

PS. 5.5 months later, I was looking for a photo in my phone library and came across a screenshot of a passage from a book about Duchamp. Somehow I forgot I’d read “Why Duchamp?” by Baruchello and Henry Martin. (The “wasn’t particularly stimulated” above must have been in reference to his agriculture project.) In any case, courtesy the screenshot: The effect we’re defining by drifting this way through everything he thought and wrote, the effect we’re defining by the way he confuses us. And this confusion is important. It’s important because it’s one of the natural responses to Duchamp that’s always suppressed. Confusion is something that’s never admitted to in any of the critical texts that you see written about Duchamp, there’s no perplexity there at all, everything is presented as clear and abstract and limpid, the critics simply don’t admit to having experienced this Duchamp Effect that we’re talking about, it’s a duty really to be confused by Duchamp: he was often involved in creating something close to nonsense, and what’s one really supposed to do with nonsense if not be perplexed by it? That’s certainly much more sensible that dedicating all of your time to trying to explain it.

Dave the Lawyer sent over the first draft of the SALE OF PRACTICE contract. He did a really good job. Reading it over, I got spooked again (a single clause the cause) — a renewed, even augmented, certainly uncanny, (acute) awareness of the doppelganger conundrum. Of course, in the context of the project, my doppelganger’s intention/(un)scruple shouldn’t matter: the art they’d create as Darren Bader would be art by Darren Bader. Art is art is art is art etc.

Still, a shout out to human fundamentals, the maw/gnaw/awe sort of pre-conscious pith. I remember being borderline horrified as a child when watching my friends in school plays (and musicals and cosmetics often remain unnerving to me). Authentic and fake couldn’t be mere constructs. Funny that I’d thought I could — in my work over the years — invert the two (even if implicitly temporary) and yet here I am following one of my regular lines of logic — a name is but a name is but a name — only to find I’m my own dupe. 

PS. Shout out to Daren Bader, who I’ve had the pleasure of creatively brainstorming with twice over the past decade.

Happy New Year. I hope this journal becomes more light-hearted and/or art-generative in 2023. I’ll begin here:

I’d like this show to come to life. It requires some bleeding-edge tech (which may be so bloody it doesn’t exist yet):

pants in your ants: an open call for micro-sculpture

Invite sculptors to submit a 3D model of a sculpture they’d like to make or have already made (and hopefully like). Models will be printed and “painted” on the micro-/nano- level. Micro-/nano- sculpture will be “installed” inside various cells, as additional organelles. And/or micro-/nano- sculpture will be “installed” in some subatomic quarter (this may well be physically impossible, but the show is more or less impossible, so let’s keep the subatomic in the mix). Definitely need some capital to make this possible. Etc. 

pants in your ants coming 2024-25…

2022: the usual mix of enervating, educational, exhilarating. Ending with burst pipes + flooded apartment (water level thankfully low) + relocation till February. 

My partner and I will welcome our second child in March, so I regularly consider how the possible sale of my practice could adversely affect my family.

In several regards I’m a successful artist and feel very lucky to be so. But I live in the most expensive city on the planet (not proud of it, but it’s home) and no longer bring in enough to avoid significant debt. (I feel this candor is useful/needed, especially given how in recent years the art market has grown in market-ness at the expense of* art-ness.) 

I digressed-ish. Point is, sale of practice could prove much less beneficial to my family’s financial future than being an asset of sorts. I’ve heard strange, sad tales of artists changing names and their collectors more or less ditching them — all the more reason for me to pursue sale of my practice — but my family… 

(I’ll figure it out. But, again, I feel candor here isn’t mere sideshow to the “main event.”) 

Maintaining a firm belief in my “sale of practice” project’s legitimacy/relevance/utility**, I’ll persist with it as long as I can (which will hopefully be till June (whatever the results of the process’s culmination)). 

*bizarre idiom in this context
**interesting word choice, but I think it’s a good one

PS.
Practice-ly, production prohibitions prevent my providing new (profligate) produce.
Plenty preclusive, partially problematic. Point being: please be patient if perusing this journal for proof of new (precipitously) planned parlor-tricks/pratfalls possibly patterned on previous journal proclivities.
Prolix Pardon,
Peryn Peydr

To divest oneself of one’s public identity. 

For the first time since I conceived the SALE OF PRACTICE project, I got spooked. Of course identity is in part fortuitous spurious deleterious, but a person is a person and we all know our “I” isn’t quite/enough like anyone (else) “I” has ever met — we’re each alone (as the ages tell us in a variety of ways/fashions). Alone I am frightened (that religious reckoning life forces me to fear-face). Art (my putative/default/semi-elective faith) asks more absurd, obscene, adventurous things of me—but for what? Faith I suppose, far from gloriously triumphant, facing fatefully forward. I’m pretty sure I remain undeterred; more to come, I’m sure.

Listened to the latest New Models podcast featuring Yago & Citarella. The usual thirst for answers insufficiently answered (nothing but respect for all involved). This mess of a thing called the [C]ontemporary and what content about/therein is meant to achieve… i.e. who to speak to and for what purposes — longevity being one of these. The intragenerational/transgenerational desire to achieve something approximating dependability and how there seems to be so little meaning/content at play that assumes quasi-semi-permanance(ness). Endless etc in hopes of the age-old death-defy/live-well-to-non-die. How to be part of one’s time, privileging the present, investing faith in novel wisdom [etc.]

Y&C both recognize art risks being meaningless/nothing sans extended care (their brief but mostly-undiluted emphasis on “philanthropy” and “archive”ry), something somewhat consonant with my gut-conviction that art absolutely requires significant degrees of the: arbitrary, elitist, myopic, contained, circumscribed. Art is barely a material category, therefore it requires material attributes/hypotheses. 

Also notable, Yago (cursorily?) uses the word “aspirational” as a sort or correlate to art. It strikes me as a [their-]generational notion. Art as social aspiration strikes me as confused (though clearly the two can be amenable). There are madnesses/obsessions/devotions that are more salient than aspiration. These voices we’re equipped with for compass, clairvoyance, and captivity will lead us unfailingly to the remarkable multiplicity of their limits.

I think I just realized I’m scared of my signature. Maybe my dealers have long known this. No need to subject readers to involved auto-analysis, but I want to write about this so I’m going to… It’s as if it’s a fear of seeing myself reflected or photographed — you probably know that feeling, the potential to be betrayed by the (purported) real. 

But perhaps I could reframe my habitual inquiry: what is art? It’s always been an escape, that’s clear — passionate study is not drudgery. But the fear of being an author, that’s interesting. Roberta Smith gave me my first NYT review (and a good one) in April 2007 and she deemed me “ostentatiously ambivalent.” For years I’ve felt that wasn’t a fair assessment (likely due to the motivations behind the main work in that show), but perhaps she was spot-on. Trepidation and/or tepidation and/or an escape clause. Etc. 

Should I be less fearful of my signature? I don’t see why or why not. I just think it’s apt for a human to dread theirself.

I’m now being reminded that Roberta also said I was “abjectly nonchalant.” That does ring false. I may be terrible at finding a suitable form for my intuitions/ideas, but I’m not nonchalant, nor do I enjoy the aesthetic pursuit of the putative abject. Whatever impoverished-cum-extravagant economy I’ve developed over the years, it’s not with any genuine love for the abject (though Bataille’s [translated] thought and prose I remember with great fondness).

Once I started regularly selling work in 2011-12, I had to think a lot about the work’s owner, realizing that descriptive/prescriptive language — in its precision and concomitant lack thereof — was crucial. How to let someone else know what you mean(t). (Wittgenstein meets Derrida meets pretty-much-everyone.) This could all be considered axiomatic to an extent, but I haven’t seen proof of that outside of clever and/or cumbersome quarters of institutional critique. In any case, I’ve embraced “collector relations” in my conceptualizing [enterprise]. It can add an integral aspect to what (my) art purports to be.

I think the current specataculational art fair [ABMB] was the impetus for this post. I’d like to say how interesting it is to create artwork deliberately for the transactional qualities of the art fair (i.e. emphasize immaterial work or work that . And though I’ve often been dissuaded from aestheticizing the art fair as institution per se, I continue to think such advice misses the crucial point: art fairs are equal to museums in several ways, they are consumer cathedrals where museums are ecclesiastical palaces (art galleries some sort of eucharist(?)).   

though it’s in no way an artist’s [not to be confused with artist-as-showperson] requirement to offer their goods at market to then transfer title of ownership, it’s in many ways impossible to comprehend an artwork’s import without reference to its precedents, which are commonly known through their ownership (or stewardship is some cases). 

I think it’s silly that there would exist some sort of profane-sacred double standard whereby the fair is deplored by even its most conspicuous exhibitors, but can’t not be indulged. Make such indulgences rich in content…