Marcel Dzama/ Ralph Bakshi

 



Marcel Dzama is an artist that was recommended to me during one of our group critiques.  I was told to look for his work on instagram, as a lot of it is deliberately undocumented by the artist.  I was able to find plenty about him on-line and listened to a podcast by Zwirner Gallery, which represents him.

  The anachronistic aspect, the cast of characters, and a general underpinning of mischief are of note.   He works in a mind-boggling array of media, which is inspiring at this time, when I oddly find myself open to working in installation, performance, and possibly "social scultpture".  The idea of interactivity has taken on a rich meaning, especially after these newly present opportunities to incorporate viewer responses into the evolution of the work.

Paul C. sent me a link for Paul Bakshi, an animator.  He speaks to cartoons and fantasy, and the far-reaching capacity of animation beyond the domain of children.  Paul also knows a simple way of making animation that sounds way too labor intensive, but I would love to learn how to execute this method he described.

I am too immersed in casting now to even think about another medium at the moment!

Open Studios

Things People referenced while viewing my work...

• Edgar Allen Poe...the BFAs. His short story, The Cask of Amontillado.  Which lead to discussion of "darkness".  We discussed the complexities of pinning down this concept.  We talked about monsters and demons in the work of Hieronymous Bosch, whose name ellicited cooing of approval from BFAs. 

• Tim Burton....Spencer, one of the BFAs.  Also in my Wakanda class, he shares a space with the bubbly BFA girls, and speaks so thoughtfully.  We talked about the dog who is a character in the Nightmare Before Christmas, who lives a "cursed existence, but does not know it"-a comparison to the felcan.

                                       

• Ralph Steadman...Jenn McCoy.  I had to respond that he is way up there in my pantheon of inspirations.  

                                         

• Catdog -- This cartoon was brought to my attention by two people now.  I checked it out, and see the correlation.  The animation is abysmal and the storyline is profane, but here you go.  

• Eduardo Kac's genetically engineered glow-in-the-dark bunny. Brought up by a late-coming straggler.  Learning about him was accompanied by a conversation about the importance of knowing artists who are doing work in the same vein.  Eduardo Kac's work in transgenesis I find interesting in its allusion to evolution.  The assumption that humanity in all of its abortive glory would control evolution seems inevitable.  I would not call this art, however, as the artistic imperative mandates a companionable and non-hierarchical stance concerning animals.  

Topics that came up...

Eggs...and how they are not male or female, just a "becoming" -- .a faculty member. She saw eggs in my Ben Wah ball piece. I restrained myself from naming the piece to her and asserting  the connection between sex toys and fertility.

Rayograms....Ed Cuppola, a faculty member, and our safety consultant. 

"darkness" 

"Does the felcan feel pain?"  --MJ, from my Collaborative Studies class.  I responded yes, and referenced the importance of this concept as explained by David Foster Wallace in Consider the Lobster. 

"I was really worried." -- Steve Keltner, on the extension cord piece.  "I like a lot of your work, but that thing looks like I could buy it at K-Mart".

Dale Williams

     I had the pleasure of meeting Dale Williams' work at the opening party for Gowanus Open Studios.  The vast space was all but covered with his charcoal and paper works. Many of them approaching mural size, they were impressive against the white washed brick interior.  His work deals in characters, narrative, and history. Dale is a graduate of Hunter College, and has been working in this Brooklyn community for over 25 years.  I enjoyed the sketcherly quality of the finished works and noted their power, despite the presence of color-all of the emphasis placed on the stark graphic quality of the black and white. 

Here's a great write up on him and his studio on Douglas Street.  Dale Williams

Ugly Aesthetic

October 24

    I am thinking about ugly. The "ugly aesthetic" came up when learning about Kathe Kollowitz.  She included the images of the less fortunate at a time when it was not fashionable.

     Beauty is historically a signifier of truth, virtue, and the sublime. Ugly suggests evil, unrest, bad character, and deformity.  Kathe Kollowitz's Unemployed (1925) a wood-cut print, depicts the faces of the impoverished- the gaunt faces and sagging skin.  Kollowitz shows their ugliness as a call to action, as it inspires pity and represents injustice.

      Ugly makes you want to turn away, but it also fascinates.  Grotesque is a related term which  has a psychological suggestion.  Its as if the ugliness has somehow traversed the barrier of your flesh, and is burrowing inside of you, imitating a reflection of your bloody mushy insides.  I would argue that what constitutes ugly or grotesque, is shared by all humans, and it is only the way we respond to it that varies from culture to culture.

      The human standard for ugly seems to be different between the animate and the inanimate. For instance, humans pan-culturally appreciate texture in clothing and art.  Polk dots and stripes. When those qualities, however, appear on human flesh such as in the case of an aging face, the liverspots and creases that accompany us into our twilight years, mark the cessation of youthful beauty.  Asymmetry is beautiful in design but works terrible for a person's face.

Felcan update:

Found someone to help me with rubber mold.  Trying to make it uglier.

Sill haven't been able to get Spring out of the mold, but should have that done by tomorrow.  Fingers crossed.

Found plaque for taxidermied head.

Started My Mother was a Dancer.

Matthew Barney/Dream Logic

 October 21



"Objects and narrative acting together"..I remember going to see the Cremaster Exhibition at the Guggenheim, and  being floored by the artistry involved with the "props", although that is clearly not the right word.  The peices ranged from blue Astroturf to plastics and resins in drip formations, these items relating to each other with a sort of "dream logic", as was described by another onlooker. 


Barney's epic Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) was a project consisting of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation.  Barney's vision encompasses a wide variety of media, including video and performance. His influences include Jack Smith, Norman Mailer, and Bruce Nauman.

I share with Barney the compulsion to eradicate gender, or even identity as a human.  A character that is not a being. 

So what does that make it, a prop?  I am talking in current work about the felcan traverses a world of animate and inanimate representations.  Through this, systems of presence can be devised.  There appears to be a tendency to pair the non-being character in a world that is not our own.  Then there are artists who created monsters, demons, fictitious characters, used animals, ....never personification of animals until recent times.  Makes me think about how Disney characters are as much like humans as they could possibly be before becoming human. 

All of this speaks enticingly to that dream logic.  The trick is to humanize it.   (Thank you, Archie)



Felcan update:


completed Spring this weekend, despite many obstacles. Pic Forthcoming...

The Mechanicals

Rube Goldberg.



 Arthur Ganson
artichoke petal

The Seemen

Survival Research Lab (Kal Spelltich.)

T.H.E.R.M. West Oakland Artist Collective

Talmudic Format

I am posting a message and response between myself and a prof.  I find this all to be very useful ...

information....First my message, and his response. 

Hello!  I just want to mention that it occurred to me today how fortunate my art generation is to have your art generation to inform us.  As I think I may have mentioned to you, my dear friend/mentor, Susan Josepher, alumni of Brooklyn College, was on hand to explain the so-called "importance" of Abstract Expressionism during my art pubescence. "You just had to be there'" she said.  And now I get it!  Its the zeitgeist.  

When I was asking, "Whats next?" It was more a philosophical question than an art question.  Does not art reflect the spirit of the times?  I am wondering from your perspective, what this may be, and more broadly, I am trying to conceptualize what it actually is. 

Post Modern philosophy is very interesting.  To the extent of my knowledge, there is a huge emphasis on the "meta".  Vice Versa.  Irony.  The snake eating its tail.  We live in a time when art shapes our existence as much as our existence generates art. 

RESPONSE:

Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to share this note with your colleagues if you like.  

I have never seen a great work of art that is primarily ironic.  Not Goya's royal portraits or any of Warhol's work... and Hogarth is (a) not great and (b) more moralistic than ironic.  

If examined even cursorily it is OBVIOUS that great art, from any culture, is HUMANIST and presented with and by AFFECTION.   All of these titles and philosophies muddy the waters of what artists actually do and are injected into aesthetic conversations by impotent observers who seek the power of quashing the fluidity that I showed operating in the work of Eva Hesse and setting up a "contextualizing" perimeter over which they claim authorship.  Greenberg and Rosenberg actually fought over whether New York based artists of the 40's-50's should be called "action painters" or "abstract expressionists".  

Aesthetic philosophizing is a pissing contest with all of those puerile motives in tact.  Barney Newman was by no means an "abstract expressionist" nor was Eva Hesse a "minimalist".  The French, offended at New York for taking the temporary spotlight, came up with all these assholes that you are now required to read - 40 to 50 years after their initial pronouncements and are now calcified in the curriculum of universities whose observational capacities are glacially slow to shed any of their safe encrustations.   

Derrida's "Jewish" "talmudic" formatting I sometimes think is a sadly pugilistic response to the iconoclasm, the weakness, the lack of the visual, in Judaism.  Forget the "meta" and the "essentialist" crap.  What I've been showing all semester, and will continue to show, is that what artists do is actually CONTRARY to what the cultural analysts say we do....and they say that after the fact so they can neatly stack their assumptions into a container and neutralize all of the IRRATIONAL and PURELY VISUAL (not verbal) INTELLECTUALISM that happens in the MYSTERY of the art that deeply moves us.  Some people just can't stand a MYSTERY.   They must WIN.  They must kill the MYSTERY - like Penn and Teller - so that we KNOW.  The enduring value of art is that we never know and keep asking, which keeps us ALIVE.

The reason that Louise Bourgeois, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre and Eva Hesse and Smithson the Earthworks guys are interesting and the reason the Donald Judd bores the crap out of me is that Donald Judd was an ART CRITIC and explained his approach, justifying his work with the relief of his finite theories.  The same goes for Ad Reinhardt about whom I couldn't care less.  

Mondrian's paint, when examined up close, looks like cream cheese, which defies all the "purity" of neo-plasiticism......WHY  did he paint THAT  way?  I've never read a critic address the incongruity of his paint handling with his compositions - but he was Jackson Pollock's great champion with Peggy Guggenheim.  Go figure.  

The reason that my oldest friend, Larry Poons, keeps painting in a way that has lost all critical support and whose work is "out of fashion" but still greatly admired by painters is something that the critical dialogue would simply not deal with rather than examine.  

Irony is bullshit.  It is a shield against the courage to be vulnerable and therefore be accessible, to provide the generosity of nutrition, by taking the stance of received information and illustrating it for a timid public that wants emblems of what it is already told to believe.  All the best,