Gorilla ad campaign. Have people in public places, like the airport terminal, blabbing on their cell phones at loud volumes.
"Oh no. What happened? Oh God. Good thing they were in a Ford."
"Wow! What a great deal. How Many? How much? I better get over there right now. Where? Target? The Target on Atlantic?"
make a sculpture that suggests we were not created equal. It may divide people. Are we a group of haves and those who have nots. Make a sculpture that is only visible to some.
get a duplicate of a sculpture. see how many times more removed you can make it. how many copies from copies can be made. how many modifications can be made to the first copy?
1. Make things out of material (traditional figurative)
2. Make things out of things (clever (con)figuration - hawkinson)
4. Make material out of material (traditional abstraction)
less interested in a personal, formal language than the infinite diversity of nature
so the mechanical age of reproduction. this is probably different than what i'm about to talk about but whatever. what about art that has been mechanically produced or reproduced that is "better" than work that is, let's just say, made by hand? wait i don't want to exclude handmade things. cause i include things in the mechancially made category that were made by hand but according to some process (crap. shooting in the foot). the hands carried out the mechanical process. i like process art and mechanically made art or rule based art that appears to be expressionistic, intuitive and abstract because it challenges our notion of beauty. that beauty is one that comes from the "soul". or that this way of making is soulful.
objects with little or no social value, discarded cheap stuff determine the shape and readings of the works. the works appear to be using an abstract and gestural way of making marks or forms. it is a language that is rooted in intuition and feelings. it's very 60's. but that is not the case. the works came from a mechanical process. they came from banal objects.
the works are bilingual, trilingual, etc, a singular reading is denied. we can no longer adpot and speak in a particular -ism and make art according to the language of that -ism. they are no longer isolated languages. they are verbs, nouns and adjectives in a larger language. i use the language developed by abstract expressionists but never alone. or i use a language that has all the earmarks of abstract expressionist work but in fact was made in a very different way.
take roxy paine's sculpture machine and drawing machines. mechanically reproducing works that have all the trademarks of abstract expressionism or an art driven by intuition and expression. his work is only one end of the spectrum in my area of interest. it is not neccessary that things be made by an actual machine. adopt -ism's and languages from old and new modes of display and ways of making.
(blah blah blah)
my concern now is that people are not picking up on the larger critical dialogue my work is partaking in.
rather than getting a thing and making a big sculpture out of it. get a thing like a table or a chair and build a small sculpture off of the corner of it. like a spot of mold on a slice of bread.
Gravity does the sculpting for me. Materials dangle, drop and drip from things both made and readymade. The things I make and find determine how the materials applied to them take shape. It’s like an icicle forming on an overhang.
get the colored buckets from the party store. stack them up real high. put a belt sander on top. turn it on. let it sand away the buckets.
use the shavings to build something.
make a sculpture. i'm thinking one with a figurine in it and a blob growing off of him. some type of disease that deforms him altering his natural state. calling into question his purity and uniformity. he has been comprimised. put it on a pedestal. slice the pedestal and the sculpture in half and present them as two. put a mustache on one of them.
put my work on the wrong side of the pedestal.
put my work on both sides of the pedestal.
put my work on all sides of the pedestal.
remake the same piece for each side.
(title: dumbdumb)
looks like a palindrome.
make a realy tall pedestal for a sculpture. one that obscures the view of the work maybe completely. put a little man looking up shielding his eyes from the sun on top of it.
maybe:
put a ladder next to so people can go check it out. watch them look at what the man is looking at.
there is a new recipe out there in the art making world. artists have started to modify commodity. 1. take a readymade. (readymade seems like the wrong word now. readymade doesn't acknowledge the context that these things are coming from. readymades are always commodities.) 2. modify the readymade and make it a commodity again. re-com-modify.
a decoy is capable of suspending disbelief. it can be the difference between your public and private lives. you may be a middle class person but can afford to dress yourself in upperclass clothing. in public you appear to be rich but once you get home or step back into the line at mcdonalds you find yourself in a dif. social stratum than your clothing or eyewear suggest.
the magician is the perfect decoy. not only in terms of the tricks they perform but also in assuming the role of someone with paranormal abilities. they have a costume to disguise their masquerade. take houdini. he would submerge himself in a tank water, handcuffed in a straight jacket. we all assume he is in danger. but on the contrary he is totally safe. his exit strategy is simple for him. there is no fear and little risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Houdini
Harry Houdini (March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926), born Erik Weisz, was a Hungarian magician, escapologist, stunt performer, as well as an investigator of spiritualists, and an amateur aviator.
Houdini's funeral was held on November 4, 1926, in New York, with over two thousand mourners in attendance. He was interred in the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, New York, with the crest of the Society of American Magicians inscribed on his grave site. The Society holds their "Broken Wand" ceremony at the grave site on the anniversary of his death to this day. Houdini's wife, Bess, died in February, 1943, and was not permitted to be interred with him at Machpelah Cemetery because she was a non-Jew. Bess Houdini is interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
do a series of works based on magicians. as decoy, surrogate, the death of the magician is the final act - mortals, superhero, con-artist, disguise, allurement, attraction, bait, blind, blow off*, booster, camouflage, catch, chicane, chicanery, come-on, deception, deek, drawing card, ensnarement, enticement, fake, imitation, inducement, inveiglement, lure, nark, plant, pretense, pusher, seducement, shill, sitting duck*, snare, stick, stool pigeon*, stoolie*, temptation, trick, trickery
make a sculpture for tall people.
make a sculpture like a teaser for a film. it's an abreviated version of the whole. (through hiding)
it's kind of like what i was trying to say about the painting i wanted to make. i feel like i know it is good before i even start it. it is as if the idea of it is enough to give me the feeling that i want it to give to others. the labor often gets in the way or changes the way you originally felt about it. in the beginning you were seeing it in a completed state as the perfect observer. totally unaware of the process that went into making it. there are no flaws. there may be some chunkyness to the paint and obvious imperfections but all of these things were deliberate and add to that feeling you are after. you are at that point the perfect audience for your work. you see it for what it really is and wants to be. it is inevitable that the labor and making of the work confuses or blurs your relationship to it. and that feeling you originally had is complicated because you are on the wrong side of the fence now. you aren't the perfect virgin audience anymore. you know all of the secrets, problems and compromises that went into its making. it's like seeing the most beautiful thing in the world and then finding out a million people died trying to make it. that original feeling you had about it is complicated by the knowledge you gain through making. this is the exact reason why i can't conceive of projects before i make them anymore. i couldn't stand losing that feeling i got before i made something. the making was killing it. i was being stubborn about the making. now i have to let my presumptions about what it's going to take to get at that feeling go if they aren't working. improvise along the way in order to ensure that feeling will be there in the end.
round one
assume A is a pile of materials. i have two A's. one A over here and another A over there. take one of the A's and turn it into a B. then put that B next to the other A. i like this idea.
round two
repeat round one and then take B and try to turn it back into A.
make a sculpture that is hard to see (in an very analog kind of way).
take all of the art i have made here at school and put it in a trash compacter. cube it up like a car.
deform or distort things and film them returning to their original state then play it back in slow motion.
make a shoe with leather and laces on the bottom and rubber on the top.
try to make the supermarket site seem black on black. no 'greys'.
take little screen shots of every little icon, tool and graphic in all the apps on the computer. show them together in groups, alone and all at once. create a narrative with them.
buy those plastic injection mold topographic maps put them together in a sphere and paint it black. or paint them with some kind of material that will do something else. make it more than a black planet. have it react under certain conditions. or have it make skids when pushed.
