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ideas
A thing of Beauty
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I attended an MFA creative writing program salon last night with my husband featuring author Manuel Muñoz and poet Richard Siken as discussion panelists. The topic was “The Beauty of the Sentence,” however there were many digressions outside of this, as one would expect with a loaded word like “beauty.” It was fascinating (seems to be my word of the moment) to hear what one’s first thinks of as a visually-oriented concept being discussed by writers, coming from a completely different angle than the way I’m accustomed to discussing or touching upon such subjects with artist friends.

- There is no measurement or finite definition of “beauty.” There’s beautiful, ugly-beautiful, beautiful-ugly. Yet it’s more than just a matter of taste. The commonality between these two so-called extremes are something that excites and engages the mind and the heart.

- Presentation is the vehicle of beauty. How effectively it is transmitted from the mind/heart of the person making the work to depends on presentation. Presentation requires the creator to place themselves on the receiving end to determine how best to transmit the concept. There are some things you have to experience first hand to be felt as beautiful, other things you can be as, or even more gratifying as second hand experiences in writing, in photographic/video reproduction, etc.

- Responsiblity for beauty (inadvertently?) creates power structures: the beautiful thought itself as seen in the mind/heart of the creator, wanting to transmit that beauty to others in a representational manner. The receiver of that thought and their empathy with the creator, as well as their own interpretation of the representation. Being a presenter of beauty, such as a publisher, gallery, venue, production company, even a book reviewer, requires a higher level of responsibility. This, in turn, requires the presenter to hold the artist accountable for their work, the reasoning behind it, and in the presentation of it.

- What part of your body does your voice come from?
books, ideas
Convenience Store Theory?
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After reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory and attending the slideshow presentation for Bill Mackey’s newly released Field Guide to Tucson Convenience Stores at MOCA, I’m wondering if there’s not a cigarette-smoking monkey sitting at a typewriter somewhere out there writing Convenience Store Theory. The presentation and book were excellent, and - in hopes there will be another - I can’t wait to check out the next IGNITE! Tucson (which took place on Oct. 18 but am unable to find any descriptive links about).

In the pamphlet’s introduction, Mr. Mackey writes “Convenience stores are our landmarks, our meeting places, a part of our cultural heritage.” Since my journey moving a houseful of furniture, a husband and a 57 lb. dog 1,000 miles from Austin to here just over two months ago, I strongly concur with the idea of convenience stores as landmarks and cultural sites. But perhaps “meeting places” needs to be qualified. Yes, they are gathering places in the sense that everyone simply goes there because, at some point, you have to. Indeed, they’re convenient but they are really more like fleeing places. Places of shame. Places to starve the body of nutrition with a high fructose carbonated 32 oz. fountain drink and possibly a cheese powder-covered corn-based snack to get me through the next 200 miles, items I’d never purchase in my regular grocery shopping. When traveling in-town, a place to occasionally stop for a 99-cent tall boy to sip covertly in the car en route to a party. For others, to buy candy and porn and beef jerky and skewered hot dogs. Jarring, uncomfortable places with faceless consumers and workers that I want to exit as soon as possible, praying litanies to Our Lady of Clean Restrooms. A place of its own exclusive mood, like a hotel. Just as Koestenbaum identifies the taxonomy of what he calls “hotel women,” surely the shadows of convenience store women exist (subsist?) in a similar twilight realm.

P.S. DRAWN, on display in the gallery, was also pretty cool, for a drawing show (hint: it’s also a fundraiser). I especially liked the glitter on posterboard pieces.
books, ideas
Image - Text - Image - Text
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Two books I’ve read recently, in a sort of home audit of my husband’s grad school creative writing classes, have inspired me to think about works of literature as works of visual art. Not just they way they’re laid out in a graphic design sense where the layout works with the content, but the content of the text itself and the way that text is arranged as a separate element alongside, achieve the impact of the whole work meaningful in the particular flavor of visual art.

Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, first published in 1973, consists mostly of hundereds of clips from a small town newspaper in the 1890’s and early 1900’s. Stories of murders, epidemic disease, farmers being hauled off to the nuthouse - catastrophic life events summed up in a few brief sentences. Spliced between the listings from each year are a series archival images by the local studio photographer: individuals standing in front of their homes and businesses, funeral flower arrangements, studio portraits, corpse portraits, horses, candid snapshots. Lesy shows how one’s trained response to history is to experience it in a Big Picture sense, the persepective we were taught in school, separated from intimate individual lives. The reader/viewer zooms sharply in to understand the misery of late 19th century rural life. Yet in the repetition of reports, we are re-detatched, cut off at the pass from feeling sorry for the victims. At the end, we realize there is indeed a distinct line between understanding and empathy.

Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum is rather simplistically described as “two books in one,” like a buy-one-get-one free sale. But really it’s two books side-by-side: a pulp novel set in a non-place, non-time at a Hollywood hotel in one column, and in a second column on each page, a series of documents - dossiers - incoporating literature, music, poetry and visual art describing and analyzing what Koestenbaum calls hotel theory. We all know this mood. My mom calls it “livin’ the Motel Life” (our standard was more Motel 6 than Marriott). It’s both indulgent and grating. You arrive at a hotel. It’s afternoon, it’s evening, you’re tired from being cooped up in the car or plane. You first turn on the air conditioner, go to the ice machine and drink a Coke with ice from plastic cups wrapped in cellophane, or perhaps the paper-covered glass tumblers. The toilet paper is folded into a point. You wonder whether to re-hang your towels or throw them on the floor. Maybe you have some Tom’s peanut butter-cheese crackers or peanut M&M’s from the vending machine - something you’d never eat at home - or go swimming in the pool. You keep vigil watching cable TV, trying to ignore the silence/noise of the faceless strangers staying in identical cells all around you by cranking up the A/C. The streetlight shines through the uncloseable chink in the curtains right onto your pillow. It’s worse when you have to stay more than one night. As you’re reading the book (and the choice is entirely yours on how to read it), you are reading one column only but you know there is something going on simultaneously on the other side of it, you just can’t participate in both. Just like a hotel room or lobby.

Thursday, October 30, MOCA Press in Tucson presents its Multiples & Monographs imprint with Bill Mackey’s Field Guide and Check Lists in a limited edition of 75 copies. According to the email invitation, Mackey playfully analyzes our current patterns of consumption and leisure, appropriating the classic practices of ethnographers and natural scientists. The $10 member/$25 non-member admission includes the Mackey created pamphlet: Field Guide to Tucson Convenience Stores. I’m really curious to get my hands on a copy of this. Ever since I moved to Tucson, I’ve been fascinated by the large number of winged 60’s convenience store throughout the city. I don’t think I’ve seen stores quite like these except for random backstreets in Ft. Worth and what was, in the early 1980’s, the only 24-hour store in New Braunfels. I’ve been waiting till the weather gets cooler (yes, I’m a big pansy, but it’s not the heat that’ll get ya here, it’s the dryness) to spend a day cycling around town and taking documentary photos of all the 60’s stores I can find.
type, drawings, style, ideas
milagros
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The word “milagros” has been stuck in my head the last few days since I saw Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo last week. For some reason, the first time I saw “Miracles” - the neighborhood community center in the movie, I read it as “Milagros” - which sounded much cooler to me. My next project is to find the right t-shirts to paint it on in a couple of different styles. Oh, and the t-shirts will be shredded, of course.

Ink on paper

August 10, 2008
photography, www, ideas
Photography & Reality
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There are things that photograph well but aren’t that impressive in real life.

- Pre-framed/matted Art prints sold at big box stores. I can imagine that some of these actually look like craigslist submissions.

- Creatively displayed but poorly executed art installations. It bothers me that the mere presentation of something can make up for lack of substance and quality. Yet in saying this I point the finger of blame at myself, a graphic designer/marketing geek/art installer. Because what’s fun and interesting to me about my work is that you can control people’s expectations and impressions of things. When you do that, you can influence reality a great deal. One could completely power trip off of it, but when you work with clients in the real world, you must often bend to their will and accommodate their quirks and foibles. Make them look good, but compromise.

- Street fashion. I’m kind of glad last year’s silliness and excess is going away a little bit. It’s still there but it’s being drawn back into practicality. My fashion philosophy is combining function AND expression.

- Outdoor weddings.

- Non-pap shots of celebrities.

- Giant interstate highway mixmasters.

And there are beautiful things in real life that underwhelm when photographed. Maybe most things are like this. Sunsets, people, black clothes and rose bushes come to mind. What are your ideas?

***

As a child, I adored looking at the impeccably decorated interiors and lush, expansive gardens featured in my mom’s Southern Living and Better Homes & Gardens (this was in the days before Martha Stewart). I’d linger on every photo, picturing myself living in each one: cooking for guests in the (futu)rustic kitchen at my country manse, soaking in a big Roman tub with the sun streaming in through the retractable skylight in my alabaster bathroom, coming home to the white noise of my mid-century modern loft in the heart of a bustling city, sitting on a stone bench contemplating my lotus-covered water garden, walking under my fragrant rose arbor, etc.

Now in addition to lingering on paper, we can also linger on pixels. There’s an ever-growing number of websites, blogs and Flickr groups that enable users to easily share photos of one’s home online. The lighting, the placement of objects, and the lack of personal knick-knacks in some scenes look as though they were styled and shot by professionals. The controlled environment of the photograph is deceptive, yet as we live more and more of our real, public lives on the web, it’s easy to confuse this illusion as reality. One begins to see one’s clothes and home - intimate expressions of self - as a scene in a photograph. How unsettling to be a voyeur in your own life.
culture, paintings, ideas, critique, observations
Beauty vs Decoration
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Revisiting the bird silhouette that was a major element in my 2004 paintings has made me realize how much my experiences over the past 3-4 years have changed my approach to making art. When I first started using the bird silhouette, it was basically a copy of some hipster pop art I saw on Gallery Lombardi’s website. I say the bird was an “element” or an “image” rather than a “theme” because theme would imply there was some kind of meaning behind it. There wasn’t.

The same goes for a lot of hipster pop art. Art, for this sort, means a cool design with a lot of well-executed elements, but no theme or underlying idea. Which is why I really dug AMOA’s recent exhibit EXTRA-ORDINARY: The Everyday Object in American Art. The docent who gave the tour I went on admitted that a few of the pieces in the show didn’t really have a particular message, their purpose was more about the quintessential postmodern experience: to throw more questions back in the face of the viewer, to unsettle one’s perspective. Was it art or design… or neither? There was something deeply satisfying about hearing this question actually being acknowledged to the public by an art institution.

This question arose again as I re-worked my bird paintings. It was the first time I had fun painting in quite some time. The graphic designer part of my mind took over and went into cruise mode - the side that can easily make very simple things look interesting. Not that I don’t enjoy doing “real” paintings, instead the thought process at work there is a meditation on the execution of the piece.

Since most of my work over the past couple of years grown more in that direction, I embarked on the new-old bird paintings as a lab experiment in beauty vs decoration. Decoration makes people happy. Beauty makes them think. Decoration is cute, superficial. Beauty can appear ugly or pleasing, the beauty itself is in underlying (in the process, the meaning, the mystery).

I don’t think average people want to buy or learn or educate themselves about beautiful things these days. I’ve tried to see how/why one can call something art, and what goes into the making of it. I don’t think the bird paintings are art. They are design, they are decoration. Maybe there’s a little meaning - the bird is such an archetypal metaphor - but not too much. Just enough to make people feel elevated a little without dealing with the guilt of a message or solving a mystery. Art Lite.

On this note, I’m also conducting a marketing experiment during E.A.S.T. I’m not displaying any of my “real” work, only the Art Lite bird paintings. I get a lot of positive feedback about my plates and fabric paintings, whether to my face or whether I mill about my work at a show as a fly on the wall. But I get the impression that people don’t know what to make of it (I’m well-aware that I need to improve my presentation - I think that would help). If these decorative pieces prove to be more popular, I want to see that dynamic in action. Who knows, I might even sell one to a total stranger.

Then I’ll go back to painting on pillowcases.
ideas, observations
Can do or can don’t?
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I noticed that Coke has very recently launched a redesign of its cans. It’s a much simple 2-color, slightly retro-looking version. The red is a bit less intense, I think, and the sweat water-beads are missing. Can’t find anything about it online, except to say that the new design was originally launched in Japan.

I wrote about a trend idea I had about throwbacks to 50’s-80’s package design of food products a couple of years ago. I wonder if other major brands will follow suit?
words, ideas, observations
The Ripple Effect
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Blogging isn’t for everyone. That needs to be said. For every trend that comes along, the opposite must be part of the picture. For without traditional and even retrogressive avenues, trends could not breathe. As an artist, you have to be true to your voice. And not only do you have to know yourself, you have to find the right conduit.

I feel the same is true for my blog. It’s been cathartic in some ways and has helped me understand myself better as a writer and as an artist. I now understand that while I’m good at analyzing and observing, I’m not so great at storytelling and condensing, which seem to be the most common formats for blogs. In my mind, an idea is visual. It should just be there, wordless but not mute. While the artist gives it structure in terms of composition, it hits the viewer’s eye all at once. Then the eye, the mind invents its own structure as it travels around the piece.

And it doesn’t even have to be art. It can be a hand holding a cherry red purse hanging out the window of an old pick-up truck, against seafoam green paint. It can be a poodle riding on the back of a Harley. A smashed computer monitor in the middle of a busy intersection. There’s a story to be told, and yet all you need is the one image. Calculated and improvised, elusive, full of inexpressable meaning. There is an old Coptic text written from the voice of Wisdom/the Goddess. It reads: I am the silence that is incomprehensible… I am the voice whose sound is manifold… I am the utterance of my name. An idea is static, it stays in one place, but its facets are infinite.

This is the difficulty I have with writing and, occasionally, speaking. Trying to say everything at once and describing as much as possible. When speaking, I call it Porky Pig syndrome. I often think of two synonyms at the same time, and what comes out of my mouth is a jumble of both words. I have practiced slowing down when I talk, to plan what I want to say. You can imagine how slow I am at writing.

Words, to me, are linear no matter how they’re put together. You can have fragments of a story, a thought, mixed in different paragraphs, twisting and turning back on itself. But the reader’s progression through the work still moves one direction: forward. You are heading towards something, even if it’s the same thing over and over. Thoughts visit me like stones thrown into a pond, sometimes like blows to the head. The reprocussions move outward in all directions and cause different sensations, yet is one event wholly felt.

Art and graphic design allow me to say everything at once, unencumbered by a particular direction. To establish a sense of navigation that can be revisited and looked at in different ways. As you change, the image changes with you. The fundamental experience is that it comes at you all at once. And that is also the experience of making it. Like physically taking an object from inside of you and placing it outside of yourself. Those things you can’t take apart on the inside and rebuild on the outside. You can see it from different angles but you can’t see what’s inside. It’s your decision to leave it whole or to hack away at it, but you may never find the source.

Some things can only be expressed linearly in writing, for the sake of knowing where it came from or where it’s headed. I write when I’m looking for answers, escape routes, not so much to suspend a state of being. The unexpected beauty of reading can also provide this. In a book, you can suddenly find answers you didn’t know you were searching for. Those answers that tell you about your own story.

Words and images are like magnets. They repel each other on one end, and attract on the opposite. Words sustain our need to explain life as we experience it. Images fuel our desire to experience the inexplicable.