30 days left, and 5 days until spider man 3

some shots of the giant redwoods at big basin park

Well today we went out for a late lunch, and a long drive to big basin park outside santa cruz. We took a short walk amongt the giant redwoods and then came home to do laundry and whatnot. yesterday i got the oil changed on the truck, and while it was being changed I talked to Krist Mills. Krist was this really great abstract painter/musician i met in college, before i was making art. He was also one of the long time principal members of Redux studios in charleston. But most importantly he just moved out here to work for the djerassi artist residency. I talked to Krist at length and it turns out he is looking for a reliable and cheap car, and since he is familiar with our saturn he will probably buy it. The problem is the van he drove out here is going to cost several hundred dollars just to get it up to california emission standards, or smogged as they say. It is kind of funny people really say things like I am going to have my car "smogged". So Krist expressed interest in the Saturn and i would feel really good selling it to him. Krist and I also just talked general stuff about life, art-making and stuff like that. it was nice talking to him and i hope to see him at least once before we move. Tomorrow after school i will go by the studio and load up my truck with the stuff i am taking down to sand city on tuesday morning with ben hunt and david anderson. that's all for now, time to watch desperate housewives.

33 days until we move, and all kinds of work ready to go

here is the washer piece with it's nice concrete padhere is the crushed piece on it's new platform/sun deck

i like this view of the studio, it is from the floor which is where i sit if i sit in the studio at all

So today was a pure work day, first i secured the washer piece to it's concrete pad, then i disassembled the steel boxes i built awhile ago. Then i cleaned up the crushed piece, and built a small platform/pallete for it, to make it easier to display and move. Then i finished framing and mounting the rust print diptych for a show in santa fe. The washer piece and the crushed piece are going together to a place next tuesday in sand city ca. i owe a huge thank you to david anderson for setting me up with these opportunities. After I finished all those pieces i invested the next batch of coffee cup, and they are ready to go in the burnout kiln. I then went to the office for my hour, and came home and showered and now i am typing and brooke is knitting soon we will go to get dinner. While I was working today i was thinking about the notion of intuition vs intellect, and consistency, versus diversity. David and I talked for awhile about the reality of artists rarely getting the chance to show disperate works together, since most curators and exhibitors want to see some sort of consistent style. In the meantime check out www.somethingoranother.net

35 days to go in the san jo

this is the postcard i have been designing for the san jose state university mfa show, unfortunately this is not the true color of it or a finished lay out but you get the gist

zero in her travel carrier ready to go


well yesterday i had to take zero to the vet and they said she was very well behaved, and the vet tech was very impressed with how nice she was. Above you can see a picture of her in her dog carrier, and an image of the lift off flier for the san jose state mfa show at the ica. unfortunately i won't be here for the show, but i hope to get at least one or two copies of the catalog as a memento. Today Ben Hunt helped me pour a small concrete pad for the shiny washer piece so it can be in a show next week. I am really feeling overwhelmed right now trying to finish a frame and box up some other things that are going into shows, and also trying to plan moving back. I am excited about driving across country. Oh I spoke to my brother yesterday and he is all crazy with the upcoming south carolina primary debates on thursday, I hope i can get a chance to tune in and watch a little bit. I have another application that i want to send out next week, which brings the total number of residencies i have applied for in the last two months up to 4. so far no news from any of them but that doesn't mean anything since decisions aren't usually made until around july. anyways by next week moving will become a very real thing since we turn in our 30 day notice to our landlord and the week or two after that we will start the great clean up/pack up.

38 days until we move

this is a fairwell stop action movie to our current apartment music john frusciante.

So it is a bittersweet moment, I will finally be finishing grad school, leaving san jose california and going back to my beloved Charleston South Carolina, but oh how i will miss this apartment. By the way everything you see except for the books and the cat will soon be available for sale on craigslist.

39 days until we move, and would you like to buy a car

two shiny mochas used to make one shiny mocha( it is actually a bent mirror positioned so that the reflections line up to create one mocha)
I was thinking about the virginia tech thing i was left wondering how much of the shooters attitude is indicative of the generation of students who would have grown up post columbine and graduated high school around september 11th. These events coupled with the divisive attitude of americans for or against the president may be contributing to an overall environment of anxiety and fear that has trickled down to a new class of students who are fatalistic and career obsessed. That was just a passing thought I had while working in the studio yesterday listening to the gonzalez trial/hearing . The current mood may be part of the reason i am beginning to be drawn towards very shiny things. I am not sure or it just may be the experience of looking at something that is looking back at me. this weekend I think we are going to start cleaning up the saturn to get it ready to sell, hopefully we can get a little bit of money for it but it may be hard to sell a car whose drivers seat is held up by a milk crate.

41 days remaining in sanjose! and this time i have the correct count of days

i just noticed the other day how nasty the keyboard and mouse pad of my laptop are, i wish they had made the black macbooks when i bought mine but now i am stuck with this white stain magnet

sometimes i remember to look up and take in the beauty that san jose has to offer.
well the history art show opened at work yesterday without incident, except that i heard from those who attended that the artist's lecture was as boring as his work. Today i had to give a talk to shannon wright's students about my work and i tried to make it fun and light hearted while also emphasizing the systems and playfulness i use in making my work( the class is called systems and structures after all). i think it came across but i can never tell. right now I am doing laundry and then tonight i am going to the cadre lab to hear artist camille uterback lecture and that should be really interesting her work is totally rad! During the hour before my talk in shannon's class brooke and i went to look at snug top camper shells for our truck, but just our luck we picked the most expensive place in town hopefully next week we will get a chance to shop for better deals. I have got to hustle these next couple of days, because i have to get the rest of my projects finished and out the door and begin figuring out how we are going to move.

43 days remaining in san jose

this is a 30 seconds of life with my cat zero captured at 2 frames a second






Well things are starting to get serious around here. This morning the cat had some problems, i will spare you the details, but involved some cleaning of unpleasant areas for all involved. Sometime next week i will start showing the updates as i dismantle my studio, that should be fun. My logic is i will throw away everything that isn't a tool,and try not to move any raw materials cross country since that would just add value to what were originally free materials.

44 days remaining in san jose

I was driving to berkeley today 4/14/07 and it really started to rain, and Common- "Be" was on the iPod and everything seemed to be moving like in that old volkswagen commercial.

this is the view from inside Bruce Nauman's "performance corridor"

Today I went to oakland to help Shannon Wright move some stuff, and go with her and her class on a field trip to the berkely art museum to see the Bruce Nauman show again. It was nice to see it again especially after spending so much time in the school's gallery with a very different type of survey. It is amazing how timeless so many of the Nauman pieces seem, while a few do seem incredibly dated, the strongest pieces still hold their own. The sort matter of factness and unclouded ideas in the work really ring true even today. There are some very fundamental experiences in his work, and the majority of the power of the work is in the straight forward logic of the titles, which act as explanations of for the pieces are. I have a lot of imagery clouding my head right now because of work, the nauman show and the movie the science of sleep which we just finished watching. Brooke and I had sushi tonight at kazoo,and we began our preliminary moving inventory at dinner and are trying to figure out what stuff to sell, what to ship back what to drive back and what to keep, things will really be taking shape in the next couple of weeks, I will probably start dismantling my studio very soon.

45 days remaining in san jose, and let me tell you what i really think

this is one of my consumer fetish objects on an acrylic shelf that brooke made for me
So the show i am installing at work is called Gerald Walburg, Looking, Thinking, Making, which is also the title of the accompanying book. After spending some time with the work and skimming the catalog,and meeting the artist and hearing him talk about the work, I was left wishing Mr. Walburg had done a bit more looking and thinking and a lot less making. The work on the whole is the kind of mediocre modernist derivative penis period sculpture that northern california excels at. the work falls into a category i like to call Branguchi's( Brancussi+ Noguchi= generic office decoration sculpture) For the most part according to the book and the work Mr. Walburgs greatest accomplishment was that he secured a job teaching 40 years ago and essentially stopped thinking about pushing his work, and instead enjoyed the luxury that comes with this form of artist's welfare. It is important to note that curator Jo Farb Hernandez's argument for this survey and the accompanying catalog is that it was mr walburg's teaching position that afforded him the "luxury to pursue his muse free of market influence" Yeah a great accomplishment especially since the work is incredibly dated and it is difficult to distinguish the work from 2007 from the work he made in 1967. At best this show is a prime example of how california loves itself and supports bad art to the fullest. Mrs. Hernandez's approach to writing about this artist relies on a classic california approach to art scholarship, that of genius artist by association. In her book she says that since mr.walburg and his sub par work were closely associated with and shared studio space with Bruce Nauman that some how there is a commonality. The story that mr walburg tells, like the ones that so many loser artists from california tells, involves some passing encounter with nauman, apparently Walburg had the studio across the hall from nauman in grad school, and that somehow there work has some connection. In the book Mr walburg is even quoted as saying that in Grad school he asked Nauman why he didn't finish his pieces and nauman told him he only does what is necessary, Walburg confesses that he has always kept that thought with him. I find this hard to believe since the majority of walburg work is covered in the kind of overwrought surface treatments, artist signatures, and bases, that generic california public art excels at and seems incredibly unnecessary. This obsession with the surface is the pinnacle of the stupidity that guides much of the mediocre crap that comes from mr Walburg's studio. But what do I know I am just some guy from South Carolina being paid by the hour to install this work.

46 days remaining in san jose

this is a screen shot from inside the ars virua gallery in second life
this is a rare screenshot of my second life avatar the elusive and reclusive Brilliant Marx
if you look on the screen shot i am at the table in the blue shirt on my laptop operating my avatar in the red shirt


this is more of the best public art san jose has to offer
well a lot has happened since the last blog entry. On tuesday night i went to the cadre salon lecture series to hear my friend james morgan lecture about his work. One of the biggest things that james does is run the ars virtua foundation. While i was in his lecture i got into the geek spirit in the room and logged into second life to follow the simulcast of his lecture. Yesterday one of the most horrifying days at work happened. A piece of art from 1965 that was part of the show got knocked over and and broken, as the result of a freak domino effect caused by a pedastal falling over and knocking the piece over and then launching the top across the room. My heart sank when i found the crime scene, theta my boss reminded me that that is why we have insurance, and thank god it was a piece that can be repaired and not a ceramic piece. Today i have to go back to work to finish hanging the show but i just want to leave. I have so much work left to do to get ready for the move it is ridiculous, I feel like i am already running out of time to pack and move.

48 days until we leave, for real, this time

here are some more things we will be leaving behind when we leave san jose, anti war/anti bush protesters

one thing i won't miss about san jose, it looks like one big shopping mall with valet parking

well I checked my calendar and i made a mistake i recounted and as of today the official countdown begins, 48 days until we leave san jose. At work we are setting up a show right now that answers the age old question, Where does corporate art go to die? apparently the answer is california. i will be pretty tied up with setting this show up for the next couple of days but hopefully i will get back into the studio to finish off everything that i have started. With only a month left until we move i won't be starting too many new thing, but once iget back to charleston I will resume production full throttle.

47 days remaining in san jose, and the public sculpture i will miss the most

So this fine specimen of public sculpture is just one of the many endearing things I will miss most about san jose. Lately these magnificent sculptures have really captured my imagination and i wanted to start documenting them. to see the current images in my collection of the greatest public sculpture in america click here to be taken to a slide show on my flickr site of some of my favorites.

50 days until we move

but hang the sign slanted

this is a new diptych format for the rust prints, I also tried a slightly different chemical mixture to get a browner rust, some areas went black , kind of cool, but I won't get time to mess with this some more until I get back to charleston
uncle phil estes, zinnia specter estes, papa steve estes, and an un-named stuffed puppy get down with some snack time

the left side of my body vs. the left side of nauman's body


some classic boring nauman in the studio kind of videos
so phil estes was in san francisco visiting his brother steve estes, sister in law carol , and niece zinnia. So I took phil with me to the berkeley museum to see the bruce nauman in the sixties show and it was pretty cool. I also managed to get another packet in the mail to a another gallery this week, so here is hoping. I have pretty much set it up so I have a different residency application due every two weeks for the next 2 months so something is bound to get a hit. I will probably be pretty quiet on the blog for the next couple of days, since work will be getting crazy as it is time to take down the world in a jar show and set up the next show. While we are talking about the next show, let me just say up front that it should be a real bore, but it will be a good experience installing it.

we love fine art and fine art loves us-

well brooke and I took a trip to palo alto to visit the cantor center for the arts at stanford, and we took the opportunity to get to know some of the fine works in their collection just a little bit better. One of the crown jewels of their collection is an andy goldsworthy wall, which we both enjoyed... some more than others






















on a more serious note one of the most moving pieces of art that we have seen lately was the richard avedon in the west photo exhibition that is up at the cantor. The images are of coal miners, drifters and other marginalized characters from america's west. The photos were large black and white prints and really struck in the gut, very powerful. I really can't describe them in any other words except compelling, avedon really is one of the greatest american photgraphers, next to say william wegman.

Application fever+only 70 days remaining in the California adventure

I have caught application fever. Currently I have five different applications sitting on my desktop, all due sometime in the next three months. On top of that I have my taxes to figure out. But enough bitchin, I took a day off this week sort of and worked on one application and called a bunch of people I haven't spoken to in awhile. I spoke at length with an old friend named melanie rogers, who studied art history with me back in 2000, at the college of charleston. She is doing great, she works on the road crew for all these super famous rock stars, preparing their food and stuff. Talking to her was cool because she reminded me how lucky I am to be doing what I am doing now. Brooke and I have also begun the countdown to the drive back. This time when we drive across country we are going to stop several places to see if we want to live in any of them. one of the places we plan to spend a few days in is Albuquerque, we are really curious about it and it's people. Today I think we are going to palo alto, and continue our string of tourist style trips to area's around here that we haven;t gotten to fully exploit. I am getting more excited about leaving and that is going to make these next 70 days in california my most anxious seventy days ever.