2010, University of Chicago Press
In 1989 I traveled to Paris where I saw the exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Magiciens de la Terre. There I ran across Ilya Kabakov’s installation, The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment. I was stunned. I had never been take by surprise in this way by a work of art and it stayed with me to this day. In the following years I made several pieces about the experience including a small painting bought by novelist Terry McMillan and this.
In 2003 my son happened to be at the California College of the Arts studying with Matthew Jesse Jackson while he was working on a book about Kabakov. That book has just been published. I’m reading my son’s copy, which I’ve pilfered. Great stuff: Post-Stalin Russian artists working their way through and away from Modernism. Kabakov’s earnest sincerity in trying to paint The Masterpiece for four years and then (Erik Bulatov quoted in the book) “Kabakov was passionate about trying to paint this painting and then one day he decided it was shit, and just threw it away.” (p. 31) …”Kabakov would not make this mistake again. In the future, his work would dwell long and productively in the regions outside high art.” (p32)
More later.
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It occurs to me that much of the work I’m drawn to draws me away from the practice of painting. In the studio today (where I am once again making my little paintings) I wrote, “shape, fence-painting, color, landscape,” with a sort-of vague hope that this means something. It seems like I’ve come to the conclusion a million times that my own earnest attempt at making “abstract narrative landscapes” is a rehash of abstract expressionism and basically shit.
And then there is this 24hour thing (red carnations) which scares the hell out of me because of what I don’t know (I wasn’t there for the revolution and the technology is precarious). Still I can picture a completely out of control mass of images all going at the same time and I want to make it.
2010/09/05
The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes by Matthew Jesse Jackson
2010/08/10
2010/08/04
Justice, education: Michael Sandel
I found this by googling Michael Sandel after Hubert Dreyfus (Philosophy 185 – see previous blog) mentioned his amazing teaching methods. The Justice course is accessible to the public on line.
2010/07/24
What you do and how you do it
I started listening to Hubert Dreyfus’ lectures in Philosophy 185:Heidegger again. Way over my head but I manage to grasp a few things here and there. I had this thought while listening to The One II: If one is what one does and how one does it (and not a self/inner self etc.) that changes everything. It puts doing ahead of being and it makes waiting stupid. I finished the first draft of the first channel for Redcarnations. I’m going to get rid of most of the narrative sound in the auto play version and keep it just to the ocean/airport ambient sounds. I’m attached to the radio narrative since it was the reason for the whole thing but it gets in the way. It will still be structured around it but that sound will be a separate thing at the bottom of the page that can be turned on or off. Also still playing with the proportions and the content (maybe some re-shooting). In the back of my head the whole thing seems ridiculous. How will 24 videos load up and play at the same time for most people – seems like too much now that providers are putting a limit on data for mobile devices.
2010/07/03
A quote about sentences
“It is the sentences made with objects which have a meaning and not the single object in itself.”
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1959, referring to the practices of bricolage)
See: http://www.tate.org.uk/itunesu/
Symposia > Cy Twombly Symposium, Part 2, (8:30min)
2010/06/27
Rethinking redcarnations
Have been rethinking the Red Carnations project. Decided to clarify the whole thing and make it more simple – throwing a bunch of things out. The only sound will be the 24 hours tape, ocean and airport background sounds. Everything will be structured around the 24 hours. 24 videos, 13 minutes each (that is the length of the tape). Much of the imagery will be abstract. The idea is to present all 24 videos together, playing simultaneously, six by four rows so color and simple imagery is important. Here is the basic structure. The content, of course, is the 1974 revolution in Portugal. The problem is to learn more about it and compile a good bibliography. Here is a great youtube video of it and a quote about the revolutionary condition from Lyubov Popova.
2010/06/22
Stanley Fish on teaching
“But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.” – from: Deep in the Heart of Texas by Stanley Fish
2010/06/17
Notes on Rothko symposium
Probably it is just because I’ve been listening to a symposium on Rothko the last few days but I’m feeling sick of landscape and narrative in painting. I would like to strip it down to materials and marks.
2010/06/16
2010/06/03
Thomas Hirschorn: 2008 Carnegie International
This is a two year old talk by Hirschorn but his discussion of collage is so great.