Thursday, November 6, 2008
Department Store Collaboration
In the Sculpture Seminar we were required to participate in a group exhibition organized around the theme of a department store. Details of the show are here: http://www.deptstore.blogspot.com/
One of the factors built into the show is that each case moves according to an algorithm and eventually some of the cases will run into one another and when cases collide, the artists must collaborate on what the cases will look like. The case I worked on collided with that of others in the class (shocking!). Here are some photos of the collaboration as we decided what to do with the collision.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Some of my classmates
I'm going to add links to some of my classmates as I go. Here are a few.
Scott Jarrett: http://davidscottjarrett.com/ Scott's a first year sculpture grad.
Nozomi Kato:: http://nozomirose.com Nozomi is a first year photo grad.
Caleb Charland: http://calebcharland.com First year photo grad.
Stephanie Victa: http://stephanievicta.com First year Film, Video New Media grad.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
What I did tonight
I have been painting some more. Tonight I made a bunch of encaustic paintings and here are some of them.
This first set is four separate paintings. The panel is 18x24 and the strip on the right is about 5 feet long. I also made the ones that follow tonight.
The white ones with text are like a bunch of others I've been making, except these have some wax on top of the gesso. Under the white gesso are action paintings in the style of Pollock, but made with wax (a little art history joke about ab ex painters and a reference to Jasper Johns, who typically uses encaustic). The prior ones used word combinations I thought were interesting or some of the spam titles I've collected. These included here are references to the Wallace Stevens poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, an epistemological poem which has always been very important to me. The uncovered drip paintings will likely be covered with gesso and words or phrases will be carved into them.
The three skinny ones in the first photo are encaustic on industrial aluminum and they all curve quite a bit away from the wall, though that doesn't come through in the photo. So each of them is kind of sculptural in the way they occupy the space in front of them.
an update on visiting artists at SAIC
Well, here are a few thoughts on some of the visiting artists I've seen while I've been in Chicago. The first major artist who came through was Martha Rosler. She teaches at Rutgers now. A large number of her photo-montages are up at the Art Institute so it was great to see her work up close and then listen to her lecture. She's an unusual artist in many respects, including the fact that she writes extensively and a lot of her work is assigned in my classes. You don't see that many artists who make seminal art who are also important writers on the arts.
Her work is in the art history books and usually it's the Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems or her photo-montages of images of the Vietnam war paired with images from glossy fashion magazines ("Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful"). She has also done a bunch of great video work. I didn't get to meet her, but she was the mentor at Rutgers for Clifford Owens, the visiting artist who is teaching the Photography Seminar, so we've talked quite a lot about her work and her writing.
Here are some of Rosler's works:
Omer Fast was in the Whitney Biennial with video work and he visited SAIC as well. Another artist I didn't actually meet, but I did met three SAIC students who worked on his newest video installation ("Looking Pretty for God (After GW)"). He also did an artist's talk. Not a great talk, but really amazing work. You cannot appreciate the work in a static environment but really need to see it as a video to understand the intelligence and amazing craft of the work. Here's a link to part of the video from the Whitney: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=omer%20fast&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLF&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=omer%20fast&emb=0
The installation is much better. The entire video is about 40 minutes long and it is shown on 2 screns, with the front showing actors portraying a story that looks seamless. You walk behind the panels and you see the speakers in a traditional interview pose, talking, but you can tell from the visual how heavily edited the story is. In this video, the protagonist (an American soldier) describes shooting an Iraqi civilian and a completely different story of a very bad date he went on while stationed in Germany. Fast edits the two stories together so that they appear seamless from the front. He creates fiction from the "facts" of the video in pretty amazing ways.
As good as this video is, I prefer a piece he showed which was made right after he got his MFA. He was watching CNN all the time and edited the clips (almost never more than a single second in length) into a new narrative that he wrote. It is an amazing piece of editing and of writing. I wish I could find the text of it. Here's a short excerpt of that video: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=omer%20fast&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLF&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=omer%20fast%20cnn&emb=0
There is a constant stream of visiting artists and I can't summarize all of them here, but it is one of the cool things about this place.
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