Monday, December 29, 2008
New Stuff.
I'm on my way. Kristy agreed, after a bunch of poking, prodding and alcohol, that it would be great to let me hire her to make my art for me. it's actually a little bit better than that, but stay tuned. I'm working on it. I'm going to contract with her to make a photograph to my specifications and she's going to sell me the aesthetic and artistic rights to the picture. Her photograph (a large format photo, no smaller than 20x24) will be displayed along side the contract in which I purchase the artistic and aesthetic rights to the image. I'll tell her what to photograph, which will essentially amount to saying, "get that," and I'll own everything else. Brett has agreed to do the same and I'll have to come up with a contract for him as well. I will then complete the series by making my own photographs (which will doubtless suck compared to theirs), and I will show all of them, including the contracts, together. All this will happen well after Kristy and I get back from Marfa, but I've got a rough draft of the contract done. So far, it is 11 pages long. I may have to edit it up or down, since I want it to be frameable as the same size as the photograph I'm commissioning.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Reading is FUNdamental
My favorite bookstore in Houston, Half Price Books, has an after xmas sale every year and I go and I spend. Here's what I got this time:
Body Art: Performing the Subject, Jones
Illuminating Video: An essential Guide to Video Art, Hall/Fifer
The Object of Performance, Sayre
Unnatural wonders, Danto
After the End of Art, Danto
the Filmmaker's Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age, Ascher/Pincus
Trainspotting [the script], Hodge
Air Guitar, Hickey
The Texas-Mexican Conjunto, Pena
The Declaration of Independent Filmmaking, Polish Brothers
Second Sight, Mann (this turns out to be a scarce first edition that is available for $450 online but it was $4 at Half Price Books)
Ruth Bernhard: Between Art and Life, Mitchell
Access Rome, Wurman
The Treasures of Venice, Manno/Venchierutti/Codato
Milan and the Lakes, no author given
The last three books are in preparation for the class I hope to take this summer that tours Rome, Milan and Venice, culminating at the Venice Biennale.
The book on conjunto music presents the history of the unique musical form that sprang up in the Rio Grande Valley and which I heard at every wedding I photographed or attended in my teens. It turns out that those amazing musicians were really on to something.
Excerpts of the Danto and Hickey books were assigned reading in some of my classes this last semester and I would like to read the entire thing rather than exerpts.
And the Sally Mann monograph, if sold, would pay for all of them and leave me with a tidy sum of cash to buy more books. I told that to Jane when I was buying these books and she just rolled her eyes and said, "uh huh."
Friday, December 26, 2008
To Marfa From Marfa
So Kristy and I are planning a trip to Marfa over Xmas break. Jane's lending us her SUV so we can pack all the stuff we want to take. The idea is to make a kind of quasi-spiritual pilgrimage and document the whole thing. I want to focus on the spiritual part of it for a few reasons: first, several of the photo grads at SAIC confided to me at the end of the semester their religous beliefs and how they relate to the making of art; second, Kristy's been having some concerns about the way people talk about art and the whole art-making thing; third, I've been reading Lewis Hine's book, The Gift, and am trying to figure out a non-spiritual or religous way to address my own desires to include wonder and joy in the artmaking process. Finally there are so many people I've talked to who describe their own experiences in Marfa in religous or spiritual terms that I'm a little sceptical about the whole thing and like the idea of skeptically commencing a pilgrimage. And I like that neither Kristy nor I have an agenda for how the trip will go, in other words, that it is an open-ended journey and we'll take what we get. Whatever that may be.
We'll bring video cameras, a large format camera with black and white and color film, digital cameras, polaroid cameras, and a DAT recorder. We want to create an immersive installation at the end, with video, sound, photographs, found objects, the camp fire we will make, and the SUV all in a gallery. We will also recreate the first art objects we remember making (for me, clay figures and a big castle made around a hole in the ground). There will probably be text as well. We will probably spend about 5 days all told making the trip and returning. I've got 20 hours of video tape and 20 hours of audio tape on the way and we will have wide angle, standard and long lenses for the large format cameras. If this works out, we would probably propose it at Lawndale or anywhere else we can drive a dusty car into a gallery and set up a campfire and show 3 or 4 videos and have room left over for big photos, plants, rocks, clay figures, and other stuff. I think it will be hard to make this something other than a cliche or maudlin but since we both think that, there's a chance we can avoid it. We'll see. Note to self: buy extra nicotine gum.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Color Crits
So Aimee's color class (in which I was the teaching assistant) ended the semester with final critiques. Here are some photos I took during the crits.
This girl is not responsible for the mess on the wall behind her. It belongs to a guy who hired a woman off craigslist to destroy all his photographs made over the last 3 years. He photographed her destroying them and then mounted them on canvas and beat the crap out of the canvases and stabbed them repeatedly. 
That's Aimee standing.
One of the students, Blake, took pretty abstract photographs and mounted them on flickering television screens so they looked like stained glass.
This is Jamie, below. She was spending a semester here from Scotland. I wish I had taken pictures of some of her photos. She was, by far, the most talented member of the class. Beautiful photographs of a woman she met this semester and photographed all semester long.
Radika, below, was a huge surprise at the end. She made very poor work until the last day and then made a big leap. I was kind of proud of her.
If it's a crit, there has to be graveyard photos, right?
Jolie is pretty good with alternative processes.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
pretty much the end of semester
So the first semester is pretty much over. The guy who taught our photo seminar (Clifford Owens) leaves soon and the visiting student from the Royal College of Art in London is leavig this week. So there was a party Saturday night at a student's house. I finally left at 4:00 am. When I did, there were still people dancing and smoking pot and drinking. I was never invitd to smoke pot and I'm sure none of the folks in these photos were doing anything illegal. Here's some people (including Nozomi) dancing at about 3 am.
Dave, another first year in the photo program talks to one of last year's grads who now teaches at SAIC. Dave's on the left. 
The omnisexual sculptor/performance artist Elise is on the left below trying to get lucky with her pal, Stephanie, a second year photo kid. 
I'm on the right sporting the new glasses which replace the broken ones I had for the last few months. Karen, a brilliant woman with mental illness running in her family, is on the left.
Dave's sartorial splendor requires no explication.
Stephanie loves her photo being taken. Dave (background) loves everyone.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Open Studio Night
This Friday is Open Studio Night for the grad students at SAIC. I won't be there for it (I have to go to Austin, the Valley and Houston to be a lawyer), but I put up on the wall the stuff I've been working on lately. Last night I took some photos of the studio. Let's hope people like the smell of bee's wax. The space smells very much like bee's wax.
