an organ, some signs, a carnival booth, a southern home facade, and some thoughts on life in the city of charleston

so i found the guts of an organ on the side of the road and i totally plan to hack into it and make noise with it, or failing that it will become raw material for a future sculpture installation project
and as luck would have it i found this very appropriate sign, just in case i forget what to call the place i work in

and i found all the magnetic signs from a cold stone ice cream store and put them up on my metal wall. I figure on those painfully hot days i will look at the ice cream menu and think cool thoughts.

i also tinkered around with the line piece some more, once it is finished i will clean it up and paint it and then it will really pop.

last week i gave a lot of my building energy to the out of hand events company. I have been making sets and props for them like this southern home facade built to house a 9'x12' rear projection screen. I was given a very basic drawing and idea to work from. in the end the illusion was carried through.

i like this kind of work because creating a simulated environment really interests me.

my other bit of magic was making a "carnival" booth out of two sheets of 1/4" plywood. I hacked this together in a couple hours and then plastered it with printouts of coney island posters to give it that authentic carnie vibe

I have been thinking alot about how charleston functions as a city and it's relationship to the idea of a simulation. I have always seen charleston as the perfect example of the simulacrum that baudriallard speaks of. Charleston is more the image of a city than an actual city. Because the city is designed to cater to tourist, college students and young professionals the city landscape reflects that. The city fosters a locust approach to living. Swarm in, go out to clubs, restaurants and disposable non-essential retail, go home and think nothing of it. Because Charleston maintains the appearance of a city everyone assumes it is a city. But it functions more as a version of one than as an actual city. and speaking of simulations of things, i am still working on my army of water bottles and as soon as i finish with those i will post them here.

tiger woods action painting and performance art

i saw this tiger woods commercial the other day and it made me think about action painting and the nature of the artist's mark. Evidence of the hand of the artist is something that has become less desirable in the contemporary art market. the notion of design has swept through every facet of modern life. As wal mart and target strive towards bringing good design to the masses a certain taste for slickness and presentation permeates the art world. two poles have begun to emerge, on one end are artists who produce well manicured, well designed, well composed and slickly executed works, and on the other pole has been this emergence of the faux naive or handmade work. The irony is that both of these methods are as insincere and rooted in marketing as the other. as i watched the 30 second tiger woods spot i couldn't help but think that the author of the commercial was a half assed student in school. she or he probably took some art history survey classes, and whether they realized it or not absorbed this classic hans namuth film of jackson pollack painting on top of the camera.

It made me think about how there is a contemporary art history lesson embedded in the tiger woods commercial. while jackson pollack was still truly trying to express what a modernist angst ridden shamanistic artist living on the fringes of society and at that time the art world felt, tiger is just flaunting his huge cultural capital. But there is a distinct difference in the way tiger paints his painting. tiger's "art" is the result of pure action and no innate expressive emotion. his painting is the evidence of an action, in this case hitting paint filled golf balls similar to performance, process, and action artists of the sixties(although to his credit i cannot immediately think of any artist making art with golf swings at that time). In the sixties the contemporary art world in america was small and exclusive, no one cared, there wasn't a need to have a perfect artist statement and expansive resume, these artists were primarily making work for themselves and their friends(the audience was an added bonus, they flocked to the spectacle later to see people shoot themselves and camp out in the gallery). One of the methods employed by these artists was to follow a series of actions(see richard serra's verb list for the epitomy of this) and then the resulting "evidence" comprised the work. As a self described student of the sixties, it's art, it's culture, and to a lesser extent it's music, i try and imagine myself somewhere in between the purely expressive art and purely process/action art of this era. It is funny how a 30 second commercial for a product i will never covet, endorsed by a celebrity i care nothing about, can hit upon so many of my interests. as if this rabbit hole of thinking weren't enough to make me really want to go back to school and write a book, i took the thought process even further. i started thinking about other incidences of car commercials riffing on artworks and i remembered a few years back when the honda company ripped off/paid homage to fischli and weiss's der lauf der dinge.
here is the honda commercial.

after re-watching i also noticed a subtle tribute to other artists work including calder mobiles and such, and some of chris burdens kinetic pieces.
now compare to the fischli and weiss

oh well the lesson is i shouldn't be allowed to watch tv, when i am thinking about art, it's kind of like grocery shopping when i am hungry.

blame it on craigslist

a link to this ad i placed on craigslist

After i finished my marathon of contact mics, I really got the itch to play some more music. Lately I had only been playing once or twice a month with phil estes, because we had both been so busy our schedules only lined up occasionally. So I took the plunge and placed an ad on craigslist, and much to my delight i have had a pretty full schedule of music this week. The responses have run the gamut, from generic mushy hippie bar music(which i think indicated that the guy hadn't read my post at all, but i thought he was looking to try something new so i tried to do it but couldn't make it through more than an hour and a half of that music), then i played with a really promising guitarist and keyboard player, who are looking to write and play a mixture of pop indie keyboard rock mixed with other stuff, and then tonight I am going to try out for a pretty straight ahead progressive rock band. All of these situation have been interesting, but I still think i am going to work on expanding my solo performance abilities and compose solo compositions on the drums and other instruments i constructed. I kind of see the drums as a big portable, variable,sculptural arrangement, since i can change the setup of the pieces in the kit to suit the situation i am in.

this was a strange happening, I started playing with starbucks straws again, and am now using the same method to construct linear work with steel pipe. when i finish with the welded steel versions of the melted plastic straws, i will clean up the steel and paint it green to match the straws. I always find it satisfying to draw inspiration from the materials that inspire the work.

i keep finding piles of stuff, like these coat hangers, so i stacked them up for now. I also found a payphone but can't decide what to do with that yet.

i had a brief moment of inspiration and endeavored to realize my bifurcating lines from the rust prints as actual objects. I admit this is also partly inspired by john bruneau's infinitree i saw four years ago, but always thought would be cool to make. it is proving to be a bit difficult to reach the connections as the lines begin intersecting each other.