george carlin vs. bruce nauman

it is no secret that i enjoy contemplting the orignal context works of art were presented in historically in order to better understand them, but it is unusual that the death of a comedian would prompt me to re-evaluate the context of another artist. George Carlin, was a wordsmith through and through, a punster with a penchant for opining his views on everything from drugs and suicide to the way popular prhases sound. His hippy dippy persona was in conflict with the way he used words. Carlin was truly erudite in his approach but down to earth enough to reach everyone.

a classic george carlin bit playing with words and their meanings


Bruce Nauman is also an artist of george carlin's generation who drew ideas from the sounds of words and the way we say them. Like George Carlin he based his work on his own direct observations of the artistic practice.like george carlin, bruce nauman's early youthful experiementation paved the way for the rest of his career. In this piece nauman has actors conjugate a series of action verbs in monotone repetitive phrases. in the same way that carlins rythmic recitation of the 7 words you can't say on tv creates content, nauman's script for his actors creates the piece
a nauman piece playing with words

thinking about george carlin's passing and nauman's develpoment i realized that wordl play and reevaluation of meaning were actually generational during the sixties and seventies. I think in a less profound way the new wordsmithing of compulsive text messengers is also changing the way we perceive language like carlin and nauman did. I think a good contemporary representation of both carlin and nauman's influence is this video by julia bradshaw

to see bradshaw's complete explanation go to her website juliabradshaw.com

for my part i have been working at my new job at the museum,
here are a few shots of my desk

these are some of the office supplies i found strewn about

and this is a monument to september 11th utilizing some of the other office supplies i found laying around

trying to play music and keep my studio in order. after the big rainstorms several of my walls got soaked with water and now a small growth of mold is on them. i will either have to pull them out completely or cut out and replace the moldy sections. I went into the studio recently thinking i would work on some new stuff but instead i made a shelving system for my drums

so i could store them in the apartment. I have been working on some new ideas for objects but got too focused on searching for new imagery. I feel pretty good that in the coming months i will resolve the water bottle works and create a cohesive suite of work out of the large bottle, the small cast bottles on the shelves and some works on paper. once i resolve them i will set them all up as one big installation in the studio and photograph them together.
this is a picture of the storefront i was going to renovate and turn into the brilliant gallery.
I had even made this photshop image of what the gallery sign might have looked like with the blinking red arrow(if you can't tell the text says "brilliant gallery").

The building owner was talking to me and i told him i needed to think about it and he rented it to some one else, but the other day i drove by and the for rent sign was still in the window, so who knows maybe i will still get it. I had all sorts of ideas and designs and i even had a nice mission statement worked up for the gallery. so the next time a little store front comes up for rent i will not hesitate to jump on it.

when it rains it pours

this is a view of the street in front of our apartment after a short summer cloud burst. Typically multiple areas of the city flood after a good rain. People who are native charlestonians are used to these happenings, but new arrivals are panicked at the thought of being a little wet. Some people even stupidly drive their cars through this and then are surprised when the car stops working. I think it is still one of the charming things about living in a less than modern southern city, that we pause to respect mother nature.in the above picture the women on the porch of the store is actually stuck temporarily until the waves recede(the store is in the front of the building we live in). this is not global warming this is just charleston, a beautiful city that is mostly at or below sea level.

this is the view from the gallery prep area at the gibbes museum of art where i am now working.

this is my desk at work, it's weird that i have a desk, but oh well. the one thing about working in an office that is universal is how similar things are to the tv show the office.not to sound like pitch man for that show, which i did not find super funny the first couple of times i watched, but the show grew on me and seems to represent the truth of the world in a way that seinfeld captured life in the mid-90's . To extend this line of thinking if seinfeld, and shows like it reflected our comic desires in the nineties, hanging out in our friends apartments, coffee shops, and diners, then the office reflects our millenial desires to be hyper productive and vigilent in our pursuit of normalcy in the post-september 11th global world we live in.

this is the rest of the prep area where i will spend a lot of time matting and framing historic prints. you can see the racks of frames, awaiting art. i can't show you any other parts of the museum since that would require clearances and what not, but this is the part that i will see the most.

about of good news and opportunity opening up all at once. in my life right now i have multiple examples, even though my studio flooded a bit in the recent rains damaging some drawings and works on paper i have been working on, and i keep getting a steady stream of rejection letters from various things i applied for, i do have a couple of i also like the expression "when it rains it pours" because it can describe an overwhelmingsignificant occurrences. the first positive storm on the horizon is the peoples art center, which as an ad hoc organization of artists, gallerists, developers , and other interested parties trying to develop a vision for a unified arts center for charleston's arts community. one of the exciting ideas being tossed around is making a temporary model art center, but nothing is set in stone and a panel is being held next week to discuss ideas of what is possible. the second thing, which i don't want to jinx but may help by talking about is my hopes of finding a viable space downtown. Tomorrow i am looking at a storefront space downtown, that has me really excited about the possibility of opening my own gallery. but as with everything i am keeping my expectations low so that i won't be disappointed if it does not turn out.

looking forward to new experiences and still working on old ones

i started working on this "electric xylophone". it consists of sequentially smaller pieces of square stock steel mounted on a resonator box made up of birch panel scraps left over from the blackjack tables i built for ooh events. I mounted a contact mic inside of it and it is kind of like a chime/amplified woodblock depending where i hit it. I plan to polish the steel a little bit just to help and then i will figure out how to mount it so i can add it to my drum set.

on monday i start working at the gibbes museum of art. this should be good for me since it will mean i will divide my time between a museum gallery setting and my studio. I also got confirmation last week that i am going to do an installation at the dam stuhltrager gallery in brooklyn in semptember. i am really excited and nervous about the show, but as long as i have enough stir sticks waiting when i get there i should be able to build something cool in the ten days i have to make the installation. on top of this brooke and i have begun the painful process of looking for a new apartment. one of the unique things about living in charleston used to be that you got to rent an apartment in an older building for around 500 a month. by older i mean at least 200 years or more. but lately the rents have sky rocketed to such an exorbitant amount that it is harder and harder to find a unique living situation on the peninsula. but brooke and i will persist. we have been in our unusual apartment for six months and it seems to have reached it's useful limit. our upstairs neighbors are noisy at 2 in the morning, the restaurant/coffee shop we share a wall with emits an unusual smell which leeches through our wall(but so does their wireless signal so we can forgive the smell) and nothing is quite level in the apartment(on a positive note all the aforementioned issues also comprise the character and charm that make us want to stay downtown). we were just looking forward to the idea of starting over since we kind of took this apartment in desperation when we got it and we still haven't completely unpacked from when we moved back from california. but the cold reality of the bloated charleston rental market is sinking in and we are determined to make this apartment more livable and hospitable if we can't find a suitable replacement. i guess i should document all the modifications and things we made for the apartment and any more that we will be making if we decide to stay in it.

these are just a couple of pics from a walk brooke and i took last week at the caw caw interpretive center. the park is actually an old rice plantation and was the site of a massive slave rebellion.
today it is just a scenic walk in the woods, no more rice crop but they do have a nice set of trails and for only 1$ you can walk them, so we will definitely go back.

here is a shot of the blackjack tables i was making for oohevents. i need to get some finished shots of them. it was kind of nice for a little bit to be working on them, but once i finished i couldn't wait to get back to work on my own art.

so i have now determined that i will never finish working with this thermoplastic cast stuff. I still haven't solved the problem of stability. I keep building larger and more precarious constructions with it and making them so big that they collapse under their own weight. after years of messing with it I finally have to do something different. but even if i just keep building stuff out of it that collapses it keeps my dexterity up and it is kind of fun building stuff with it knowing it will eventually collapse.

this is the new beginning of the thermoplastic sculpture i think this time it will sit on this heavier footing and move up in this column like formation filled with coffee cups.

on a whim i painted the bifurcating line sculpture purple and i think i like it.

below is an example of pure serendipity. i have been manufacturing these cast water bottles and low and behold one day i found this old watch display case behind a store. it turns out that my painted water bottle sculptures fit perfectly on the shelves.

there is a recessed area in the top of the display case that can accommodate a light fixture which will create some really nice down lighting on the bottles and help to pick up the pearlescent white i mixed into all of the colors. i hope i can eventually display this case with the related drawings and steel water bottle sculpture as some sort of homage to the consumer fetish of the water bottle. I was thinking i would make more coffee cups and related works to go with it and then make a show and an artist book called coffee and a water please:a meditation on portable consumer fetish objects.

my computer before it died

my computer before it died
Originally uploaded by jonathan_brilliant

so this is my 2004 ibook g4, before the hard drive completely failed. like a cavalier idiot i hadn't been backing up all my data and figured it would be fine to just keep clamping it to the table to by pass the short in the logic board instead that short shorted out the hard drive and now i have to send the drive off to get the data back. such is life. if i had acted sooner i could have synced the machine to an external hardrive before it died and recovered all the data myself. i am slowly trying to get back up to full operating capacity, but so far i can't get my new computer to connect remotely to my website, and i seem to have lost all the powerpoints i made of my work, and other such stuff. who knew lost data could give a person that empty feeling in the pit of their stomach and cause them to lose sleep. among the data lost were drafts of writings, images, and photoshop collages in progress.

my computer died 5 days ago and i am still without but not too much longer i hope

my computer crashed. i have been busy making stuff for other people and i miss writing here. i feel weird blogging without pictures. one of the blogging rules i gave myself, was never post without an image. i don't know why but something about an image on my blog feels more true to my experience of the world since i am primarily a visual person. so here are some pictures(borrowed from my flickr page) of some things i have observed in my landscape

i am left to question the proliferation of these Orange line elements around town. I wonder why this cable has to be so long and obvious on every building that it is installed on

sometimes when i see this stuff i see it as the most beautiful sculptural intervention possible

i guess i should explain what happened. my computer crashed, and not just an ordinary run of the mill easily recoverable software crash. the motors that turn the internal hard drive actually quite being able to turn, so no data can be recovered unless i have the hard drive rebuilt(which costs as much as a new computer, and besides i am praying to the data gods that i backed up the essentials). i thought i would be more upset by the loss of my computer, but day 5 of having no computer of my own, after 4.5 years of constant use has not been so bad. i am not saying i am giving up having a computer just that i am learning to make do(between mobile web on my cell phone and checking email once a day on an old dell desktop at my parents house i am getting by). at the moment though i can't update my website, i can't work with my digital images and i can't finish the proposals i was working on, but i will be okay. Mostly i am okay because i got two really great pieces of news last week, so the total loss of my digital iLife has been less devastating. as soon as i get my old computer restored or my new one arrives i will resume blogging and discussing what i have been doing, but for some reason i feel less comfortable writing on a computer that is not mine, or maybe writing on one that is fixed in place after the total freedom to write anywhere afforded by the laptop.