The theme for this month’s 27 project was “Portraits.” After being in front of the camera twice in the last couple of weeks, I actually didn’t feel like attempting any self-portraits. (Can you believe it?!) I turned my cheap HP scanner on its side and scanned my friends and dog in. I’m calling this method scannerotype because like a daguerreotype, the subject has to sit still for about a minute while it scans. I’m really happy with how these turned out.
Sorry for the vulgarity — this is inspired by this Conan O’Brien version of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster my cousin posted on Facebook earlier this afternoon.
#1) Sometimes I feel like I’m the only white person who’s annoyed by the ubiquitous adage. I mean, seriously? Would you truly do that in a crisis just because a poster told you to?
#2) I don’t have a TV and never watched nighttime talk shows anyways so the controversy regarding network scheduling and humor rhetoric that has all social media abuzz is more interesting to me than which host said what. It’s not so much the hosts who are irritating as it is the fact that that the overall man-in-suit-behind-a-bigass-desk-with-a-coffee-mug late night talk show format is ridiculously outdated.
#3) I do think that “Work Hard and Be Nice” is good advice, although don’t forget about the part that goes something like “As Long As You’re Raking In Millions.”
This one’s more serious. It’s a phrase I’ve had stuck in my head since yesterday, more along the lines of one of my art idols, Barbara Kruger. Particularly her piece "Cram Life Into Death," which I have in a book but can’t seem to find on the internet. I was also trying to think of what was the opposite of a crown. A dunce’s cap? A jester’s hat? An executioner’s mask? The point of a stiletto heel? A combat boot? Ah, yes. A weird, mocking, mask-like smiley face that looks not unlike the monster in Miyizaki’s Spirited Away. What does "DON’T do" really mean? Verbally? In a public service poster?
I’m not much into party politics, but I find the Supreme Court’s recent ruling highly disturbing. In the vein of the Passing the Buck piece I did several months ago, I just made these two flags, inspired by this Adbusters flag.
Started off attempting to makeup inspired by Patrick Nagel. Duran Duran’s Rio remains one of my most favorite albums for both music and cover art and, although I didn’t know it at the time, his illustrations of men and women were ubiquitous in all the pastel-hued hair salons my mom drug me in tow to in the 80s. But I also had the idea of using this church-lady hat I bought at Burlington Coat Factory in Austin over the Holidays last year, so then the concept turned into kind of a early 1900’s bohemian tearoom sort of costume. But that’s about it. It’s really just a study. This is the part that my photographer friends are better at than me in terms of both concepting and editing. I was at a loss with the editing — all I could think of was just blacking out the eyes, as that was the only thing I kind of liked the look of. Fortunately some good did come out of this: the makeup component gave me some practice for a photoshoot I did with a friend a few days later. We’ll see how those come out.
2009 was an expansive year for me… I had work featured in the finale of the major local runway fashion show this spring, styled models in my own fashion show segment (ok, only three outright, the other two were “borrowed” and I didn’t do their hair/makeup, but it was still a lot of concepting and manual labor!), founded an art collective that’s produced four events this year, celebrated 1 year of blogging on Tu Scene, was a featured interviewee in several newspaper articles, on two long-format radio interviews, one television interview and joined my first board. Whew!
Not that I felt I bit off more than I could chew though. This growth was a necessary and long-overdue character-building experience. The past couple of months though, I’ve felt borderline burned-out. Or just in need of a break that lasts longer than a three-day weekend. In need of time to relax with my family (husband and dog), with myself, work on my own artwork outside of group collaborations, re-focus on Tu Scene. The dayjob has been going in high-gear since October, and every time I’ve seen a potential break on the horizon, it eludes me with the infliction of some new task for work. It’s not that I’m not up to the challenge, but I keep finding myself double-booked, overpromising and underdelivering. And while I can take criticism of the results of my work, I hate being the flake in the inception of a project I’ve committed to. That irresponsibility, that unreliability is so not “me.”
In the vein of a break to pursue personal work, I also feel like I need time to get to know people. I’ve been blessed to work with so many talented, brilliant, kind artists on various projects who also just happen to be amazing, fascinating individuals, but feel like I haven’t been able to get to know them as friends so our relationship could continue outside of mutual goals. Part of that is my own choice. Work is a protection mechanism for me. If I keep the relationship mostly professional, I don’t risk the personal entanglements of navigating a friendship. The other part of it is that I sincerely do take a great deal of pleasure in simply realizing a dream, especially one that’s been built with others. (I also wonder, with anyone I’ve worked with, if the feeling is mutual [not reciprocated, but shared/understood]?) But it’s gotten to the point that I’ve almost forgotten how to just be with people, to spend time with them, pursing interests that don’t have to have any accomplishment on the other end, i.e. “hanging out”, “chillin’ “, whatever you want to call it. So my motto for 2010 is “less doing, more living.”
Not that I’ll stop being an overachiever, as I always have been, but realizing that I need to just back off when being tapped for a project. As an early Virgo (born August 28) leaning more towards Leo than Libra, there’s a stuck-up Leo side to my natural community-serving, genuinely concerned Virgo-ness that wants to look good and take credit for things, feeding into the negative self-critical aspects of Virgo if I pass something up. Maybe that’s why I enjoy my Libra family and friends so much, they ground me away from all of that and help find a balance. At least until the point where we start driving each other crazy, like my cousin and I. Childhood best friends all the way through much of our 20’s, born 6 weeks apart, we’d need space when she felt like I was being controlling and harsh, and I felt that she wasn’t sticking up for herself when she had every right and credit to her accomplishments as an individual to do so.
Part of this is also motivated by my husband. Ironically, he’s the one who has the knack for maintaining long-distance friendship. When I was a child, my best friend from 4th grade and I continued to write letters for four years long after I’d left the school after just one year. I always had long-term pen pals, one from Germany, one from Australia. My husband, on the other hand, moved around a lot more than I did and never kept up contact with any friends he made in school. Now, it’s the opposite! He keeps in touch while I make excuses for letting things slide. It’s not that I feel jealous of his strength, what I feel is more admiration and respect, much like the other things he’s good at that I simply could not imagine myself doing, like teaching everything from first grade to ex-con adult education. The way I witness him doing it is through correspondence, being more open about himself as a person than as a writer/artist, and through spending time with others for a movie, coffee, drinks, exercise. Things that I just said I seem to have almost lost the understanding of. (And to be really self-deprecating and completely honest, an understanding that I’m not sure I ever had. As a naturally shy person who was not taught or had the expectation of practicing basic social skills by my parents like answering the phone or shaking hands, I’ve spent my entire life since leaving home at 17, almost 18 years old, studying/analyzing for myself the basic courtesies of various social situations.) For me, it all rose to the surface when we visited Austin for four days in December, after almost a year and a half of being gone from the city we made our home for 10 years. I was genuinely happy to meet up the longtime friends I was able to, and still happy to make contact with those I didn’t get to see in person. But the experience was eerily like my sophomore year at collage: all the people I felt I knew in high school and formerly spent a good deal of time with, I realized had not actually been friends. And since there’s a chance we may be moving out of Tucson later this year, I’m determined not to let that happen again, because a piece of me will always be here that will never find a home anywhere else.
In 2010, I’m trying to keep those long-term life experiences in scope and in balance with continuing to build my mission as an artist through less doing, more living.
October 27: tail lights, by Molly McClintock
We began this project to make ourselves grow as artists, and to see and interact with what other artists are doing. 27 is more than just a picture-taking/picture-looking project.
We pick themes that are strong in their simplicity. Themes that you can shoot on a busy weekday, but that you can also put some thought into. We want to hear your thoughtful, introspective, aesthetic, and intelligent comments.
27 is how different artists approach the same theme. 27 is to be excited and inspired by photography. Come be inspired with us.
We are currently planning a traveling exhibition, which will show in Brooklyn, New York, and Tucson, Arizona.
Round 3: Friday, November 27th, 2009
This Month’s Theme: Reflections
Shoot with any lo-fi camera such as:
Disposable camera
Digital point and shoot (less than 3 Megapixels!)
Your plastic toy camera
Camera Phone
Please email maxedart@gmail.com if you have any questions, or if you would like to contribute to the traveling exhibition by hosting a show in your hometown. If you’re participating in the November shoot, let us know if you need the password for MAXED 27 Flickr account.
team 27
Rachelle, Molly, Steve
Get your 27 on at MAXEDART.com.
Staring at Screens painting #2 (original photo)
Acrylic on canvas
worked on June-November 2009
Although I have a BA in Art with a concentration in painting, I was never taught basic techniques how to wield acrylics or oils. Yet, at as artist, I’m highly skeptical of “tips/tricks/helpful hints.” in art. I was taught Technique — Hannon excersies in the form of life drawing for three years: one in high school, two in college. That was helpful. It validated the experiments I’d done, discoveries I’d made on my own around ages 13-15: there are no lines in the world, only variations in shadow.
In 7th grade, a piano teacher showed me how to “improvise”: certain cadences and arpeggios that could create a new piece or transition an existing song in performing with an ensemble (vocalist, instrumental). It killed, to this day, the composing I’d done on my own since I was 7. I felt I learnt more from music theory, which was pure math and pure ear, dissecting intervals, the algebra of counting, without any connection, any “tips”. “Ear” was what I felt naturally. While I didn’t always get all the math equations of the annual TMTA theory tests correct (but close enough to get a 95-100% score every year for 10 years), I aced the listening part of the exam every year. It was like the final round on Wheel of Fortune where you’d get R S T L N E on the board: depending on grade level, there’d be 2-5 questions with different notes filled in. The moderator would play the whole melody and you’d have to figure out the rest; to use the Wheel of Fortune example by grade 9, you’d be lucky to get a couple of R’s and one N, I think the last one I took in 12th grade had the key signature and the first two notes out of 10 measures. It was also like “So You Want to Be A Millionaire?” in the sense that in the early years, you could ask the moderator to play over certain measures as often as you needed, by the upper levels, they could only play it through, no special requests, maybe three or four times. No colors or flashing lights, just melody, just intervals, just the distance between two things.
I also entered a new school in 7th grade, and enrolling in a new school means new competitions, chosen or not. A classmate, J., was a pianist and a good student, like myself. Yet we passively hated each other. She was a memorizer of literature, algebra, science, Chopin. I felt the knowledge I sought, and while I had an desire for it, it was a desire for utility, for creativity, not for… well, I still don’t understand people who learn based on memory to this day, over 15 years later.
What I was sold as “improvisation”, as creativity, in 7th grade connected empirical knowledge and interpreted emotion, irrevocably, instead of figuring out the connection on my own, as an artist. So, sure, I could probably take a painting class and be “taught”, but I’m so paranoid of the creativity being killed for life. Figuring out on my own how to paint layers that are also solid colors is a puzzle. With music, as with art, I have to use mathematic and scientific processes to work out and to feel, to creep my way to the solutions of the problems for myself
After reading Paul Maliszewski’s Fakers, lately I’ve been wondering about the devices of farce and hoax that visual art can use, which writing (journalism, literature) cannot. In Fakers, Mr. Maliszewski mainly cites examples of written hoaxes, primarily American since the mid-19th century. Yet he doesn’t delve very deeply into the theory as to why these writers may have created these fronts, and how the public — consumers, other media, government — reacted to the stories, how these entities were perhaps unsuspecting (or knowing of the simulation), what their response meant. While I understand there are myriad explanations behind the psychology for writing fake news passed off as fact, I can’t help but crave an explanation from his point of view as a con-artist himself. If you’re going to put this much research into a book, you’d better have something to say about the material.
The only person who seemed to be able to manipulate and explain hoax, farce, faux news in the book was an artist. Why was Sandow Birk allowed, in the public/art establishment, to exhibit fake paintings, installations, and a Ken Burns-style documentary about a war that never happend without any lasting outrage? Is the falsehood, the projection more visible or clear when an artist is passing off fiction as commentary, as truth, as a joke, as opposed to a writer? Why do words have the expectation of being rooted in reality so much more than images? Why do newspapers have more “established” (traditional) credibility than art galleries? What is each really doing? Who is each really serving?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, can we process all of it? Are we really doing that? Or are words really necessary to make the point crystal clear?
I went down a 2-hour Wikipedia rabbithole this weekend, starting with this blog I recently started following on the Tucson Citizen (along with my obsession this year for all things Ghost Hunters, GHI and Paranormal State on Hulu). Let me see if I have this straight: Aleister Crowley (and about 20 related topics) > Black Mass (ugh, weird) > Goliard (/Carmina Burana, which I have fond memories of singing Carl Orff’s setting in college classical choir).
When I read about the Goliards, I couldn’t help but think of The Yes Men’s recent US Chamber of Commerce fake press-conference stunt. One one level, they were basically doing performance art and guerilla theater (as well as music and poetry) exposing the corruption in the Catholic church. The Church lacked credibility at the time (when has it not?), much like the US government over the last decade or so. The spirit of their antics was certainly not real-fake (like propping up a fake Pope, or fake miracles, and then — “The Reveal” [to cull from reality TV-speak]), and not for theoretical-artistic noogies in which no one’s reputation really gets hurt (artist or butt), but extreme late-night cable TV parody.
Let us not flatter ourselves that everything sacred in Western history has been shattered only within the last 50 years. Been there, “done” that.
