Diablogue

Finally, and What Feelings Never Cease Their Iron Grip

2011-01-30T17:13:00.000-08:00

Doris Salceda
Untitled (Armoire) 1992

February was the free weekday special at the Museum of Art in Chicago. I visited a few days of every week while I could. It was, rather embarrassingly, my first visit there. The coat check crew grew tired of seeing me very early on.

The first day I couldn't stop for any length of time at all in the late 17th or early 19th century. I needed something else. I wanted to binge on some fleshier work, something coagulated and floundering. So I sought out some of the Ab Ex.

There's a concentrated area wherein Joan Mitchell, De Kooning, Pollack and David Smith all glower at you. Hanging around Ab Ex feels like watching a motorcycle gang from a nervous and timid periphery. They're just really tough. The reputation is true, and I can see what all the lampooning is about as clearly as anyone. But the work is tough. Undeniably. It's athletically poetic. Where would we be without it? What a dumb way to think, I suppose.

They have De Kooning's "Attic" and a much later one from the 70's not far away. I love the work from the 70's. His vision just blooms and undulates like he's constructing something that breathes, battered and eviscerated though it may be. I'm for art that's beaten into existence. On top of this De Kooning's is sexy and lovely and sensuous. Like you can see the genesis of a genetic lineage of flowers.

Willem De Kooning
Untitled 1975

Sure, De Kooning has all the signature marks of the macho bravado of Abstract Expressionism, but really, enough with all the schoolyard hushed talk about the aggressive kid. In-crowd reactionary art about other art really only goes so far. Endurance calls for far more personal risk. Except Paul McCarthy. Fire away, sir. Yours is keen insight into universal human absurdity.

Untitled XI from 1975 is juicy. It's a prime example of a consistency lacking in contemporary discipline. If a better pure painter was produced in the States in the 20th century I have yet to discover them.

Joan Mitchell comes close.

Joan Mitchell
Untitled 1955

I want her to tie me to a chair in a room with one wall of windows and beat on me until I pass out. Is that weird?

Cy Twombly
The First Part of the Return from Parnassus 1961

Twombly speaks my language. To quote a love song by Erland Oye: "My baby, when you're gone there's no one, and I'm lonely." It's as simple as that. Twombly's aesthetic is par excellence when it comes to speaking in tongues.

I just read the below article which was presented not long ago by Carol A. Nigro. It's got it all. I won't waste your time.

Cy Twombly's Humanist Upbringing, Carol A. Nigro, http://www.tate.org.uk/res earch/tateresearch/tatepap ers/08autumn/carol-a-nigro .shtm

Surprises abound in museums. It has become a place for me to go to gauge my devotion to what I'm supposedly aiming for in my own life. You go for lessons, for discussion, to see what still seems spectacular, what has become stale or banal or has always failed spectacularly. Have I kept myself flexible? Have I kept myself open yet sought insight and formed my own opinions? It's all there for us. I collect toss-aways and garbage and debris and going to the museum offers much of the same, too. It's just more rich raw material much of the time, raw material to be left intact for others.

I've seen Doris Salceda's work before. Many times even, but often in reproduction. At least, the concrete and furniture piece. It really grabbed me this time. I was just ready for it to come inside. It's arranged in a little niche with some other great work.

A Kiki Smith for one. Her work has had a line directly into me for as long as I am able to recall. A very straightforward display of what looks like flayed flesh is pinned to a wall. It's just paper and water based paint but it knocked me over from a hundred feet away just the same. Preschool children use these materials. Here it is on a museum wall knocking me silly.

Kiki Smith
Untitled 1988

Brice Marden
Attendant 2, 1996-99

Brice Marden is odd. His shift to the above play of abstraction was some of the first nonobjective painting toward which my developing eye gravitated.

That means a lot to me. Finding those ins to new terrain is one thing that perhaps the information age takes for granted. But, as I've maintained for years, the phenomenological experience of even 2D images is irreplaceable. Growing up as I did in one of the vast expanses of nowhere in the U.S. I seldom came across good art. So, discovering Marden in books was one thing. Rediscovering him in person was something else.

But he holds. The flow and sensuality of the image can be somewhat beleaguered by it's dry, stiff surface. This tension is nice. All the simple formal elements add up to some very poetic results. And sincerity, too. Take the leap; risk being sentimental and lame.

Mary Cassatt
The Child's Bath, 1893

Mary Cassatt has long been a mainstay of my visual vocabulary. Probably even before my age reached the double digits. It's all kind of kitschy and borders on the verge of a Hallmark Card image, but that's the risk she took. It's one of the most difficult risks a serious artist can take; to be intellectually branded as kitschy or sentimental.

But the work is powerfully touching. Cassatt worked fucking hard. And she didn't stray into territory where her personal visual endeavors didn't belong. That's too easy to do. She found her voice, and she stuck it out.

The bit of canvas in "The Bath" I detailed up top, it's some of my favorite rendering and placement of shape within composition of any painting I've ever seen. There is, of course, something baptismal or at least loosely affiliated with Christian imagery going on in this painting. What with the washing of feet and all. The pose is something similar to Michelangelo's Pieta'. I'm injecting some of my personal baggage into it, of course, but I can't help but see it as an image of protection. A protector finding rituals appropriate for shuttling their ilk into a harsh world.

Luca Giordano
Abduction of the Sabine Women
1675/80

I never knew anything about Luca Giordano. My preferences in pre-modern paintings never really veered toward the grandiose canvases of the Italians, but I was captivated in that area in the collection. Not just by Giordano's Abduction, but most potently by far.

First of all, the arrangement of the life-sized figures is unusual, it's emphatically asymmetrical. The action is lead and played out over and over (rendering the retelling of this particular tale a more horrible and less theatrical tone). In fact, Giordano's handling of paint and his treatment of the figure in both rendering and pose look so much like what Goya did a little while later.

I am absolutely blown away by this piece. It's pathos and violence are powerful. It sweeps and punctuates the space.

Philip Guston
Reverse

I'm not sure what to say about Philip Guston at this point in my life. He's meant so much to me. I don't think it's all gold. It's not. His is a modern art hero's tale, but its got legitimacy. He took unintellectual risks. His Plain in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum collection changed me. He was just a name before that. Painters need to look at Guston's surfaces. I assumed that more knew what this meant, but it isn't so. It's very much a painter's term. If ever any Ab Ex painter managed to infuse concept into the material and breath new life into a brush's touch, Guston was he.

Brice Marden's flow of image which I'd mentioned as being somewhat incongruent to the paint handling and surface; Guston's like that, too, but it's the opposite. His images and drawing are clunky. But the surface and paint handling are delicious. His is a virtuosity and grandeur supporting images of feverish insomnia and awkwardness.

I love that he took what was developed in materials and imagery through Abstract Expressionism and brought it back to a heavy human stain again.

Automatism. The re-emergance of the figure from long abstracted fields. Homage to history's stake. A head completely in the present. These things combine brilliantly in Guston's work. It's pregnant with human sadness, and the paintings and drawings respirate between feeling congested and expansive all at once. From Phil Guston I've learned to better honor my instincts. From Phil Glass I've renewed my commitment to making work that could be feasibly authored by an idiot. There's a powerfully subversive sophistication to simple-mindedness.

I also very recently saw his Reverse which was painted late in life at the Toledo Museum of Art. It's miles deep, but so spare. He gifted it to a writer whom he met late in his life, a man through whom he felt understood and with whom he had great conversations.

I have a terrible feeling in my stomach. It comes from the suspicion that passionate writers and visual artists don't have a healthy relationship anymore. Writers invested in art write about art and read art theory. Artists read theory, too, and then make work about it. But the two are divorced from one another. No communication. It seems stagnant and incestuous. Gross and sad.

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875) isn't exactly pertinent to young artists. I overlooked him for a couple of decades. Landscapes from the 19th century don't exactly make me quiver and tingle. Corot is a painter's painter in certain ways, though. His landscapes were obviously consumed readily by a nonpainter audience in his time, but they are sophisticated in ways that stimulate a much more discerning pair of eyes, too. The light is exquisite, often of an aching timbre.

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
Souvenir of the Environs of Lake Nemi, 1865

But I was so surprised and mesmerized by his Interrupted Reading from 1870. The treatment of the figure, it's blockiness and heaviness; they seem to allude to what would come to us through the Cubists. My ignorance prohibits me at this moment from knowing whether or not Picasso studied Corot's work at all, but this piece reads undeniably like a precursor to many of Picasso's monumental women. If seen in context with his tight and meticulous landscapes it comes across as that much more surprising. It's comparatively loose, paired down, and the focus is brought to very specific points. The feel of Corot's brush on the surface suddenly becomes more intimate.

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
Interrupted Reading 1870

It's noteworthy to point out that the piece Interrupted Reading was painted in the last years of Corot's life. It radiates a lifetime of looking and studying, of the reward inherent in continually finding the profundity in playfulness. What else could it be but that very concept which Picasso was trying to tell us later?

Pablo Picasso
Head 1927

Picasso's surrealist figurative experiments from the 1920's and 30's couldn't possibly mean more to me. Just brutal and raw. Splayed, crooked, taut, unflinching. Playfulness like this is as offputting and inevitable as a young boy torturing small animals.

They say more about our conundrum of being human than most would like to admit.

Gerhard Richter
Ice 3

The seductive qualities of oil paint are seemingly limitless. Never mind all the intellectual rigor mortis. It's just sexy and full of life and death by itself. One of the challenges of art making is to present something that stands on its own as an experience of significant and shaped magnetism. Oil on surface has proven itself to get an artist there with great efficiency through all the technological changes. There will never be a viable substitute for human on human fucking. Oil paint has that same primal quality.

So, it's with some real disappointment that I find myself at odds with my most recent encounters with Gerhard Richter's work. In my development as a painter he's been key in that primal seduction with the material. I suppose I've always been aware of the fierce intellect behind his practice, but now I cannot shed it's ubiquitous coloring of the work.

Consistency is Richter's domain. He's kept that same cool rhythm for decades. And, obviously, he's been quite prolific. So now where his abstracts seemed so celebratory before, they now feel clinical. Or, more precisely, the ever-present clinical quality is not subsumed by their celebratory bravado. How did I never note the restraint in the past? His power as a painter is astounding, but the lack of animus leaves one feeling bereft of a potentially deeper experience. It's an interesting tension. The odd taste of failure seems to come from these canvases painted with such virtuosity.

Gerhard Richter
Two Candles, 1982

Martin Puryear
Sanctuary 1982

I know dick about Martin Puryear. I was lucky enough to happen to be in MOMA when his retrospective was taking place in New York. I admit, I glanced over most of it.

Sanctuary really grabbed me, though. Figurative nonliteral sculpture with a healthy pinch of playfulness grabs my boys. If I weren't as clumsy I'd work with wood instead of paint. But I can't afford to lose all my fingers right now.

Charles Ray
Hinoki, 2007

Charles Ray's room feels like a meditation room. That seems fitting. Or probably intentional. "Hinoki" looks like a dead log. That's what it is, but not really. Or actually, not, but just not entirely. It seems too pale and uninflected to be that, so you start thinking "this must be cast" because something is off about it. If you look closely or just read the information provided you learn that it's all carved. It's a carved sculpture of a dead log Ray had found, but it's carved from new wood by a team of professionals from Japan. Ray cast it, and they imitated the form.

Can one transfer the consciousness of a fallen and decaying tree into a less decayed "tree?" Or is this about the projected consciousness we put into other things? When we preserve things is it just another pathetic and beautiful attempt to talk to the future about our thoughts?

I'm not one to react well or readily to information-heavy pieces, but it's unfair to call Ray's piece info-heavy. It provides so much visual pleasure and weirdness. It's graceful and meditative and proportioned to elicit charged response to a viewer's bodily interaction in space. It's also celebratory. A dead log, but given a proxy through which it's likeness will last another several hundred years. All with the visible touches of the human hand and mind.

This was intended to be a succinct and thorough personal review of my experiences at the Chicago Institute Museum of Art. It failed. It was terribly naive of me to think that I could do it all at once. It's really just a paltry cross section at best. But, then I've always set out to offer impressions rather than enlightenment.

My collection of sensations there will never be forgotten, but also never fully expounded upon in a blog. Another lesson in humility.

Brown Line Eyes

2011-01-12T18:36:00.000-08:00

Brown Line Eyes

For some weeks I've been depending on the trains in Chicago to get to and from work. The cold and snow are too much for my limited body and limited gear to ride my bicycle.

It's been nice to read on the train. People watching is fascinating, too. There were some new fashion spread billboards put up on the Brown Line platform. They're roughly lifesize images of a smiling model in winter wear. Situated as they are along the railing that lines the outer edge of the platform they are exposed to vandals. I waited several days to see what would happen. Soon enough someone acted on their compulsion to decry the outlandishly handsome man's image. But the marks were surprising. Just angry slashes across the eyes. None of the usual squiggled marker or highly stylized graffiti. Not even blackened teeth.

2010-12-26T20:58:00.000-08:00

Staggering around doing the best we can.

Xmas came in like a lonesome coma. I languished in the resulting miasma most of the day. Out of bed, sure, but joined at the hip with a bottle of red wine and no bath; one doesn't really leave bed like this.

Back to Herzog for me. I opted to look into one of his earlier films, The Land of Silence and Darkness from 1971. He presents a number of German citizens who are all in various stages of being struck both blind and deaf. Some went deaf and then blind later in life, one after the other. Some were born into deafness to be followed by the loss of sight or vice versa. We follow a woman whom had taken a violent spill down some stairs as a child. The blow swiftly robbed her of sight and secluded her to her bed. Without warning her hearing began quickly to sputter and fail as well.

She communicates using a system developed over time via the palm of the hand. It's known as the tactile alphabet. Throughout the film she steadfastly displays a will of iron and unending energy. She slowly but emphatically employs the tactile alphabet in greeting old friends and new acquaintances alike.

Herzog shows us how each of these various people deals with the truncated sense of the world in which they find themselves. It ranges savagely from devout hope and will to lost animalistic ruin. A lot of that outcome, it seems, is a result of how loved ones and civilization in general reacted to the needs of the deaf-blind. If there was despair on the part of the disabled coupled with an unwillingness or inability of others to develop tactile communication and, therefore, stimulation then many of the deaf-blind in the cases presented became arrested in a solitary world perhaps fairly likened to autism. Locked away and drifting ever further beyond reach.

And as for those born under the veil of these two missing faculties it seems hopeless altogether. One woman training two young boys on the tactile alphabet admits severe limitations in her progress. A basic grasp of tactile communication doesn't necessarily mean that any abstract concepts are developed or understood. Communicating such ideas, it seems, is futile.

One of these boys lingers in Herzog's lens for prolonged periods. His movements and behavior are nearly indiscernible from what one could only liken to mental retardation. But nothing beyond the basic input of sight and sought is physiologically wrong with his brain. It's atrophy in regular development is the result of an impossible roadblock that forces his will into scattered offshoots. It is a state of being into which we have no insight.

What haunts me is the fragility of human powers of comprehension. Take away two of our main sensory inputs and I fear it is a very slippery slope to becoming a mindless animal.

One man was born blind. Up the age of 35 he retained his hearing, but that failed too. He had learned braille, but, astoundingly, that concept atrophied. He drifted out into the deep recesses of his mind and sought out the company of animals. He slept in a stable for years. His mother continued to care for him through all of this, but she fell short of seeking out proper care to ensure a line of communication should remain intact between the outside world and her son.

In some of the final shots of the film this middle aged man is introduced to the woman Herzog has focused on throughout. Communication is attempted, but fails of course. The man's polite reserved actions look like a faraway parody of social grace, a shadow of learned behavior. He rises from the benches where his mother (dressed like a widow and hidden behind large sunglasses) sits with the central woman and her guide.

As they chatter away about his state he wanders aimlessly behind in the grass. Completely on his own.

Herzog has something of a tendency to get surprisingly emotional in some of his earlier work. At least, in this film in particular.

Jackson Wyeth Davis III

I couldn't muster much interest in The Ecstasy of The Sculptor Stiener. Admittedly, I didn't know anything going into it, and it turns out to be a film about a ski flyer. Beautiful footage of jumps, but Swiss athlete Stiener isn't terribly interesting to me. I thought he was literally going to be a sculptor. I was a lot more interested in the workshop were he carved his overweight skis. Planks of wood. Multitude of chisels all hanging neatly overhead. Good stuff.

I like workshops. I always need one. Growing up wandering around my pop's workshop was invaluable. He kept everything. Now I do, too. Our ideas of usefulness are vastly different. He was set up for years in the first floor of an old renovated barn about fifty yards from our house in Pennsylvania. He was therefore my Jackson Pollack and my Andrew Wyeth. One whom I loathe and one whom I love. Don't worry, Dad. I love all of you.

2010-12-22T17:51:00.000-08:00

Happy Xmas

There are a couple of days until xmas comes around again. I'm drinking borrowed wine.

But I'm not miserable despite the expectations of some. I've spent the day writing cards to some family and watching two films: Chaplin and The Wonder Boys. The link? Robert Downey Jr. of course.

What a phenom. I hadn't seen Chaplin in quite a few years. It's hurried along in some ways. The manner in which films were made during Chaplin's rise is a fascinating start to an ubiquitous industry. Downey honors Chaplin in performance and complexity. It seems he was not garrulous offscreen, either. Quarrelsome, devout to the point of stubborn, and absolutely a workaholic.

Enough.

It's xmas, I'm out of Pittsburgh, but if and when I need to visit and cannot afford to (and I almost never can) I elect to watch Wonder Boys. It is set in my former modest city of former glory. They were smart enough to film it there, too. It honors the place so well. The rooms, the light, the cramped misery of architecture, the suffocating feeling of clumsy inward terror... All of that adds up to charm. The film gets it and makes me miss it. Sewickly and Braddock are both mentioned. These two neighborhoods could't be more diametrically opposed.

It isn't to say that Wonder Boys is so close to my heart because of any of that, though. It's a fantastic film on its own merit. Michael Douglas, Rob Downey Jr., Rip Torn, Frances McDormand; this cast is marvelous.

Chaplin makes me wish I were a performer. Wonder Boy makes me wish I were a writer. But my ability to write is just a performance, my desire to perform not worth writing about.

Anyway, I miss you in your own way, Pittsburgh. Your cheap drinks. Your choked lungs. Your insulated sense of the world...

2010-11-26T15:33:00.000-08:00

The dreams of daytime workers are different. They feel more urgent. I've recently been switched over to the day shift at my workplace. I'm up at five or six in the morning and I'm not home again until five or six in the evening.

Readjusting the sleep schedule has made for less, lighter sleep, and, thus, more vivid dreams. I rarely remember dreams at all. But I've had very strong CSI superhero-themed dark stories populating my hours just on the other side of awake. Last night it was a story about Superman (sans the S swathed across his manly chest) being duped into death and regenerated in the form of growth-accelerated fetuses. These were all lined up in neat square boxes full of some manure concoction. At the evil genius' whim a new Superman could be birthed. Once incepted he would unknowingly perform whatever unseemly tasks his creator desired.

I am fully infected by nerd. I now breath the fluids of fantasy in my subconscious whereas previously my rarely recalled dreams were merely banal scenes of living. But under the hot breath of an unseen and malicious force. Anxious dreams, dreams of powerlessness and non-agency. I am now someone more willing to take the reins of his agency. Even in the good possibility that agency itself is a feeble illusion. It's worth the risk.

There, there

It's a seemingly inconsolable double helix away from which I cannot flee; the intertwining of brutal fact and the poetry of need. Werner Herzog does this to me. I always lose just enough of how much he manages to fling me into panic-stricken and emotionally raw territory that when it happens again, it is terrifying.

I watched another one of his films the other night, Encounters at the End of the World. Based on his usual completely unromantic motivations he travels to a compound in Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton's original ramshackle hut is still there preserved. Herzog's eye is always trained on brutality of fact. He shows us all the banality and the everyday unremarkable manners of people. Scientists and all manner of drifters are interviewed. Like the rest of us they're all beautiful losers. But not with disrespect, not with the youtube era's ubiquitous self-mocking and inability to pony up the courage to take our absurdity seriously.
I suppose that's Herzog's woven beauty. His unemotional presentation, his bias, when it does come through, is plain and direct often delivered in his own soft, unforgiving tenor. He tells me that whether or not it's going to be ok is irrelevant. He tells me that the world is so thoroughly logical, that benevolence doesn't seem to naturally bloom from logic. Benevolence isn't real, it's a tactic of sacrifice in the game of survival. If we proceed with the flimsy notion of compassion then we won't be reflections of the natural world, we'll survive. We can stave off the inevitable nothingness, which is to say that we can eschew the anxious coma it would induce to consider it at length and without distraction. Go to work. Eat something.

Herzog manages some really strange things. There's an unassuming shot of the sea bed under the ice that made me feel with absolute certainty that God is simply not there. He makes no bones about his view of the pitiless universe, nature's overriding cruelty. I suppose we're all trying to find a way to deal with that undeniable fact. Pick one. Go to work. Eat something.

I want more than anything to feel as though meaning is present. I suppose I mean that I want whatever I'm doing to not feel completely futile. Doesn't some echo of goodness carry to outward points? Doesn't it fade and die at some points and get picked up and pushed on at others? Isn't that what I've found and done all along? At least, where I'm not mired by the pseudo-agony of the specter of death.

I'm still not there. I never was, and I don't know what you're talking about.

I'm doing some audio exploring. It's more like I'm taking the sensibility of paint and trying to make some audio that feels like how paint can feel. Like I've never known anything and how blissful such a reprieve as this can be. I never knew, so I'm not reprehensible by any authority.

And He was 80 Years Old

I'm catching up on films. It's late. I just finished Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. In a synopsis teaser I glanced over before viewing it they mentioned that the director was 80 years old at the time of filming. Such fine actors. Such a grim story. It doesn't bode well for advancing in age. Nothing really does anymore. I'm just going to stay childlike, thanks. Not childish, mind you, but childlike.

All You Need is What You Need

2010-11-17T21:37:00.000-08:00

Sure bets, true sutures, and other horse shit. That's what I wanted to title a one-man show in Pittsburgh before I skipped town. Dreams can come true. It can be inflicted on you.

"One other thing I've noticed about you; you find unabashed cruelty very funny." Elise Goldstein

I hear all. Very selectively.

I get an erection when somebody warns me that I could get fired.

So, I'm letting myself get mean. Or go mean, anyway. It's not as if we're not inherently capable. I've waited long, and now I have an ability to switch as soon as I like from infinite patience to sociopathic selfishness. Waiting is luxury. This fortune told me a few months ago that genius is infinite patience. Fuck that. Waiting quietly just makes everyone think you somehow know what's coming. Patience, my friend; to be read: I dunno.

Not that there isn't genius in bottom dwelling humility. Aha.

I forgo brushing my teeth too often lately.

I Want to Drink Like Edith Piaf

Some part of me deeply suspects that the real me is a reckless, all-but-useless megalomaniac. Prone to fits of ego one minute, groveling and self-loathing the next. Hitting turbulent lows has gotten me everywhere. That's just part of who I am. I can't pretend to be different. Or, when I do I come off as a detached sociopath.

Wait wait wait... I always forget. Fuck. Walking that rope of arrogance versus aggression. Let us try to discuss the difference between these two. For my purposes, arrogance has always been a sign of insecurity made functional by way of self-induced ignorance. If you close your eyes nothing goes away as much as it just recedes to the dark wings for a minute. Aggression; it's recklessness before you can think. That's a lot more valuable.

A survey asked me recently how important it was that their programming and funding be put toward individual growth of artists. Also, is it a bad situation, this seeming inability for arts institutions to take risks? First question: Very Important. Second one: Yes.

But is any of that applicable? What does it mean anymore? I don't know that I'm speaking the same language. No programming or institution has ever felt like home, like it personally got me anywhere. Some of them buy me time. I think that's as good as it gets. A step above hopeless, which counts for everything.

I can't wait for Xmas this year. It's the first one in all of my life in which I will not be at the house in which I grew up, not with my parents. Do I want to be away from them? No. I like watching the holidays denuded of their flimsy meaning. Skeletons teaching me to want food.

Buoyes

2010-11-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

There are always experiences coming to claim your social composure and irreverently bend your will. These will inspire and teach you.

It's really just whether you're willing to lose yourself momentarily to something overwhelming. I get that in museums sometimes, almost never at galleries, more often than I can describe or to which I'd like to admit in a nondescript moment of seemingly banal living.

Elise is encouraging me toward the world of kink. It makes sense. I like my pleasure caught up with pain.

I was hurled into a test of endurance and a loss of composure recently. The ride on my bicycle to work takes me about eight miles south of my apartment. I had agreed yesterday to meet a friend at a coffee shop six or seven miles further south after work. So, after a night of insomnia and then a nine hour workday I headed south into heretofore unexplored terrain on my bicycle. South of the loop in Chicago is Pilsen, and then it gives way to the meatpacking district, open spaces, bad roads, some strange malevolence like cinder in the air at times. Then, you eventually cut east and get into Hyde Park. More upscale and student-based. Then the darkness overhead I had seen blowing in culminated in what was just the beginning of nasty weather. It began to hail and rain on me.

And honestly, I don't mind. Riding in the rain isn't really that bad. At this point I wasn't far from my destination anyway. The right amount of dampness had gotten into my clothes and set into place a chill that wouldn't subside for the rest of the night.

Meeting strangers is a mixed bag, I admit, but always worth it. I talked with a young lady for a little over an hour when she left abruptly to go and have dinner. It left me feeling somewhat stymied as to what kind of impression I must have made. But I put less and less of my time and energy into such speculations.

So, I suited up and pushed eastward toward the lakefront in order to take the trail north. The temperature had plummeted and the rain continued. Again, no complaints. I was looking forward to seeing the lake at night this far south. When I reached the shore and began to head north along the trail the wind revealed it's undiluted force on my person. It descended relentlessly like new gravity, like a nightmare torpor. Every inch was earned.

The choppy water to my right was beautiful. The moonlight caught the froth of each spastic crest and sent it glowing across the deep cerulean and violet-green plane of endless eastward water. The wind crushed me. It sent a fine spit of freezing water over me from the surface of the lake. My jaw fell into a rhythm of set determination and slack concentration. I knew I wanted every second of this. The opposition, the unending and unfeeling force. Alone and flailing just above hopelessness is a good place to go.

I was in the habit of taking long walks in blizzards when I was young, and I did it a number of times in my twenties. It's a liberation borne of realizing your limits. It teaches you about yourself with what I can only describe as perfect will. This is as opposed to the polluted (albeit very fascinating) will of other people who set out deliberately to teach you. It had been far, far too long since I'd set myself up to be torn apart by perfect will.

Something sizable was trotting along the trail ahead of me on four legs. We were squeezed together into a narrow strip of grass and trees between the city looming up on the left and the massive lake spitting and heaving on the right, a wild dog of some sort with black and green gleaming voids of eyes staring at me as we approached one another. As the distance closed the scenario's threat suddenly grabbed me and I had a moment of panic. This thing was eyeing me with pitiless holes, the pounding wind screaming in my ears had weakened my body, I really was at a point of helplessness and a dozen miles from home. And this thing was ready to set upon me with a will of raw focus not softened or made diffident by human consciousness. The tension peaked as we veered slightly away from one another and passed with defensive glares of mutual panic. It was a pact formed in the humiliation of the forces at work around us.

Such is the unsullied perfection of animal attack. Your pompous will and supposed superiority distilled from elevated levels of consciousness mean nothing in the face of the will of animals.

Onward the trail took me along the water's curving shore, up small inclines and through dejected clusters of naked shivering trees. Ghoulish isn't the right word. It was just a throbbing, lugubrious landscape of complete indifference. That small whimper that comes with physical fight for breath began quietly. I couldn't help but think of McCarthy's The Road. The seeming pointlessness of continuing. Small hopes can mean everything, and I knew that I had a warm shelter up north.

But being there, only there and completely of that moment meant everything to me. There was no desire to go west into downtown where the buildings would divert the wind and I could be among other people. None.

As I made a few mile's headway the waves began to pound upward teen or fifteen feet in the air beside me where concrete inlets gave the water a flimsy wall against which to rail. The winding trail provided small moments of reprieve from the wind. As I peaked a small hill the violent air would slam into me renewed and rob me of breath for few seconds. Once when this happened it threw my head back and slightly to the right. Out over the bay a thousand gleaming white buoyes tethered to one another in a beach inlet were bodies in my wild eyes carried up and down in the heaving bay. My horror was real. It was absolutely beautiful and horrifying.

And this brought me to remember with new vividness the impetus of all my creative drive: I have little to no use for beauty devoid of conflict. One of my favorite authors on art talks at length about visual pleasure and how there is no shame or limitation in it's pursuit. But I like my pleasure caught up with pain.

The little whimper had by now bloomed into an earnest stifled yelp, just another lost noise in the cacophonous world around me. Ohio Beach is a cement tomb on the bay, but the spray frothed over it's edge, water protruded upward in pulsing monoliths like tongues of seizing titans and fell upon the concrete land. And still the wind railed in my contorted face, against my wasted frame bent ludicrously over the handlebars in aching locomotion. And on we go. Or not.

The path narrowed and arced around the lakeside wall of the science museum. Constructed entirely of an embankment of glass and metal, it afforded me a view into calm caves and still water in a large display enclosure. My slack and stupid face stared into that surreal and synthetic quiet. My throat involuntarily bellowed out useless jumbles of vowels and consonants from a shapeless mouth as the city skyline exploded around the bend full of beads of light and shadowy congruence. Before I could process that shift of presence twelve feet of dark lake water slithered almost soundlessly straight up into the air against the wall to my right and fell back into the blackness. It fell with perfect grace. As though it were teaching me.

Four miles from home I finally cut to the west through a tunnel beneath Lake Short Drive. It failed to cast out the wind. Emerging into the downtown area in my state was akin to staggering out of bar into the daylight. The context underlined my relinquishment of affected grace. Wanderers there looked oblivious.

Still, the wind found me at points. I couldn't help but think of the furies. Every opposition encountered is generated from my own doing, not quite karmic, not quite Catholic guilt. Eventually I arrived home closer to the verge of collapse than I've been in some time.

I had forgotten that Elise and Jason were entertaining a guest. So, it was not without some awkwardness that I staggered half crazed into the warm, calm room quietly aglow with conversation. I felt like I had returned from a vision quest. I offered my frozen, wet and numb hand to our visitor and then went to my room to try and struggle out of clinging clothes. Elise kicked into Jewish Mother mode. She listened patiently to my nearly incomprehensible and feeble outbursts about the preceding hour while she warmed her buckwheat pillow in the microwave. This she draped around my neck. I deposited my ruined form into my handy shut-in pants and a dry sweater. I nestled hunched and dumb under a blanket in the living room. The conversation went on with my added presence like a nearly comatose hysteric. If that's possible.

I don't know that my 20's went without enough recklessness. I certainly don't feel regret, but my remembrance is tempered with a new understanding that my growth is largely stagnant without opposition, without forces all too eager to tell me how my love can always be expanded and somehow simultaneously focused.

I Won't Really Paint Again Until Something Perverse Happens

2010-10-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

Luc Tuymans

Something delicious and perverse needs to goad me. Otherwise genuine painting will remain out of reach. I just don't think it can happen. Or, at least, it will be a different kind of imagery and treatment than I want to communicate my life's findings. I think that means that I don't want to bore anyone, least of all myself.

Conversations with my friend Elise are hard. She's smarter than me any day of the week. Compound that with her hunger for meaning and her voracious appetite for self-knowledge and you have a very formidable artist. Not all, not even many of the conversations are difficult. But I know she can tell that I'm floating in a dense ether right now, and she's demanding that I come out. So, we're talking about God. Or god. About our relationship to meaning and sex and how we want to die elegantly.

At any rate, she and I both know that I need to get laid. Something is building.

As I advance in age I find it more subtle, the line between thinking you're getting dumber and realizing that you're becoming more refined in your needs and how to meet them. So, patience for certain barriers becomes less. By 'refined' I do not mean calm. Those two are too readily associated. I mean efficient, and I need to efficiently streamline my need to have and absorb and process carnal human experiences. It's more than getting action. I know where that can get me, and contact means a lot to me and my work in so many of it's various implications.

Elise says that my logic is opaque. That's true, in a way, but I suspect that it's also too inchoate. It always has been. The way I feel, I've always been terrified of falling too short in transmuting that to some form of expression. It's all limited, and I do realize more and more that my internal experience isn't unique, so what's my deal? Folks, it's always a matter of security. I'm also terrified to face the possibility that I'm worthless. Then, it's into the river.

I can see through the you you've constructed to the one you're protecting. I love them, but I know it's too much to ask that I get to interact directly. How often do we really get that in a lifetime? Nearly never. Maybe definitely never. Is that the drive to have children, to be directly in contact with someone (albeit something largely unformed) before they slip away forever?

Art is an externalized security filter to me. Risky, serious, worthwhile art, that is.

Tuymans took my Composure

Luc Tuymans

My friend Rob, I've mentioned, he and I have challenged one another to become a monk in regard to our painting. I'm more spiritual, he's more... monkish. At any rate, he's been berating me for a little while for having missed the Luc Tuymans show he traveled to New York to see. Well, Tuymans is here at my local MCA in Chicago, so I sauntered down there relishing the fact that Rob's Pittsburgh will never bring a contemporary painter of such caliber. Ever. Ha ha. Eat that, Rob.

I've not been entirely sure what I thought of Tuymans, but I developed something of a crush and fascination a good while back. My affections used to be reserved for his younger counterpart, Wilhelm Sasnal. Counterpart? At least, so many critics and writers want them paired.
I knew I'd get something significant out of the show, but really I felt overwhelmed in front of more than one of the pieces. I can pinpoint four of them that felt like a punch in the stomach. True, I'd been a bit starved of really impactfull painting, but that wasn't the only thing at play. Tuymans really shows you something. It is somewhat hit or miss, but the consistent level of ruthless focus for the most part is more than a little boggling.

It's a consistency in each individual piece, too. His is a focus I can't overemphasize. It doesn't happen in so much young work I see.
And therein lies a struggle I've encountered lately: I've decided that part of my beef with Francis Bacon is that his is imagery and handling that is declarative rather than exploratory. That's how it presents.

But now I see that in Tuymans done with more of an idea of collective human responsibility. His tone is not leaden with Frankie's fact, but it soars and penetrates in a way that an idea can subvert what you thought you had a firmer grasp on in regards to the world's basic function. Bacon just preaches his nihilistic arrogance. He isn't conflicted, just inflated.

Francis Bacon

Luc Tuymans

Tuymans' process is all readily available right there in front of you. He's usually beginning on unstretched linen. You can often see the penciled square around the perimeter of the finished stretched work. Sometimes the pencil sketching comes through on the image surface, too. And then there is a deliberateness and efficiency of paint and mark that happens which could easily fail and read like ADHD or lack of commitment, but his focus comes through and gives the picture this unsettling growl-in-a-void kind of feel. It goes. Not all of them did it for me, some more readily than others, but when it goes it glowers at you.

Luc Tuymans

No-Thing

2010-07-08T18:33:00.000-07:00

What's news? A relocation to Chicago has found me 12 pounds lighter, more tan, more resilient, and pining for some of Pittsburgh's hills.

I've been a resident of Chicago for a month now. One single move by car with a small Uhaul trailer. Most of everything I brought was work and studio related. I'd say a good ninety six percent. Ridiculous. It drove home the realization of my arranging and rearranging my life in order to accommodate making things for the past fifteen years.

C'mon man and rain down on me

My first night here I moved all of my belongs up to our third floor apartment in Roscoe Village. Elise and I had beers. I was out of sorts but elated. I had no bed yet so I (happily) nestled into Elise's couch (think of a burlesque house where Sesame and Bourbon intersect and you can see this couch). The windows were open right over my head and between three and four in the morning a sudden and torrential downpour broke out. Violent and ferocious on the tree limbs just outside.
It was lovely. I love summer storms. Then a shock went through my body as I realized I'd left my much beloved bicycle, Ettiene, out on the second floor deck. Fucking hell.

I sprang out of couch, threw on the filthy shorts I'd worn during the drive and clambered outside to retrieve him. A waterfall of freezing water coming off of the sloped third story roof nearly sent me into shock. I scooped up Ettiene and turned to run back up the stairs only to find that the door had shut and locked behind me. I was outside in a torrential downpour in nothing but a pair of shorts with no keys or phone. Elise did eventually hear my pleas and let me back inside. Ettiene went into the bathtub for the night. Shivering and feeling like I was swimming through a dream I toweled off and went back to sleep.

Missing: 12 pounds of boy-man

So, I think all the time biking the eight miles to and from work would have made me more tan by now if I were still dimensional enough to cast a shadow. I've shed weight but I'm making a conscious effort to up my intake at meals.

Hell Raiser Bun Bun

Thrifting and vintage shopping in Chicago is incredible. It's a goldmine. My favorite find by far as of yet is a ten inch ceramic rabbit whom I'm fairly certain has absorbed the bubonic plague. I saw it on a shelf with other castoffs at a Village Discount. From a distance it grabbed me and when I got close and picked him up for a good look I almost vomited. So, I knew I had to have him.

Lost Twin

Elise and I are of the same blood. I adore her and I love living with she and her boy Jason. Elise is a performance and installation artist. Our work springs from the same place but manifests completely different. She moms me. It's good, I need it. I get her laughing. It's good, she needs it.

Move, Goddammit

The paint is just moving again. The newest chamber is the smallest I've yet had, but quite adequate. Putting up one of the larger paintings is akin to being trapped in a small room with a large unpredictable animal. We're pinned together in a much more urgent way. Proximity is my latest element of emphasis. The music waves over me like a good massage in a small room, too.

The room already feels rich with cultivation and fermentation. The work and I, we coerce one another into behaviors very intensely very quickly in a small well-lit space.

New Enablers

We live almost directly above two key locations: A bar and a thrift store. We finally met one of the bartenders recently. Amiable, and forthcoming. Now he remembers me and it seems like we'll get along well enough. There's an older photo booth in the bar. Good way to get actual photo documentation of how much money I will drink in the next year. I think the bartender will react alright when I inevitably misbehave in the future.

A History of Bad Rock

The bartender, John, has revealed to us that our apartment is the former residence of one Fall Out Boy. Ok.

Canine

Elise and I have been shopping for a dog. We need a mammal around. Cats are preferred by me, but Jason is allergic. We test walked a little guy named Gandolf from a local shelter, but he's strangely detached. Actually, he behaves a little like a cat. Another heavy hitter was a French Bulldog puppy we were going to call Bruce (after Mr. Wayne) but he's too expensive. And he'll probably shit on the floor.

The Vinyl Say

I ponied up the cash, bought a record player. It's a very charming thing from a local vintage shop. Talking down the price didn't require much effort. I even got a free Ray Charles record with it. So whenever I can I will very slowly and with heavy consideration collect some vinyl. Lady Holiday is here already, and some $.99 records that seem like decent finds. Elise is also very enthusiastic about this avenue.

Tenderly Burn What is Left of Me

So far, so good. I'm not sure how I fit in here but I feel settled. Everyone still thinks I'm strange. Even Elise, but we're siblings. Paint is moving more, but I remain skeptical that I'll find gallery support.
I've been reading an autobiography of William Segal. He was a boy born in Macon, Georgia long ago. A great athlete growing up, and then a great publishing entreprenuer. Best known for Gentry. From the fifties through the nineties of the last century he studied mainly Zen meditation, painted, and pursued the work and company of such esoterics as G.I. Gurdjieff. A smart, somewhat brash and very compassionate man. It's been a life that was meant to fall into my realm of consciousness at the right juncture.

There is much concentration on a state of no-thing related heavily, of course, to Zen Buddhist meditation. There was one very beautiful phrase someone uttered to him, the state one reaches in meditation when one "is breathed" rather than breathing. This is a oneness, a path to the connectivity of being to the real world of no-thing.

He speaks beautifully and right on the mark about how I feel about paintings's connection to oneness, to a level of consciousness and love beyond intellectualization.

But really, the jury is still out on my feelings about Chicago. I've not been out much. People seem to make communication a low priority. At a year's mark, or even ten months, I'll be very attune as to whether a longer stay is appropriate.

Chicago's an Asshole

Yep. This is another month later. Parking tickets like a motherfucker. Ok. Only two, but they add up to $110 I don't have.
No matter how much one tells one's self that one will inevitably eat shit for months when one moves to a new city one cannot help but despair some in between mouthfuls of shit. Mmmmhmm.
It's mostly financial I suppose. And it won't kill me to have to eschew bourbon for a while. That part is easy, but couple that with being quite alone working for shit money, being completely uninterested in romantic entanglement, etcetera, blah, blah, blah, whine.

First arrival brought a heavy dose of William Segal and therefore Gurdjieff's teachings into my life. All of that is processing, but I feel numb and feverish and exhausted and in a malaise of sorts.

I'm making a broader range of work. I like it and it's emotionally messy, and what's more I don't care who doesn't respond. Not as much as I used to. It springs from a place of sincerity I cannot fake in my haggard state. So fuck 'em. Chicago's filthy lesson. I know how to keep it all close to the chest and be colder than anyone. Reading peoples' insecurities coming through their actions and words is like braille to a blind man for me. You don't think I see but I do.

Aggressiveness

I'm dredging my character to test my aggressiveness again. It's a survival tactic. It's crude and cruel at times right now, but it falls back into a graceful assertiveness after the airing out. I even yelled "TURN SIGNAL, MOTHERFUCKER!!!" into a cab driver's window today in heavy traffic. It felt goooood.

I'm 30 and I belong to no one and I belong nowhere.

Vanity Now! Rapist Clowns!

2010-05-31T10:08:00.001-07:00

Ryan Sigesmund and Kate Hagerty are two good friends. They're an adorable couple who are both photographers. They were good enough to come by the cave and document newer work for me before I vacate Pittsburgh for Chicago.

It was a fun exercise in casual documentation of documentation of presentation of cave activities. Ryan photographed paintings and multimedia pieces from his tripod. Kate roamed taking photos of the yeast and fermenting materials I've collected, the tools in various states of rot and wear, and me in various states of wear and rot. We all love to tell jokes:

Kate: Heh heh...

Brett: What?

Kate: A little boy in a chef's hat is playing on the sidewalk when a clown in a pickup truck pulls up and parks beside him. "Hey, there, kid. Get in and I'll give you a ride." The boy innocently consents and they drive in silence for a minute before the clown asks him "Do you know what a pedophile is?" The boy scrunches up his face in boyish concentration and says "No."
They drive on and after another minute the clown asks "Do you know what fellatio is?" Again, after a moment the boys says "No."

Another minute passes and clown again turns to the boy and asks "Do you know what anal rape is?" and the boys says "No, and listen, I think you're confused. I'm not really a chef."

Brett and Kate: HA ha haha!

Ryan: I think I missed something.

We ate bagels with cream cheese and young coconut and french press coffee. We got wired.

People like Ryan and Kate keep me alive.

I've always been able to admit that there is something of a performer in me. Even with my visual work. I think my body is in there all the time. Sure, that means I chew on mortality a lot, but I recognize something else body oriented, too. It feels more like the manifestations of our ability to discuss our thing-ness and whether this has cogent agency or identity with anything nonphysical. Or if there is no nonphysical all we do is really just another emphasis of absurdity. You don't get away from absurdity. You just don't. But how do you cope with it?

Your Flesh is my Vittles

2010-05-16T08:41:00.000-07:00

I halped ma frend make a film. I wuz good he say. I eat my work mate.

Through a lens. Now oblong, now backward.

2010-04-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

Transformation is key. It happens regardless of our pathetic wills, but it can be harnessed, shaped and influenced at least. Or so it seems. Thus we have things like "identities" and art. Physical manifestations leave some nice trails to follow, some crude documentation of the flux to which we are beholden.

I went over the handlebars recently. Dumb and perfect. The best experiences are usually humbling. Otherwise we're just riding on empty air thinking nonsense about being untouchable. So I'm transformed and reevaluated through the lens of some permanent scarring. I haven't been able to get the taste of dirty asphalt and ground teeth out of my mouth.

Someday someone is going to cut me in half. Some kind of transformation is always ready to break you down. I like Chuck Palahnuk's book "Invisible Monsters." Mostly at any rate. It plays heavily on the themes of enduring an event from which you cannot recover and the unreliable flimsiness of appearance. The main character (spoiler alert here, if anyone reads) turns out to have shot herself in the face. It took off her jaw. Who you are to yourself transmutates out of its stiff predecessor in key ways after such trauma. People whom realign in the wake are profound in a way I've long admired.

The solo show for which I was gearing up has been cancelled. Or, rather, I cancelled it. The space isn't right, the work needs more fermenting. And I want more of it. It's refreshing to work in the studio without two layers and a parka for a half hour at a time.

This was a good piece I saw at Space Gallery:

I like its timing. Gravity is, of course, a major player. But is it on or off? Is this the moment when this figure perishes and is transformed forever? Earth and body become one again. It's also as though the duality of the movement (up and down) manages to suggest an outward release of something like a spirit from the body's suddenly dead vessel. Blood in the soil, ashes in the wind.

Veruca la'Piranha is a friend of mine. She performs at drag shows that have been going on at The Blue Moon. It's an impressive affair. Themed, with edgy and creatively repurposed clothing and accessories, great music and performance. It can even get dangerous and messy. Objects get broken on stage and various fluids spray the crowd at times. Money is thrown. Gay and straight alike people the small room. It riles up the spirit in a way probably something like what punk rock used to do.

Veruca was assaulted recently. In my neighborhood not more than a block from where I live, no less. Her daily conceptual transformations are cross referenced now with unforeseeable physical transformations. It's made me livid, to think of people harming and aggressing. But I know that Veruca will transform outward from this, too. Realigned.

Frosty spoon, babies, maggots, Truman Capote, ceramic Adam and Eve, shark grave,

2010-03-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

The tail end of my week off from my day job. It was Holden Caufield attempts a bacchanal. Or some such thing. Drinking makes me sharp the next day. It's a lucid focus, but I'm not purporting some devotion to a drunken master style of art making. It's a method. Nothing more.

The aviary on the North Side of Pittsburgh is pretty impressive. The first birds you see are goofy-looking eagles and macaws. Then penguins. They've been slaughtered by superstitious folk in countries into which they've been imported because they were thought to be trolls. True or false?

I went there with Ange and her kid, Sophie. It was great. I was hazy and jubilant.

Gina and her kids were there, too. Her kids seem to like me more than Sophie. I think I freak her out.

The aviary folk were feeding maggots to some of the birds in the large tropical room. Musty and pulsing with airborne fluid like a giant mouth.

From there to great coffee and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. It's an early novel of his and it's quite good. Some passages flow like honey and gold.

Over to The Society for Contemporary Craft. It's tucked away in the Strip District near the golden-domed church. A ceramic show. Eden imagery. Some of it really knocked me down.

A long walk up Smallman to Butler, up Butler past some teenage hecklers and into the Allegheny graveyard. My first wander around the grounds. What a sight! The overcast and merciless light was perfect. And, like an audible fart in a French cinema, the infamous JAWS gravestone:

I got a little lost for a while but I certainly didn't care. Will Oldham in the ears, sharp, cold light, wriggling trees desperate for the sky, and coagulated earth. Lose me. Ideas came on like the stickiness of gracefully delivered but shockingly bad news.

I'm Almost Human

2010-03-11T17:28:00.001-08:00

I've accrued some paid time off hours for my day job. Enough that I scheduled a week for myself. It coincided quite nicely with a gorgeous turn in the weather.

It's remarkable having my day for me. There is little sleep. I don't want a minute wasted. Mostly this time is to set out the final surge for my first solo show opening in May.

I think the work is strong, but I'm forever remiss to grant myself any room for congratulations. There should be more. More depth, more scope and focus. And less. Less fuss, less guided-ness.

The city is breathing a sigh of relief in the weather's reprieve. I walk the dogs. I drink a lot of coffee and get back on my bicycle for longer rides. The studio work goes, but it's studied and slow. It's the opposite of feeling sure but somehow knowing.

I like having some visitors, too. Heather White came over today. We ate some breakfast and poked around in each other's studios. She's a behemoth of energy and mental organization. We both like personal debris and beloved garbage. I feel at times as though I'm her slow-witted cousin who never went to school. Or something like that. But talking with her is a really nice reminder that need takes precedence over procedure in our art making.

Good things lately:

Matthew Collings' latest Diary column in Modern Painters

The Goya etchings in the special exhibition at the Carnegie. The Fragonards and Daumiers and Hogarths look stiff and dated compared to his. So much conviction and power. Some kind of haunting.

Gooey brie on apples.

Espresso.

New pair of jodhpurs. New belt, too.

Some glimpses of something with power in some parts of some of the new work.

Heaving in the Mind

2010-03-02T17:57:00.000-08:00

My friend Jamie makes art about our failures as humans in the form of culture. I think he means that culture is always incomplete. It services us for so long depending on various factors, but ultimately it fails in its timeless and universal scope. I think that's what he's saying in a lot of ways.

We've shown together numerous times. Our work takes pretty different forms. But some of the impetus is quite similar. I think of failure a lot. Not my own in some small-scale quasi tragedy, but as human experience en masse. Always just falling short of what meaning there could be and some calling it the unfathomable and building a religion while others call it impatience on our part and scoff at anxiety.

Jamie Adams "Battle Popes" 2007 multi-plate woodcut
http://www.dinosaurversusrobot.com/Jamie_Adams/Welcome.html

In my own small way I'm always making work about being overwhelmed. Anxiety comes into it as a big theme. The acceptance of mortality is really important to me. I find that grace occurs when we submit to that realization not with passivity but with the attitude that strings of inevitability engage our senses endlessly.

Lately I've realized that my images center around trauma not in a direct way, but in a way perhaps more horrible when fed through memory over and over again. Leonardo Da Vinci said that painting moves in the mind. I find that to be more and more true the more I get involved with painting. That's how I mean to paint. I think that's a huge part of its power. It moves in the mind immediately and simultaneously it unfolds endlessly as though one could get the feel of a novel at a glance and yet find undulations of engagement on a visceral level over long periods of time too. Good painting says something when it makes its noise. More people could make good paintings if they concentrated on just that simple notion: How do I make it good?

So, my figures are patchy. Every mark is really toiled over on the surfaces so they're taking a long, long time to make. That's rather fine with me. I can't abide painting forms. I don't really know why outside of knowing that I can't abide the arrogance of purely perceptual inclinations presented as facts. Not from me anyway. Previous abstract work was a brash and floundering attempt at building forms of doom. These figures come from the same place, but I feel I have worked into a more sophisticated focus in the mark making and color. The doom has a better idea of itself anymore.

It all adds up to these floating collections of bruises. It feels successful sometimes in that way where it moves like the memory of flesh in my mind. Heaving or breathing shallow, twisting, immovable but falling apart. Moving with love and the consequences of mortality. It has little to do with culture outside of self-awareness. It's certainly a reaction to culture, but not one that's significantly different than someone reflecting on where they were, say, in 1110 A.D. And I'm a product of my time. That's what I meant by inevitability in some ways.

Living is the widening circle to death. There is nothing worth living for, as the process bows to the result. Everything is worth dying for.

LOOKY THE LORD THROUGH! BREATH THIS!

2010-02-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

It cannot but too often seem as though it's look here, look here, LOOK HERE GODDAMMMITT. Either that or crouching low and keeping your entrails tucked away. For what? And when?

For some, sometimes called 'that', slippery initiative that supposedly transcends our skin and pulse. To a quick place of no time? Hmmm... been chewed on for millennia. No assurance now, nor soon, nor later. So faith it is. But logic beats that with a stick every day. No? Not every day? One begets the other, perhaps?

And why always perhaps? Someone explain to me the meaningful difference between rot and fermentation. The latter is great, but it's turning point can only be divined by trial and error. And then mostly through the latter again.

We're snowed in here in rickety Pittsburgh. I've got a blood blister the size of a dime on my left hand. The kerosene heater pop gave me over xmas actually does some good in a studio that is essentially just a wooden building with no heat. From the outside it looks to one as though they may be in luck if they're seeking lawn and garden equipment in clean order. But the inside drops down ten feet more and it's actually a turn of the century horse stable naked and creaking and abiding the new absurdity of one animal over others long dead. One more while blackened roof beams look on.

Filth and ferment and turnover and some guise for transcendence. Not escape, mind you, but realignment of things to accommodate deeper living. Deeper than what? Deeper than what a pokey academic mind can follow in books. Not dull, but not exactly leaving a good trail to follow either. Kerosene+turpentine+lead+cobalt+or-a few hundred thousand steps et viola! A few seconds distilled.

A shaman, an alchemist, and an astronomer walk into a barn and the astronomer reveals a handful of semen with a pathetic look while the other two laugh for different reasons.

Hotel Katkowski; It's a Lovely Place

2010-01-28T14:29:00.000-08:00

My comrade Rob Katkowski finished his suite of four foot by four foot paintings for the hotel being constructed in downtown Pittsburgh. It was a pretty sweet gig, and he knows it despite all his bitching.

He had some people over to his studio to show them off before they were transported to the hotel for display. No one we know would be able to afford to see them there.

I've seen them a few times in progress over the past eight or nine months. Working with such pragmatic purpose and with a bureaucrat's watchful eyes upon you changes your process. It can leak into the studio like a toxin, but not to the detriment of the work if you've got any vision at all.

Rob rolled with it. They don't all look completely resolved, but the strong ones show the evidence of pushing on to a broader field. I like the one that starts to look like it's jiving on Milton Avery's work. I never imagined Rob going that direction, but it fits. It's more candy-like and less playful (somehow) than Avery's powerful musings but such are the ways of filters and desires.

Rob's surfaces get more fleshy as time goes on. He's been working on thicker and I've been struggling to get delicate thins up to par in my crucible.

Milton Avery "Island"

Rob's intense but polite. He paints with purpose and he always gets me excited talking about technical things. Brass tacks. That's his new obsession. He's gotten down to brass tacks. Ha! Kill me now. He's sold me on it, too. Luc Tuymans uses them on the edges of his surfaces. Rob saw his show in Cleveland but I missed it because I'm a boob. And Mike Ninehouser is a pushover for women. No, I'm just a boob. I should have made it there. Rob and I have both gotten very energized by Tuymans only lately. We warmed up to him in the past few years, but now we're fairly agog.

Luc Tuymans "Rabbit"

Do people take Rob seriously enough? Who knows. Some do. I take his work ethic very seriously, but he's a sweetheart and won't fess up. Look at this kid:

Some good blue art.

2010-01-01T20:34:00.001-08:00

Mike Ninehouser

I happened upon an art opening at The Spinning Plate art collective. Or whatever it is. Some people I just saw last night at a friend's New Year's Eve party were in the gallery space milling around. I met most of them just then.

It was Mike Ninehouser's apartment. The party that is. He's funny. I've been hoping his art would get more of that and less flimsy seriousness that doesn't need to be there anyway. He's starting to do it. Less of that Pittsburgh artist's tendency to make mythic images of stylized figures and animals and more fuck you in the surface. A really pretty relentless surface of paint a little like a course Tuymans with all the gloominess and some confounding sense of seriousness. This despite tits and wolves and extremely clumsy paint handling. He's pulling it together. There's an almost accidental relentlessness. He tells me that he's trying to loosen up the paint. I don't really believe that but it's sitting there in a much better way that it was before.

Mike Ninehouser

It's a tidy show. Not as much variety as would be beneficial. There were some sculptures by a fellow named Gabe Felice. I saw him on the way into the show. Oh, I thought, there's that kid I blew off at a New Year's Party four or five years ago when I was in a dark place like I am sometimes. I gave him the cold shoulder equivalent of "go eat your own shit." But Mike pointed him out as the maker of the two assemblages to which I really responded. "Time Machine" is some sort of chairs in a coital pile painted blue with a painted head panel and a tape recorder painted silver that makes farty moaning noises when you twist the nobs. Up above is a mechanic's light. It's kind of superb. It sold for nine dollars. Funny and cobbled together but sad too. I recall I apologized to him some months after our rocky first meeting. He sat in a chair against the far wall with his girlfriend looking like someone who thought he wanted to go the school dance. But he didn't.

Gabe Felice

His other piece I liked less was on the floor really low. It's painted white. It was less than a meal at McDonald's too. Somehow they seem like they should look dated and like someone's been gumming the nipple of Rauschenberg and Johns but they don't. Shit, I don't know. Kudos to him.

Gabe Felice

Another guy was Jason Rosemeyer. Someone told me he was an outsider artist. Ok. Anyway some of his things were alright too. I liked this one because it looks like Shell Silverstein designed a record cover for some British group in 1962.

Jason Rosemeyer

Everyone seemed like they were friends. Ashley Andrykovitch's pieces were interesting at times too. Still a little too typical of that Pittsburgh Wes Anderson "I care in a tender but unattached way" in some ways though. Everyone's work had a similar feel in this children's learning experience sort of way. A lot of clunkiness and bad surfaces. Not necessarily in a detrimental way, but not always helpful. A lot of blue.

Ashley Andrykovitch

I fished a framed photograph out of the trash in the corner. A really tacky and badly composed image of a sexy girl in a slinky dress showing off her legs on a stairway. The artist was there but I didn't tell him I took it. It was so trashy that I had to take it. Good cheese and crackers there too.

More Holla. Less Daze.

2009-12-28T09:40:00.000-08:00

Xmas with a small portion of the family. I wanted to shoot some of my father's guns but constant freezing rain prevented the redneck reconnection ceremony.

For pop: One bottle of Butterscotch Schnapps
For mama: One handmade bag, one pot of poinsettias.
For big sissy and man of matrimony: One grocery gift card
Plus hugs and kisses for all.

I grew up in that one house for 18 years and then one or two more. It looks smaller every time I return. There were eight of us in it for so many years.

Pictures of people I haven't met: My little sister's husband and his family. My older brother's twins. Scattered Americans just playing our role.

Pictures of a past of which I have so little idea.

Punches

2009-12-12T17:30:00.001-08:00

I've not been to Space Gallery a lot in my years here. It's a very nice space for art nestled in the cultural district Downtown. They've showcased a generously wide selection of disciplines.

I think the show there now is the best I've seen so far. It's a collection of works contributed by artists whom are also gallery workers in the city. Those people you see there, they're usually making their own work, too.

And it's good. A happy proportion of it. Quite good.

I went twice; once for the first opening and then again this past first Friday for the Gallery Crawl. It still felt good. Andy Warhol's weight bench still felt pretty boring. Scorched rugs no longer meant a good indication of STD, they mean pretty clever and nicely executed portrait shots.

It was a good mix of media and ideas. But all of them pretty neat and clean. Where's the mess? It was spilling out of Chris Beauregard's sound piece. It was one of the best in the show by far. It was also on two mixed media pieces neatly framed on a wall.

But mess does not equal success. I can't believe I just said that. Strike that. Mess does not guarantee a competent mess. But the collages and the sounds were competent messes. They both invited chance and metamorphoses into the doors and then cut off their fat and flung it out the window. To the street with you, excess. Like dressing a kill. Why keep useless shit? I guess that's how I relate to works like this. No plan. Just a primer.

But some of the other pieces I liked I could never stomach actually doing. Nicole Rosato's cut maps are nice. It seems like a schtick at first because they're portrait busts of figures created by carefully cutting the tangled lines of colored road maps. All veiny. But they're small and lovely and seem like they talk about place and identity. What good is something if it doesn't teeter on the edge of failure? Especially corny failure. She presents well and it doesn't feel like she has settled on this manifestation of her ideas.

Around the partition was a piece that also went with a geographic feel. It was a construction set low on top of which was a sculpted material made of some sort of muslin or light cloth shaped into the terrain of the land into which Pittsburgh's three rivers gouge and converge. But all clean white with twinkling lights and glowing as though the industrial revolution never touched us. Or maybe as though the landscape were bleached and bruised instead of blackened.

There was filler, too.

There was a figurative painting I liked, too. Kate somebody. It looked like something that would crash and burn like the fodder we painters have to slog through in undergrad and for years after as we learn to push paint around looking for that homunculus or graphic or other. But this one was strong. Kind of like a meal at which Munch and Soutine were talking and then some obscure Neo Expressionist from 1983 listening in had too much wine and got courage and tried to touch their boy parts. How else should we talk about the cycle?

There's also a swing with twenty five or thirty feet of chain arcing up in suspended motion in the corner. It's old and weathered-looking which can be a death mark but not always. I admit I fell for it because it reminds me of Richard Hughes. I fell for him at the last Carnegie International. Simple things in front of us that somehow, when arranged, confront us with the entanglement of the human condition, our impending rot, unsettling weirdness.

The swing didn't get that far, but it's a nice form. It vacillates in that wimpy way lacking the impeccable craftsmanship of Richard Hughes but also not willing to (forgive me) swing to the other side and be dangerous mess. It looks fun to goers and therefore gets attention but the most shallow kind most of the time unfortunately.

Beauregard's amplifier on a pedestal with distorting filters fed through it was presented as it was. No fussing really. And what for? Those gutteral sounds churning out of it were like blood-soaked velvet. Who fucking cares about the vessel? The attention to the presentational vessel is evident in it's understatement. It helps to make the piece matter; it's oozing quality just needed a framework off of which to reverberate.

Those collage pieces are great. So lovingly eviscerated over and over again. They had a rare candor to them. Remember that shit? No one does. It comes up sometimes but it's called mysteriousness or naivety by most and sincerity by others. I miss it too often.

Other things that night were alright. It was the first time in a while I'd had a big bloody burger from Tessarro's. I've been sliding back organically toward a more vegetarian diet. But I don't care about eschewing meat. I like the way blood tastes but it's heavy in the stomach anymore.

Plus Rob and Jen are good company. Jen is amiable and easy to please and Rob is grouchy. I love them both.

Yorke Youth Ponders the Ecosystem

2009-12-12T17:22:00.000-08:00

Thom Yorke is Dennis Mitchell in Disney's Dennis and Mr. Wilson Save the Polar Ice Caps. Begins May 8th in theaters everywhere.

You Can't Take it With You, and Leaving it at the Crossover Will be Humiliating

2009-12-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

Unblurred on Penn Avenue is always a crap shoot. Most of the time just crap. No A's for effort. Here and there some of it manages something memorable.

But it isn't as though Shadyside or Downtown gallery spaces capture an audience in any meaningful way either. I know so many people that live here and bemoan the apathy and dullness. They're the same ones that settle in and talk love on this town and it's football heroes and the grit that's really just industrial waste and Penndot fuck ups and not character.

But I love people here. Gems end up anywhere. Gems for anyone.

The Unblurred art walk on Penn Ave is usually a grim reminder that people need to be shaken up and that I should just go. No one wants it. But I'm happy enough for anyone that gets enough out of what's here. When personal dissatisfaction outweighs compassion you're just a prick.

I've been contributing to my friend's space at the corner of Penn and Millvale in Garfield. Carolyn Wenning. Her space was the first at which I showed work here in Pittsburgh some years ago. She's a firecracker. She looks like a cuter gay Nancy Spero. Her work is much more somber than her personality. Something of somnambulant wandering. Lacquered blurry photos on heavy wooden panels sometimes with piles and slashes of thick tar and paint surrounding it. Like a little glowing tv monitor just freshly unearthed.

Her friend Derek Sober contributed to our last show. I thought his telephone and actual little tv monitors were someone else I showed with a while back. They were interesting for a little bit, the novelty of old timey phones with tiny screens built in that talked at you about loss and yearning. But kind of corny.

Only two or three doors up is Modern Formations. My friend Jen owns and operates that one. It's been an area mainstay and frankly one of the best galleries in the city. She's been ready to throw in the towel a number of times but stuck with it.

Her show this month is two fellows. One of them won a show at her annual Salon in which he garnered enough votes for the pieces he submitted. Heavy lacquer again. Something seems to not work with lacquer. It's too easy and lazy to me most of the time. It just lays on a candy shell for some false dimension both visually and conceptually. But I liked what he had in the show. Collage cityscapes. Kind of poppy a la local superhero Burton Morriss but minus the shitty aspect. Grimy Pittsburgh instead of Morriss's tidy boring soft jazz version of Pop Art. Corporate coffee house rubbish whereas this guy's are more like elevated local coffee house.

They had somewhat mysterious words plugged into a number of them, too. That usually falls flat, but it had a little something to it here. I like the one that said "Mable" coming from a thought bubble of what looks like the last moments of a drowning girl. It's sad and funny and not a little confounding. Actually I recall the girl in water looking despondent but seeing the photo of the piece again it seems she's a pilot in the dome of a single engine craft. Pining for her lover? Still sad and funny. A little dreamy, too.

There's something about isolation in vastness that appeals to me. Being obviously obliterated by elements instead of swallowed by routine. That's why I made the Elephant Island series. Not everyone sees death as part of their destiny. What a shame.

Quoting The Sphere

2009-11-21T18:42:00.000-08:00

Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo it's rolling agin. Goin sumwheres. A little of what a lot adds up to.

The best laid plans of mice and men. That's the subtext of everything I try to make. The plan is shit save for the tiniest kernel that was or was not recognized as the impetus behind all the absurdity that might yield something.

Premise: Today everything I've got here is pathetic and misguided and worthless and I can't believe allthe goddamnn time i've sunk inot this lay me down now and sleepe forever/.

Premise: Today it's got something and I feel fine.

Outcome: Unknown event entry.

2009-11-21T18:25:00.000-08:00

bedwetters. Chop chop chop. You gys are great, Haha! Fucking but who brought candles? and all the little noises too

Test if it's good Mmmmmm. mmm.

go back to spin class asshole; dares

Part of you gives ineveery time. Wow, isnt that going somewhere?(car sounds, sort of)

Old Men Drinking

2009-11-16T22:38:00.000-08:00

I've known Rob since I was finishing undergrad at EUP and he was starting graduate studies. I've realized recently that he's like a more adventurous version of my dad.

He makes abstract oil paintings. Together we're old men at the trendy bars getting idiot drunk sometimes and venting about painting all the time. No one likes us. Not even us I suspect, but not always. A girl talked to us last time. I got tipsy and riled up and ended up ranting too loud with a stiff finger toward her face about the absurdity of talent. Sorry about that.

Rob does better than I do. His work is a little more accessible for an audience I think and sometimes he laments how that must be a bad thing. He landed a deal with a company thats building a hotel here in Pittsburgh. They commissioned twenty paintings, each four feet square. It's fun to hear about some of the requests. Less pink, for instance. What the fuck are you on about? Luckily he has a go-between. She's an artist that isn't making work but rather brokering deals like the one with Rob. Good for her I say. We need her.

The demand and volume has changed Rob's process. And thus, his images and surface too. I went to his studio to look at them. Chunkier and clunkier than in the past. It's a transition I'd wanted to see him make. He says his work deals with forces in the universe not commonly pondered but that super nerd physicists study and quarrel over. Mountains too and the unseen strata and the physical presence and girth of landmass.

We get along pretty great. We can talk about this dog's life we've gone for until the cows come home. I suppose it's fair to say that we're old fashioned. But some of that is good. It cultivates sincerity instead of shallow incoherent theory. I think I say some things that help him, and I steal his color ideas and his discipline for layering a lot, too.

He also has a solo show down in Alabama coming up. So his plate is pretty full.

Lovers in California

2009-11-16T21:56:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from California. I like to fly. It's very introspective for me. Flying is a very childish and pathetic act of rebellion. That makes it touching.

I was in Santa Barbara for the wedding of two beloved friends. Stepping out of the plane onto the tarmac of Santa Barbara's tiny airport I could immediately feel how different the air was. The groom-to-be retrieved me and we went to lunch. Then he dropped me downtown to pick up some things while he ran his own errands. "Be careful" he warned me as he pulled to the curb to drop me in the shopping area "they're all under 18." But no one out there gave me a second look. It's yuppie sprawl. Two minutes out of the car I saw a man stacking up tupperware containers. They each held a snake. Yes, that's about right for the experience I had in the shopping excursion. Pretty carefree and somewhat mindless brats prancing around.

The wedding and it's surrounding activities took place in a campground nestled in a canyon right by the ocean. It's striking, but what it may lack in our eastern coast haze it makes up for in the scent of money.

The first night I was dumbstruck by the sky. It was littered with stars, constellations I'd only ever really heard of were suddenly there.

I didn't sleep much. Up at 5 on the first morning I went for a walk with a book. No one else was out. Desperate for water I walked a little dazed into one of the restroom buildings and saw an informational on the wall about mountain lion encounters. Turning the corner I jumped as a man with furry man boobs was brushing his teeth over the sink. I turned and left without looking back.
Everything was so dry. On the flight in I studied a huge brown fan shape cascaded down a mountain side. That's where a fire blazed recently, I was told. I went up a slope off of the trail through two trees. Up in the dry grass I came across some bones. Fairly sizable ones. It was a little alarming. I sat up further on the hill as the sun rose over the adjacent peak and read. Then I realized I had made myself a pretty easy target for the lions. Then I went to breakfast.

There were friends there whom I love, but most of the trip was much like my life here in Pittsburgh. Feeling pretty alienated and separate. It let up here and there. It's all my fault.

Wildlife I saw: A small snake, two lizards, llamas, an adorable donkey, goats, hawks, herons, gulls, and dolphins.

The ceremony was a simple and sincere Jewish one. It took place on a flat grassy plateau that looked back through the canyon to the ocean at dusk. I was taken aback by how beautiful and touching it was. I feel humbled and grateful. Like how you feel in love.

I made damn sure to book window seats for all four flights. The views were spellbinding. Coming home from San Francisco at dusk over the expanse of the midwest felt like I'd never been to this planet. After nightfall little clusters of electric lights looked a little like this:

But much better.

Do you take thee, in dullness and violence?

2009-11-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

The connection between Cormac McCarthy and Joel and Ethan Coen is already recognized. The brothers are obviously fans of McCarthy's writing. They try to make very similar work in mood; dark, absurd, malevolent. And, of course, they've adapted his work into film. I just finished Outer Dark, a novel published in 1968. All these artists seems to be asking: what kind of God could there be, how can we not be anything short of abandoned?

I think the key difference is that the Coen brothers take full advantage of abusing their characters relentlessly. They are coldly brow-beaten with a smirk and a condescending shake of the head. McCarthy's isn't exactly always a compassionate or empathetic vantage point either, but his is a presentation still more stark and aching with the pathetic human stain precisely because it is bereft of any clear bias. All judgement has been brushed aside in order to examine the plight of humans. And his prose constructs a painfully gorgeous landscape in which his characters struggle and flounder.

It howled execretion upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor.

The imagery falls over itself, turning and folding again and again.

I like the Coen brothers' work. It's just a different medium and they squeeze the storytelling in finding their voice. Maybe the characters are simply dumb animals or violent animals too much of the time. Maybe I am just dismayed to hear about us described as such.

Crumble and Spit

2009-10-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure if Maurice Sendak were still with us. He co-produced Spike Jonzes' film adaptation of his book Where the Wild Things Are.

I only realized how I felt about it about three quarters through. I felt very ill at ease and puzzled and at odds with the timing. Just like childhood in other words. Kind of sick in my stomach but mesmerized and frustrated. That's how it was perfect. No gimmicky crap or wooden child actor lines. Just vessels trying to keep their contents from making them fucking nauseated. So utterly whittled down. No hokey magic or filler.

Some Jungian sort of play. That difficult force of creation more demanding in some than others running amuck, essential but so needy and difficult and high and low. So loyal, holding you to the highest degree of expectation and esteem. That thing that forces you to do it better, do it again, obsess and seek. That thing that blessedly wrings out all the hollowness and is simultaneously a curse to control.

I had been waiting for it. I thought I would be able to escape into it. Sweet and easy to deal with. Not really. I'm thankful for that. Maybe I'm just really vulnerable right now. And this and that and hopandskip an d throw up a little and doncha wanna feel it in yer bones? Someone's always falling out of the goddamn boat.

It's stealing season. Bring me fruits on a tray, on celluloid, on rotting pages or howling gibberish across Liberty Avenue. Just STOMP OFF THE FUCKING ICE IF YOU'RE COMING IN.

Found in the Road, Days later Dead

2009-10-10T14:21:00.001-07:00

I've been reading and re-reading a book of letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1907 he went to Paris for a time (among other places) and wrote letters to his wife nearly every day.

These were compiled specifically for this publication because he talks at length about Cezanne. He also writes of Van Gogh and Rodin, but the insight surges strongest from his shared thoughts on the former. Apparently, the painter was a significant influence for Rilke's work. And Cezanne was a serious, devoted and strange man. Strange to most, I suppose. A stern and ridiculed personage. Children actually harassed him. They actually threw rocks at him. This is noteworthy to anyone nostalgic for a supposedly bygone era where great art was recognized and respected. There is always a generation of children ready to hurl stones.

Rilke went to a local pavillion day after day and spent a great deal of time with the Cezannes on display. This was nearly a year to the day after the old man died. The understanding of painting he displays in his writings to his wife is profound. Does anyone not involved with the brush and filth look at work like this? It was inspiring to know that an audience of such sincerity and brilliance could be there. So that it's not all stage tricks and vacillating between bloodthirsty devotion and flabby doubt.

The manner in which he corresponds with his wife makes me desire to hear them have a conversation. He writes of Cezzane attaining the sensitivity and discipline of a saint. Having done so one could possibly approach everything with love. Rilke exposes himself as one whom loves without celebrating himself for it. Birthing the ability to love and then cheaply touting it robs it of meaning.

And then there's Cezanne. He is compared to a dog more than once. Haggard, faithful. He was found unconscious in the road after getting caught in a rainstorm while he worked. He was dead some days later. He himself reportedly neglected to show up to his mother's funeral because he was "with the motiff." But that's just sensationalism, really. What he did, the manner in which he conducted his life around his work is in the work itself.

It's exciting to read about the relationship between two poets. I don't know if Cezanne were aware of Rilke or his work, but I've come back to Cezanne through an initial connection to Rilke. From there I look again at Matisse and Picasso, George Condo and Laura Owens. The rippling out of thought and creative acts. Pleas for sense linking one generation to the next. There is a disturbing level of numbness to the past among my peers.

She was my Rushmore

2009-10-01T11:11:00.001-07:00

I know what had to be, but some days I miss someone to the point of sickness.

We Out N'at.

2009-09-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

Story time:

The Brew House has a sordid history. It started as a squatter's paradise. For some it remained just that thirty years down the road. The squatters were threatened with being thrown out long ago, but (Adam and Eve, pay attention to this part) they dawned some innovation and responsibility and won the rights to the building and the right to stay there.
The Hienz Foundation endowed the BH Association with funding for public programming like the Black Sheep Puppet Festival for a good while. Strife erupted, of course, among personalities and egos, but a sense of common purpose was thinly maintained. Good and not so good people came and went, music and events, art and endurance.

Brew House membership entailed volunteer hours (10 to 12 a month) so as to endure the troubled waters, maintain the building, keep the mission of public service vital, and stave off the highly financed, hungry and envious eyes of developers who sought to reign down upon these generations of degenerates and squatters with expulsion. Compromise was later mulled over with any development group that could work with the BH to see commercial space co-exist with the living and working spaces of dozens of artists.

Year 2000: The building is being brought up to code (albeit slowly). Members come and go. Sometimes grudgingly. Sometimes involuntarily. There are detractors and there are contributors. Just as in any group effort. By now the Southside of Pittsburgh has run it's cycle of decades of neglect by the city. It's been bottled, neglected and aged well enough so that yuppies start to see the DIY efforts of many innovators as quaint and hip. Developers buy up cheap lots. How is the U.S. different than 16th century England again? Please, do remind me. No property, fuck off.

At any rate, September 2009 rolls up and presents the the BH with a letter of eviction from the head of the head of the head of Pittsburgh housing. "It don't go no higher" as some downtrodden BH members put it. Two weeks and you're out. We opted to scramble to complete the list of small code violations whilst the contractors whom the BH Association had already hired to finish the wiring and sprinklers were doing just that.

And to no apparent avail. After the final inspection by a small army of officials we were patted on the head for effort and told to get out. So, one more move for my studio in Pittsburgh. I picked up a moving truck at 7 am, finished moving my necessary belongings to the new space by 4 pm, drank, and was set up and ready to work in two days time.

So... what's noteworthy here? A lot of uncomfortable coincidences surround this event, not the least of which is the fact that it corresponded perfectly with the G20 Summit. Yuck. But, I honestly doubt that it had much to do with that. In the thick of things there were wildly mixed messages from people in the know: From "It is absolutely hopeless. Move out now." To "You'll be fine. We're in great shape and there is strong hope!" But I've seen a number of BH longtime members move out very recently. Others would be conveniently gone for professional reasons.

After final analysis we suddenly have hope again. The head of the head of the head himself is supposed to be in the building today. Well, how convenient. This smells like a slash and burn operation now. A ruse. But there is no more 'we' anymore. I'm done. I care infinitely more about making good work than serving the community through most any association. Besides, once you pry up the floorboards you find that that wonderland has the same bedraggled crew turning the wheels as most other organizations. Big promises.

Pulling up anchors in Pittsburgh is a big priority. Sure, your problems follow you, but they tend to fester and take root more firmly in certain places.

So, I'm realigning. I'm renewing the open invitation for risk and chance.

Benji in my Olive Bread

2009-09-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

The thing about the history of invention is that everyone involved themselves with material things in front of them. It's the experience of physically interacting with some thing while abstractly considering your relationship to it. I have to have something there affecting me somehow. Then I change it. Then I change it again.

What's confounding is that human relationships are universally predicated on that same phenomenon. You have to deal with someone else's physical presence while calculating abstractly any exchange that goes on. It's like an AC DC flow. Few people end up telling the truth because you seldom exact significant change.

But honesty is paramount to good art. You can't hide anything if it's going to turn out. Otherwise it's flabby and inchoate. Your relationship with what you're making or doing can't afford to suffer from lazy dishonesty.

Setting up to see this act through counts for a lot. A crucible is always needed. I've had to relocate mine six times in the four years I've been living in Pittsburgh. Now it will be a seventh time this weekend.

Best of Show: Hines Ward

2009-09-04T01:07:00.000-07:00

The season's turning always affects my blood. Everything is just different, it just flows differently overnight. Part of that is arguably allergies. But Autumn is injected into me like nothing else.

The Open House at my studio building came and went. It was fine, nicely received and attended. Hot House came and went, too. My piece, "Paternity Suit", was badly lit and equally badly displayed. Oh, well. Space was limited, blah blah blah. I loved that it was displayed next to a BBQ grill from Giant Eagle that was also being auctioned off. The grill sat up on its own pedestal looking like some old Jeff Koons sculpture. Not far away was a football autographed by Hines Ward. Who can compete with this shit?

People dressed up for Hot House. It was a lot of fun to see. Jodpuhrs and booty shorts on boys. Great drag, great DJ's, scant but free booze. Forget food. I was still waiting in line to get on the elevator when the free food vanished upstairs. The main hall looked a little too much like upscale senior prom, but with a great DJ booth. Next year: Bare-knuckle boxing in a section of the main hall drawn off in chalk on the floor boards.

But all that hoopla is over. For now. Painting returns as is seasonally its nature to do so. Under the auspices of Autumn all the imagery I've stored up is reinvigorated. Struggling awkwardly and nearly fruitlessly over the summer months always builds to this.

I'm turning 30 on Wednesday. Ninth day of the ninth month of the year 2009. I've decided not to let my birthday slip by this year. Not like it has in the past few years. I want loved ones around. I want to be a little self-serving. I don't feel at all like I'm saying goodbye to a golden decade. Fuck all of that. I'm better than I have ever been.

Paternity Suit

2009-08-27T09:10:00.000-07:00

Pittsburgh's HotHouse is this Saturday the 29th. A few weeks ago I was asked to submit a piece for the art auction portion. It's a somewhat strange event. A "tableau of civic engagement." I can buy that. It's a kind of fundraiser for community projects. Especially The Sprout Fund.

But that's not really what I want to talk about. The theme for the pieces in the art auction was centered around inspiration from the work of Joseph Cornell. I know the basics about Cornell. Definitely one of the more confounding 20th century artists to gain prominence. A very intensely private sort of work; smallish constructions containing objects and (often) astrology images oriented just so.

I happened upon a book about Cornell while killing time before having to work my day job. While I perused it and read some passages I realized that I had missed a mandatory meeting for my department scheduled for exactly right then. Well, I hate being late for anything. Let alone mandatory meets. The embarrassment (and slight disappointment in myself) sent me inward enough to set about building something I really am rather proud of for this auction. I think going inward is the right step for identifying with Cornell's ideas.

Initially I never imagined myself getting so involved. At least not emotionally. I have to start simple. Cornell's little containers seemed simple enough. Here's an old rather deep panel with linen stretched over it and primed which I built six or seven years ago. I actually painted out the image. So I turned it around and started there, a little cove. Each added thing had to be necessary on various levels.

It soon became apparent to me that this piece was begging to be about private machinations surrounding the process of painting. It's sculptural, but, without using any new paint, I knew it had to be a corporeal kind of structure that was a painting. It also became apparent that I had to limit my materials to things I've had in my studio for however long and never really used. Bits and pieces infused with my process and private world. Oriented just so.

I became consumed by it. I had made semi-sculptural assemblages previous to this, but years later I've come to realize how important it is to utilize my mark making. It's been very important in the last four years. I shied away from it in student days because it didn't feel serious. Now it's broadened in very meaningful way. It's a funny and sad thing. Marks are pregnant with the human condition, with pathos and desperation. I've incorporated text in this case as well. It's just more mark making organized to communicate differently.

But from the beginning keeping it simple was the main objective. No goddamn clutter. No smoke and mirrors. It swelled and shrank and writhed in a bizarre gestation in front of me. And I think I love it.

It's titled "Paternity Suit" which is kind of a pun. The piece looks a little like a suit that someone has stepped out of from behind to go use the toilet or eat some granola. It's disjointed with a little elegance and not a little gross. I don't know how else to describe myself. It's also very sincere. Maybe I'll see some drastic shortcomings down the road, but it's opened up avenues for me. Every piece should have that return.

Pride, Power and Punch Lines

2009-08-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

J'Lea and I went to the Richard Avedon show at the ICP. Getting there from the MOMA was not the hop, skip, and jump it normally would be, though.
We swam through a crowd attending the Dominican Pride Parade surging down the Avenue of the Americas. It was pretty intense. Dudes in the street flexing shirtless for very enthusiastic girls in the crowd. Dancers on makeshift floats. Pumping music, much cheering.
It went right by the door of the ICP. I actually loved looking at the show inside with the cheering crowd and obscenely loud beats. The upbeat fashion photos received new life.

It was a creepy coincidence that a dozen or so of a specific series of Avedon's photos were there while Ensor showed at the MOMA nearby. J'Lea tells me that in Avedon's series in which a model poses with a skeleton the boney fellow has been speculated to be a stand-in for Avedon himself. This is when he was well aware of being ill and probably had mortality on his mind. Ensor depicts a lot of skeletons, too. Both he and Avedon have a penchant for images that are powerful despite (or maybe because of) their overt absurdity. Ensor particularly reads like a timeless joke with the resonance of a Proverb. It seems like the skeletons (especially in pieces like "Two Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring" or "Skeleton Drawing Fine Pranks") act as a slightly self-deprecating stand-in for him as well. Morbid and ridiculous. What an efficient way to sum up living.

Personal Land-Speed Record

2009-08-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

This weekend trotted out of the gate with (I believe) Pittsburgh's first Visionary Arts Festival. It was loosely described to me some weeks ago as a blanket term for a gaggle of artists whose work could fit into a sense of mysticism. Ok, ok, but then... what?

Pittsburgh is the kind of town where an arts fest is still a reason to set up tents in a scenic area and make visual jumbleaya. It makes for little cultural impact, but it's relaxed. Very. It's a way to get people together and have something for tourist mags to write about. And some decent artists get attention, too.

And this is certainly no claim that no good work makes its way into the mix. It just has more of a County Fair feeling to it than an Art Basil one.
Maybe it's for this reason that the quantity of nude suggestive images of women felt right. Only, instead of tossing darts at targets or pennies into glasses to win posters of Pamela Anderson's tits you are meant to experience the works as art in a tent.
Mike Buddhai has been known to get lusty at times. Some newer images feature his cute-enough-to-puke animals and vampires screen printed over the nether regions of TNA magazine starlets.

Someone else was also experimenting with incorporating gratuitous images of loose women into multi-media pieces. Quite at home next to such lasciviousness was, of course, Cornell-esque little pieces cut into old texts about the seven deadly sins. Although, I don't think "Anger" was among the list of sins as the title to one of pieces would have us believe.

Then there was some electronic stuff. Some kids scribbling on giant paper. Some pretty digital prints. Some horrendous painting.

The standouts for me were Carly and Vanessa German. Carly's work I'd seen very little of. We're acquaintances, but the occasional fist pound revealed little to me as to how profound her private little world of image making has become. That's exactly what it is, too; a very private little world. That's only part of the reason it absolutely smacks of Alice Neel. In a very good way. The paintings there were all self-portraits and obviously done from life. Just very spare and honest and genuine. Not the most accomplished technically, but really the most straightforward impressive thing I've seen done in paint from someone in Pittsburgh in a long while. The nudity in her watercolors is so erotic, too. She paints herself from behind on all fours with both orifices deftly and clearly represented. Nearby are the water pots used to keep the brushes fresh. Nothing else is there. They're stark and so natural and off-putting simultaneously.
Thrown in among the paintings were boxes of ancient rotting fruit paired against her own body represented in paint. The connection doesn't seem emphasized, and Carly dresses like Keith Haring; very colorful, like someone you pay to entertain children, but rotting bananas next to nudes vibes in a specific way for better or for worse. She's so odd but sincere in her searching. That's rare for Pittsburgh. That honesty and private restlessness.

Vanessa German makes rather intense African-influenced pieces. Many are painted dolls with things like shells and bullets and bones incorporated. Sounds like a disaster, but it works. They're really engaging.

From the Visionary Arts Fest in Pittsburgh I went to New York for the remainder of the weekend. From trot to land-speed record. It's astounding. The Moldy Peaches sing that New York City is a graveyard. I love them, but I disagree.
Rob got the idea of going in order to see the Francis Bacon special exhibition at the Metropolitan. That was our first stop. I've long been at task to see what was so worthwhile about Bacon. I'd had very limited access to any of his work in person. The 65 paintings at the Met didn't produce any immediate response. Some were impactful, had an unfolding beyond flashy grotesquery and surface treatment.

I like that he squeezed the work down to the point of hit or miss. He trashed a lot of work we'll never see. I like his thoughts on the nature of removing the intellectual barriers between paint and viewer, but he's not a strong painter. He can compose really, really well. I think of David Hockney drinking too much and forgetting how to paint.

Some of it produced that "raw emotion grafted onto the nervous system" he talks about. I felt nauseous in front of one. When he paints his companion George Dryer it feels so much less sensational, grounded by the reality of human tragedy instead of some abstracted diatribe about how crappy life is.

Seeing that rhino skin-like surface on several of the paintings was really something, too. Bacon is easy to sensationalize. He's accessible, he was an alcoholic, and his filthy studio will always be emphasized. The Met put out displays of some of his actual magazine clippings, drawings, and photos spattered in filth. Nice touch.

James Ensor at the MOMA, though; that is something. I'd only been lightly familiar with his work. The Carnegie here in Pittsburgh has a great piece out on display. Seeing dozens more made him one of the most meaningful artists for me. It was one of the best exhibitions I've ever seen. Succinct to the point of being truncated. That's because his variety, dedication, and craftsmanship is rock solid across the board. I imagine a show twice the size would still fail to do justice to his output.

Whereas Bacon's handling of paint gets its power strictly from its earnestness, Ensor seduces you with one brushstroke, a few pencil lines. His genuine relationship to his materials alone would have carried him far.

But he LIVED his work. That made the difference. It's so truly strange and unapologetic. Some of it could be brilliant work coming out of a studio yesterday, and he worked 100 years ago. That's part of how he's like Goya; ahead of his time. Their drawings are similar, but Ensor's tragic human parody has more humor. Good Christ, the paint! He was a virtuouso, a wag, and a painter with more sincerity than most of my generation can muster.

Some pieces looked like Turner without all the austerity. I prefer it that way. Some looked like Vermeer with softened intensity.

While at the Met I made sure to visit some of my other favorites. The Howard Hodgkin and the late Philip Gustons. Ensor still won out over them for now.

Obstacle Corpse

2009-08-04T08:18:00.001-07:00

This is the new location for some of my thoughts and writings. Below are the older posts I published on my website which, I suspect, were never read much.

Here's to hoping that this new format will shed more light on my process and drive.

Brett

The Past is still the Past

2009-08-04T07:59:00.000-07:00

12/16/2008
The past seven months have forced me to process a lot of major changes in my life. For a short time I was able to afford my own apartment in which I was also able to keep a studio space. However, the work always felt a little stunted, and ultimately I had to relinquish this space due to financial duress.

Shifts such as these often come into my life seemingly of their own will, and they are almost always for the better. Conscious choices don't seem to be my strong suit. But, hell, I've always wrestled with the issue of a deterministic universe anyway.

I've relocated my studio into a beautiful space in the |http://www.brew-house.org|Brew House| on the south side of Pittsburgh. I was also here last winter and spring. At that time it proved to be the most significant factor in making a leap to the next level in terms of my output and craftsmanship. I'm hoping to move above and beyond this new personal standard once again.

My new living situation also finds me in a better place. I was simply wrong about thinking I wanted to live alone, and having loved ones nearby is a welcome change.

Currently I am laying the foundation for a body of work, part of which will be on display in |http://www.modernformations.com|Modern Formations Gallery| this spring along with fellow Pittsburgh artists |http://www.dinosaurversusrobot.com|Jamie Adams| and |http://www.katkowski.com|Rob Katkowski|.

1/1/2009
I've had good news. |www.newamericanpaintings.com|New American Paintings| has decided to include me in issue #81 due for publication in April. Some of my friends roll their eyes when I tell them, but not from simple snobbery. They just know I've talked a lot of shit on many of those included in the past. Was it jealousy? A bit of snobbery on my part? Probably at least a little of both, but recognition feels good.
New Year's Eve was timed perfectly this time around. Rewarding myself with alcohol and antics is not unusual. Everyone else partying just made the atmosphere that much more celebratory. Is it so wrong to occasionally pretend it's for me and my small success? Why waste time considering such things when there is bourbon to drink?
But this year tequilla was my dark angel. A flask full got me through a brief gallery crawl with Rob and Jen. Two dogfishheads later I realized it was 11:45 and I got it in my head that I needed to be at Remedy a mile away by midnight.
I had one fall while sober already, and now I'm running down the hill from Penn Ave to Butler in cowboy boots on ice. Drunk. Losing my front teeth on a fire hydrant might make me more successful later when I have to use creative methods to make rent, but I'd rather put that off for as long as possible.
How I didn't fall I don't know. The sheer volume of boot on pavement is astounding. It must have sounded like a cross dresser in plus size heals was late for something. Easter has the rabbit, Xmas has Santa. New Year's should have the fashionably late man-gina in a miniskirt.
It was a great time, and a much needed one at that. I don't know the last time I was up until four in the morning OR able to function so well after being thoroughly saturated with tequila and beer. I bit it big time in a brick alley on the way home. If Drunken Master taught me anything it's that taking a fall or a punch when you're shitfaced is easy. Even funny. Unfortunately my coccyx smashed my phone. But that's still a lot better than wearing a cement diaper for six months.
My strange silence about my work seems to be ending abruptly. I talked briefly with a friend about it. The studio feels like home again, a perfect combination of visceral intellectual pursuit and sex. Painting never abuses me, never leaves me, never fails me. The opposite is nearly always true.

1/5/2009
I become a bitch when I don't so something visually stimulating for any period of time. My business sense is deplorably underdeveloped. This makes gathering the required information for New American Paintings somewhat frustrating and laborious. It's not unknown to see me squander opportunities or just plain fuck up.
An embarrassing admission: I have been somewhat religiously reading my horoscope in Pittsburgh's City Paper for some months now. All of that nonsense, it never interested me in the least in the past, but now it can feel like encouraging advice. When it comes to such a tempestuous ego I feed on whatever source can offer me sustenance no matter how seemingly juvenile or shallow.
The studio has been vacant for days. I've had to divide my time between house/dog sitting for a friend and my day job. I wash dishes. My hands remind me of my accelerating carpal tunnel syndrome on a daily basis now. I see that photo of Renoir in a wheelchair with crumpled, claw-like hands. I tell myself it won't be all bad so long as I'm making work. The future holds fortunes close to its chest and advertises all the hardship we'll someday endure.
Reviewing my resume has left me feeling somewhat inadequate. No solo shows. What the hell is "professional experience" anyway? I pace around a cluttered and toxic space staring maliciously at a piece of cloth with pigment smeared on it for hours on end, day after day, bristling and grimmacing at my own doubt, discovering small moments of revelation. Viola: Professional Experience.
There is constant vacillation between a staunch belief in what I'm doing and a crushing self-loathing that I've somehow missed the boat. The former occurs when I'm painting, the latter when I'm washing dishes. The indications seem pretty obvious, but it never seems to get any easier to understand.

1/13/09
I haven't been ill in years. Literally years. I've had strange 24 hour bouts and perhaps food poisoning. Now, I'm a little under the weather. A dense piece of phlegm just nonchalantly fell out of my open mouth at the bus stop this morning. It looked as though I had just shed a horrid yellow tooth. I think the man standing next to me gagged.
Hot totties and soup. "Old medicine" is what my old man calls it. I think my mother thinks of it as northern aggression. Southern girls just can't let it go.

I watched the episode of Art 21 featuring Barry McGee and another street artist. I don't know what to make of the ephemeral aspect of so much contemporary work. I think he was arguing that exposing every day people to visually sophisticated work on the street makes the work live in their daily lives and in their memories. Some of that seems viable, but adding to the visual muddle of an urban epicenter or urban decay seems like an act of bitter retreat. It seems like a message posted on a bumper for lack of conviction.
Some of it has something. Some of it seems like an organ thriving in the visual structure of the city and in the pulse of it's people. But very little I've seen. I concede also that I live in a city without much in the way of flourishing street art.

1/15/09
Still sick. Already bedridden for two days. Now a third.

1/18/09
Andrew Wyeth passed away yesterday morning. I don't think yesterday could have been more depressing.
Mr. Wyeth was and continues to be one of the reasons I feel as passionately as I do about making paintings. For those of you familiar with his work I admit it seems a strange and distant connection. If anything I hope to emulate the tone of his pieces in my own way.
At any rate, it's an occasion for pause. He is someone I've long admired. The world feels more empty.
This past year I've lost three instructors; two I knew and talked with, and, in regard to Mr. Wyeth, one with whom I always felt kith and kin. He pulled that quiet and anxious melancholy from the Pennsylvania and Maine landscape and put it in all of his paintings. His figures as well. I suspect that a lot of young artists don't even know what they've lost
The Helga collection alone is a solid testament to the staggering discipline and focus of a poet. His work reminds me that it is death that pets my hair and lulls me to sleep as much as life and light make me laugh from the gut. That, maddeningly, there is always some nagging and illusive nature to the world.

2/17/09
Paint is moving again. Life still needs to be arranaged around the studio though.
Started looking at George Condo after finding a discounted book on his "Imaginary Portraits" at a store in the strip. I've been aware of his work, but only to a surface-oriented extent. It's exciting. Is it just exciting to see someone painting who makes no apologies about being an extension from the Modernist era? I don't know. Dana Schutz is gets a lot of attention, but George Condo's work (even in the 80's) has more depth and complexity. And it's more efficient. And he's fucking weird. He never paints things the same way even if it's composed the same way. His curiousity about paint is like Picasso's; new and refreshing techniques are employed to keep it vital. What if it's painted this way? What if I draw with the paint? How can I use softness?
David Sylvester's short writings have been inspirational and enlightening lately as well. No one really has much to say about Chaim Soutine, but Sylvester's passages about painters of sensations versus painters of things is enthralling.
Just when I think I'm dead paint comes back. These figures I'm wrestling with, I don't know what to do with them yet. It's coming around though.

3/2/09
The momentum of the work finally feels good. It's been months. Jesus.
I pulled a book off of the shelf and finally started reading it last night. It's a presentation of Sigmund Freud's athiestic worldview coupled with the writings of one of the people he influenced but who later became a devout theist, C.S. Lewis. So far the background information and the hinted conflicts seem to be a major impetus for my work. Oddly, they always have been; the anxiety over whether there is a God. It's the same vacillation bewtween life and death that I love about Robert Frost.
The Modern Formation show is coming up quickly. I wish I had settled into this studio four months ago so the work could percolate more. But these are things that cannot be changed.

3/26/09
Issue 81 of New American Paintings hits the stands in places such as Barnes and Noble and Borders in a few days. Maybe a week. It's exciting, but I had hoped to be more prepared.
I've been absorbed in a new body of work. Probably the best and most personal I've made. It feels somehow so risky and so sure-footed at the same time. I'm happy with the work included in the issue of NAP, but it, like so much work, now feels preparatory. I hope that never goes away.

4/1/09
I was in New York for the weekend. It's incredible how serious that city is.
Hit the Chelsea galleries when I first arrived. Good Michael Readecker paintings. Weak Dana Schutz. A lot of forgettable clutter. Gagaosian's Picasso show is great. There is a corner of some pretty erotic images, one of which makes accessible the two orifices of the female body to the viewer. An older lady and I stared at it for a time. She had a hand to her chin in that all-to-often purchased-sophistication gesture that says "I am getting so much of what the artist intended out of this." I wanted to walk up to it and tickle the anus while looking her in the eye.
The Bonnard late intereriors at the Met were great too, but I loved the two I saw upstairs a lot more. Incredible little 1895 piece of two women feeding two children at a table in dim room.

4/7/09
Getting to work back in the studio was incredibly difficult. There was just so much to digest from visiting New York. It was a scalding reminder of how too much of my technique is still flimsy. But, I have launched headlong into the largest canvas I've attempted to date with surprising results. Sometimes pieces take a year to finish. Sometimes it's as though they paint themselves. I feel that the newest work displays the most of myself without hindrance of surface gallantry. Normally I would never even consider letting such a large piece start so close to a show (Modern Formations Gallery in May), but it had to happen. I've been floundering far too long this past year.

4/8/09
Three policemen were murdered here in Pittsburgh a few days ago. A funeral for one of them took place at the church just up the street. It was heartbreaking. Particularly when the slain officer's young niece and nephew spoke inside the church. It was broadcast on speakers outside in the street. People's faces fell. It was as though we were all ashamed of ourselves.

4/18/09
Nuance, then brash recklessness, then nuance tries to talk sense into it, some form of lashing out (to varying degrees), nuance lulls it to sleep/saws off its arrogant head.

Where's that fucking magazine?

4/27/09
Mine, Jamie and Rob's show is opening this Friday. It's exciting. I honestly feel like this is the most sincere work I've ever made. It's very close to the chest, but it's still not close enough.
At my lowest lows of late I've felt horribly alone. But when I'm alright I feel unrestrained instead, I feel a new capacity to recognize and better understand my identity. And not so much drinking.

5/3/09
Jen at Modern Formations Gallery is amazing. If you're looking for a streetwise and smart space that has been a staple of Pittsburgh's art and music culture, look no further.
Our opening reception went well. I thought it would be more crowded, but I am thankful that it wasn't. People actually seemed to be looking at the work. Four cases of beer vanished in two hours. I saw a douche bag with two pairs of pants on stuffing several bottles into various pockets before walking out the door. I've never seen Jamie so overworked since I've known him. He absolutely never stops.
I watched 9 1/2 weeks last night for the first time. Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. It had more than a few gestures of the celebratory luxuriousness of 80's economic boom. Wow, did that tape flip itself at the push of a button?! That was amazing! Kim Basinger's character works for an art gallery. She breaks down in a secluded corner one night while the gallery is hosting an opening reception for an older artist whom is very out of touch with the throngs of fashionistas, punk rockers, and art star hangers-on slithering through the place. She has a lot of these slightly strange and unexplained emotional moments, but I assume it meant that her heart ached for the poor old man who lived alone, loved to paint and fish, and whose mind was clearly exiting stage left in advanced age.
Before I even saw a copy of the New American Paintings #81 in which I was included I received a phone call from a man in Puerto Rico who has graciously expressed interest in my work. One never knows from whence fortune and gratitude will come forth.

5/6/2009
No more drinking for now. Maybe some wine now and then. I'm just useless when I drink. I haven't had one since the opening last Friday, but I had enough then to see a group of people several days dizzy.

5/7/2009
Advice to fellow struggling (to be read "totally obscure") artists: When all the running about is done, all the labels look professional but not pretentious, all the box wine is bought and transferred into recycled empty bottles of better quality wine (mmm... card-Bordeaux ), when all your friends have been e-blasted and all the local power-tripping critics have been bribed, when all the coffee shops and liberal arts campuses have been canvased with show cards, all the overnight framing has been torn through, and the opening has gone off without notable incident and you find yourself in the throes of postpartum depression try, as difficult as it might be, to monitor and control the frequency of your masturbatory activities.

5/8/2009
I need my generation to believe in something. Where did all the cowardice come from?

5/27/2009
The Modern Formations show is almost over. I have to wonder how many people actually saw it. It was sparse this year. It's usually about this time of a show's run when I begin to ask myself "Why did I bother doing this?" It's expensive, stressful and time consuming to set up for exhibitions. Then scarcely anyone really sees the goddamn thing.
Jamie sold two pieces the night of the opening. It's about time more attention was paid to his work. It's drawn from the still images of (usually) kitschy sci-fi films cranked out all those years ago. Male guilt and shame, homo-eroticism. It's great stuff. His delivery of the concepts can easily trek from one foothold to another through different mediums. That's because his ideas are so rich. He printed some of these astonaut images very sparingly on shiny metal aluminum for a solo show at Gallery Chiz. They're some of my favorite because they look like plaques honoring some vague deed, the virtue of which seems lost or skewed by the equally lost and skewed figures featured.

6/2/2009
Always look for things to steal. You're nothing without your predecessors and little without your peers.

6/29/2009
Here we are again. Everything feels useless. Futile. I am the walking talking dead. Or, rather, the singing, dancing in utero facsimile of me. A facile cocoon. Needs, needs, needs. Rob and I decided that we're fucked until we're 50. It doesn't need to be looked at that way necessarily. AMC told me tonight that "you can't fight an enemy that doesn't care if he lives or dies." I don't care if I die, but I had better be living. I think no one hangs around very long because my M.O. offers no clear and distinct prize.
"If the road you were on led you to this point, then what good was the road?" That's McCarthy. Sort of. I keep reading my horoscope. It's... encouraging I suppose. The absolute absurdity of what I've dedicated so much time and energy to is an echo of that absurdity.
It has to remain exciting. Honesty is exciting. Excruciating so much of the time, too. Paint is a powerful lie or a brittle plea. Which one? Both?
I'm having a very difficult time dealing with the idea of sacks of meat and bone walking around with ideas and sense. Rights and wrongs and arguments and such. Logic in the gaping maw of the unknowable. That is what is truly insane. Keeping it together for an entire life knowing that it will end. Insane people are boring.

7/2/2009
Tender nuance and brutality of fact: Flow and ache: Light as a physical presence, a physician.
Every time I need to get going... well, not every time, but many times I look at some Picasso. It's astounding. Just the inventiveness. I read an interview with a painter recently who said that she likes when things are "weird." I agree. I noted years ago that I can only tell when I'm getting somewhere when some form or element comes from my body without a discernable logic that catalyzed it. Some people would say that the "spirit moves you", but I don't know anything for sure about that.
I have been reading a little of Rilke's poetry though. He talks a lot about a very benevolent presence stirring in the dark beside him. It seems about right.

7/6/2009
Friends coming to town means that you go to the places to which you've intended for too long. The Mattress Factory is a curious place. It's like the young want-to-be hip sibling of the Warhol Museum.
A fine sculptor named Thaddeus Mosley has an exhibition/retrospective of his wood-carved pieces on the 4th floor. It's arranged rather badly. It's very crowded in every room. Some pieces are mere inches from one another. Without having read anything much about the display I assume the only motivational aesthetic at work is trying to make a dialogue (or force it) between the pieces. Or maybe the studio working space is meant to be reinforced? That comes through in the scent; a sweet-pungent fragrance of an obviously barn-like structure. I grew up around a lot of stables and large animal stalls, I know that smell. It was endearing and intoxicating. It was obviously embued in the grain of each abstracted tendril and whittled down trunk, so credit goes more to the artist than the curator. It seemed to bring the work to a much more human level. Being crowded together only seems to have detracted from the nuance and subtle line at work.
The James Turrell permanent pieces are quite moving. They have a combined stoicism and playfulness that results in the kind of power and respectability that so many artists today seem wont to cowardly eschew. They are very minimal, obviously, but also, almost unexpectedly, they make me aware of my physical body, and leaving it, and returned to it again as though I were jettisoned and then re-entered through the pores. My eyes' physical flaws integrated into the sophisticated light play. There it was, my heart beat bending the light and the lines created in front of and behind my eyes. My endocrine system suddenly a distinct current when I am quiet.
One room suffers greatly from general visitors' chronically bad attention spans. The near pitch-black balcony. It's a shame, too. Once you settle in some real cinema a la Kubrick starts to happen. That's if everyone can shut up. Which they can't. Or won't.

7/17/2009
I've moved into a larger space upstairs at the Brew House. It's great, and won't cost much more, but now, of course, the work is on hold. I feel like I'm ready to spit acid. Fucking flat tires on the bike. Fucking broke. Working fucking 14 days in a row at my day job.
It's all worth it. Things boil over now and again, less frequently and with much less ridiculousness than in years previous. I know how to save what counts for the work. That's about all that anybody really learns outside of technical prowess. It can be so thoroughly absurd and inescapable. And everyone thinks you're fucking stupid or crazy. Some people even think that it's pure fun. It's neither pure nor fun. It just vacillates from ecstasy to agony and back and forth.