Vanity Now! Rapist Clowns!

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

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

Through a lens. Now oblong, now backward.

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,

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

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

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!

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.