Roman Ondak

Karina Smigla Bobinski

Tommy Becker makes videos grouped into “albums” and pairs them with phrases such as “Pulling Down The Sky to Give You The Sun,” which is actually as descriptive as it is clever. I think that one is his strongest video, as the others overuse the Mac robo-voice in combination with not the best lyrics set to music.

I found Tommy’s work through what looks to be a brand new site called Art Micro Patronage, a site partly funded by a 2010 Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant. The concept is centered on monthly web shows curated by independent curators who propose shows which then collect funding from viewers who donate to specific artists or works. Once you’ve contributed (possibly as little as $.50) you have access to the works you funded indefinitely.

There’s this perspective: End Online Panhandling. But I think any time someone says there’s too much of something on the internet, what they’re really complaining about is that the proper filters haven’t been invented yet. Personally, I like this model since you can contribute what you can afford to artists who may not get anything otherwise. It beats seeing a bunch of video stills because artists don’t want to give their work away for free. It’s affordable enough that I don’t mind paying for work that I can see elsewhere on the net.

As they say, “Donorship, Not Ownership.”

I saw this painting in a local shop (it’s large!) and am now obsessed with it. It is much better in person, and the frame serves it right. This is the only image I could find online. If someone has an extra few thousand dollars to spare, this is the thing to burn it on… Cross my fingers for a double dip fire sale?

1.

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.

— Charles Bukowski

2.

He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

— Charles Bukowski

3.

The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.

— Banksy

(via Upali Project via Traci)

Hiroshige, One Hundred Views of Edo

While at the Legion of Honor with an art history class, I saw Japanesque, a show of Japanese color woodblock prints, and the ones that were the most amazing were Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views of Edo. They seem very modern and photographic to me. Not only were they all vertical, many of them contain a foreground vertical element that acts as a partial frame. All of a sudden I felt vindicated – in some of my vertical Mission photographs I include slices of walls around the shop windows I’m interested in, and when people question whether they are necessary, whether they contribute anything to the photo, I don’t know what to say. Obviously, Hiroshige uses this effect much more prominently and with more mastery than me, but I do feel that there is something non-linguistic and simply attractive about this vertical foreground element. It’s not pictoral in the traditional sense, and adds just the right amount of pleasurable confusion to the composition. Very satisfying.

Hiroshige, One Hundred Views of Edo

The show goes til Jan. 9th, so you still have time to check it out if you’re in the area. If you can’t make it, I saw this book in the bookstore that is just wonderful: One Hundred Views of Edo (30th Anniversary edition). It’s a more affordable and smaller version of a larger edition, but it is no less beautifully packaged in a hard box that unfolds to reveal the prints bound into a Japanese style book consisting of a nice feeling toothy paper. The bigger book must be really great, but a little out of the range of starving artists. (And a racier alternative: Poem of the Pillow.)

Amazon customer image

There’s also a woodblock printing demo and screening of Yojimbo at the Legion on Sat. 12/11 (tomorrow!), which sounds like fun.

On the Yellowstone trip, I got to know Jeremiah a little. He’s a performance artist who just finished his MFA, and my first encounter with his work was when he rolled by inside a giant transparent cast of his own head. That’s an entrance if I ever saw one. I caught the tail end of the performance, by which time the sticks that constituted the frame of the cast were breaking apart and tumbling about in the head with him, and the impermeable plastic had made the interior hot and uncomfortable.

The video on his site is better than words, but being there was better than the video, which doesn’t really do it justice. Up close, the plastic shimmered in the evening light. The plastic was starting to tear. He was turning red. You get none of the feeling, at least for me, of wanting to help the man out. He’s sweaty, tired, and every step gets more and more difficult. A small crowd gathered around, following him as 4 or 5 photographers and videographers took footage. (Folks in the 3D imaging workshop I was attending took the opportunity to shoot some close up footage, and I’m hoping to eventually get my hands on that, or at least access to an edited version.) I want to run up and yell, “would you like some help!?” But in the context of art, I’m afraid that would spoil the piece. Maybe it’s about one man’s struggle? But then again, what if it’s about people not lifting a finger?

I cave and play it safe by standing back, but it’s hard to watch in person in a way that the video document is not hard to watch. The disparity stirs up my love of photography, of visual art. A person could make a life’s work out of translating that in-person emotional weight to film. Or flash media, as we may as well get used to saying.

Portrait of My Father Illuminated by Pounding Dry Ground (excerpt), 2009

Looking at his other work, I like the ones that use dust. Maybe it’s my interest in projection, but I love the little piece in which he pounds the earth at night (click image for the video excerpt). Not being very versed in performance art, it’s sometimes difficult for me to get past the production values of the documentation, but there’s something about the darkness, and the incarnation slowing appearing and warping that gets the physicality of the act across. I confess I’ve never pounded the ground, but I imagine it’s hard to think about much other than pounding the ground (given that you’re going at it with the appropriate fervor) while you’re doing it. Can you vigorously pound the ground and think brainy rational thoughts simultaneously? An excellent experiment to conduct, if I do say so.

I’ve been reading books on the contemporary art world and all of them can’t seem to stop from mentioning multimillion dollar price tags. It’s nice that the more performance-oriented art still seems less touched by commerce, despite Rirkrit Tiravanija’s pots and pans. The more polished the documentation, the less like documentation and the more like a commercial product it seems, though I can’t deny that well done documentation really animates the performance. For instance…

Shirin Neshat, Passage, 2001

Shortly after returning from the trip, I went to SFMOMA for the Fisher Collection preview and saw Shirin Neshat’s Passage, a video also containing people stirring up dust on the ground, this time by a circle of women dressed in black. There’s a bit more to the piece – fire! – and it has a polish that made the actions seem a little less visceral, but the score really drove the piece forward, giving it a sense of urgency and lending it an emotional tone that wouldn’t've been present without the music. After a bit I realized, of course! It’s Philip Glass. (On a tangent, a good documentary film: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts) The music and editing lent the video a structured cadence that you usually find in… well, music.

Another tangent… In an interview, Neshat says:

In Passage, the main theme revolved around a relationship between men and women (dressed in black) and the landscape (forces of nature). I needed to separate these two so that at all times the audience became aware of the juxtaposition of the two. If this film was shot in black-and-white, it would have had a totally different effect, where often the people got lost in the landscape and there would have been no separation. Here, the people seemed more like silhouettes against the changing and colorful landscape.

After reading this, a light bulb went on above my head. Earlier in the spring I had been trying and failing to explain why I like this Eggleston photo in color rather than black and white in Lukas’ book class. A couple of people thought that the graphic elements of black and white would be preserved in monochrome, but for exactly the reasons Neshat mentions, I like it in color!

William Eggleston, Adyn and Jasper

Turns out I’ll be going to China a little earlier than expected, which means, unfortunately, I’ll miss Bob Dylan in Monterey this August because travel plans changed, but in anticipation I had been reading the Essential Interviews, and came upon this, in an interview with Nora Ephron in ’65:

Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemetaries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.

Hmmm.

I’ve never thought of it as writers’ block, but I definitely have periods of greater or lesser activity. I think that’s pretty natural. The key is not to panic when you’re in one of the troughs of creativity. Because that’s so valuable, there’s so much learning to be done in that. In the moment, I feel like I’m in that space. It’s not resting, it’s almost like treading water and gathering information and trusting that it will come around again, and it will. I see it on a greater scale with projects, really. I think that’s completely natural. Sometimes you see artists burning very brightly, and they’ll have three or four projects in a row that are absolutely incredible. But I think it’s very hard for anyone to sustain that time after time after time. Some people do, but they burn out quite quickly. Or they die or something. [laughs] But in lots of artists that I admire, I see the peaks and troughs that [they] move through.

The first time that I felt bereft of any inspiration I may have panicked, but when you’ve been writing for 15 or 16 years, like I have, I trust in it now, I know that whatever it is that comes through me– this desire to make the work that I do, it’s there, it will be there no matter what. Even if I tried to beat it off with a shovel, it would still come back. I don’t worry at those times. I just know that it will be back.

It becomes something that I trust will be there, and all I have to do is let it be there. There’s no separation, really, between living and creativity. I don’t think there is. Sometimes people will say “Where do get your ideas from?” and it’s just life, it’s just breathing. The key is being open to that moment, and then there’s a wealth of inspiration.

In an interview with Laura Hird, what she says about dark music not necessarily being indicative of a dark personal attitude mirrors what she says in the PF interview about the work not necessarily reflecting on the creator’s personal life. For me that’s exactly what I want – some emotive impact without the bleeding heart exhibitionism. Much of art is translation of experience, sometimes alien or extreme experience, isn’t it? (I have David Lewis’ bat example on the brain for some reason – the problem of other bat minds?)

I really like that push and pull you get between the dark subject matter and the beautiful melodies that are flying around in there, which are quite uplifting, so I never feel particularly dragged down by the record. I always feel quite uplifted really, quite comforted.

One doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering, you can orchestrate that. And I think in some ways when you’re not suffering yourself, you can present it in a much clearer way because you have that perspective, stepping back and looking at it. A lot of the people I find funniest to be around are people whose work can be very dark. It doesn’t mean that they’re dark people at all, it just means they have a certain sensitivity or a certain insight in being able to present that.

I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when you’re younger you imagine all these things about how your life’s going to turn out and ultimately that doesn’t happen to anybody, and so a sad song is incredibly touching because it connects us all to that sense of loss in some way.

I took a short 3D imaging workshop, and I’m keen on getting a stereo Holga. I’ve never been a fan of the Holga aesthetic but there’s something so sharp and delineated about most of my work that it’s frustratingly devoid of emotion in some way. I suppose lo-fi is an easy way out, but sometimes all you can hope for is a starting point.

I think particularly with instruments that I’m unfamiliar with, I can’t use my intellect to play that instrument because I don’t know how to apply it. And so it does all become about emotional response, and that’s often very naïve and child-like, and I use that to my advantage. I’ll often purposefully go to instruments that I don’t know anything about just to access that place.

(Thanks, Susan!)

This quarter I’m taking some great classes. Alternative Processes, where we’ll be making cyanotypes, Van Dyke, palladium and gum prints, among other things. The Photo Book, which is the perfect opportunity to make a final object of the radio station photos – I’m thinking something serial and semi-informal (with a web supplement?). A projects seminar, which I’m taking as impetus to get more shooting done on the Mission stuff. Film history from 1960 onward – great excuse to watch Mulholland Drive again, though I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Groundhog’s Day is one of the recommended films, heh heh. And last, an art and science class that focuses on addressing environmental issues with art and culminates in a 2 week roadtrip to Yellowstone.

I’m also taking a beginning singing class. I’ve had this itch to sing in public for a while but the nerves are something else. We’ll see how much croaking in front of people I can withstand before imploding. God forbid I don’t hone my vocal skills in time to serenade the bison on the plain though…